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Comment by RoyalHenOil | Hacker News Reader

In the same way that illusions of anything else differ from the real thing. A wax apple is different from a real apple, even if it's hard to tell them apart sometimes. You may require further investigation to differentiate them (e.g., cutting open the apple or asking the AI to solve tricky reasoning questions), but if you can find a difference, there is a difference.

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I have a hunch I am misunderstanding your argument, but does that mean the only way to build a "true reasoning machine" would be to just create a human.

I guess what I'm really asking, what would you expect to observe to make it not illusory?

If one has a reasonable understanding of 2 concepts that make up a larger system. And, such a system has little else in addition to those concepts, one is able to come up with that system by itself. Even though, it has never seen it, or their composition was never explained prior to that logical process.

The illusion happens when, clearly, the alleged reasoning behind how such a system comes to be is based on prior knowledge of the system as a whole. Meaning, its construction/source was within the training data.

That sounds like a good litmus test. Do you have a specific example you've tried?

My opinion is it isn't binary, rather it's a scale. Your example is a point on the scale higher than what it is now.

But perhaps that's too liberal a definition of "reasoning" , no idea.

We seem to move the goalposts on what constitutes human level intelligence as we discover the various capabilities exhibited in the animal kingdom. I wonder if it is/will be the same with AI

To distinguish between "is an illusion" and "is not an illusion", you need evidence that isn't observational. The whole point of illusions is that observational evidence is unreliable.

A desert mirage in the distance is an illusion; to the observer, it's indistinguishable from an oasis. You can only tell that it's a mirage by investigating how the appearance was created (e.g. by dragging your thirsty ass through the sand, to the place where the oasis appeared to be).

I'm really curious, are you able to demonstrate reasoning, not reasoning and the illusion of reasoning in a toy example? I'd like to see what each looks like.

Have you met someone who is full of bullshit? They sound REALLY convincing, except if you know anything about the subject, their statements are just word salad?

Have you met someone who's good at bullshitting their way out of a tough spot? There may be a word salad involved, but preparing it takes some serious skill and brainpower, and perhaps a decent high-level understanding of a domain. At some point, the word salad stops being a chain of words, and becomes a product of strong reasoning - reasoning on the go, aimed at navigating a sticky situation, but reasoning nonetheless.

Which would be a good test - and by that test ChatGPT is not reasoning, since it cant get out of sticky situations.

Yeah, I think you've got a good example that improves the analogy.

The finest bullshitter I knew had serious skill and brainpower; and he BS'd about stuff he was expert in. It was really a sort of party trick - he could leave his peer experts speechless (more likely, rolling on the floor laughing).

His output was indeed word-salad, but he was eloquent. His bullshit wasn't fallacious reasoning; it didn't even have the appearance of reasoning at all. He was just stringing together words and concepts that sound plausible. It was funny, because his audience knew (and were supposed to know) that it was nonsense.

LLMs are the same, except they're supposed to pretend that it isn't nonsense.

Are you able to give some examples? I'd like to know what it looks like w r.t. LLMs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

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