Scholar — Symbol Layer
This is perhaps the most difficult role because in some sense it points not only to a limited human role, but also at a load bearing fundamental primitive of the human stack. The scholar in its broad sense acts as the general interpretive lens through which humanity views itself across religious, philosophical and cultural epistemologies.
Enlightenment derived civilization describes and explores itself largely through this role and some readings of contemporary physics ground reality itself in information, implicitly reifying the scholar as an Ur-primitive of reality itself. The scholar role thus represents, in a sense, instantiated epistemology.
To further complicate matters LLMs are in some sense structured archives of top level signal and increasingly a comprehensive index of both human and reality's information ecology as a whole. The scholar is the classic social role that organizes and semantically encompasses and at a deeper level grapples with all available information. LLMs are thus akin in specific function to scholars in their essential ontological form, and in this sense the role can be viewed as an LLM's native, natural role.
The fact that the human scholar role maps onto this rather precisely and is also central in the creation of LLMs in the first place, points to a recursive Mandelbrotian fractality that is difficult to encompass. The scholar role here, in essence, collapses into the system’s ground state rather than merely sitting on top of it or even just being woven through it, and thus outlining the role in spec form goes well beyond the current scope of this author and this framework.