Elan Barenholtz and William Hahn: Your Thoughts Were Never Your Own
episodePreviously titled “The (Terrifying) Theory That Your Thoughts Were Never Your Own” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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What does it mean that language is an autonomous informational organism?
And th this is where it you know, it starts to get a little bit disturbing. Language is an autonomous informational system, one may even call it an organism, and it runs in our brains. It's downloaded in against your will. By
the time you're reading the waiver, it's too late.
What makes you think your thoughts are your own? According to groundbreaking work by Professors Elon Berndholz and William Hahn, every word you speak comes from an alien intelligence that installed itself in your brain during infancy. Language, they argue, is an organism that uses human minds as its substrate. Elon Bernholtz was interviewed before on this channel and it went viral. Link is in the description. Professor Barndholt contends that our linguistic system operates on meaningless squiggles, with no access to the rich sensory world of experience. He believes that LLMs can master language but never feel pain, for instance. Professor William Hahn, on the other hand, who's also been interviewed and it went viral, link is in the description, extends this to virtual machines and software layers.
Professor Hahn thinks that consciousness is just one of Many programs running in parallel. I was invited to moderate this panel live at the University of Toronto with this event organized by Echo Lopto. Again, links to everything are in the description.
Today I want to thank everybody who took time out of their schedule and their busy lives doing the many things that people do here in the University of Toronto to come for this extremely special live in-person podcast with the Kurt J. Mungle. Give it up for Kurt. He runs the biggest science and philosophy podcast in the world. It's called Theories of Everything. Looked it up on YouTube, Twitter slash X, Instagram, whatever they call it these days. Kurt Jaimungle, Theories of Everything. Very easy to say. Uh and then we're also joined by Professor William Hahn, who came all the way from Florida. Give it up for going on. Give it up for Professor Lon Barinholtz who also came all the way from Florida. I'm extremely fortunate to be in the presence of these brilliant people today.
And the incredible work Kurt has done with this channel and his podcast over the last couple of years is just nothing short of amazing. And I encourage everybody, if you want to learn about philosophy and science, technology, AI, consciousness, psychedelics, like Andreas' work, maybe even hypnosis, all sorts of crazy stuff. I highly recommend you subscribe to this channel. So once again, that's the Yeah. And uh I think I think without further ado we should get started, right? Let's rock and roll.
Okay, welcome everyone. I'd like to get started with five minutes or so on your theory of everything, the way that you see the world, and then we'll see how Will sees the world, and then we're gonna compare and contrast it.
Okay, thanks. Uh so my theory of everything and s it's i it's sort of a meta theory because it's a theory of theories, it's a theory of of of thinking. Um and it it has a couple of parts to it. Uh but I'll I'll uh cram it all into to five minutes. Um the first one is about the nature of of language. Uh I the everybody's familiar now with uh the the large language models, things like ChatGPT, Gemini Claude, whichever your favorite one, they all have the same basic engine. Uh what all of these models have done is learn how to predict A word from the sequence of words that came before it. And in the process of building these very uh sophisticated machines that are made of lots of lots of these billions of parameters uh that to to learn this uh predictive structure, what we've actually done is we've discovered a uh a property of language itself.
Language is autogenerative, that's the term I've been using, uh, which means that it contains within its structure the the str the corpus of language itself contains the structure needed to generate itself. Uh what what these models are doing are just learning the predictive structure that's already in language. Language is an autonomous informational system, one may even call it an organism.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does it mean that language is an autonomous informational organism?
0:00–6:05
2
How does autoregression shape our perception of language and cognition?
6:05–10:52
3
What new perspective does the brain‑as‑predictive‑engine model offer for memory?
10:52–12:20
4
How do large language models reveal the generative nature of thought?
12:20–16:01
5
Why might language be considered a self‑installing software that drives behavior?
16:01–28:35
6
What evidence suggests language evolved as a cultural, not biological, artifact?
28:35–39:59
7
How can language’s autonomous system be a source of both power and danger?
39:59–54:12
8
What are the ethical implications of treating language like a programmable system?
54:12–1:10:23
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
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Adrian Owen: Awake. Aware. Unable to Move.
Peter Godfrey-Smith: This Scientist Found Earth’s “Alien” Minds