Do #LLMs have mental states?
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Did it? If so, it seems it would have avoided the second blurge. I don’t see evidence that it interpreted the meaning of “blurge” - hence my skepticism.
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@icastico you can say "Incorporating your word...or your input is how the predictive text generation works" but given that no one has ever uttered the word 'blurge' the only context in which one could 'predict' it is the context of this very communicative exchange. So how is that not (some form of) 'communicative grounding'?
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@icastico it llama 2 can't change its initial response format but it `responded' to my
question in two placesFor "Could you give me an answer that is less of a blurge?" it gave me a shorter answer and for
>>> I guess my qustion is why you blurge like this in the first place?
it gave me a semantically and contextually appropriate 'response', no?
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Ulrike Hahnreplied to Dimitri Coelho Mollo last edited by
"some things will go down to choices we make depending on what turns out to be useful"
and that's how it should be!
But I think this very helpful exchange overall today is also making me realise more that the real issue with LLMs is that we have a network of inter-related, mutually supporting, conceptual terms and LLMs push against every one of them (I'm sure you'd long got to this point), so useful answers need to take into account much, or all of this, network all at once
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Ulrike Hahnreplied to Dimitri Coelho Mollo last edited by
@dcm @pbloem
I appreciate solving by dissolving, my point was more that his particular attempts haven't tended to work for me. I thought the point of his `intentional stance' was that beliefs, intentions and desires are convenient fictions, in which case I have low expectations for the current context other than an answer that says 'call them mental states if useful' which I can already get to just by words being words ;-). But I will read Three Kinds of Intentional Psych! thanks again! -
A blurge follows. Apologies.
We, of course, only have objective access to the words produced (just like with people) - but I think there is evidence that the LLM’s responses are not communicatively grounded.
Yes. It gave you a shorter answer based on your explicit instructions and it was able to incorporate a new vocabulary word that you defined for it. That is literally what LLM’s are designed to do. It mapped an association between “blurge” and a semantic network of terms for “too much info”. It is an open question whether that counts as “interpretation” in the sense I was getting at. It was able to represent the meaning of your text.
For the “why” question - it’s a mixed bag. It started with a semantically and contextual appropriate response - again doing what it is designed to do - then it started confabulating and talking about its feelings and motivation. In a human-to-human interaction, those assertions would be appropriate- but in the context of the LLM talking to a human, it seems contextually inappropriate in two ways. The first is that it ignores your stated preferences to avoid blurges and in the second it attributed feelings and motivation to itself which it is unlikely to have.
One of the keys to communicative grounding is the “quality”/veracity assumption (from Grice) - I assume you are telling me what you believe to be true. If you are flouting that assumption I look for a reason for why you are telling me an untruth and interpret based on that (e.g., you are saving face, telling a joke, trying to deceive). When the LLM attributes human emotions to itself - it flouts the veracity assumption- but why? If it was communicatively grounded, it should be apparent and I should be able to interpret its “actual” meaning (knowing that we both know it isn’t emotional). Maybe it is trying to make me feel comfortable with its alien nature. Maybe it is telling a joke. Whatever interpretation I come up with, it requires that I attribute motivation to the LLM and that I attribute to it the capacity for interpretation of its utterances.
But the other option is to assume it is simply and mindlessly filling in patterns. That seems more likely. And that would not be communicatively grounded.
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@UlrikeHahn I can try.
My first thought is I think the same as the one you posted. If you think about mental states the way that I was introduced to in philosophy of mind classes, it's very natural to think that LLMs/AIs of some sort could have mental states.
I think that we always revise and refine concepts, but I'm not sure that we need to do much in this case.
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Thomas Hodgsonreplied to Thomas Hodgson last edited by
@UlrikeHahn What interests me the most right now as a philosopher of language is what we should think about these questions:
1. Do the sentences produced by AIs have meanings? (Characters, contents, whatever.)
2. Can AIs say things?
3. Can AIs mean things?
In particular, I am interested in the arguments people use for negative answers.
I think there is a parallel to the point about mental states: be careful not to rule out human language use.
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Thomas Hodgsonreplied to Thomas Hodgson last edited by
@UlrikeHahn I did try to articulate some thoughts in a short talk recently, but that's all I have written about it.
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Dimitri Coelho Molloreplied to Ulrike Hahn last edited by
@UlrikeHahn @pbloem I think it is more than that (and he is not really a fictionalist about those). The point connects to discussions we had here, relating to patterns, higher-level explanatory constructs, generalisations and predictions, etc.
There may be no thing in the brain that we look at it and say 'oh, look, that's the belief that p', but that does not mean that the claim the person believes that p is false or a fictionalisation.
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@twsh great slides! your questions are extremely congenial to how I have been thinking about things and to my interest/motivation in starting this thread.
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Ulrike Hahnreplied to Dimitri Coelho Mollo last edited by
@dcm @pbloem
read it now (bar a few Google book pages missing) and it's really great. Happy to publicly eat humble pie on that! And I agree that this connects to our #JuarreroBook discussions, and it's no coincidence that the link is agency and meaning. -
@icastico Does this reply get to the same place, but now by a different route? Rather than asserting a 'maximalist' notion of communicative grounding (caricature: 'it's only CG if it's everything humans do'), it's now invoking a maximalist sense of CG in order to *interpret* what it is the LLM does?
If so, I think this second route is much more interesting but, even in this guise, a maximalist perspective cuts out what I'm personally most interested in: exploring the proto-space