I’m having trouble seeing why someone would want to apply it to humans, since it’s generally not in question that humans can have real beliefs and real desires. But I guess if there were uncertainty about whether some particular person has real beliefs, we could set that uncertainty aside by talking about their quasi-beliefs[1].
In the interest of having a somewhat forced concrete example, maybe we’ve started to suspect that our friend Dan is a p-zombie and we often debate that, but right now we just want to talk about whether he’s figured out that we’re planning a surprise party for him, so we set aside the p-zombie issue by talking about whether Dan quasi-believes our story that we only bought confetti in case there was a confetti shortage coming up.
I would guess the type signature of human beliefs and goals and desires is at least fairly often closer to the LLM quasi-x than to the crisp mathematical idealizations of those concepts.
Humans are kinda a world model with a self-character, I think distancing LLMs from this by implying that LLMs beliefs, goals, desires are super different brings people’s beliefs further from tracking reality.
I think that in ordinary usage, whatever sort of things humans have, that’s what we mean when we say ‘belief’, ‘goal’, etc. Insofar as anyone thinks those are crisp mathematical abstractions, that seems like a separate and additional claim. I worry that saying ‘humans don’t actually have beliefs’ makes it pretty unclear what ‘belief’ even means[1].
As James points out in another comment, the ‘quasi-’ framing is solely intended to set aside questions about whether LLM beliefs (etc) are ‘real’ beliefs and whether they’re fundamentally the same as human beliefs, not to take a stance that they’re not. Chalmers: ‘Quasi-interpretivism does not say anything about whether LLMs have beliefs and desires’. There are a lot of interesting and safety-relevant discussions to be had about what LLMs believe in a practical sense (eg ‘Does this model believe that Paris is in France or Germany?’), and I see this terminology as basically just a way to prevent such discussions from being counterproductively derailed by questions about whether a model can actually believe anything at all.
Maybe it’s suggesting a highly deflationary stance, in the same way that illusionists think humans aren’t actually conscious? But consciousness is a highly abstract and contested topic, whereas there’s a pretty ordinary and uincontested sense in which humans believe things, have desires, etc.
Seems worthwhile as a way to simplify conversations with people who seem to be too be confused, but I think this isn’t a reality mapping exercise and probably makes it harder to see the structure of reality which is kinda sad even if useful for talking with some people?
I’m having trouble seeing why someone would want to apply it to humans, since it’s generally not in question that humans can have real beliefs and real desires. But I guess if there were uncertainty about whether some particular person has real beliefs, we could set that uncertainty aside by talking about their quasi-beliefs[1].
In the interest of having a somewhat forced concrete example, maybe we’ve started to suspect that our friend Dan is a p-zombie and we often debate that, but right now we just want to talk about whether he’s figured out that we’re planning a surprise party for him, so we set aside the p-zombie issue by talking about whether Dan quasi-believes our story that we only bought confetti in case there was a confetti shortage coming up.
I would guess the type signature of human beliefs and goals and desires is at least fairly often closer to the LLM quasi-x than to the crisp mathematical idealizations of those concepts.
Humans are kinda a world model with a self-character, I think distancing LLMs from this by implying that LLMs beliefs, goals, desires are super different brings people’s beliefs further from tracking reality.
I think that in ordinary usage, whatever sort of things humans have, that’s what we mean when we say ‘belief’, ‘goal’, etc. Insofar as anyone thinks those are crisp mathematical abstractions, that seems like a separate and additional claim. I worry that saying ‘humans don’t actually have beliefs’ makes it pretty unclear what ‘belief’ even means[1].
As James points out in another comment, the ‘quasi-’ framing is solely intended to set aside questions about whether LLM beliefs (etc) are ‘real’ beliefs and whether they’re fundamentally the same as human beliefs, not to take a stance that they’re not. Chalmers: ‘Quasi-interpretivism does not say anything about whether LLMs have beliefs and desires’. There are a lot of interesting and safety-relevant discussions to be had about what LLMs believe in a practical sense (eg ‘Does this model believe that Paris is in France or Germany?’), and I see this terminology as basically just a way to prevent such discussions from being counterproductively derailed by questions about whether a model can actually believe anything at all.
Maybe it’s suggesting a highly deflationary stance, in the same way that illusionists think humans aren’t actually conscious? But consciousness is a highly abstract and contested topic, whereas there’s a pretty ordinary and uincontested sense in which humans believe things, have desires, etc.
Seems worthwhile as a way to simplify conversations with people who seem to be too be confused, but I think this isn’t a reality mapping exercise and probably makes it harder to see the structure of reality which is kinda sad even if useful for talking with some people?