The philosophical significance of LLMs and a potentially powerful philosophically based critique of LLMs have not yet been developed and perhaps their importance has not even been recognized yet.
Could LLMs be tied to a certain philosophical view regarding the mind, language and the world? And if such a view is manifestly erroneous could not this furnish a sound basis for acknowledging - alongside numerous other reasons - the social and cultural harm of LLMs?
For instance, could we not explore the relationship between LLMs and Quinean extensionalism and meaning-as-use theories? Are not LLMs based on the rejection of the irreducible intensionality of human symbolic activity? Behind every symbol there is an intension. And a formal theory of intensionality must itself acknowledge the intensions of its meta-symbols. But there is no intensionality in LLMs beyond that of the humans involved in their creation. Searle's Chinese Room ignores the deeper philosophical meaning of computation - or a potential associated geometric theory of meaning - but may be of interest for a critique of LLMs.
Do LLMs compute? Computation is a primordial intensional human activity (see our paper Analyticity, Computability and the A Priori).
Perhaps there are other machine learning models of language of a more geometric or even combinatorial-algebraic nature which would have interested Riemann who wanted to relate meaning to a kind of cognitive geometry. Perhaps statistical regularities should be traced back to geometry.
What are LLMs really, formally? Can we formalize the critical values wherein they become 'adequate' for their proposed task? What exactly in 'large'? How can this be formalized rigorously? Can LLM techniques be used for formal axiomatic-deductive systems and automated theorem proving? Or can we prove certain fundamental limiting theorems about the powers of LLMs akin to the unsolvability of the halting problem and Gödel's incompleteness theorems?
LLMs only exist because of the Internet. The Internet and LLMs are part of the same historical-cultural-technical process. This ontological process might be described as the datafication of humanity. Language ceases to be a tool of human thought, communication and culture-building but rather a tool for the reduction, degrading, emptying, perversion and commodification of humanity itself. The Internet and LLMs are the anti-Gutenberg. Man has become text, sound, image, data, statistics. LLMs are a counterfeit reality, a monstrosity, the world becomes one big corporate controlled screen.
If we compare the training data and the resulting LLMs is there or not a loss of information? Would it not be more worthwhile to develop sophisticated search algorithms and querying language to access the training data directly?
LLM culture is the culture superficiality, atomization, banality, cosmetics and deception (a LLM is almost a trained deceiver in the biological sense - it detects and mimics human patterns). There is a loss of the multiple layers of meaning behind every symbol which cannot be reduced to statistical correlations with other symbols. Meaning is replaced with arbitrary social-statistical emergent correlative patterns.
The realm of pure mathematics - and that of pure logic, combinatorics and computability - is a pure realm which LLMs cannot touch or corrupt. So the formal mathematics and formal philosophy projects, contrary to popular misconception likely resulting from deliberate propaganda and deception - are the antithesis of and antidote for LLM culture. There is a pure universal computational-mathematics-akin language (far beyond the natural language or the audio-visual data that can be perverted and imitated by LLMs) and a pure logic and a pure thought and mankind may indeed hope to attain them.
LLMs are not intelligent and statistics cannot solve formal computational problems nor can they encompass the pure a priori synthetic principles of formal computational systems (i.e. the cognitive certainly of the foundational principles for metatheoretic knowledge) as detailed in our paper mentioned above.
No statistical pattern analysis of the shadows are sufficient to lead to knowledge of the object. Pixel injection in image recognizers demonstrates this fact, and similarly for formal reasoning. Besides lacking intensionality, LLMs lack reference and context (despite the misleading terminology of context windows).
And most important of all since the true intellect is inseparable from morality, empathy and compassion, completely beyond the reach of LLMs. LLMs do not have the bondage to an illusion of a self.
A major task of philosophy is to destroy the evil empire of LLMs and a good starting point is deconstructing and refuting the worldviews (extensionalism, meaning-as-use) which LLMs embody.
Is a lawyer someone trained in a specific system of laws or someone who has developed the skill to study, interpret and apply any given system of laws or perhaps be able to cope with significance changes in present laws? Such a metalawyer is the analogue of a universal Turing Machine. A LLM could never be a judge or a metalawyer - it could not grasp the spirit of legal institutions or the deeper meaning of a given legal context.
Billions use light-bulbs without understanding the underlying physics. Billions could use LLMs thinking they are conscious.
LLMs will become more interesting in the measure in which the multilayer perceptrons models are replaced by geometrically and mathematically more sophisticated models (KANs are a step in the right direction).
