CONCEPT
The Copier Analogy
Spinoza's own example — the man who copies a book without understanding the thoughts expressed within it — applied by Bodde and Burnside (2025) as the most precise available analogy for what a large language model does with human expression.
In the Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding, Spinoza offered an example to illustrate the first kind of knowledge. A man copies a book. He possesses the words. He can reproduce the sentences. He may recite passages from memory. But he has mostly inadequate ideas about the thoughts expressed within the copied book, precisely because he has only copied the book's contents. He does not understand the antecedent causes or reasons that produced the form and arrangement of the actual thoughts. He has the symbols without the understanding, the words without the meaning, the output without the comprehension. In a 2025 paper in AI & Society, Bodde and Burnside identified the analogy's structural precision for the large language model: a copier of extraordinary sophistication, fluent in patterns, innocent of causes.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The analogy's power lies in what it concedes to the copier. The copier