Most researchers in our labs already frequently employ LLMs in their everyday work. They use them, among other things, to finetune [sic] and revise their drafts, as a supporting tool for programming, to suggest formulations for research items such as questionnaires or experimental instructions, and to summarize research papers. We have observed a significant increase in quality in all of these areas after the widespread adoption of these models. … Indeed, we believe that working with LLMs will not be fundamentally different from working with other collaborators, such as research assistants or doctoral students. [Schulz et al, in Binz et al 02025, 2]

When we lived in Los Angeles my partner and I got a membership to the Huntington Gardens so we could visit whenever we pleased. We took full advantage, and some of the trees there came to feel like friends. Later I came to suspect that friend did not do justice to the relationships in question. The word that came to mind when I recalled standing beneath a tree aloe (Aloidendron barberae), with its spiky deliquescence, or placing my hand on the caudiciform trunk of a Queensland Bottle Tree (Brachychiton rupestris), was familiar. These trees were my familiars.

Perhaps one thing I meant by familiar is that, in regarding the sprawling Coast Live Oak (Quercus agrifolia), say, I understood the two of us to be playing coordinate roles in some common undertaking. I understood us as parts of something. In my notes I wrote:

By familiar I mean any presence that you experience as distinct from yourself and yet implicated in your own coming-to-be — a co-improvisator, a partner in self-making.

Now this feels wrong. For one thing, though I would hardly deny trees a presence in the world, perhaps a presence to the self, I don’t know that I could specify what self-making would mean for a tree. There is an experiential gap here — or perhaps an experiential cliff, if we wish to hold open the possibility that there is “nothing it is like” to be a tree. Any effort to bridge this gap, if a gap it be, must rely on projection, a speculative attribution of “something like” one’s own experience to some other part of the world — and here we must take care.

No question, any thing we encounter that has for us the coherence and distinctness we associate with the term individual shapes us in an accretive way, inflects, as it were, our posturokinematic habit. Do I adjust my posture, perhaps unawares, to match the shapes of the trees I see around me? Certainly those whose habit evokes in me a body-like expressiveness, a limbedness — I think again of the Coast Live Oak, or the equally louche Peppermint Tree (Agonis flexuosa). Limbedness is too restrictive: there are days when I identify more with a colony of Golden Barrel Cacti (Echinocactus grusonii) than anything arborescent. Still, perhaps this is all I meant by familiar: something that evokes in us a bodily deformation, something that invites a response. But in adopting this stance I sensed I was keeping something off camera.

For a long time I resisted the urge to treat this thing I felt, walking the gardens, as something interesting. I suspected I was making too much of it. Perhaps I was willing myself to experience the trees as partners in self-making, or perhaps I was retrospectively ascribing greater intensity to the feeling than it had in the moment. I imagined my sense of kinship with the trees reflected more a longing on my part, for some kind of connection with the plant world, say, than something unfolding in me spontaneously. Part of me wished to construe it as nothing more than benign dissociation. And yet, I kept circling back to it, convinced it had something to show me.

Some time later, I began to observe that something had changed in our relationship to language (note the introduction of the notional us). We seemed less and less invested, even in a casual, implicit way, in the idea that the meanings of words — words like ‘sriracha’ or ‘broccoli’, say — had something to do with the history of our encounters with sriracha and broccoli. By encounters I mean bodily encounters. When I say something had changed in our relationship to language, I mean more and more, I sensed, people were comfortable dismissing the role such encounters play in the propagation of meaning — seemed content to allow that meaning might reside exclusively in a network of coöccurrences of words and phrases, so that a sufficiently sophisticated classification algorithm — rather, a process instantiating that algorithm — trained on a sufficiently rich textual corpus, would become capable of practicing — perhaps experiencing — meaning in the same way that consumers of sriracha and broccoli do. This was interesting in itself, if not altogether surprising in view of other things unfolding at the time, but what was more interesting was that it formed part of a broader shift in folk semantics, in our workaday theory of meaning. This shift was particularly marked in the case of artistic style: no longer was the meaning, say, of Hayao Miyazaki’s painterly style grounded, even implicitly, in the history of his development as an animator, nor in the history of audiences’ encounters with his work. Its meaning resided, rather, in a network of recurring stylistic indicia that could be applied to any theme — or rather, in what those stylistic indicia evoked in viewers independent of their history with Miyazaki’s work (the mood suggested by the color palette, the charismatic altriciality of facial features, etc).

I write I began to observe, but this was a thing that unfolded over a period of years, during which time I found myself drawn to one or another aspect of the phenomenon in question without being able to say why and without seeing how they fit together. For five years it lay beyond my grasp. I struggled to identify a theme, something I felt compelled to write about. When I did write, I struggled to write something connected — my work from this time was fragmentary, more the stuff of a private notebook than anything fit to share. Mostly what I sensed was that I should be writing about the thing I felt standing before the Coast Live Oak at the Huntington. Gradually it dawned on me that the thing I kept circling back to concerned a phenomenon similar to that by which words acquire meaning: a history of encounter, a history of efforts to represent some fragment of the world in oneself. When I say the Coast Live Oak and the Golden Barrel Cactus colony at the Huntington Gardens felt like familiars, part of what I mean is that they had acquired meaning for me via recurring encounter.

In the time when I struggled to write coherently I sometimes said I felt as if my hands had been disarticulated. This was not simply metaphor. I was conscious of an abiding desire to have something skillful and constructive to do with the hands apart from slicing vegetables. Periodically I’d pick up drawing, or needlework, but never consistently or for long. And then, when I turned forty-nine, I began to draw, every day, to extend my technique, to feel myself developing a sense of style, a position, something, as it were, to say in this new medium. Initially, most of what I had to say concerned plants.

In a matter of months, drawing became an exemplary way by which I sought, as I put it above, to represent the world in myself. As a way of attending to the world, drawing is distinguished by how it obliges you to realize your attention in the movements of your body — or rather, by how it brings into focus the fact that attention is something realized in bodily movement. Quickly I came to see that the more you involve your body in constructing representations of the world, the more the world opens up. The scene, as it were, breaks apart, spontaneously, into its component layers. And this opening-up is implicated not simply in how things acquire meaning but in how they acquire value: that is, it is ethically freighted. A couple months after I’d begun drawing the plants in our container garden I gave a talk where I put it this way:

The habit of inviting the world to open up to you by giving yourself over to the skillful practice of representing it is the same habit that fosters ethical imagination, the capacity to experience our lives, and others’, as ethically significant, as something saturated with value. Ethical imagination demands the ongoing replenishment of meaning that comes of recurrent encounters with the world.

In 02022 I became fascinated with meokbang (Korean: eating show), video performances that feature, primarily, young women preparing and consuming dishes chosen, among other virtues, for the sounds they elicit — the mechanical sounds, the sounds of chewing and swallowing. I will confess that my descent into the meokbang subculture began with a New York Times Cooking feature in which Times food columnist Eric Kim offered a chocolate-cherry cake in homage to their Internet friend Lizzy, aka SassEsnacks, an improbable star of ASMR YouTube who died in 02019 but whose videos continued, long after, to garner new views. There is, in fact, something special about SassEsnacks, something that sets her apart from the community of aspiring meokbang influencers. Perhaps part of it is age: SassEsnacks was in her forties when she began, and this lends her performances a gravitas, a sense of stakes. Whatever inspired her to take up microphone and camera and barricade herself in closets lest noise from leafblowers spoil the effect, you sense she was not in it for the likes. Her final performance, recorded in September 02018 just weeks before she was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, is a text for the ages. In twenty-eight preposterously compelling minutes, she consumes a tray of supermarket spicy salmon roll (brown rice) followed by a wedge of carrot cake the size of your head, all while explaining, in her spine-tingling whisper, why it’s been so long since she’s posted a video: it transpires she has moved house, having sold her California condo and purchased “the cheapest house in the best neighborhood” in Georgia, where, despite intermittent abdominal pain, she intends to continue her calling. I know how I sound — but I say in earnest that the way she draws together food and real estate makes this recording, for my money, among the most compelling critical commentaries yet formulated of the proverbially late capitalist milieu in which she lived. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would find myself wrestling with it in fiction:

Not long after, I got one of those devices like a jade scraper that you draw across the wrists and brow when you lie down to hear women who died before you were born extract mugwort mochi from heat-sealed mylar wrappers and make coffee from those single-serve tear-off packets with the glossy lining, describe their mic setup, wrap ice cream in fruit leather and tap the sugar gyoza, as the outcome of this procedure was known, with their fingernails. There were scrapers that allowed you to see the video projected on your inner screen, but I was living beyond my means as was and in any case I did not care for video. I was in it for the sounds of chewing, of foods I would never eat, never desire to eat: carrot cake, spicy salmon roll, straining to catch the squeak of the supermarket pet clamshell as they unpacked their haul. The spill of peanuts in a melamine bowl at the start of a healthy snacks episode ran down my spine like a shaman’s rattle. This was true sorcery, and it got me through a difficult year.

Around this time, a friend in market research asked me for an opinion on the future of breakfast cereal. In my response I cited SassEsnacks.

In this case I suspect watching and listening to someone eat has become a proxy for sharing food … In some of her posts a lot of the action consists in her preparing the meal first — this enhances my sense that what at least some devotees are getting from meokbang is an experience of being cared for. Most of those who find their way into this scene, I suspect, have a pronounced ASMR [autonomous sensory meridian response] — they experience an evoked rheotactic sensation up the cervical spine and caudorostrally over the occiput in response to quiet reciprocating impulsive sounds (crackling, crunching, mixers, washers, muffled heartbeats). Whether you think this is a vestigial reward for crunching through charred long bones to get at the marrow or simply an epiphenomenon of neural crest ontogenesis and the evolutionary history of rheotactic mechanosensing inherited from teleosts, the effect is to feel as if someone were stroking you up the back of the neck while you watched them prepare something (for you?) to eat.…

In a sensory ecology of ubiquitous anosmia and declining taste buds, mouthfeel moves to the center of the pleasure of eating. The future is crunchy.

The idea that ASMR could represent a vestige of “rheotactic mechanosensing”, that is, the lateral line system (not “inherited from” teleosts, as I wrote in the otherwise awkwardly precise note quoted above, but perhaps present in the common ancestor of teleosts and synapsids such as ourselves), however speculative, appeals to me because it evokes a narrative arc joining modalities of hair cell–based mechanosensing across evolutionary history: from the gravity-sensing statocysts present in ctenophores and cnidarians to the flow-sensing neuromasts of the teleost and amphibian lateral line systems to the vestibular sense of angular acceleration and, of course, cochlear hearing.

Natural history here is nothing more than a prop — a way of drawing attention to the fact that sound is a form of sensed movement.

Another genre of sensed movement: words. Consider how words acquire meaning — in fact, let’s make this concrete: cast your mind back over the history of your encounters with the word ‘sriracha’.

When I do this exercise I find myself asking if, in fact, I’ve ever tasted sriracha. Likely but uncertain. I have but a vague sense of what it tastes like. Sriracha lies beyond the compass of my experience, or, at best, it occupies a penumbral zone between that which I know by experience and that which I know from others’ accounts. And yet there is no question that the word ‘sriracha’ has meaning for me.

Contrast broccoli. Here there is no question: I have had ample experience with broccoli, enough, in fact, to last a lifetime, and while I can imagine knowing a vegetable by description, having never tasted it, my history with broccoli informs the meaning that the word ‘broccoli’ has for me.

A better contrast: tamari, or genmaisu, or — a penumbral case — nattō. (Perhaps there is something distinctive about condiments?)

Switching modalities, and freeing ourselves of the aura of the dictionary word: how does the phrase ‘the pencil-like feedback of a Tachikawa No. 44 nib’ acquire meaning? No question, the phrase had meaning for me long before I used a Tachikawa No. 44, and perhaps the key is the pencil-like, which offers a bridge to more familiar experiences. But the phrase became more meaningful to me once I’d become familiar with the nib it describes.

This bridge to more familiar experiences offers a path to pursue. For consider how ‘sriracha’ might become meaningful for me had I never tasted sriracha. I might infer from context — reading, listening to someone describe a recipe — that ‘sriracha’ referred to some kind of fermented-chile paste and rough in its taste, including the chemesthetic and tactile dimensions, by analogy from fermented-chile preparations with which I’m familiar. Or I might consult the ingredients list printed on the bottle: Chili, Sugar, Salt, Garlic, Distilled Vinegar, Potassium Sorbate and Sodium Bisulfite as preservatives, and Xanthan Gum. In this way, by borrowing from neighboring forms of experience, I can imbue ‘sriracha’ with meaning even in the absence of encounters with sriracha.

But note two things. First, at some point in the course of imbuing ‘sriracha’ with meaning, I must have recourse to a history of encounters with the world. I need not draw all the properties I end up assigning to ‘sriracha’ (and attributing to sriracha) from the same place: perhaps the sweetness and acid I pull from brown rice vinegar, the mouthfeel from ketchup, the chemesthetic burn of chile and garlic from Tabasco. I recombine the memory of these sensations to fashion a stand-in for ‘sriracha’. A lot of meaning unfolds this way, by chains of association across a network of prior meanings. But at some point, these chains of association must resolve to a history of encounters with the world.

Must is a strong word, and indeed, I suspect that more often than we’d like to admit we imbue signs with meaning on the basis of chains of association that end up being circular, that never resolve to encounters with the world, to put it crudely, of things.

But — second — this is a shallow form of meaning. As with ‘the pencil-like feedback of a Tachikawa No. 44’, ‘sriracha’ becomes more meaningful — acquires depth — when I’ve actually tasted sriracha. And the stronger the current of my history of encounters with sriracha, the more depth ‘sriracha’ acquires.

No doubt we reach a point where it no longer makes sense to say that a sign acquires depth with every encounter with its referent. In fact, a sign might lose depth with overexposure — this is the phenomenon we call habituation. If I doused everything I ate in sriracha, sriracha, and with it ‘sriracha’, would lose its distinctiveness, its capacity, respectively, to evoke or delimit a particular quality of experience.

“But what about mathematics?” Or any domain whose concepts seem to lack grounding in the world of palpable things. A perennial concern. I want to say: even the most abstract concepts take on depth when we tie them to intuitions derived from our history of encounters with the world of things. So much of understanding a proof, in my experience, consists in distilling the phenomena in question to something amenable to visualization. The distillation need not be visual — it could be auditory, olfactory, kinesthetic — but at any rate it will entail projecting oneself into the scene and observing how things unfold. My hunch is that something like this underpins the meaningfulness of many of the signs that we take to have no correspondence to the world of palpable things.

Thus far we’ve been concerned with how words, among other things, acquire meaning for the individual. But if anything we should be more concerned with how signs acquire meaning at the level of the community.

The meaning, say, of ‘sriracha’ or ‘the pencil-like feedback of Tachikawa No. 44’, is a landrace phenomenon, as in a rice variety whose salient traits are propagated at the community level — some members of the community are more rust-resistant, others yield chewier kernels, and to get the ensemble of traits associated with the landrace you need to maintain all the different strains together. Even if you could devise a single cultivar that integrated all the useful properties of the population, you would do well to forbear, for it is likely you’d observe antagonistic interactions between the selected traits. Similarly, I propose, the stability of ‘sriracha’ depends on inter-individual variation in the word’s correspondence in the mind to a history of encounters with the world.

In some cases, of course, correspondence to a history of encounters with the world diverges between parts of a community to such a degree that it is no longer clear members of the different parts are referring to the same thing. Signs change their meanings, or acquire divergent meanings for distinct communities whose distinctness is partly a product of the divergent uses they make of shared signs. Equally, the things a sign refers to change. The nattō I eat today is not the “same thing” as the nattō eaten a hundred years ago — standardization of strains of Bacillus subtilis, introduction of mechanical refrigeration and disposable packaging, changes in the nature of breakfast routines, in the socialization histories by which we acquire tastes, all these things conspire to make the thing referred to by ‘nattō’ something other than what it once was. And yet, we have no difficulty recognizing a continuity over time, just as we recognize a continuity in our bodies though the constituent parts change over time.

This is all well-trod ground, but perhaps there is something new to say. Consider feedback, as in ‘the pencil-like feedback etc’. Tools take many forms, and one way to characterize this variation, to say that tool A is more like tool B than it is like tool C, is by the degree to which its use entails feedback, entails the creation of a new channel between body and world through which information about the world and the effects of one’s action on it can flow. A pen is high feedback: the continuous stream of information we receive, as we write, about the pressure exerted by the writing surface on the tip of the nib, the texture of the writing substrate, etc, is integral to using the pen. A squeeze bottle, as for sriracha, is medium feedback: the flexible wall of the bottle provides intermittent feedback on the kinematics of our grip, not to say the pressure of the contents. A bowl — imagine a rice bowl or a tea bowl, a vessel intended to be held in the hand — is low feedback: we experience its weight through the strain imparted on the Golgi tendon organs of the hand, wrist, forearm, upper arm, and shoulder and calibrate our movements accordingly to keep the surface level as we guide it from table to mouth and back — but we do not expect the information so gained to change significantly in the course of the hand-to-mouth movement.

I would like to say: meaning is more like the pen than the squeeze bottle or the cup. It entails the maintenance of a continuing relationship between body and world (where the world, of course, includes the body). The meaningfulness of ‘sriracha’ or ‘broccoli’ or ‘the pencil-like feedback of a Tachikawa No. 44’ is something that needs to be periodically replenished, it is grounded in a history of recurring encounters between body and world no less than in a history of recurring coöccurences of gesture (sign, word) and world. The latter without former is like the shell of a gastropod: it is the trace of meaning, but it is not meaningful in itself. The trace lacks the ongoing, materially freighted temporal extension, the activity, that abides at the heart of meaning.

(Perhaps there is something distinctive about condiments?)

I intended this in jest, but now I must stop and ask: why did I begin with taste? Why take food — specifically, with the exception of broccoli, condiments, flavor enhancers — for an exemplary genre of meaningful things? What is it about taste that gave me to believe, without having articulated this to myself, that it would make plain the challenge of explaining how things become meaningful?

Taste is the most elusive of the senses. In fact, taste as we ordinarily understand it entails coordinate sensation in six modalities. There is gustation strictu, mediated by odorant receptors embedded in the papillae of the tongue, palate, and esophagus, adapted, in humans and other terrestrial animals, to the evaluation of nonvolatile substances and coming in a small number of coarse-grained categories: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami, possibly starchy and fatty. There is olfaction, adapted to the detection of volatile odorants and orders of magnitude more discriminate than gustation. There is chemesthesis, mediated by chemical activation of the same transmembrane transient receptor potential ion channels that figure in the sensing of heat and cold — think of the burning sensation elicited by pepper (capsaicin), garlic (allicin), or horseradish (isothiocyanates), the cooling sensation elicited by menthol, camphor, or cinnamon.

In comparison with the other senses, taste and smell exhibit a marked sensitivity to physiological status and context. Thus, we are more sensitive to umami and acid when we are underslept — and so our thresholds of satiation for these tastes are lower and we gravitate, instead, to sweets. And a single odorant will evoke divergent interpretations depending on how we’ve been primed — in a market, butyric acid might evoke Parmesan, on a fairground, vomit.

Alongside these chemosensory channels we have cutaneous tactile sensation, which gives us mouthfeel: the distinct “body” of a good tea, not to say such qualities as creaminess, graininess, grittiness, sliminess, stickiness, unctuousness, and astringency. There is thermoception, again mediated by transmembrane TRPS. And there is proprioception, specifically via the Golgi tendon organs of the jaw, which afford sensitivity to mechanical loading and give us the qualities of resistance to mastication characteristic, variously, of yielding, fibrous, and brittle foods.

In a way there is nothing exceptional here. All sensory experience is metamodal: it entails the integration of information from a number of channels, and generally, past infancy, we do this without effort. Consider something as simple as turning your head: awareness of the orientation of the head relative to that of the trunk comes from a range of sources: visual, proprioceptive (angular strain sensors in the cervical vertebrae), baroceptive (modest compression of the carotid artery when you turn your head), vestibular (the angular acceleration–sensing hair cells of the inner ears), and, for those who hear binaurally, auditory. Ordinarily we give no thought to integrating all these lines of evidence. The metamodal quality of the experience of knowing which way your head is facing comes into focus when the lines of evidence disagree — when, say, owing to a Zoster varicella infection of the inner ear, your vestibular apparatus provides head orientation cues that diverge from what your eyes and spine say. Perhaps you’ve experienced this: positional vertigo, the feeling that the world is spinning though you know your head is stationary.

For the most part, the metamodal quality of sensation remains in the background — save with taste. Taste offers an object lesson in the role of metamodal integration in the encounter between self and other. No doubt this integration is partly innate. But perhaps it is partly something learned in infancy. Then we forget we ever had to learn it, but some trace of that early struggle to experience taste as a unified phenomenon lives on within us. This is why it feels apt to describe phenomena whose characterization depends on context, or that elude reduction to a single defining factor, as having a certain flavor. Taste presents a challenge to theories of meaning founded on vision and hearing.

I sense now that in my reading of October 02022 I got it backward, or at least, that I saw but half the story. No question, meokbang gives many fans a sense of being cared for. But now I would propose that the converse is equally true: in consuming meokbang we place ourselves in a position to care for others — here the performer comes to serve as a stand-in for an other-than-human counterpart of the sort that humans of all times and places have appealed to for guidance and succor. The meokbang performer is a shaman or medium — it is we who feed them, and, through them, the spirits who typically abide in subtle or insubstantial form but who require nourishment all the same — and who can be coaxed, ephemerally, into the material realm with offerings of food.

In this interpretation, meokbang represents nothing so much as a contemporary reflex of an old and widespread impulse, the collective nourishment of spirit. There is a tension here, one that has been addressed in different ways by different communities, between the feeding of the body and the cultivation of those faculties by which one may enter into abiding contact with the world of spirit. For the chieftains and ritual officiants of Warring States and early Imperial China, observes historian Roel Sterckx, this tension was omnipresent: “When should one fast and when should one feast[?] … Should one nourish the body or nurture the spirit, engage in covert forms of spirit worship or overt ones?” The metaphysics of early China emphasized “continuities between the human world and the realm of the spirits.” Still, there were times when honoring the spirits and governing the people demanded askesis rather than conspicuous display. A good ruler had to be skilled at both.

Of course, taste differs from the other senses in a more basic way, which is its unique intimacy. Taste demands that we bring the world into the body in order to know it. Ingestion, the introduction of foreign matter into the body via the mouth, is among the most intimate things we do as animals, yet we do it all the time. We cannot help but associate ingestion with taste, nor taste, in turn, with the interoceptive sensations of food passing through the gut. The rhythmic contraction and distension of this inner self, this evolutionary body-within-the-body, provides one of the fundamental recurring cues, together with breathing and the rhythmic contraction of the heart, to the fact of the self — though we would do better to imagine a sheaf or constellation of selves — not to say a continuing reminder of the obligation to tend the fire, to keep the body fed — and thus, a continuing reminder of our mortality, our finitude, of the fact that our bargain with the Second Law is provisional at best, that no one outruns entropy forever. What lends taste its depth as a channel of meaning is that every act of eating evokes in us life’s one certainty, something we share with plants and doctoral students but not LLMs: that it will end.

That our death as individuals does not augur the end of meaning gives testament to the fact that meaning is something held in common: it abides in the continuing exchange of interpretations between beings possessed of that ineffable capacity to resolve chains of signs to a history of encounters with the world — the capacity, that is, to represent the world in the self.

This is the ethical dimension of meaning: it exists in virtue of our disposition to experience one another as beings possessed of a capacity to represent the world in the self. Absent this capacity — and our will to recognize it in others — all our words, all our drawings, would be nothing more than grunts and squiggles.

—

JOSH BERSON writes fiction and essays and occasionally makes procedural noise as Additive Set. His work includes The Human Scaffold and The Meat Question. The still point at the center of his thinking is the relationship between skill and value: how our habits, inter alia, of listening, breathing, sitting, and eating, inform what matters.

References

Barwich, Ann-Sophie (02019) A Critique of Olfactory Objects. Frontiers in Psychology 10: 1337.

Binz, Marcel, Stephan Alaniz, Adina Roskies, Balazs Aczel, Carl T. Bergstrom, et al (02025) How Should the Advancement of Large Language Models Affect the Practice of Science? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the usa 122(5): e2401227121.

Kim, Eric (02022) A Chocolate Cake for the Queen of ASMR Eating. New York Times, Jul 20.

Sterckx, Roel (02011) Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zuraikat, Faris M., Rebecca A. Wood, Rocío Barragán, and Marie-Pierre St-Onge (02021) Sleep and Diet: Mounting Evidence of a Cyclical Relationship. Annual Review of Nutrition 41: 309–32.