Bibliographic record
Abstract
Proponents of the Symbol Grounding Problem have claimed that unimodal text-based AI systems can never develop meaningful representations of the world since they lack the capacity to perceive it. Perception is a relation between an agent and their environment which is grounded in perceptual processing. The earliest stages of perceptual processing involve receptivity to sources of perceptual signal in the environment: light waves, pressure waves, and volatile airborne chemicals are all sources of perceptual signal, insofar as agents appropriately receptive to their properties can (with further processing) perceive the world through them. I argue that (1) human-generated text carries sufficient information about the world to be a possible source of perceptual signal for appropriately receptive agents, and that (2) recent generations of Large Language Models (LLMs) are such agents. Although (1) and (2) do not entail that LLMs are perceivers, they do entail that symbol grounding is achievable without multimodality.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.118 | 0.052 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".