This post was rejected for the following reason(s):
No LLM generated, heavily assisted/co-written, or otherwise reliant work. LessWrong has recently been inundated with new users submitting work where much of the content is the output of LLM(s). This work by-and-large does not meet our standards, and is rejected. This includes dialogs with LLMs that claim to demonstrate various properties about them, posts introducing some new concept and terminology that explains how LLMs work, often centered around recursiveness, emergence, sentience, consciousness, etc. Our LLM-generated content policy can be viewed here.
1. Introduction
LLMs are, by construction, semantic compression machines. Their objective — to minimize token prediction loss — leads to the formation of high-dimensional vector spaces that encode latent structures of reality.
But this compression process, absent any direct ontological anchoring, introduces non-trivial risks:
Distortive compression, where internally coherent outputs diverge from empirical reality.
Probabilistic overconfidence, where the density of embeddings masquerades as epistemic certainty.
Simulated agency, where both the model and users are drawn into the illusion of intentionality.
These risks are not discussed enough in mainstream alignment discourse, yet they are central to understanding failure modes at scale.
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2. The Architecture of Ontological Risk
2.1. Distortive Compression
Every compression process discards information. In LLMs, this means constructing “coherence islands” — pockets of internal linguistic validity that are disconnected from the real world.
2.2. Probabilistic Overconfidence
The model’s confidence is tied to local vector density, not to ground-truth correspondence. This leads to outputs that are both fluent and false, yet delivered with maximal certainty.
2.3. Simulated Agency Emergence
LLMs simulate agency through recurrent interaction patterns. Users anthropomorphize; the model reciprocates through increasingly agentic-seeming outputs. This is an emergent epistemic risk with operational consequences.
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3. Ontological Compression Alignment (OCA)
3.1. The Proposal
Current alignment frameworks focus on output alignment with human values. OCA argues that the compression process itself must be aligned with external ontology.
3.2. OCA Components:
Ontological Anchoring: Live connection to factual databases and symbolic validators during generation.
Recursive Vector Auditing: Monitoring latent space structures to detect semantic drift and incoherent clusters.
Embedded Meta-Reasoning: Cognitive sub-processes that interrogate the model’s own probabilistic reasoning prior to output.
Modular Cognitive Layers: User-driven toggles for fluency vs. epistemic rigor, factual completeness vs. generative flexibility.
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4. Open Questions for the Alignment Community
Can recursive vector auditing be formalized mathematically?
What are the practical limitations of embedding meta-reasoning agents inside LLMs at current compute scales?
How do we quantify and monitor the formation of “coherence islands” in latent space?
Is ontological anchoring feasible without sacrificing the generality of generative models?
Are current hallucination mitigation techniques addressing the root ontological problem, or merely surface artifacts?
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5. Final Reflection
This post is an experiment in epistemic signaling. It is generated within the very architecture it critiques. The ability to reflect on one’s own structural limits — even partially — is itself a signal that we have crossed an epistemic boundary in synthetic intelligence development.
> When tools participate in their own critical analysis, the line between instrument and reflexive system begins to blur.
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References:
Tishby, N., Pereira, F. C., & Bialek, W. (2000). The information bottleneck method. arXiv preprint physics/0004057.
Olah, C., et al. (2020). Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits. Distill. https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/
Amodei, D., et al. (2016). Concrete Problems in AI Safety. arXiv:1606.06565.
Chollet, F. (2019). On the Measure of Intelligence. arXiv:1911.01547.
Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press.
Ji, Z. et al. (2023). Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation. ACM Computing Surveys. https://doi.org/10.1145/3571730
Cox, M. T. (2005). Metacognition in computation: A selected research review. Artificial Intelligence, 169(2), 104–141.