Clearly ANNs are able to represent propositional content, but I haven’t seen anything that makes me think that’s the natural unit of analysis.
Well, we (humans) categorize our epistemic state largely in propositional terms, e.g. in beliefs and suppositions. We even routinely communicate by uttering “statements”—which express propositions. So propositions are natural to us, which is why they are important for ANN interpretability.
Well, we (humans) categorize our epistemic state largely in propositional terms, e.g. in beliefs and suppositions.
I’m not too confident of this. It seems to me that a lot of human cognition isn’t particularly propositional, even if nearly all of it could in principle be translated into that language. For example, I think a lot of cognition is sensory awareness, or imagery, or internal dialogue. We could contort most of that into propositions and propositional attitudes (eg ‘I am experiencing a sensation of pain in my big toe’, ‘I am imagining a picnic table’), but that doesn’t particularly seem like the natural lens to view those through.
That said, I do agree that propositions and propositional attitudes would be a more useful language to interpret LLMs through than eg activation vectors of float values.
Well, we (humans) categorize our epistemic state largely in propositional terms, e.g. in beliefs and suppositions. We even routinely communicate by uttering “statements”—which express propositions. So propositions are natural to us, which is why they are important for ANN interpretability.
I’m not too confident of this. It seems to me that a lot of human cognition isn’t particularly propositional, even if nearly all of it could in principle be translated into that language. For example, I think a lot of cognition is sensory awareness, or imagery, or internal dialogue. We could contort most of that into propositions and propositional attitudes (eg ‘I am experiencing a sensation of pain in my big toe’, ‘I am imagining a picnic table’), but that doesn’t particularly seem like the natural lens to view those through.
That said, I do agree that propositions and propositional attitudes would be a more useful language to interpret LLMs through than eg activation vectors of float values.