[qsera]

> and come away with the idea it cannot reason

Reason and "appearance" of reasoning are two different things. Some people intrinsically understand this. And some does not, and those people can never be made to understand it. I think it is one you things that you either get it automatically, or not get it at all..

[GorbachevyChase]

So does a human engaged in rationalization or confabulation just appear to reason? We might be closer to these machines than you think, and I don’t mean that in a positive way.

[NateEag]

Not OP, but as an LLM skeptic, I'd absolutely say that humans are natively very poor reasoners.

With effort, support, and resources, we can learn to reason well from first principles - call it reaching "intellectual maturity."

Catch an emotionally-immature human in a mistake or conflicting set of beliefs, and you'll be able to see them do exactly what you describe above: rationalize, deflect, and twist the data to support a more emotionally-comfortable narrative.

That usually holds even for intellectually-mature individuals who have not yet matured emotionally, even though they may reason quite well when the stakes are low.

Humans that have matured both emotionally and intellectually, however, are often able to keep themselves stable and reason well even in difficult circumstances.

The ways LLMs consistently fail spectacularly on out-of-distribution problems (like these esolangs) do seem to suggest they don't really mature intellectually, not the way humans can.

Maybe the Wiggum loop strategy shows otherwise? I'm not sure I know.

To me, it smells more like brute-forcing through to a result without fully understanding the problem, though.