I have noticed that when I try to feel a particular feeling, it is often vague at first.
I need to translate it into words first, drawing on descriptions left by people before me to recognize what I am going through. The same is true when I imagine something concrete: I sketch part of its outline in words, then follow those lines to slowly fill in the rest of the picture.
These words are a kind of draft. They temporarily hold part of an abstract and complex meaning, freeing the mind to keep working on what remains.
Thinking itself seems to unfold this way. I need to find the sentence before this one before the next thought can follow from it. One sentence becomes the context for the next; one thought becomes the context for another.
If words carry thought, then from this angle, human thinking may not be so different from that of a large language model. Large language models already possess some capacity for reasoning, even if we cannot yet say that they have thoughts of their own.
Then what, exactly, separates a person from a model?
If it is only thinking, machines seem increasingly capable of replacing it. If we view a person as merely one component in an industrial system, our unique value as information-processing units appears to be diminishing quickly.
But there is something more primal in us.
“What do I want?”
It is a more primal kind of motivation.
I think of a line from Soul:
“A spark isn't a soul's purpose.”
It is more like the tiny force that makes someone willing to keep living, to keep moving closer to certain things.
“Time goes by so quickly. I don't have much of an impression of what happened this year.”
I have heard people say this more than once. Some were 32, some 40, and some 56.
Since the end of last year, I have been deliberately recording what happened each month.
The app I used could export a calendar image at the end of every month. Each day on it showed the one photo that had left the deepest impression on me that day.
It did change what I paid attention to. I began noticing more of what was happening around me.
But I increasingly found that a calendar was not a very good view. Whenever a day was blank, I would instinctively want to fill it.
Filling the calendar became a kind of purpose in itself.
It took me several months to adjust. I began to accept the blank spaces in the calendar—to accept an ordinary day on which nothing happened.
This morning, I read an article by Mao Yuan from Youzhiyouxing. It contained a line:
“What truly makes up a life is precisely that long stretch of continuous, unnamed time between two points.”
I want to make an app that helps people notice what carries them through each of these stretches of unnamed time.
I originally wanted to make an onboarding page for it. I put the idea aside after what I made did not look right.
The concept was an animated sequence in three acts.
In the first act, a person chases a train.
They keep running forward.
In the second act, the train gradually becomes a gigantic clock.
The person keeps running, but the only thing that really seems to change around them is the passing of the seasons.
In the third act, the concrete world begins to disappear, little by little.
The train, the clock, the seasons, and the road all recede until only words remain.
A question appears at the top of the screen:
“What to do next?”
Below it, words begin to appear one by one, as if generated by a model:
Worked through another task, commuted across the city, replied to the messages, exercised for a while, planned what comes after, finished what needed finishing, moved on to the next thing, working...
Work, commute, reply to messages, exercise, plan the next thing, finish what needs to be finished, then move on to the next. This question seems to have an endless supply of answers.
Then another question appears:
“What do I want?”
Below it, there is only thinking...
At the same time, the person who has been running gradually disappears, finally collapsing into a blinking cursor.
|
People are increasingly living like LLMs.
“What to do next?” always has an answer.
But sometimes we struggle to answer:
“What do I want?”