>> Some say that if you can memorize facts and algorithms and apply them to new data, it is a memorization. Some say that it is reasoning. Who are those "some"

>> Some say that if you can memorize facts and algorithms and apply them to new data, it is a memorization. Some say that it is reasoning. Who are those "some" who say it is reasoning? Here's a question. If you enter a command in your terminal do you expect your shell to have memorised the result of the command from some previous experience, or do you expect your shell to compute the result of your command according to its programming and your inputs? A rhetorical question: we all assume the latter. Which one is more like what most peoples' informal conception of "reasoning"? Retrieving an answer from storage, or computing an answer from the inputs given to a program? >> We can always look at human experience mechanisticly and say that we don't think -- we just memorized thinking patterns and apply them when speaking and "thinking" I think this is confusing memorisation of the rules required to perform a computation, like a program stored in computer memory, with memorisation of the results of a computation. When we distinguish between memorisation and reasoning we usually make a distinction between computing a result from scratch and retrieving it from storage without having to re-compute it, like in caching or memoization, or getting data from a database. For a real world example, we memorise our time tables but we don't memorise the result of every sum x + y = z, instead we memorise a summation algorithm that we then use to derive the sum of two numbers.