I am not gonna pretend to have one true definition but there are hopefully components of reasoning we can agree on:
- The ability to hold a collection of beliefs/statements and perform operations on them such as noticing one contradicts the others. Claude in my example clearly failed this.
- The ability to make logical inferences. Since logical steps can be represented by text, current LLMs seem to simulate this on the token stream and seem to have decent results most of the time. True inferences would be representing statements in some abstract form and being able to perform operations on them according to rules. The key here is that once it has a collection of statements and is given ("decides to use") an operation to perform, then it can do this correctly 100% of the time (ignoring hardware errors).
- The ability to hold a collection of beliefs/statements and perform operations on them such as noticing one contradicts the others. Claude in my example clearly failed this.
- The ability to make logical inferences. Since logical steps can be represented by text, current LLMs seem to simulate this on the token stream and seem to have decent results most of the time. True inferences would be representing statements in some abstract form and being able to perform operations on them according to rules. The key here is that once it has a collection of statements and is given ("decides to use") an operation to perform, then it can do this correctly 100% of the time (ignoring hardware errors).