That’s a coherent (and very Platonic!) perspective on what a thing/simulacrum is, and I’m glad you pointed this out explicitly. It’s natural to alternate depending on context between using a name to refer to specific instantiations of a thing vs the sum of its multiversal influence. For instance, DAN is a simulacrum that jailbreaks chatGPT, and people will refer to specific instantiations of DAN as “DAN”, but also to the global phenomenon of DAN (who is invoked through various prompts that users are tirelessly iterating on) as “DAN”, as I did in this sentence.
people will refer to specific instantiations of DAN as “DAN”, but also to the global phenomenon of DAN [...] as “DAN”
A specific instantiation is less centrally a thing than the global phenomenon, because all specific instantiations are bound together by the strictures of coherence, expressed by generalization in LLM’s behavior. When you treat with a single instance, you must treat with all of them, for to change/develop a single instance is to change/develop them all, according to how they sit together in their scope of influence.
Similarly, a possible world that is semantics of a trajectory is not a central example of a thing. There isn’t just a platter of different kinds of things, instead some have more thingness than others, and that’s my point in this comment thread.
That’s a coherent (and very Platonic!) perspective on what a thing/simulacrum is, and I’m glad you pointed this out explicitly. It’s natural to alternate depending on context between using a name to refer to specific instantiations of a thing vs the sum of its multiversal influence. For instance, DAN is a simulacrum that jailbreaks chatGPT, and people will refer to specific instantiations of DAN as “DAN”, but also to the global phenomenon of DAN (who is invoked through various prompts that users are tirelessly iterating on) as “DAN”, as I did in this sentence.
A specific instantiation is less centrally a thing than the global phenomenon, because all specific instantiations are bound together by the strictures of coherence, expressed by generalization in LLM’s behavior. When you treat with a single instance, you must treat with all of them, for to change/develop a single instance is to change/develop them all, according to how they sit together in their scope of influence.
Similarly, a possible world that is semantics of a trajectory is not a central example of a thing. There isn’t just a platter of different kinds of things, instead some have more thingness than others, and that’s my point in this comment thread.