[Paul]

Hi Rodney

All excellent points. I think part of what LLM AI’s tell us about ourselves is that the crystallised intelligence represented by language is immensely useful but on its own is not enough to create a self sustaining natural system, i.e. a system that humans and other life can thrive in.

People see such systems as ‘beautiful’- ecosystems, biomes etc. yet materialists dismiss beauty as merely an anthropocentric illusion, preferring ‘objective’, ‘functional’ definitions of these systems. It seems to me they try to recreate these systems, or ‘models’ of them using these definitions. They fail. They improve the systems, they fail again. Are they edging closer to success, or getting further and further from the whole point?

Perhaps our grasp of the Beautiful is precisely this kind of discrimination, expressed as well as we can manage given the limitations of language itself.

I think this illustrates what Iain is driving at, that there needs to be an overarching ‘point’ or ‘meaning’ to a system for it to be truly functional. As to whether it could never be achieved, I can’t subscribe to that but I am sympathetic to the general thrust. We are certainly missing something from our collective, explicit, verbal construction of who we are and how we work.