Theme of inquiry
Why do models show mismatched confidence and reasoning across tasks?
A question within its area, explored through 4 lines of inquiry below — each a family of specific questions the research asks.
18 specific questions
- How does role play differ from consciousness grounded in stable selfhood?
- Why do LLMs succeed at social roles without a stable self?
- Does post-training transform character role-play into realized psychology?
- Does role-playing without biological needs constitute genuine linguistic agency?
- How does maintaining a superposition differ from committing to a character?
- Does alignment training intensity push LLM personas from pretense toward realization?
- How does quasi-interpretivism differ from simply role-playing character analysis?
10 specific questions
- What distinguishes static grounding that presumes understanding from dynamic grounding that builds it?
- Why can't static grounding alone close the gap between agreement and understanding?
- What is the difference between static and dynamic grounding in dialogue?
- Why does static grounding prevent AI systems from supporting dialectical reconciliation?
- What role does dynamic grounding play in achieving real mutual understanding?
- Why does the distinction between functional and causal grounding matter for AI alignment?
- What distinguishes functional grounding from genuine causal grounding in AI systems?
43 specific questions
- Can language meaning emerge without joint attention and shared embodied interaction?
- Does embodiment and interaction matter for linguistic competence beyond pattern learning?
- What makes some interpretive postures stick while others fail to form?
- Why does frame-activation matter more than word-by-word composition?
- Does embodiment matter for genuine linguistic agency?
- Can the human mind be uploaded or only its context?
- Does selective suppression of linguistic relations enable human meaning-making?
39 specific questions
- How does semantic association differ from mechanistic causal reasoning?
- Do LLMs show stronger reasoning about causality than about temporal ordering?
- Can LLMs reason through semantics without understanding causal mechanisms?
- Why do causal reasoning directions succeed while temporal reasoning directions fail?
- What makes counterfactual thinking different from behavioral pattern matching?
- How might human-LLM teams reinforce each other's causal reasoning mistakes?
- What are collider structures and why do they reveal reasoning errors?