| You're confusing language with ontology. > Reasoning is a social construct The word "reasoning" is a "social construct," as all words are. Reasoning itself is not. Our brains do things. Reasoning is one of them. The word "reasoning" is one of the labels, the approximations, that we use when we name that activity. Changing the label doesn't change the fact that there exists something that we're naming. The person you're answering is asking whether reasoning -- that thing that really, actually exists -- is one of the activities LLMs perform. It's a valid question. And the answer is that LLMs do not reason. Or if they do, we have no evidence of it or way of verifying that we actually understand qua reasoning the activity the LLM is performing (which is to say nothing of the fact that reasoning requires a reasoner). Anyone who says that LLMs reason is mistaking special effects/simulation for reality and, in essence, believes that whenever they see a picture of a dog on their computer screens, there must be a real, actual dog somewhere in the computer, too. |
Deleuze and Guattari's idea of striation and smooth space is a more honest approach to how we describe and interact with the world.