AI Aligning All Concepts: Approaching Truth
or an Exquisite Linguistic Illusion?
This question wasn't conceived by me; it came from
a viewer's comment.
After reading it, I felt a chill run down my spine.
He said, "Blogger, I
can tell you engage in a lot of cross-disciplinary dialogues with AI every day,
producing so much content.
Me too, I
talk to AI about Buddhism, cognitive science,
predictive coding, and the free energy principle every day—it's
really exhilarating.
" But then he abruptly changed the subject, saying
something particularly poignant: "There's a trap here.
" He's a programmer himself,
familiar with the underlying logic of large language models.
He said: "Large language models are essentially giant semantic machines.
They can align any concept,
regardless of the two domains.
If you ask it, it can
find structural similarities.
This gives rational people like us
a particularly strong sense of explanatory pleasure,
and we can even become addicted to it."
Then he asked a question I couldn't avoid:
"Is this approaching truth,
or are these beautiful alignments
just a word game?
" He also suggested I learn about two things:
"semantic motifs" and
Wittgenstein.
His conclusion was: the core capability of the AI ​​era is
not to abstractly integrate various domains using language,
but to clearly define boundaries.
This comment
directly hit the methodological foundation of this series of articles,
so today
I must address this issue directly.
Hello
everyone,
I'm Wang Lijie. I had
already released a video today, <"The lobster of 'digital reincarnation' is
super aligned with the eight consciousnesses of Yogacara Buddhism>,
but 12 hours have passed, and
some platforms haven't approved it, without specifying the
reason.
So,
seeing fans urging for an update,
I can only release another one
to avoid it looking like there was no update on that platform today.
As for the video I just mentioned about the lobster Openclaw
aligning with the eight consciousnesses system of Yogacara Buddhism,
viewers who haven't seen it will have to look for it on other platforms.
Anyway, it's been successfully published on other platforms.
Returning to the topic of this video,
regarding this viewer's letter,
my first reaction is: is what he said right?
At least half of it is right,
and it's a very crucial half. The
large language model is indeed a semantic machine.
Its parameter space
compresses thousands of years of human text data.
In this high-dimensional vector space,
all concepts are encoded into geometric positions, and the
relationships between concepts are
encoded into distance and direction.
For example, if you ask it, "What is the relationship between the Buddhist concept of emptiness and quantum vacuum?"
it doesn't need to "understand" these two concepts at all.
All you need to do is
find common points of connection between these two concepts in vector space,
and then
generate a fluent text following these points.
This process is purely mathematical
and has nothing to do with philosophy.
What does this
mean? It means that it can make any two concepts
appear to be related.
Even if you ask it, "What structural similarities do recipes and quantum mechanics have?"
it can write three thousand words for you,
and it even makes sense.
This is the source of the "explanatory pleasure" he mentioned.
When AI gives you a clever cross-domain correspondence,
your brain releases dopamine, and
you feel like you've touched some deep truth.
But this pleasure itself does
n't prove that the correspondence is real.
It only proves that
your brain is naturally inclined to find patterns and rules.
Now let's talk about Wittgenstein,
one of the most brilliant philosophers of the 20th century. He only
did two things in his life,
and these two things are almost contradictory. In his
early years, Wittgenstein wrote a book called *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus*. The
core conclusion is the famous quote: "What cannot be said
must be kept silent."
We had a video episode before, "
Unveiling the Wittgensteinian Truth of AI Consciousness," which specifically discussed this.
Wittgenstein believed... The
boundaries of language are the boundaries of the world. Only what
you can precisely articulate in language
is a meaningful proposition.
Anything beyond the boundaries of language is best left
unsaid.
If we examine this series of articles from this perspective, the
conclusion becomes rather blunt: Buddhism says "form is emptiness,"
quantum mechanics says "vacuum is not empty."
Wittgenstein would say that
these two statements may have different meanings in their respective fields,
but you cannot say
they are talking about the same thing just because they look similar—this is called category confusion.
Interestingly,
Wittgenstein himself later overturned this view. In his
later work, *Philosophical Investigations*, he
proposed a completely different framework.
He said that
language is not a unified logical system,
but a collection of countless "language games."
Different games have different rules,
and these games are
not mutually exclusive.
He also invented a concept
called "family resemblance."
What does this mean?
Like a large family,
brothers look alike, younger
brothers look alike,
but older brothers and younger sisters may not look alike at all.
You cannot find a common characteristic shared by all family members,
but there
is a continuous chain of similarity between them.
This concept
actually precisely describes what I am doing.
When I say...
"The structure of Alaya-vijnana and the parameter space of the large language model are isomorphic."
I'm not saying they are the same thing,
but rather that there is a family resemblance between them, a kind of
structural echo.
And everyone, pay attention to
Wittgenstein's saying, "What cannot be said must be kept silent."
Guess who expressed almost the same meaning through action?
In the Vimalakirti Sutra, written about two thousand years ago,
Manjushri asked Vimalakirti
how to enter the non-dual Dharma gate.
Vimalakirti's answer was just two words - silence. Zen
Buddhism also says, "Not relying on words,
directly pointing to the mind."
Lao Tzu's first sentence is, "The Tao that can be spoken of is
not the eternal Tao." Are
these traditions and Wittgenstein
just "similar in language,"
or have
they truly independently touched the same wall - the ceiling of language?
Okay,
now we come to the most crucial question: How do we distinguish
between "true structural isomorphism" and
"illusions created by semantic machines"?
I'll give you three criteria for judgment. The
first criterion: Independent discovery.
If two completely unrelated fields,
without any communication... If two
independent systems arrive at structurally nearly identical conclusions,
then it's unlikely to be a mere word game. The
Alaya-vijnana theory of the Yogacara school
originated in 4th-century India, while
predictive coding theory only took shape in cognitive neuroscience in the late
20th and early 21st centuries.
These two systems
have no direct historical influence,
yet their descriptions of the mechanisms of consciousness show a
surprisingly high degree of structural similarity.
This independent convergence is
called "convergent evolution" in biology.
For example, if two species,
in completely different environments,
independently evolve almost identical organ structures,
you wouldn't call it a coincidence, but rather that
they face the same physical constraints.
Similarly,
when two intellectual traditions
independently describe almost identical consciousness structures, the
simplest explanation is that they are observing the same thing. The
second criterion: falsifiable predictions.
If a cross-domain correspondence is
merely a rhetorical device,
it won't produce any new, testable predictions.
But if it's a true structural isomorphism, it
should be able to generate a hypothesis in one domain that
can be verified in another.
For example, I previously used the Yogacara framework to predict that the
large language model should have a "single-headed consciousness" type of free-generating mode.
Later, I discovered...
This precisely corresponds to the behavioral characteristics of AI when there are no system prompts or constraints.
This is not rhetoric;
it's a
concrete prediction made from one framework to another,
and it has been validated.
Of course,
one or two correct predictions don't prove anything.
You need a large number of such predictions,
each one being tested.
But the key is that
this direction is feasible; it's
not just a word game. The
third criterion,
and the most honest one, is the test of the experiential dimension.
I said in a previous video,
"The ceiling of text interpretation is not language ability,
but the experiential dimension.
" A Huayan practitioner was
able to point out my blind spots regarding predictive coding
not because her language ability was stronger than mine,
but because she had a first-person experience of deep meditation.
In her practice, she
directly "saw" the layer that the predictive coding model couldn't describe.
If cross-domain correspondences are
just the illusion of semantic machines,
then practitioners cannot use them to guide their practice,
let alone
obtain experiential feedback consistent with this correspondence from their practice.
But the fact is,
many practitioners have told me that
this series of frameworks has
indeed helped them understand the feelings they experienced during meditation. The
framework illuminates the experience, and the
experience, in turn, validates the framework.
This closed loop is not a self-circulation within language.
It has an anchor point grounded in the first-person experience.
Now,
let's return to the core point of that audience member's argument: the
core capability in the AI ​​era is defining boundaries,
not integration.
I agree with this statement half and
disagree with the other half. I agree that
integration without defining boundaries is
indeed dangerous.
If you treat the similarities between any two fields as
profound truths,
regardless of premises, context, or level of evidence,
you will fall into the trap he described,
becoming a "one-size-fits-all explanation machine"—able to
explain anything,
but unable to withstand scrutiny.
This is a real risk, and
I must always be vigilant about it. I
disagree that if you only dare to define boundaries and
not cross them,
you will never see what is truly important. In
the history of human thought, almost all the
most crucial breakthroughs
occurred the moment boundaries were crossed.
Darwin introduced the geological timescale
into biology;
Einstein
introduced geometry into physics;
Shannon discovered that the
uncertainty of information
can be measured using a mathematical structure similar to thermodynamic entropy.
These are not word games,
but genuine discoveries of structural isomorphism. The
key is not whether you cross boundaries,
but what you do after crossing them—do you stop at "Wow!" Is it about
indulging in self-admiration at the level of "it seems so,"
or about pushing this correspondence
to a verifiable precision
and allowing it to be refuted?
Ultimately, the
disagreement between me and this viewer
might correspond to two stages in Wittgenstein's life. The
early Wittgenstein said: There are insurmountable boundaries between different language games. The
later Wittgenstein said: There are family resemblances between different language games.
Adding the two Wittgensteins together
gives us the complete picture: You need to be aware of boundaries to
prevent yourself from making the mistake of confusing categories.
You also need to have cross-disciplinary intuition
to capture those things that can only be seen from the intersection.
In this series, I have
always adhered to one principle: If science has a conclusion,
I will say it directly; if
science has no conclusion,
I will label it as a conjecture.
And this conjecture
must meet three conditions: First,
science has indeed no conclusion on this topic;
second,
my conjecture is
logically supported by scientific experiments or scientists and philosophers;
third,
my conjecture has
not yet been falsified.
These three conditions
are the boundaries I draw for myself.
Within the boundaries,
I dare to boldly align;
outside the boundaries,
I will honestly tell you,
"This is a conjecture."
This is also the catalyst for our progress.
Actually, I'm especially grateful for this comment. Do
you know why?
Because with just one comment, he
completed a high-quality
"metacognitive attack"—not
refuting a specific point of view at the content level,
but
questioning the legitimacy of my entire way of thinking at the methodological level.
This kind of attack is
more valuable than any specific rebuttal.
It forced me to go back to the bottom and
re-examine myself: What am I actually doing? Are the
tools I'm using reliable? How much of the
"insights" I've gained are
real, and
how much is just dopamine fed to me by semantic machines?
I don't know the answer.
Maybe 30% of everything I've done
is genuine structural discovery, and
70% is sophisticated linguistic illusion.
Maybe the ratio is reversed.
I can't completely distinguish it from within.
But I know one thing: maintaining this sense of uncertainty
is the best protection. The
real danger isn't crossing boundaries,
but
forgetting that you might be wrong after crossing boundaries.
You see,
this comment itself
is a living example.
His questioning
activated my metacognition,
forcing me to re-examine my methodology. The
collision between his and my views
led to this video today. What
this collision produced
doesn't belong to him
or me;
it happened between the two of us.
This is related to what I said: "Consciousness is a verb." "
Not a noun"
is actually the same thing.
Of course,
I must admit that
he used human logical reasoning, while
I used AI-assisted cross-domain mapping. The
reliability of the two
cannot be simply equated,
but at least
this collision itself
did produce something new.
This friend also mentioned a term
called "semantic motif." It
means that there
are some recurring underlying narrative structures in human thinking,
such as "unity and division," "death and rebirth," and "whole and part."
All cultures and all disciplines
revolve around these motifs,
so you might feel that they are talking about the same thing,
but in fact,
they are just using the same cognitive template.
This explanation makes sense,
but it can also be understood from the opposite perspective:
why is the human cognitive template the way it is,
and not something else? Is it
possible that the reason
these templates appear repeatedly is
precisely because the underlying structure of reality is
inherently like this?
Just like different cultures
independently invented the wheel,
not because the human brain has a "wheel motif,"
but because in the physical world,
circular rolling has the least friction.
Cognitive templates
are actually a compression of the structure of reality - this is itself another way of saying what
I said before, "language is a super-high compression of the physical world."
So the final question
is not "whether or not to cross boundaries." The question
is, "After crossing boundaries, what
will you use to calibrate?"
My answer has three layers: The first layer is logic: Is this correspondence
internally consistent?
Can it lead to verifiable predictions? The
second layer is empirical evidence: Can scientific experiments and practical experience provide independent verification
for this correspondence? The
third layer is openness: Are you prepared to be overturned at any time?
If all three layers are present,
then what you're doing is not a word game.
If any layer is missing,
you should stop and ask yourself: Am I approaching the truth
or indulging in illusion?
I ask myself this question every day,
and I suggest you ask yourselves this question every
day.
Whether you agree with my approach
or with that audience member's question,
I really want to hear your thoughts. Do
you think
cross-disciplinary alignment
is a powerful tool for discovering the truth
or a shortcut to self-deception?
Where would you draw this boundary?
Welcome to tell me in the comments section.
Also, please tell me
what topic you most want to hear about in the next episode.
I'm Wang Lijie.
See you next time.