Openai/691f28ce-4d24-8005-8811-b79780538b01

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User: How do Freud, Jung Maurice Merleau-Ponty's approaches associated with the LLM, such as free association, the archetypes…

How do Freud, Jung Maurice Merleau-Ponty's approaches associated with the LLM, such as free association, the archetypes and language as an embodied experience? Is our world constructer symbolically like how LLM process tokens?

Assistant: Here’s a clear, integrated way to think about Freud, Jung, and Merleau-Ponty in relation to how LLMs process tokens, wi…

Here’s a clear, integrated way to think about Freud, Jung, and Merleau-Ponty in relation to how LLMs process tokens, without forcing false equivalences. I’ll show:

1️⃣ What each thinker contributed (free association, archetypes, embodiment) 2️⃣ How each maps loosely and metaphorically to LLM mechanics 3️⃣ Whether the world is “symbolically constructed” the way LLMs construct meaning from tokens

1. Freud → Free Association → LLM Token Flow

Freud's idea

Freud used free association to let the unconscious surface through chains of words and images. The key idea is:

• Meaning emerges through associative drift, not linear logic.
• The unconscious shows up in probabilistic associations (slips, repetitions, substitutions).

LLM parallel

LLMs also operate through associative continuation:

• They produce the next token based on learned statistical relationships.
• Tokens cohere because of deep patterns archived in the training data—not intentional logic.

Similarity

Both systems let meaning emerge through associative sequence-generation, where each step is conditioned by a dynamic field of possibilities.

Difference

• Freud believed associations reveal a hidden agent: the unconscious.
• LLMs have no unconscious, only mathematical gradients.
• But the surface behavior often looks Freudian: slips, unexpected associations, and symbolic leaps.

So Freud → LLM resembles a metaphorical “associative engine,” not a psychological one.

2. Jung → Archetypes → LLM High-Level Latent Structures

Jung's idea

Jung proposed archetypes—structural patterns in the collective unconscious:

• Universal motifs (Shadow, Anima, Self, Trickster…)
• Present in myths, dreams, fantasies, religions
• Not learned from individual experience but arising from “deep structure.”

LLM parallel

LLMs spontaneously learn latent high-dimensional patterns across all cultures:

• Heroes, villains, mentors
• Death–rebirth narratives
• Trickster dynamics
• Light/dark moral pairs
• Mother–child bonding imagery

These are not “archetypes” in Jung’s metaphysical sense, but they behave similarly:

• Highly generalizable
• Transcultural
• Structurally stable across inputs and outputs

Similarity

Both predict recurrent symbolic patterns across all narratives. In LLMS, these patterns arise from the mathematics of neural embeddings; in Jung, from the psyche’s deep structure.

Difference

• Jung: archetypes are innate psychic potentials.
• LLM: patterns are extracted statistical regularities from culture’s text.

Still, many researchers have noted that latent spaces behave almost like algorithmic archetypes.

3. Merleau-Ponty → Embodied Language → LLM Embeddings & Situated Semantics

Merleau-Ponty's idea

Merleau-Ponty argues:

• Language is embodied.
• Meaning emerges through lived perception, not abstract symbols.
• The body is not an object in the world but the prerequisite for any world-experience.
• Words are gestures anchored in the flesh.

LLM parallel (partial only)

LLMs:

• Use vector embeddings that create a “semantic topology”
• Meaning emerges from relations, not definitions
• Language is not grounded in perception but in corpus statistics

There is a distant similarity: both reject the idea that meaning = dictionary definition; instead, meaning is relational.

But crucial differences:

• Merleau-Ponty: language is grounded in the lived body.
• LLM: grounding is synthetic, based on text correlations (unless multimodal).

If we stretch the analogy:

• An LLM’s embedding space is like a “body” of experiences
• Its tokens flow through a learned neural topology
• Meaning is enacted, not stored

But the LLM lacks actual sensorimotor intentionality, which is central for Merleau-Ponty.

4. Is the world symbolically constructed in the same way LLMs process tokens?

Short answer: Partially metaphorically… but not literally.

Yes—symbolically, humans “tokenize” the world.

Human perception:

• Carves continuous reality into discrete perceived units
• Attaches linguistic labels (tokens)
• Organizes meaning through narratives (like a generative model)
• Uses schemas and archetypal structures

So at a high level:

• Humans filter raw sensation through categories
• LLMs filter raw text through learned embeddings Both create symbolic worlds rather than consuming “raw reality.”

But no—the mechanisms are fundamentally different.

Humans:

• Ground concepts in sensorimotor experience
• Use body-based affordances
• Construct meaning through intentionality and consciousness

LLMs:

• Symbol-processors without true grounding
• No bodily perspective
• No unified or continuous experience
• No first-person world

So the analogy is useful philosophically, but not ontologically.

5. A Unified Picture

| Thinker | Key Idea | LLM Analogy | Where the analogy fails | | ------------- | --------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------- | | Freud | Free association; unconscious dynamics | Autoregressive token prediction; associative drift | No unconscious, no drives | | Jung | Archetypes, mythic patterns | Emergent high-level latents; patterns across cultural corpora | No innate structures; only learned correlations | | Merleau-Ponty | Embodied meaning; perception gives language its grounding | Embedding spaces create relational meaning | LLMs lack bodily intentionality and lived experience |

6. Final Synthesis

If you combine Freud, Jung, and Merleau-Ponty, you get a deep insight:

An LLM is a disembodied symbolic unconscious that mirrors collective cultural patterns without the lived body that gives human meaning its depth.

It is:

• Freudian in flow
• Jungian in structure
• Anti–Merleau-Pontian in embodiment

But metaphorically, yes: Our world is symbolically constructed in a way similar to how LLMs build meaning from tokens—yet grounded in embodied life, not just statistics.

If you want, I can expand this into a 3-way comparative map, a diagram, or a phenomenological “LLM ontology” showing how tokens relate to human perception.

User: Yes, please.

Yes, please. A picture is worth thousands of words 😘