3 ms·

> Well then I guess all the humans in this thread would come to the exact same conclusion, because according to some expectations we are perfectly consistent an

> Well then I guess all the humans in this thread would come to the exact same conclusion, because according to some expectations we are perfectly consistent and capable of logical reasoning. You've missed the point (hopefully not intentionally). Neither I nor anybody else suggested that all humans must arrive at identical conclusions as one another for the process to be considered "reasoning". But any individual human should be self-consistent, which is what I would expect of a chatbot that "reasons". Because, allegedly, the bot keeps all of the prompts in the same context, suggesting a single continuous conversation with one "entity" rather than treating each response as a separate instance. So when the chatbot suddenly cannot back up its own prior conclusion, it's demonstrating a lack of self-consistency, which shows that it is not "reasoning" for any typical definition of the term. It has no self-awareness (nor can it, though AI proponents seem to claim otherwise).

epups 3y ago
> But any individual human should be self-consistent, which is what I would expect of a chatbot that "reasons". OK, should be. Are we, though? I can recall an American president who could not even complete two sentences without a direct contradiction. And if we think about how billions of people claim to base their lives in self contradicting fictitious books, maybe we are not such a self consistent species after all. Self consistency is not a great criterion for reasoning. If I tell you "because Jesus told me so" after every question, that's consistent but not interesting. It would be trivial to emulate consistency, in fact. I think we are all talking past each other because everyone had a different definition of reasoning. My main point - which I have hopefully consistently presented! - is that we don't really know how humans reason, so we should not focus on categorical statements about it at all.

epups 3y ago

> But any individual human should be self-consistent, which is what I would expect of a chatbot that "reasons". OK, should be. Are we, though? I can recall an American president who could not even complete two sentences without a direct contradiction. And if we think about how billions of people claim to base their lives in self contradicting fictitious books, maybe we are not such a self consistent species after all. Self consistency is not a great criterion for reasoning. If I tell you "because Jesus told me so" after every question, that's consistent but not interesting. It would be trivial to emulate consistency, in fact. I think we are all talking past each other because everyone had a different definition of reasoning. My main point - which I have hopefully consistently presented! - is that we don't really know how humans reason, so we should not focus on categorical statements about it at all.