Scientists do not "need experimentation to come up with anything new". The scientific method is explicitly starting with a hypothesis (i.e. something new), then

Scientists do not "need experimentation to come up with anything new". The scientific method is explicitly starting with a hypothesis (i.e. something new), then experimenting to validate that hypothesis. Are these hypotheses frequently based on prior observations? Of course. But, reason is still being applied, so I don't know what you're trying to differentiate. You say alphago discovered move 37 from its self-play experience, but that explicitly has nothing to do with the environment. It's the equivalent of a human thinking through various scenarios (without experimentation or interacting with the environment) to come to a new conclusion. The environment is not required for that, which completely argues against what you seem to be saying. BTW, I have not made any statements about AI and reasoning, other than LLMs. AlphaGo, of course, is not LLM-based. Of course we don't all live in individual voids, so much of what we are concerned about are functions of our environments and will be expressed as such. I don't think there's anything groundbreaking in observing that a lot of our reasoning is applied to solving problems that have some intersection with our shared reality.