alt Hacker NewsReasoning 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.
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Why does reasoning require cognition? Isn’t a if else block or switch statement reasoning? Or a formal logic proof? If an LLM produces an output using formal logic or a python script why is that not reasoning? A human would offload the reasoning using similar methods. I know when I took the LSAT, I learned ways to diagram arguments and didn’t have to think/reason about it because the formal logic diagram did the “reasoning for me”.
Aren’t humans just “action potential” extrusion machines? What is unique about our neural pattern recognition to make our cognition different in nature rather than merely degree?
It seems clear at this point that the greatest insight that unlocked our current AI acceleration was scaling alone would unlock emergent properties and abilities.
Can you give a concrete example of something that is impossible for an LLM to ever do due to its lack of reasoning ability.