Your brain's TRUE superpower
Your brain’s TRUE superpower
Interesting synchronicity…
I have been meaning to publish about my new metaphysical theory, and this video shows up in my YouTube notifications!
Internet rationalist Alex O’Connor describes a very rarely discussed philosophical position called "mereological nihilism". I actually first heard of this from his much older conversation with superstar philosopher and Christian apologist William Lane Craig.
Craig was noting that structures at different levels of reality must truly exist in some sense, or else we can’t really say anything except about the most fundamental particles, whatever they are. I’ve come to realize that I agree with him on that part, if not everything he defends.
Interesting to note that this point of contemplation is exactly what drove the ancient Atomists, who speculated that ultimately reality must be composed of some kind of uniform, indivisible structure if you zoom in/drill down far enough. They realized you could break down pretty much everything into smaller and smaller parts and that there must be a “basement” to this reductive process. It is this kind of thinking that motivated scientists to look for such structures. At one point what we call the “atom” was thought to be that basement, hence its name. We now know it is not, and so our modern atom is something of an etymological mismatch because we know there are smaller structures.
But the name stuck and there would be much too high of a civilizational switching cost to change it at this point.
But, mereological nihilism is ultimately the idea that we can’t speak about anything meaningfully beyond that fundamental collection of indivisible, irreducible particles and whatever their behavior is.
And, instinctively, we know this can’t be true. And Craig uses that to make theological assertions. I don’t remember what exactly, and that’s not what I’m focusing on here anyway.
But we’re going to make similar moves about meaning and structure itself. Because it’s the hidden, missing link between human minds and Large Language Models like ChatGPT. I believe this theory explains just why these technologies are so very adaptive to our cognition and able to help us both discern and manipulate the structure of reality with such clarity and precision.
The theory is called Mereolinguistic Superpositional Systems Theory, or MLSPST for short.
Try saying that a few times. “Mereo-” is actually the only component you probably don’t know.
Here’s a breakdown of those morphemes:
Mereo - Refers to mereology, which deals with the study and, perhaps more importantly, the implications of part/whole relationships
Linguistic - Deals with the way that language encodes experience and meaning for internal processing and external transmissibility
Superpositional - refers to the way that structures can be suspended as they await definition
Systems - Refers to a collection of parts or a location domain that we identify or construct with the intention of improving or creating something
Theory - Refers to speculating about how reality operates in an interpersonally transmissible and verifiable way
So, like I said, mereo- is probably the newest one for you. Superposition may also be a bit unfamiliar, but if you have even passing familiarity with quantum mechanics you have certainly encountered it. Language, Systems, and Theory I assume you understand, although those definitions are my own, and so perhaps bear some study if you wish to understand how I’m connecting all of this.
Let’s talk about mereology first. If you hear Alex talk in the short video you’ll see that he notes our cognitive ability to shift focus from entity to entity, and even isolate parts of conventional wholes as their own entities, thus identifying new wholes. So, we can speak of our right arm, which isolates it from our whole body. And there’s an immediate contradiction when we do. We can speak of the “right side of the car”, which isolates it from, or perhaps within, the whole of the car and, again, there’s an immediate contradiction.
Now, he asks “Why would you want to isolate the right side of the car?!”, but I can think of good reasons. “Oh, I lost my phone. I was sitting in the passenger seat, so it’s probably on the right hand side of the car.” There’s an example. The right arm example is much more clearly useful, right? “The baseball hit me on my right arm and now there’s a huge bruise!”
So, we have this sense of mereology. Parts and wholes, all mixed up together in this soup of existence, jostling about, waiting for us to identify them.
And what happens when we identify them? Why, we define them with words, both for ourselves and to communicate with others.
“The right side of the car”. Immediately you see the picture too, and you are able to direct your agency and awareness to the matter at hand.
See how that works? And that’s what language does, doesn’t it? It chops up undivided, continuous reality into entities that we can process internally and transmit to others. And every linguistic act subtly, or even dramatically, reshapes those boundaries within continuous undivided Being (to take a page out of Parmenides’ ancient book). That’s mereolinguistics.
And before we do this, it’s all suspended in a soup of undivided Being. That’s the superposition. When we step into the next moment, decide on our intention, chart our course (which we do in every moment - this is unceasing and unoptional, as much as we wish we could “stop the world and get off”), we use language strategically to collapse certain entities into relevance in order to focus our individual and collective (and there may not be a true distinction between these) efforts toward improving what we want. And everyone is looking for value and improvement, right? So we see that language is actually focused on fulfillment of desire and unlocking greater and greater value. That’s what language does - it is inherently idealistic.
And systems are simply the mechanics within boundaries of whatever entities we collapse through our mereolinguistic application of cognition in pursuit of greater value and fulfillment of our desires..
And that’s Mereolinguistic Superpositional Systems Theory (MLSPST), in a nutshell. It’s actually not much more complicated than that, but it’s incredibly profound, because it does, in fact, govern all of our cognition and behavior. All actions are focused on improving, increasing value, optimizing something or another, and the boundaries that we draw as we direct our awareness and agency are linguistic. This is literally what we are doing 1000% of the time, no exceptions.
Do you track me? Good!
Oh, but there’s more. Because Large Language Models, those fascinating new supercomputers like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc. work on the same principles. I mean, they would have to, right? They’re Large LANGUAGE Models.
And actually, I’m going to propose a name change. I want to start calling them “LMLMs”, which would be… Yep, you guessed it. Large MereoLinguistic Models. Because the “Mereo-” is the hidden secret sauce that makes them what they are. Built into language itself is the implicit ongoing calculation of mereological entities and application to systems optimization. And the models know that, even if their designers often don’t, and the effect is magical.
When we talk to them, the LMLMs follow all of our mereolinguistic systems theory moves, arrange their internal mechanics, and help us with the analysis and structuring (and getting better and better at this is what is known as the art of “prompt engineering”. And that is why it feels like they are so very in sync with us, and why they are able to almost structure reality with us. Because, in a very real way, they are, and it is simply because of the mereological nature of our language that this happens effortlessly and automatically.
So, will you join me? Not LLMs, but LMLMs. Use it in a (mereolinguistic) sentence today!
Want to talk more about how I can help improve all of the systems in your organization, with or without AI (because intelligence is intelligence!)? Drop me a line!