> The meaning of words is derived from our experience of reality.

I didn't say "words". I said "concepts"[0].

> Words is how the experiencing self classifies experienced reality into a lossy shared map for the purposes of communication with other similarly experiencing selves, and without that shared experience words are meaningless, no matter what graph you put them in.

Sure, ultimately everything is grounded in some experiences. But I'm not talking about grounding, I'm talking about the mental structures we build on top of those. The kind of higher-level, more abstract thinking (logical or otherwise) we do, is done in terms of those structures, not underlying experiences.

Also: you can see what I mean by "meaning being defined in terms of relationships" if you pick anything, any concept - "a tree", "blue sky", "a chair", "eigenvector", "love", anything - and try to fully define what it means. You'll find the only way you can do it is by relating it to some other concepts, which themselves can only be defined by relating them to other concepts. It's not an infinite regression, eventually you'll reach some kind of empirical experience that can be used as anchor - but still, most of your effort will be spent drawing boundaries in concept space.

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[0] - And WRT. LLMs, tokens are not words either; if that wasn't obvious 2 years ago, it should be today, now that multimodal LLMs are commonplace. The fact that this - tokenizing video and audio and other modalities into the same class of tokens as text, and embedding them in the same latent space - worked spectacularly well - is pretty informative to me. For one, it's a much better framework to discuss the paradox of Sapir-Whorf hypotheses than whatever was mentioned on Wikipedia to date