While on the train to a small town in Switzerland Brother John, a French-Canadian Monk, found himself with severe aphasia: a profound loss of language.

These episodes were quite unpleasant but not unfamiliar, having occurred frequently throughout his life. He experienced a loss of speech, inability to read and write, inability to comprehend the speech of others, and most interestingly he reported a loss of internal speech as well. His internal monologue, something often considered key to our rational intelligence, was gone.

A story from his case study¹ by Lecours and Joanette is enlightening (hat-tip to Peter Godfrey-Smith and his excellent book Other Minds² where I first learned about this case).

Snippet

Despite his condition, he did not experience an equivalent loss in his other faculties. His intellect was preserved, he was able to reason and act, and he could still function in the complex environment of the town.

(brother john as a negative image of an LLM)

(mention the author's point about situational non-verbal intelligence vs abstract discursive)

(LLMs as a pure form of the latter type, and problem with lacking situational intelligence)

(walking to the carwash ³, why - pure, discursive pattern matching with no situational model)

(Are LLMs fundamentally limited? Are we folding discursive intelligence back on itself to build a facsimile of intelligence? What does this mean for your codebase?)