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.