Second-Hand World (Part 1): What LLMs Inherit From the World They Never Touched

A formal system derives its conclusions because they follow from its axioms: its starting rules, assumed true without proof. Consistency is guaranteed by construction. An LLM, by contrast, returns whatever sounds plausible. It may reach the same conclusions, but nothing in its architecture guarantees consistency, or that its output follows from anything at all.

The easy objection is that an LLM is “just statistics.” Too easy. We don’t know what the mind runs on either, and we still call what it does knowing. “It’s just statistics” settles nothing.

The real question is grounding: whether a system has a causal grip on what it’s talking about.

Here the formal system is instructive precisely because it’s blind. Its symbols point only to other symbols; it tracks no world. But notice: it was never supposed to. Peano arithmetic (the standard set of basic rules for the natural numbers) isn’t defective for failing to touch a world it was never about. “Tracks no world” is a defect only relative to a purpose.

So grounding isn’t a single thing you either have or lack; it’s a relation between a system and what its work requires.

That reframes the LLM. It tracks patterns in text. The tempting conclusion: patterns built on patterns touch nothing, the formal system’s blindness in a new costume.

But text is not a closed symbol game.

Text is a causal trace left by writers who were grounded in a world: someone saw the rain, ran the experiment, lost the money.

And predicting that text well pushes the model to arrange its representations so that the distances between them mirror relations that hold among the things the words are about, the geometry of the meaning-space becomes a partial imprint of the structure of the world that produced the text.

That is how grounding enters through the back door: not earned through sensory contact, but inherited as structure from the world the whole body of training text records. The imprint is not reference, and it is not clean; it is exactly the kind of thing the constraints are there to measure.

Call the first kind primary grounding: an organism in direct causal contact with its world. Call the second kind second-hand grounding: a system in contact with the traces that grounding leaves behind in text.

Testimonial knowledge already assumes that grounding can survive transmission; most human knowledge arrives through chains of representations rather than direct encounter. But not all transmissions preserve grounding equally.

The disagreement is not over whether grounding can travel, but over how much survives the journey. Second-hand, thin, deniable.

Deniable, yes. But consider what that denial entails. If our ignorance of the substrate’s qualities, and of how much grounding is preserved, prevents the skeptic from dismissing an LLM as “just statistics,” it constrains us as well.

We do not know the substrate of thought either, nor the mechanisms by which it becomes experience.

We say we know our own minds because we live them from the inside. We attribute minds to others without ever inspecting their substrate. That attribution is not the result of direct access to their mind, but of inference.

Notice what did the work just now: living a mind from the inside is itself a mark of embodiment, and leaning on it hardly makes embodiment irrelevant.

If anything, it shows how much embodiment carries. Embodiment may be the strongest indication of grounding we possess; the weaker claim is only that evidence for grounding should not be mistaken for a definition of grounding.

But notice where this leaves us.

If grounding survives transmission, and survives it in degrees, then the question is no longer whether the model touches the world. It’s what that thin, inherited contact entitles us to say.

And there is one word we reach for the moment we try to say it: we grant that a system knows, or we withhold the word.

That word has been doing quiet work under everything so far, unexamined. Whether the model has earned it is the question the next part takes up.

Next: Episode #5: Second-Hand World (Part 2): The Role of Knowing