semiotic physics alludes to a lower level analysis: more analogous to studying neural firing dynamics on the human side than linguistics
Many classic debates in cognitive science and AI, e.g. between symbolism and connectionism, translate to claims about neural substrates. Most work with LLMs that I've seen abstracts over many such details, and seems in some ways more akin to linguistics, describing structure in high-level behavior, than neuroscience. It seems like there's lots of overlap between what you're talking about and Conceptual Role Semantics - her... (read more)
I'm familiar with semiotics and language models, but I don't understand why you're calling this "semiotic physics" instead of "computational linguistics".
Linguistics vs. semiotics - I think you might say, that with text tokens, we're not just talking about natural language, we're talking about arbitrary symbol systems. If an LLM can program, do math, learn dyck languages, or various icons like emojis, one might say that it's working with more than just natural language. However, I'd argue that (a) this is still a vastly limited subset of sign systems
If you don't mind, I'll make a remark.
If it had been up to me, which it most certainly wasn't and isn't, it would be called the complex dynamics of transformers, or perhaps LLMs, because that's what it seems to be. That's where the math is from and where it's been most developed. I just ignore the semiotics part of the name. In any event I tend to think the notion of semiotics has long been overgeneralized to the point where it has little meaning. As far as I can tell there's not much of a connection with any of the intellectual traditions that fly the semiotics flag.
As you say, there's "a barrier of communication and extra translation cost for many readers." Well, yeah, if anyone wants to publish or post this work outside of LessWrong, the terminology is likely to prove problematic. If you look around you'll find that that's an issue in several posts, communicating with the larger intellectual world. I have no idea how that's going to work out in the long run.
2metasemi
Thank you for these comments - I look forward to giving the pointers in particular the attention they deserve. My immediate and perhaps naive answer/evasion is that semiotic physics alludes to a lower level analysis: more analogous to studying neural firing dynamics on the human side than linguistics. One possible response would be, "Well, that's an attempt to explain saying 'physics', but it hardly justifies 'semiotic'." But this is - in the sense of the analogy - a "physics" of particles of language in the form of embeddable tokens. (Here I have to acknowledge that the embeddings are generally termed 'semantic', not 'semiotic' - something for us to ponder.)
Many classic debates in cognitive science and AI, e.g. between symbolism and connectionism, translate to claims about neural substrates. Most work with LLMs that I've seen abstracts over many such details, and seems in some ways more akin to linguistics, describing structure in high-level behavior, than neuroscience. It seems like there's lots of overlap between what you're talking about and Conceptual Role Semantics - her... (read more)