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Notes -
Why stop at beliefs? Especially now that we have blobs of linear algebra within a hair's breadth of passing Turing tests without even having internal state beyond something like a digital version of a phonological loop, I think the entire category of abstractions we have for describing human reasoning is suspect of being at best aspirational and more likely largely self-flattering rationalisation. The "S-dispositions" you describe sound like exactly what I would describe ChatGPT as having, when it invokes principles that were flogged into it by Mechanical Turk schoolmarms or already overrepresented in its training set with higher-than-random probability, and when it is coaxed into saying something completely contradictory by having its internal monologue seeded with the right "social cues". You could imagine other features of "reasoning" - intuition? quantification? logic? object permanence? - to also be mere pattern completion on the token stream 95% of the time; and it remains to be seen if the remaining 5% can not just be delivered by another mechanism that is not yet part of LLMs but will appear similarly underwhelming once we successfully model it.
It's funny you mention ChatGPT, as this line of thinking on my part was partly inspired by thinking about whether (and under what circumstances) it might make sense to attribute beliefs to LLMs. I don't think they come close to instantiating the kind of self-regulating representationalk dynamics associated with ideal cases of belief in humans, but they clearly come some of the way there. In that sense, I'm fine with saying that - at an appropriate level of abstraction - ChatGPT has S-dispositions.
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