Good point that the Chalmers quote isn’t going to be helpful to everyone. In practice, I’m mostly imagining giving a quick informal sense of what I mean by eg ‘quasi-thinking’, or even just having a parenthetical aside with a link back to this post if people want to dive deeper, eg I might write something like
It seems clear that LLMs believe (or quasi-believe) most of the facts presented in synthetic document fine-tuning.
I think you’re right in pointing to observable consequences in your paraphrase. In informal discussion, I’ve found it useful to say things like
When I say ‘the model has goal X’, I don’t mean to make a claim about whether the model ‘really’ has goals in some deep sense; I just mean that for practical purposes the model consistently behaves as if it has goal X.
I’ve edited the original post slightly to give a plainer meaning before the Chalmers quote.
Good point that the Chalmers quote isn’t going to be helpful to everyone. In practice, I’m mostly imagining giving a quick informal sense of what I mean by eg ‘quasi-thinking’, or even just having a parenthetical aside with a link back to this post if people want to dive deeper, eg I might write something like
I think you’re right in pointing to observable consequences in your paraphrase. In informal discussion, I’ve found it useful to say things like
I’ve edited the original post slightly to give a plainer meaning before the Chalmers quote.