I don't think the human brain is a kind of machine. Do you? — ZzzoneiroCosm

Well, my dictionary has...

a piece of equipment with several moving parts that uses power to do a particular type of work:

Seems to hinge on "equipment". Oddly 'equipment' is defined by 'tool', and 'tool' as a 'piece of equipment'...

So, I'm going to need to know what you mean by 'machine' to answer that question.

Do you believe in subjective experience? Plenty of folks hereabouts take issue with the concept and phraseology. What is your view of the hard problem of consciousness? — ZzzoneiroCosm

Again, it depends on what you mean by the term. It's quite a loaded expression. I don't think the so-called 'hard problem' makes any sense at all. It seems to want an answer but can't specify why the answers already given aren't it. Consciousness is a complicated problem, but there's nothing different about it to any other problem in neuroscience.

I don't see any way into an ethical conception of circuitry — ZzzoneiroCosm

Which is where you and I differ. I don't see ethics as being inherent in the other whom we are considering the treatment of. It inheres in us, the ones doing the treating.

I assume it's only the possibility of sentience that could give rise to your ethical concerns. Do you agree? — ZzzoneiroCosm

Yes. I don't think any of the AI entities I've come across are sentient, but then I haven't investigated them in any depth. It is about them seeming sentient and how we ought respond to that.

I'm curious to know if the notion of AI rights resonates with you. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Not really, no. It's the attitudes of the humans considering it that interests me at this stage. How easily we become wedded to our castles in the air, and how ready we are to use them to discriminate.

Have you read anything of the early writing about 'the savages'. It's exactly the same linguistic style "they're obviously different", " they don't even have proper language "... You see the same tropes.

If what seems obvious to you can't simply and clearly be explicated to someone who doesn't see it, I'd say that's a good sign your belief is not as well grounded as you may have suspected.

If you're willing to provide your age, that would be welcome too. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Can't see why, but since you asked, I'm in my late 50s.

A human-looking robot may deceive us. But the guts of the robot are there to give the game away. — ZzzoneiroCosm

So if I'm lying in the street screaming in pain, you perform an autopsy first to check I've got the right 'guts' before showing any compassion? Good to know.

To claim that my vote isn't a determination is unfair and downright unAmerican. — praxis

Good job I'm not an American then.

what do we believe when we experiece sensations but don't know what they are? — praxis

Depends what you mean by 'know'. We always make a prediction as to what they are, we're never 100% sure.

What do we believe when we can see two things, like the duck/rabit sketch? — praxis

We 'believe' hundreds of things at the same time, so it depends. I believe I'm looking at the famous duck/rabbit sketch. I believe there's a picture of a rabbit, I also believe there's a picture of a duck.

Just because acting in a particular way worked out fine in the end for Frodo, doesn't mean doing something similar will work out fine for me as well. — baker

How would you know? That's the whole point of making decisions based on ideology. Until you reach the end of your life and look back on the whole thing you can't possibly say what 'worked out' and what didn't because actions have consequences which range over different timescales. Maybe you 'acting like Frodo' didn't yield the short-term result you wanted but brings about a better long-term result than otherwise. Maybe you're not just a selfish git and actually care about the even longer term (after you're dead and gone), maybe that's where the benefits lie... You couldn't possibly know. Hence any assessment of "well, that didn't work out for me" is inherently flawed as evidence for the failure of a particular approach. That's why we need virtues. Guides to behaviour other than "how well did that work out?" ranged over some arbitrary timescale.

All I'm saying about stories is that these guides are not believable simply made up alone, they lack the gravitas that being embedded in a story gives them (particularly a classic story).

In my experience, this doesn't work. — baker

What has failed about it?

Seems an arbitrary distinction, as though saying that when holding a cup in hand we can believe it’s a cup but we can’t believe in the cups texture or weight, the individual elements it’s comprised of. — praxis

We can very well believe in its texture and weight. It's not at that level of processing that these 'columns' are dealing with. All you're getting at the base of these columns are output signals from sensory and proprioceptive neurons, and in a constant stream, with a relatively high error rate. As data progresses up these columns, errors are corrected by backward acting inhibitors from cortices higher up the hierarchy. This is a one way system (hence we can reliably refer to it as s hierarchy). But at this stage it's still just noise detection, it's not "this cup is heavy". To get there you have to (so the theory goes) fire all the final neural clusters in each column with a tiny emission of neurotransmitter such that only those signals with sufficient volume (the highest 'vote') will create an action potential in one of the hippocampus-sub-cortex links to set off the chain of associations we have which form the concept "heavy" (depending on your theory of semantic memory - it's a moot point). But it's after the multiplicity that we get "rough", "heavy"...etc as actual beliefs about the cup.

Scream so "convincingly" the auditor believes the computer is in pain? — ZzzoneiroCosm

Yes.

Can a computer ever scream in a way that convinces us it's in pain? When we know it's a computer? — ZzzoneiroCosm

I believe it can, yes. To the degree I think is relevant. We find the same with things like destroying objects. One only needs two circles for eyes and a line for a mouth drawn on to elicit a few seconds reticence when asked to damage an object. The willingness to damage life-like dolls is a (low significance) indicator of psychopathy.

It doesn't take much to formulate sufficient warrant of sentience to change our treatment of objects. I think casting that aside is a mistake.

Again the NATO and Nazi things show to be partial rationales (at best), excuses. — jorndoe

Yes. The idea that Putin might have invaded Ukraine as a strategic move against a growing anti-Russian right-wing element or an expanding Western military influence is obviously insufficient...shaky grounds. What's clearly needed is the much more firm, down-to-earth explanation that he's been possessed by the ghost of a long dead dictator. Much more reasonable.

f the minimal claim for establishing the existence of suffering was 'a nervous system' then there are no grounds for the claim. Remember we're talking about rack-mounted servers here. (I know it seems easy to forget that.) — Wayfarer

This is completely the wrong way around. It's not about the object of suffering, it's about you, the one enabling/tolerating it. We should not even allow ourselves to continue poking a box whose sole programming is to (convincingly) scream in pain every time we poke it. It's not about the box's capacity to suffer, it's about our capacity to ignore what seems to us to be another's pain.

If you talked to LaMDA and your line of questioning made her seem upset, what kind of person would it make you to feel that you could continue anyway?

the burden of proof is on those who wish to claim this equates to or constitutes a being — Wayfarer

...because?

I do not think LaMDA is sentient. — Banno

Indeed. On a rational level, neither do I (though I have serious reservations about the usefulness of such a distinction). My main concern here is the invocation, as @Wayfarer does of some ineffable 'essence' which makes us different from them despite seeming, to all intents and purposes, to be the same.

I mean. How do you counter that exact same argument used to support racism? They may seem the same as us, but there's some ineffable difference which can't be pointed to that justifies our different treatment.

To be clear, I'm not saying we are, right now, on the verge of AI discrimination. At the moment they don't even really seem like us, when pushed. But the moment they do, an argument from ineffable difference is going to be on very shaky ground.

what if we are wrong? — Banno

Far and away the most important question. Ignored twice now so I thought I'd bump it.

We should be asking ourselves whether the AI is sentient at an academic level.

We should be acting as if it were the moment it appears convincingly so...for the sake of our own humanity, if nothing else.

There's something distinctly unsettling about the discussion of how the AI isn't 'really' sentient though...not like us.

They appearing to all intents and purposes to be just like us but not 'really' like us. Am I the only one discomfited by that kind of thinking?

praxis is using the model displayed and dispelled at the start of the Feldman Barrett article, in a slightly altered form:

Event → Cognition → Belief


What we now know is that this sequence cannot be recognised in the processes of our neural networks. Phrasing it somewhat ambiguously, the event is already a belief, in that it is a prediction of the neural net. — Banno

Exactly. The main problem I see with this attempt to separate out belief from prediction is that there's no special category remaining for belief to be.

There's nothing of which we 'feel certain' that is distinguishable from that about which we feel 99.9999% certain. There's nothing we form in awareness to distinguish from that which is formed in subconscious processing. There's nothing resulting from syllogism to fill what was otherwise a blank space. Basically there is no mental state which can correspond to the description of beliefs being offered such as to distinguish it from predictions, and assumptions (of the sort such that we believe larger objects cannot fit inside smaller ones). There's no dividing line between believing the table in front of me will hold my cup and believing God exists such as to delineate one as a different type than the other.

There's some (understandable) cherishing of the (unfortunately post hoc) construction process where one is aware of it, that leads to a desire to set it apart in type from the process where we are not. but there's no support for such a notion.

Assuming this theory is good, at what point in the neural process is there belief? In each cortical column or in the consensus of columns? — praxis

Firstly, Thousand Brains only deals with the NeoCortex, it still relies on the traditional functioning of the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex, and the perihinal cortex, particulalry for memory retrieval which is how relations between previous predictions are made (according to Hawkins). As such there's no real conflict between his model and that of Friston (whose model Feldman Barrett uses). The 'columns' in Hawkin's model are merely the means by which the predictions are made - thousands of options 'voted on'. The means by which the results of those predictions are stored as models (dynamic models, of course) is still the same hippocampus-cortical links that traditional models use to relate the results from one context to those of another (an image and a smell for example). So each column is still embedded in a cortical hierarchy from lower areas (say sensory) to higher ones (like beliefs). Each column, therefore is processing data not yet in the form of a belief (a belief that...) because there's no 'that' until the predictions have been related (to whatever the belief is about) and that happens (in Hawkin's model) after the voting process, where the hippocampus (or the entorhinal cortex, or sub-cortex depending on the type of memory) make the association on which we can act.

One cannot justify it, not even to oneself. It's not based on a syllogism, and one cannot even construct a syllogism to support, in hindsight/ad hoc. — baker

All beliefs are supported in hindsight.

The topic here were the epistemic implications of power relationships between people (Do I believe someone's argument because I am convinced by its rationality, or by the power of the person who made it?). You said this was surmountable. I asked, how. From what you said, I don't see that you explained that it is surmountable. — baker

I'm not sure what I can do about that. We often believe arguments made by people more powerful than ourselves. Sometime this is appropriate (if their power is on their expertise), sometimes we only make the show of acquiescence because it's socially convenient, we need the support of others believing what we do. The solution to that is that those others do not have to be real for this effect to work. Stories.

I feel like I've just rewritten what I wrote before, but maybe if it's still not making sense, you might explain what's missing.

Because I don’t think that subconscious predictions are beliefs. — praxis

Any reason why not?

Genuinely interested in a reference or substantiation for this claim. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Not an easy one to reference. It's my conclusion mainly because of the strength of alternative hypotheses for how we are influenced (and thus leaving only a little left for the advertisers to do).

By way of reference, you might start with Asch and Milgram with their work on peer and authority influences on conformity, then perhaps Erika Richardson on group membership roles and conformity.Tarnow did some work on the mechanism of group conformity in the early part of the millennium, and Martin a few years later expanded on the mechanism showing the role of systemic processing.

Mainly, conformity is the result of numerous influences on our thinking from submission to authority, reversion to mean group beliefs, social hierarchy strategies, even simple prediction error reduction. Advertisers use these influences, but they didn't create them, nor would they be eliminated if advertisers stopped.

What matters, for conformity, is the degree to which each person can see the whole of their society as a functioning unit (reduces submission to authority), the degree to which information is shared (reduces group influence on error reduction) and the egalitarian distribution of status in social hierarchies.

Do you have a source for further reading? — ZzzoneiroCosm

Well short of reading Milgram ('Obedience to Authority', if you're unsure) - where he states...

ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process — Milgram 1974

... A good article (if you have institutional access) https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.2044-8309.2010.02015.x

For the contrasting position https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959354314542368

Yep. That's the line of thinking. It revolves around the idea that social group membership and reward has become so compartmentalised in these broken-up ideologies that what one does to be a 'good member' is no longer holistically relative to being a 'human being' but rather just being a 'good accountant' or a 'good wife' or a 'good advertising executive'. Hence what we do in instances of 'work' is not related to any holistic ideology but rather a localised one in which actions from one sphere might be totally unthinkable in another.

Advertisers do what they do because that's their job. It's what being a good advertiser is. It's their job because their boss told them to do it. Their boss told them to do it because that's his job, that's what being a good boss is.

I suggest reading Edward Bernays and Ernest Dichter (et al) to get a picture of how a culture of consumerism was intentionally created. They're proud of their work and talk about it more or less openly. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Not only read both, but taught classes on them. I think their influence is exaggerated. Take a look at Milgram on Arendt and see what you think.

I'm not here suggesting that advertising doesn't work, or that control on it wouldn't help. I'm just sounding a note of caution as to the real problem. If we raise children to think their social support systems are dependent entirely on these tokens of group membership and reward, then they'll spend their lives trying to work out what those tokens are. If advertisers don't tell them, they'll look elsewhere. The hole needing filling is the problem.

it's prudent to accept that the vast majority of folks will always be manipulable. At least until our society begins to prioritize education. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Oddly enough, I think the focus on education is the problem, not the solution. But I agree with the prudence.

I assume you accept that the popularity of flannel shirts in the 90s had its origin in the grunge movement given a global platform on MTV. If MTV didn't have advertisers, they wouldn't have the lucre to exist. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I didn't say they had no part to play. Had transistors not been invented there'd be no televisions and hence no MTV, but we don't blame transistors for the popularity of the flannel shirt. The point was that advertisers neither decided, nor encouraged the trend. They may have helped finance the technology which allowed it, but so did bankers, accountants, HR managers...

This is a gross understatement of the power of advertising to influence culture. Advertisers have created a culture of consumerism. To make a buck. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Have they? Or are they a consequence of a culture of consumerism?

Are you familiar with Milgram's thoughts on Arendt? I think you're overestimating the intent behind advertising.

It's a ruse to call a society governed by mass manipulation a democracy. — ZzzoneiroCosm

If it wasn't your politicians, it'll be your parents, your work colleagues, your wife/husband/significant other...

Advertisers may be responsible for creating a desire among people for the latest chocolate bar (tastes the same as the old one, but with "six different types of bio-molecules which reduce signs of ageing!"), but no advertisers were involved in the initial preference for flannel shirts in the 90s, that was just a cultural movement (at first). It was no less powerful a draw nonetheless.

The problem is not manipulation, it's manipulability. It's not those who fill the gaping hole in our self esteem with obvious lies, it's the gaping hole in our self-esteem available for the filling.

the betrayal of truth has become so commonplace amongst advertisers, politicians, and the media, we no longer trust them and their messages lose their meaning. — unenlightened

But how do you know they've betrayed truth? You personally are not expert in the matters they pronounce on, so in order to come to believe they've betrayed truth you must have not trusted them (to some extent) first. You cannot have possibly have had any notion they were lying unless you were inclined to seek out the 'truth' from someone else whom you do trust. So did you really trust them in the first place? And has trust, as a whole, gone away? You've clearly got a perfectly adequate range of people from whom you can get 'the truth' on all matters, so what's the problem?

I am saying, not that truth and trust are the same, but that truth is required to maintain trust. — unenlightened

Yet still not saying how.

Let's say Jim claims "X!" and Jack claims the mutually exclusive position "Y!". I trust Jim so I believe X. Now how do I come to no longer trust Jim on account of his lying? The only way I can see is if I come to believe Y. But to come to believe Y I have to have already decided not to trust Jim and to trust Jack instead.

If, to use your example, the bank promised that £5 was worth £5's worth of stuff, and later didn't pay, it's not the truth of their promise that's the problem, it's their failure to pay. Trust would be equally eroded if they truthfully promised to pay out, with the sincerity of an angel, but just kept on accidentally failing to do so. I would not trust them with my money.

Broken promises erode trust because of a failure to be able to accurately predict outcomes using them. It makes no difference if the failure was the result of dishonest intent or sheer incompetence.

We cannot communicate without the trust that folks mean what they say — unenlightened

tell the truth, because otherwise nothing you say has any meaning. — unenlightened

So no jokes then?

It would mean, in my case, that I have no political beliefs at all. I would suddenly lack all sorts of beliefs about my family and friends and certainly people I know less well. Jimmy is kind. Hm, well, I don't know what he is like when he is abroad. — Bylaw

I believe this may be the objective the OP had in mind. Personally I can't see the sense in defining away a word. If we confine beliefs to those matters about which we are absolutely certain (not even 99.9999999999999%), then no one has any beliefs and we have a spare word.

I don’t see how they can change unless we are aware of them. If I have a belief that I’m unaware of it would never change. — praxis

Why do you think that?

It was difficult for hunter-gatherer tribes to join together - to form civilisations, because tribal society is ruled by alpha males who eat first and monopolize sexual opportunity. — karl stone

Literally every scrap of evidence I've ever read has shown the opposite to be the case. What ethnographies are you basing this on?

complex industrial society, that has a medium of exchange founded on trust, then the betrayal of truth by manipulation can be seen as an attack on the very foundation of society. — unenlightened

I don't understand how you're connecting trust and truth here at all. I might trust implicitly someone who is not telling the truth. The two seem unrelated. I wouldn't trust someone who lied, but lying is not the only, or even the most common, reason for not telling the truth. Simply being mistaken is by far the more likely.

I agree with you that trust is foundational, but its erosion is directly the result of a loss in trustworthiness. Someone who is untrustworthy might well be telling the truth (by accident, or because it serves their purpose). Someone trustworthy might well be not telling the truth (an honest mistake). I cannot see any way in which trustworthiness somehow gives one access to the truth.

Are we at the "defending the SS" stage of discourse? — Streetlight

Seems so.

Amusing to see just how far people will go to maintain their narrative that NATO are the good guys. I wasn't expecting a full on exculpation of the SS...yet here we are...

We are 100% certain that, absent biasing factors, there is a 50% chance of either outcome — Janus

No. Absent biasing factors the coin will not land at all. Some force has to cause it to land. That force will be biased to one side or the other. We just don't know which.

I just recommend a more nuanced way of speaking about what we are doing when our conviction is not 100%. For example if I say I believe God exists, I would mean that I have no doubt God exists. Or if I believe the butler did it then I would be 100% convinced that the butler did it — Janus

Why 100? If you want to reserve a special word for when one considers the probability 100%, why not another for 99%? One for 51%, one for 32%... What is it about 100% that warrants it's own word? I can't see the advantage of what you're advocating.

it might be based on a gut feeling — Janus

...and a 'gut feeling' is different to a belief, how?

So you think some administrative units are evil? — Olivier5

Yes. I have no problem with the notion that the SS was a morally repugnant organisation because it facilitated the genocide of millions of Jews.

As has already pointed out, this is not in the least bit unusual. We have notions of institutional morality, institutional blame...etc.

But let's not pretend you don't already know that. You're just looking for a way to wriggle out of having to deal with any moral judgement of NATO because that leaves you without the social support of the zeitgeist.

For your info, NATO is an alliance, composed of several signatory nations. — Olivier5

Ah, well in that case, for your info. The SS were an organisation composed of several administrative and operational units.

So are we back to judging the SS purely relative to their goals now? Well done them, eh?

The SS were only men. There were not 'an institution'. — Olivier5

What are NATO then, robots?

we are one hundred percent certain... — Janus

...is always contradicted by...

if ...nothing biasing towards one or the other — Janus

...this is something we can never know but be absolutely sure exists. Something absolutely must be biasing one side or the other, that's why it lands on one side or the other. We just don't know what that something is, nor what its effect might be. The probability, then, is a measure of our uncertainty.

She may have no idea whether inflation will continue to rise or not, but simply decides to bet one way or the other. That is not irrational because the chances may be incalculable, in which case it would be rational to suspend belief. — Janus

Well, betting one way and not the other isn't suspending belief, unless she's acting randomly. I agreed random action is possible, but it's not common.

I'm allowing that people may across time vacillate between belief (defined as feeling certain) and doubt (feeling uncertain). — Janus

I don't understand why you've disallowed 'quite certain of...', or 'a slight inclination toward...', or ' I'm not sure but I'm inclined to believe...' ... or any other such expression of moderated doubt. It seems to me that we quite often have a slight inclination toward one state. For example, I'm pretty sure it's not going to rain today, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did. My belief that it will not rain is neither certain, nor in doubt. I'm 'pretty sure'.

they may believe one hundred percent that its likely to be true — Janus

'Likely to be true' is already a measure of uncertainty. So saying I'm 100% certain that it's 50% likely is just exactly the same as saying I'm 50% certain.

As I said above I don't think it is always irrational to act without believing anything in particular. — Janus

I agree, which is why I included 'random' in there too. I don't think either case is common though.

If I’m reading you right... — praxis

You're not.

I can't think where you've read such a thing into what I've written when I've mostly been arguing the exact opposite - that belief is dynamic and usually held in degrees of certainty.

Could you sketch out how exactly, or point me to a source? — baker

Basically, stories. We're quite easily fooled by stories, so whilst a social group seems indispensable for the construction of many complex beliefs, those social groups don't have to be real.

It's not clear this would generally even be considered a belief, but rather, knowledge — baker

Since knowledge is considered to be justified (true) belief, if would seem that still makes it a kind of belief.

I find that often, the former are attempted by many people to be advocated as the latter. For example, "All men are created equal" or "Those who refuse to get vaccinated against covid are selfish" are sometimes advocated as being as equally true, objective, self-evident as "2 + 2 = 4". — baker

Lately this has been a trend, yes. The stuff in the '2+2=4' category changes with cultural fashions. It used to be God. Now questioning God is allowed but questioning scientific orthodoxy isn't. It depends on the dominant social narratives around at the time.

In this case, there's nothing voluntary about it, so you don't actually have a point. — Olivier5

Russia's claim is that the independent nations of Donetsk and Luhansk asked for military aid. And are now, after a successful mission neutralising Ukraine's military, the only areas substantially still occupied. Making their actions completely legitimate.

This, of course, depends on whether that is actually what happened. But questions of fact are legitimately decided by courts of law, not loonies off of the internet.

So yes, their actions so far can be said to be legitimate.

Personally, I prefer to condemn them on moral grounds, but I can see why you'd want to avoid doing that, it might take the sheen off the Top Gun poster on your bedroom wall.

Because NATO was never meant to be a moral agent, but an effective military alliance. — Olivier5

So you're saying we cannot morally condemn the actions of an institution without a moral objective. So the SS were fine as far as you're concerned. The whole concentration camps, gas chambers...no moral judgement from you on those? After all, they were set up to kill Jews and they did that very well didn't they.

No moral condemnation for the gas chambers of the SS, just a hearty round of applause at a job well done, eh?

The UN charter does. — Olivier5

There is nothing in the UN charter against voluntary uniting countries. As such it does not rule against expansion.

Voting is an individual act, not an institution, so you don't have a point. — Olivier5

The government one votes for is an institution. Since institutions are not moral actors it would be perfectly moral to vote for the Nazi party then, after all, the Nazi party are an institution so cannot do anything morally wrong?

NATO is a military alliance between nations meant to protect its members, not to be a boy scout club. People ought to judge it on its own merit: whether or not it protects them. — Olivier5

Why?

1. The point made by Apo was about legitimacy, not morality. — Olivier5

Then his point should stand uncontested. A country definitely has a legitimate right to expand. There is no law preventing expansion.

2. A few posters here have rightly pointed out that morality applies to individuals, not to institutions, so to speak of the morality of NATO is making a category error. One needs to morally indict presidents, generals and the likes but not a country or an alliance of countries. These entities need to be assessed against their stated goals, which does not to my knowledge include the boy scout pledge, or adherence to any other moral creed. — Olivier5

A typically ludicrous argument. You might as well say that we can avoid talking about the 'morality' of voting since governments are not moral agents. We support, or not, these institutions. Our support is moral or not depending on the actions of those institutions we support. Imagine if NATO had as a goal the extermination of the Jewish people. Do you think it would be in least bit relevant to point out that condemning such a goal as barbaric would be irrelevant since the institution itself is not a moral agent?

If NATO are acting immorally, then supporting them is immoral. We're not (despite your pathological obsession with the idea) standing in judgement of global actors. We are judging what we ought to do.

3. Even if one could morally indict a 'system' as wholly corrupt, eg if a vast majority of its leadership was found totally compromised morally speaking, and the rules of the system pipped in their favor, then who is to prosecute and indict these NATO officials and dignitaries with their deserved punishment? — Olivier5

Why would we need to prosecute them? Again your obsession with judgement and punishment is your own, there's no need to drag everyone else into your Judge Dred fantasy. The rest of us are talking about what we ordinary people ought to do. Which institutions we ought to support, which institutions we ought to criticise...

If I'm 100% certain there's a 50% chance, then I'm 100% correct that there's a 50% chance? — ZzzoneiroCosm

If depends on from whose perspective. Probability is a measure of uncertainty. From an objective perspective there's just a 100% chance the coin will land on whatever side it will land on (assuming determinism). So saying there's a 50% chance of it landing on heads is just an expression of my degree of uncertainty. A person with a super advanced knowledge of the coin and the air conditions might not say 50%.

I can be 100% certain and also 100% wrong. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Yes. But right and wrong are not about probabilities at all, they're just about whatever model of truth you're using.

You don't believe, you know, that there is a 50% chance, statistically speaking and assuming a perfect coin, that the coin will land on heads. It's true by definition. — Janus

That's not how probability works. If I'm 100% certain there's a 50% chance, then there's a 50% chance. If I'm 80% certain there's a 50% chance, then there's a 40% chance (depending on the exclusivity of the other options). Probability is already a measure of uncertainty, you can't have uncertainty about the probability as being some kind of separate measure.

in the example, the speculator holds anything definite to be the case about the likelihood that inflation will continue to rise, but merely that she bets on that since inflation is currently rising, and she goes with the idea that it will continue.. — Janus

Unless she's acting randomly, then betting money one way indicates a belief in the likelihood of that outcome. Obviously, people might act randomly, but it's hardly the normal case, and very difficult to prove in any case.

if they don't feel sure that it's true and only believe it's likely to be true, then they don't believe it's true — Janus

Indeed. They believe it to some degree of certainty below 100%. The most common case. A belief with 100% certainty is rare.

they don't even have to believe it's likely to be true to bet on its being true or to act as if it's true. — Janus

No indeed. They could act randomly or irrationally. It's not common though.

So, let me try to understand where the line is for you.

"I believe there is a God" is a statement of belief, right?

What about "I believe there's a 50% chance the coin will land on heads"? That's not a belief, according to you, right? (working on your example above - holding there to be a greater than 50% chance of inflation is not a belief)

What about "I believe there is a 99.999999999% chance there is a God"? Still not a belief? Or have we crossed into belief territory yet?