I think you have a mental model and that it is analogous to the model created in an LLM in that it is representable by a semantic graph/n-dimensional matrix relating concepts that are realized via terms.

You have never in your life encountered a dodo. You know what a dodo is (using the present these because I’m talking about a concept). It is a bird, so it relates evolutionarily and ecologically to “bird.” It’s flightless, so it relates to “patriarch” and “emu.” It is extinct, so it relates to all of the species extinction ideas you have. Humans perhaps contributed to the extinction, so it links to human-caused ecological change, which in turn links to human-caused climate change. Human-introduced invasive species are are causing ecological change in Australia, and that may have been a major factor in driving the dodo to extinction. People ate them, so maybe in your head it has a relation to wild turkeys. And so on. That’s how minds work. That’s how the human cognitive model of the world works. That’s how LLMs work.

Visualize an n-dimensional space in which these semantic topics are embedded. The interpretation of the dimensions don’t matter. Instead, we’re just worried about the distances between concepts. Dodo is closer to turkey than it is to snake. Dodo is closer to snake than it is to rock. Dodo is closer to rock than it is to the feeling of melancholy I get when listening to Tori Amos. We can grasp this intuitively. We can mathematize it by formally placing the various concepts in a metric space.

There’s a lot more to unpack, from neural correlates of consciousness to cognitive linguistics and embodied learning using metaphorical reasoning, but that’s kind of the gist of it boiled down to an overly long post.