Your Unconscious Friend

Here is an attempt to capture a definition of “forbearance”.

We have shown two definitions for forbearance – actually it has a sense and a sub sense (a child sense).

The two words used to define it in the definition also have multiple meanings – here, the particular definition of the defining word is linked through a MULTIPARENT operator (ir may have two or three parent links, depending on whether the word has a subcategory – like Adjective and Attributive).

The AND is also of a specific type – directly linking objects, rather than adjectives or clauses. That is, there isd a need for a node explaining the AND, rather than just an operator.

OBJECTGROUP is an operator, and can have many links for a large group, or it can have a single link to an operator which goes and finds the members of the group, when called on to do that.

Why show you this?

It gives some idea how much work your unconscious mind is doing as it reads text.

LLMs like GPT-4 avoid all this, relying on the fact someone once wrote the bit of text and they can combine bits of text because they sort of fit together (the statistics are good) – the hope that they will be useful for AGI#  is illusory, because they don't "know" anything.

We are making it seem easier than it really is - sometimes you or the machine can't be sure of the specific meaning to be used for the defining word until you see some context around the word being defined - the definitions can't be pruned to a single candidate until later.

Your unconscious mind is a valuable workhorse, allowing you to function at a high level, while being oblivious to what it does (it is doing things for you that are too complicated, or would be too long-winded, to do consciously). The long-winded part is a worry, as the workings, unreachable from your conscious mind,  can get out of date. You bet your life on it multiple times every day. But it occasionally gets things wrong. A little bit of insight into its workings wouldn't hurt.