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>You just argued that, because some animals display errors in reasoning, we can call into doubt the claim that any animal reasons.

No, I literally said no claim can be made. And I didn't just say some animals display errors therefore we can doubt any claim that animals reason.

I said we observe contradictory evidence. And my conclusion again was that we don't enough evidence to make ANY claim.



I believe the claim that some animals can reason is a very reasonable hypothesis, while the claim that no animals can reason is an unlikely one. The contradictory evidence you cite is pointing at some animals doing dumb things. Those animals can be as dumb as rocks and it wouldn’t matter for my claim, I’d only need to show you one reasoning animal to prove it.


Doesn’t prove anything for any animal you show me that can reason I can show you an example of where it can’t.

However I agree with your hypothesis. And I agree that my counter examples are not convincing.

The inner point is this. The same exact thing above can be said for an LLM. You can show evidence for both reasoning and failure to reason.

The illogic here is that contradictory evidence for animals indicates that animals can reason. But the same evidence for LLMs prove they can’t reason.




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