Comment by LordDragonfang
3 months ago
How are you defining "reasoning"?
Because I see these sorts of gnostic assertion about LLMs all the time about how they "definitely aren't doing <thing we normally apply to meat-brains>" by gesturing at the technical things it's doing, with no attempts to actually justify the negative assertion.
It often comes across as privileged reason trying to justify that of course the machine isn't doing some ineffable thing only meat-brains do.
From my other ridiculous comment, as I do entertain simulation theory in my understanding of God:
Reasoning as we know it could just be a mechanism to fill in gaps in obviously sparse data (we absolutely do not have all the data to render reality accurately, you are seeing an illusion). Go reason about it all you want.
The LLM doesn’t know anything. We determine what output is right, even if the LLM swears the output is right. We “reason” about it, I guess? Well in this case the whole “reasoning” process is to simply get an output that looks right, so what is reasoning in our case?
Let me just go one ridiculous level lower. If I measure every frame the Hubble telescope takes, and I measure with a simple ruler the distances between things, frame by frame, I can “reason” out some rules of the universe (planetary orbits). In this “reasoning” process, the very basic question of “well why, and who made this” immediately arises, so reasoning always leads to the fundamental question of God.
So, yeah. We reason to see God, because that’s all we’re seeing, everything else is an illusion. Reasoning is inextricably linked to God, so we have to be very open minded when we ask what is this machine doing.
Honestly, I was going to nitpick, but this definition scratches an itch in my brain so nicely that I'll just complement it as beautiful. "We reason to see God", I love it.
(Also, if I might give a recommendation, you might be the type of person to enjoy Unsong by Scott Alexander https://unsongbook.com/)
Thank you for the suggestion and nice words. Trust me, I have to sit here and laugh at the stuff I write too, because I wasn’t always a believer. So it’s a little bit of a trip for me too, I’m still exploring my own existence.