Why not? I think there’s fairly strong evidence that there is something that convincingly looks like reasoning. I think anthropic has done some nice circuit tracing and mechanistic interpretability work on this for instance.

There is a certain amount of irony in your comment that I hope you appreciate.

What exactly do you consider reasoning?

You keep repeating this throughout the thread, one could even say just like a certain class of exotic birds :)

Why couldn't parroting, after a certain level and complexity of the parroting infrastructure, be reasoning? What a priori restriction forbids it from being such?

Flipping a NAND is not calculation either. Billions of them? Things change.

Copying someone else's reasoning process (as best you understand it) is still a limited form of reasoning, even if it might be considered as cargo-cult reasoning (copying without understanding).