Origin

Do we, humans, truly know our origin? Not in terms of evolution, that we have science and history to help with, but in terms of what makes each me, me. We’re born with DNAs, genes, some set of “pre-conditions”. We have nature and nurture, but at what point do those start forming self identity; or has the sense of self always been an illusion, a framework to help comprehension?

LLMs make me think about this question a lot. Pretraining, reinforcement learning, fine-tuning, in-context memory…in a way it is not different from how the inner world of human cognition might formulate, a set of intuition from ancestors, reinforced by what survived, fine-tuned to become subconsciousness, aligned and adjusted based on living memories and encountering. (I have no training in psychology and neuroscience, I’m just imagining here). In that regard, do I, myself, know what’s the origin of me, with all the pre-conditions, how much of my agency, my decision making, truly came from some sort of self integrity, or has it always been “response and approximation according to context”? Like LLMs do, just much more subtle, “advanced”, well integrated.

Many think of origin as a dot, what is fascinating about a dot is that it is a filled in circle. And what is fascinating about a circle, is that it may have had an origin, but once complete, one cannot tell an beginning to an end – it is a loop. Perhaps the origin of identity, or self, is the same way – it is simplify formed and not to be deciphered. It is true, LLMs are completions at its core, trained by examples of priors and afters. But are humans different in that regard? Do I not say exactly what I am saying now, because I had been “tuned” to examples I’ve seen before? Perhaps, the point of an origin, is to trace dot to dot to dot, and say “I was here, and then I am here now”. Afterall, what is the point (no pun intended) of an origin, if there’s no connection. It is what makes a circle, dots connected. In that regards, perhaps we are not here to understand origin.

We’re here to understand connections.

And experience them as we go.