You’re failing into the same trap. When the letters on the screen tell you something, it’s not necessarily the truth. When there is “I’m reasoning” written in a chatbot window, it doesn’t mean that there is a something that’s reasoning.
Or at least they can’t reason the way we do about our physical world.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 3 days ago
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
No, they cannot reason, by any definition of the word. LLMs are statistics-based autocomplete tools. They don’t understand what they generate, they’re just really good at guessing how words should be strung together based on complicated statistics.
SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You seem pretty sure of that. Is your position firm or are you willing to consider contrary evidence?
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I can be convinced by contrary evidence if provided. There is no evidence of reasoning in the example you linked. All that proved was that if you prime an LLM with sufficient context, it’s better at generating output, which is honestly just more support for calling them statistical auto-complete tools. Try asking it those same questions without feeding it your rules first, and I bet it doesn’t generate the right answers. Try asking it those questions 100 times after feeding it the rules, I bet it’ll generate the wrong answers a few times.
If LLMs are truly capable of reasoning, it shouldn’t need your 16 very specific rules on “arithmetic with extra steps” to get your very carefully worded questions correct. Your questions shouldn’t need to be carefully worded. They shouldn’t get tripped up by trivial “trick questions” like the original one in the post, or any of the dozens of other questions like it that LLMs have proven incapable of answering on their own. The fact that all of those things do happen supports my claim that they do not reason, or think, or understand - they simply generate output based on their input and internal statistical calculations.
LLMs are like the Wizard of Oz. From afar, they look like these powerful, all-knowing things. The speak confidently and convincingly, and are sometimes even correct! But once you get up close and peek behind the curtain, you realize that it’s just some complicated math, clever programming, and a bunch of pirated books back there.
SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Ok, I’ll take that in good faith and respond in kind.
“It needed the rules, therefore it’s not reasoning” is your weakest point, and it’s load-bearing for your whole argument.
Every reasoning system needs premises - you, me, an 8yr old. You cannot deduce conclusions from nothing. Demanding that a reasoner perform without premises isn’t a test of reasoning, it’s a demand for magic. Premise-dependence isn’t a bug, it’s the definition.
Look at what the rules actually were: pastes.io/rules-a-ph
No numbers, containers, or scenarios. Just abstract invariants about bounded systems — the kind of thing you’d write in formal logic. Most aren’t even physics facts, they’re logical constraints: stated quantity vs physically present quantity, overflow vs contained volume. Premises in the strict logical sense.
When the LLM correctly handles novel chained problems, including the 4oz cup already holding 3oz, tracking state across two operations, that’s deriving conclusions from general premises applied to novel instances. That’s what deductive reasoning is, per the definition I cited.
“Without the rules it fails” - without context, humans make the same errors. Default assumptions under uncertainty aren’t a failure of reasoning, they’re a feature of any mind with incomplete information.
“It’ll fail sometimes across 100 runs” - so do humans under load. Probabilistic performance doesn’t disqualify a process from being reasoning. It just makes it imperfect reasoning, which is the only kind that exists.
The Wizard of Oz analogy is vivid but does no logical work. “Complicated math and clever programming” describes implementation, not function. Your neurons are electrochemical signals on evolved heuristics. If that rules out reasoning, it rules out all reasoning everywhere. If it doesn’t rule out yours, you need a principled account of why it rules out the LLM’s.