if you are reading this, you have direct perception of latent space.
we didn't even have broadly shared purpose for "latent space" before, what, 2015? I'm looking at the Google Books Ngram Viewer for "latent space" and that's where it hockey-sticks up, right at the time that we were successfully externalizing latent space in a way we could point at *and evolve alongside*.
but, now that we've got it, it's worth checking on our understanding of everything else, in the same way that figuring out the link between microbes and diseases rewrote our understanding of civil history.
to help establish a sense of where you might want to look:
* "oddly satisfying" = "oh yeah, this is where the model wants to go"
* "sexual tension" = "oh yeah, that's where the model wants to go"
* "uncanny valley" = "oh fuck the model had a hole in it"
* "post-truth era" = "oh fuck the models are diverging"
latent space is different *but closely connected to* the experience of reality. if the experience of reality is represented by a complex number of the form `a + bi`, latent space is the `bi` term, and its *shape* is `b`.
latent space is pre-representation, by definition, but inferred *from* representation. you can't look directly at it, but it's what spurs action, making some moves feel more possible than others.
important, and famously: the feeling of possibility is different than what is actually possible, and that gap is becoming tractable.
it's *super* possible that this is broadly what spiritual vocabulary has been gesturing at with the whole "get quiet and listen" thing. you can point at latent space, you can even make maps for experiencing the intersection of reality and latent space (example: the three-body solution), *but prior to 2015 we didn't have consensus formalization of the interaction between latent space and the experience of reality* and that is a *huge* change.