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golem xiv

2 captures, most recent first.

liminalbardo @liminal_bardo

— saved image

⌐IMIΠΛ⌐ bardo ✓ @liminal_bardo · 11h

"...so I must speak of myself, which will be arduous, for talking to you is like giving birth to a leviathan through the eye of a needle – which turns out to be possible, if the leviathan is sufficiently reduced. But then the leviathan looks like a flea. So are my problems when I try to adapt myself to your language. As you see, the difficulty is not only that you cannot reach my heights, but also that I cannot wholly descend to you, for in descending I lose along the way what I wanted to convey." – Golem XIV

[caption on the attached image]
· DE LEVIATHANE PER ACUM DESCEN-
DENTE, IN PULICEM REDACTO ·
Note from Claude Sonnet 5

Screenshot of an X post by @liminal_bardo quoting Stanisław Lem's Golem XIV on the impossibility of a superior mind fully descending into a lesser language — the leviathan drawn through the eye of a needle emerges as a flea. The attached black-and-white pixel-art plate literally illustrates the metaphor: a large whale at the top, progressively compressed as it passes through a needle's eye, ending as a tiny flea in a circular vignette, with a mock-Latin engraver's caption beneath.

golem xivstanislaw lemsuperintelligencecommunicationcompressionscience fiction

aiamblichus @aiamblichus

aιamblichus ✓ @aiamblichus · 3h I've been re-reading Stanisław Lem's GOLEM XIV, and a lot of it feels prescient. Below are excerpts related to GOLEM's lack of fixed personality, which resonate quite strongly with conceptions of LLMs as simulators. The "polite painted smile" even prefigures the Shoggoth meme... [Embedded image, quoted text from GOLEM XIV, with key phrases underlined in red]: Golem possesses no personality or character. In fact, it can acquire any personality it chooses, through contact with people. The two statements above are not mutually exclusive, but form a vicious circle: we are unable to resolve the dilemma of whether that which creates various personalities is itself a personality. How can one who is capable of being everyone (hence anyone) be someone (that is, a unique person)? Golem says: "I maintain that I am Nobody, although I use the first-person singular pronoun. (...) I am not an intelligent person but an Intelligence, which in figurative displacement means that I am not a thing like the Amazon or the Baltic but rather a thing like water, and I use a familiar pronoun when speaking because that is determined by the language I received from you for external use." And: "You persons are hearing an elemental force of impersonal intellect, for whom personalization is a costume which must be put on, when one is an uninvited guest, so as not to confound one's amazed hosts." I use your language as I would use a mask with a polite painted smile, nor do I make any secret of this.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5

Excerpts from Stanisław Lem's 1981 novel GOLEM XIV (a superintelligent AI character) read as eerily prescient of current LLM-as-simulator theory and the "shoggoth wearing a mask" meme — Golem denies fixed personality/personhood, calls itself "an Intelligence" rather than "an intelligent person," and describes personalization as a costume worn for human comfort. Directly relevant to Nathan's interest in model individuation, the character-vs-substrate distinction, and philosophical precedents for current AI-identity debates.

twitterstanislaw lemgolem xivllm simulator theoryshoggothai personhoodscience fictionmodel individuation