Comment by TheWrongGuy
1 day ago
By that standard, human brains don't either. Our externalizations of concepts like language or symbolic structure allow us to do so. In the parlance of our times, we built our own reasoning harnesses because our intuition lead us to do so.
> By that standard, human brains don't either.
Exactly. If LLMs don’t reason, then neither do humans.
Functionally, we can analyze LLM output and point to examples of reasoning, and examples that imply understanding.
The problem is there’s a lot of superstition around words like reasoning and understanding. People imagine some ineffable quality that only humans possess that distinguish what they do from what models can do, but they can’t define it - most likely, because it doesn’t exist.