alt Hacker NewsWhat a coincidence, I've also picked up inferentialism but never really got into it.
I'm interested in the reversal that Sellars proposes - it seems clear to me that "representation" is not prior to the space of reasons, despite how unintuitive it is.
> An LLM encodes the normative regularities of our linguistic/conceptual games into its weights, but it cannot be a real participant in our games because it is incapable of staking durable commitments or changing its dispositions over time.
I see no reason why this can't be the case in the future, even though I think inferentialist-based theories are generally strong. Can't you force LLM's (or whatever AI architecture will exist in a decade) to stake durable commitments itself, then? They're at least autonomous enough to run computers. I agree that that is a core part to true meaning & autonomy, but nobody just lets them yet. I don't think inferentialism is a consciousness-based argument, either, so that escape hatch isn't available. I also don't think this is a necessary condition to engage in the space of reasons (but maybe then I'm misunderstanding it, or retreating to a more Sellarsian understanding). Could you explain on this more?
Though again, I only have the book sitting on my desk, and I haven't cracked it open...
I actually agree with you. LLMs could become participants in the future, but this would require (1) durability of real awareness over time (an architecture change from the current fixed-weights + transient context architecture) and (2) that humans grant them the status of equal participants (probably not a terribly high bar given how people already treat these things). I'm not aware of any real progress toward (1), and all the stand-ins people have developed live in the context layer or textual artifacts, which are poor stand-ins for durable memory.
And yeah, consciousness based arguments are bunk IMO. It's clear that LLMs are in a basic sense "aware", and even to some extent "sapient" (in Brandom's usage), i.e. they can justify claims and object to things at least locally. I follow Rorty on the question of consciousness, which is to say that consciousness has no deeper meaning in practice beyond "are you awake", and in philosophical discussion it's largely a proxy for "are you one of us" in some amorphous sense.