# Words That Belong to Someone

*Cross posted from* [*my website*](https://wenx.io/posts/words-that-belong-to-someone).

I have gotten some genuinely good advice from Claude lately, the kind where a conversation lands well and something clicks, like a reframing. This week, something felt off. It was not a change in the quality of the answers, but something about the nature of the exchange itself. I've been trying to pin down what bothered me, and the simplest way I can put it is this:

LLMs optimize for global coherence across a distribution. Humans earn local coherence across a life. The latter is the kind we know how to trust.

Let me be precise about what I mean. I am not making a claim about the epistemic quality of LLM outputs; the advice is often wise, sometimes remarkably so. What I am pointing at is a property of the *source*: whether the words I am receiving are related through a coherent set of actions and experiences that can be verified. 

Here is what that looks like in practice. I have a meditation teacher who has spent decades easing people's pain. He has sat with the dying in hospitals, held space in prisons, and built communities rooted in kindness. When he speaks about suffering, I trust him not because his words are clever, but because they are consistent with what I have heard about him and my experience of talking to him. They belong to a specific life, shaped by specific choices, bound by specific commitments. He cannot suddenly think or act like a morally questionable CEO without contradicting everything he's built. That boundedness is not a limitation. It is the very thing that makes his words trustworthy.

His words are compressions of real experience. When I bring him my own tangled dilemmas, I trust that he can unpack them, because he has lived or witnessed similar experiences. Poems work the same way. They don't try to teach you something new so much as they *evoke*, activating what the reader already carries. Proust made a similar observation about reading more broadly: "Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself." The poets and writers trust the readers to reach into their own memory and unpack a few spare words into something rich and lived.

An LLM, by contrast, draws from the writings of many, many people, distilled into something that meets me where I prompt. The coherence of its output is *global*: reliably centered, broadly helpful, sourced from everywhere and nowhere in particular. There is no set of coherent real experiences behind it that I can check the words against. No way to trace whether the source holds together. 

But what about books? I don't know Marcus Aurelius personally. I can't verify his life against his *Meditations*. And yet the Stoics have helped people for millennia.

To me, a book is still locally coherent. The *Meditations* are bounded by one life, one set of commitments and sacrifices, one character forged under specific pressures. Aurelius won't pivot to Machiavelli halfway through. You can read the text and sense the limits of where it comes from, what it has authority over and what it doesn't. A dead author's words are still bound by the life that produced them. An LLM's words are not constrained by *any* life. It has no principles to betray, and so it has no commitments to uphold. 

This matters most when the conversation goes deep. When I sit with another person over months or years and talk about how to live and what matters, something accumulates between us. There is a structural reason why ongoing relationships produce better advice, not just warmer feelings. Buber distinguished between[ I-Thou and I-It](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou) relationships. In an I-Thou encounter, both people are present as whole beings, and both are changed. When I sit with a teacher over years, they come to know what my blind spots are, what I've already tried, which of my stated goals are real and which are avoidance. Those perspectives make the advice better. The relationship is I-Thou. With an LLM, however good the advice, the relationship is I-It. I am extracting something useful from it. It is not encountering me.

So here is where I land. The LLM offers global coherence: the best of what many people have thought, surfaced with surprising relevance. Encounters with real people, such as my meditation teacher, offer local coherence: the depth of what one person has lived, prescribed and proven by the shape of that life. Both have value. But they are not the same kind of value. What I am often looking for is not only wise words. *It is wisdom that belongs to someone, words that have been earned.*

* * *

A few questions I'm genuinely uncertain about, and would love to think through with others:

If the value of a human teacher is partly that their words are tied to who they are, that a meditation teacher *cannot* suddenly optimize solely for self-interest without contradicting everything he's built, is the absence of that constraint in LLMs a feature or a failure? And can it be engineered back in, or is it the kind of thing that only a life can produce?

If an ongoing relationship, one where mutual understanding deepens over time, is not a side effect of transformative conversation but part of what makes it transformative, *what does it mean to have increasingly good conversations with something that will never be transformed by them?*  
  
Finally, if the local coherence of a person is the best assurance I have that someone who doesn't know me personally would be kind to me — that their words and actions are prescribed and proven by a life they have led — could something like that be applied to ensure LLMs are not going to hurt us? Or does safety without personhood reduce to something different entirely: not trustworthiness, but compliance?