# A Note on Semiotic Physics **Opening:** Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. Introduction This is an attempt to explain to myself the concept of semiotic physics that appears in the original Simulators post by janus and in a later post by Jan Hendrik Kirchner. Everything here comes from janus and Jan's work, but any inaccuracies or misinterpretations are all mine. TL;DR The prototypical simulator, GPT, is sometimes said to "predict the next token" in a text sequence. This is accurate, but incomplete. It's more illuminating to consider what happens when GPT, or any simulator, is run repeatedly to produce a multi-token forward tra‐ jectory, as in the familiar scenario of generating a text completion in response to a prompt. The token-by-token production of output is stochastic, with a