alt Hacker NewsYou have moved goalposts from reasoning to "human cognition". I won't tolerate that sort of slippery wordplay.
Reasoning is making analogies between logical patterns found in conceptual space, with a direction of time (statements precede conclusions). For example. A => B and B => C. You may now deduce A => C. For something fuzzier, A~D and B~E, you may now deduce that D~=>E. This is the sort of thing that higher layer attention mechanism is capable of doing.
> This is a box they can not escape.
Would you say that Helen Keller was less capable of abstract reasoning because she had more constrained access to sensory input?
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Reasoning requires cognition, otherwise there's nothing to reason about, no context or value system to use as a basis for reason.
Decision making can be done by trained machines following rules, but that's different that reasoning. A thermostat isn't reasoning when it decides to turn on the air conditioner, to argue otherwise expands the definition of "reason" to be so broad that it becomes useless.
LLMs are trained on human knowledge and reasoning that results from human cognition, and they are excellent at stochastic mimicry - if the argument is that they are actually reasoning, then some sort of equivalent to human cognition must be present for that to be true. Lacking that, they are nothing more than "token extrusion machines" with some potentially useful characteristics.
The problem with that is LLMs can output words or symbols that seen like it used "reason" to produce. But for everything the core algorithm does, it's simply nothing like the wetware reasoning to get to the same answer. So he didn't move goalposts. He always meant the reasoning that stems from human cognition.
Technically if it has that, it'd be singularity no? So basically the premise is they are doing nothing of the sort. Prove any LLM enough and it really does show it has no quarrels contradicting itself or being bossed around. Has no belief / no orientation etc. It's truly mindless but tricks our mind and soul (or whatever) probably.