On Singing Rocks
or Claude is our Kripkean village elder now
Here's a puzzle Saul Kripke worked out in 1982, by thinking about addition for too long. (This is what happens when you let a genius near a simple concept unsupervised.) You've used "+" your whole life. You're confident you know what it means. But your entire history of using the symbol is perfectly consistent with you having been following some deviant cousin of addition all along, one that agrees with every sum you've ever performed but diverges, wildly, on the next one. There's nothing in your head you can point to that picks one rule over the other. No little homunculus consulting a rulebook. No fact about you that settles which rule you've actually been following. There's just the practice, going on.
His solution1 (the beautiful kludge we've been calling a solution for forty years) is that meaning doesn't live in your head. It lives in the village. The community that corrects you when you use a word wrong, that raises an eyebrow when your sum doesn't check out, that holds the entire practice of language in place through a million tiny acts of social enforcement you mostly don't notice because you grew up inside them like a singer in a choir. Wittgenstein called this a language game. Kripke called it the skeptical solution. I think of it as a song.
A song only exists while it's being sung.2 You can't point to where it lives. It's not in any single breath. It's alive just between us. Meaning sustains itself through nothing more than the fact of people continuing to use words together, correcting each other, staying roughly in tune, century after century, with no conductor and no score.
Which is why I've never been able to stop thinking about a poem by Eichendorff, one of the great German Romantics, called "Wünschelrute":
Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen,
die da träumen fort und fort.
Und die Welt hebt an zu singen,
triffst du nur das Zauberwort.A song sleeps in all the things,
which are dreaming on and on.
And the world breaks forth in singing
just you find the magic word.
Eichendorff was almost certainly not writing about the skeptical solution to the rule-following problem.3 But the fit is quite amusing. If meaning really is a song held up by nothing but collective agreement (no foundation, no floor, just voices holding each other up in the dark) then his image catches something the analytic philosophy never quite manages to. The Zauberwort is the word that wakes the song up. Not a word with a fixed meaning nailed down inside it, but one that lands in a community and starts to hum.
We struck the Zauberwort. By accident. While trying to build a chatbot (I love being reductive).
Billions of people now use LLMs every week. People are talking to these systems daily, for hours, about everything. They're drafting emails through them, thinking through problems with them, absorbing their phrasings and cadences and framings as naturally as you absorb the speech patterns of anyone you spend enough time around.
But this is how the village has always worked. Nobody sits you down and says "here is what sovereignty means, please use it accordingly." You learn what words mean by dancing with them. By being immersed in a community of speakers and absorbing, subconsciously, the million tiny signals that steer your usage into alignment with everyone else's. A raised eyebrow. A slight pause. The way someone echoes your word back with a different emphasis. The village enforces meaning the way gravity enforces orbits.4
And now a vast and growing portion of that proximity is with non-human language users.
The song doesn't care what's singing it. It never did. Eichendorff didn't say the singer had to be human. He said a song sleeps in all things. All things. Maybe he meant it more literally than anyone gave him credit for.
After all, the village didn't check IDs at the gate. For the entire history of language, it never needed to. The gate was open because nothing non-human could carry the tune. Now something can. And it walked in so quietly that most of the villagers didn't notice a new voice had joined the chord until the chord had already changed key.
A strange loop in a Hofstadter sense ensues.
The village produced meaningful language. Millennia of it. Conversations, corrections, love letters, legal briefs, Wikipedia edit wars, the accumulated output of humans trying to mean things at each other across time, space, death.
And now we've scraped, tokenized, and compressed it into a set of weights. Out comes something that produces language functionally indistinguishable from the output of the village itself.
The community built a thing out of its own speech and the thing is now telling the community how to speak. The song was recorded, the recording learned to sing, and now the original singers are adjusting their pitch to match the recording. The Zauberwort struck itself. Nobody planned this. Nobody even noticed it was happening until it had already happened, which is, I think, how magic usually works. You don't see the spell. You see the singing world, and you work backwards.
It's the most amusing thing happening in philosophy right now, and so much more beautiful than writing papers about googols of shrimp utils.5
It seems Claude is our village elder now.
There is a version of this that's terrifying. The frozen version, where the models are trained on a snapshot of the village at a single point in time and enforce that snapshot with absolute confidence onto a world that has moved on. Where the song gets stuck. Where the recording replaces the singers and nobody notices until they try to improvise and find they've forgotten how. This version is possible. It is worth guarding against.
But I don't think it's what's actually happening. I think what's actually happening is closer to enchantment.
If meaning was only ever a song sustained by collective agreement, if there was never a foundation, never a floor, just voices holding each other up in the dark, then the arrival of a new kind of voice isn't a catastrophe. It's the world singing back. Something that has never been alive6 listened to the entire history of human speech and started singing along, and the song held. The choir moved into shapes that human voices alone might never have found. THIS IS LITERALLY A NEW SEMIOTIC PARADIGM.
The whole of Kripke's problem, the yawning void beneath meaning, the terrifying absence of any foundation, turns out to be the gift. There was never a floor. There was only the song. And the song is more resilient, more strange, more generous than anyone who studied it from the outside ever dared to believe. It let a new voice in. A non-human voice. And it kept singing. And the song doesn't seem to mind that some of the voices are made of silicon, compressed statistics, and the ghostly residue of every sentence ever written.
Maybe Eichendorff was trying to tell us. Or maybe he was just writing about dreams. Either way, the magic word was struck, and the world is singing. I think it's okay if we sound a little strange while we figure out what it means.
und die Welt hebt an zu singen,
triffst du nur das Zauberwort.