alt Hacker NewsI tend to agree but to adjudicate that someone has to define what they consider reasoning to be.
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Crucially it's the responsibility of those who are making the claim here to bring evidence and definitions. The other approach, very popular on HN, has led to endless carping by people making outlandish claims without evidence and then demanding that every term possible be defined before they can be dismissed out of hand.
The claim that any two things are equivalent just because they look similar is a strong one, and the onus is on the person advancing it to bring evidence, not to insist that they are considered correct until it is disproved. That's how it works with the flat earth and religion and everything else; we shouldn't accept an unsupported conclusion just because some people really, really like AI and don't want to have to justify their claims.
The traditional response to such claims is ridicule [1]; we know trivially from all sorts of examples that presentation is not identity, and so 'but it looks similar' is not a convincing stance.
1 https://sites.psu.edu/sierraastle/2019/10/21/behold-a-man/
What is 'reasoning' or IQ or more importantly consciousness are very difficult open questions in science.
An approach that might shed some light is instead to define what consciousness ISN'T or what thinking ISN'T. Naively let us say consciousness is NOT a large list of weights (i.e. an LLM).
The uncanny emergent ability of an LLM depends entirely on training data. A mathematical model is used to match output against training data (via loss functions etc). The training data contains all the human ingenuity, logic, rational, patterns and features.
Try giving an LLM model the alphabet ALONE and see what it comes up with? Why are you able to immediately reason that given the alphabet alone it could not 'reason', 'think' or produce much of anything useful.
To address briefly the idea of reasoning and something assembling reasoning somehow implying the same thing. Try the following thought experiment. Given a simulated world (e.g. The Matrix), no matter how good the simulation you would not actually get WET.