Taking a different tack from others in this thread. I don't think you can say that a TI-83 is not reasoning if it is doing calculations. Certainly it is not aware of any concepts of numbers and has no meaningful sense of the operation, but those are attributes of sentience, not reasoning. The reasoning ability of a calculator is extremely limited but what make those capabilities that it does have, non reasoning.
What non-sentience based property do you think something should have to be considered reasoning. Do you consider sentience and reasoning to be one and the same? If not then you should be able to indicate what distinguishes one from the other.
I doubt anyone here is arguing that chatGPT is sentient, yet plenty accept that it can reason to some extent.
>Do you consider sentience and reasoning to be one and the same?
No, but I think they share some similarities. You can be sentient without doing any reasoning, just through experience, there's probably a lot of simple life forms in that category. Where they overlap I think, is in that they require a degree of reflection. Reasoning I'd say is the capacity to distinguish between truth and falsehoods, to have mental content of the object you're reasoning about and as a consequence have a notion of understanding and an interior or subjective view.
The distinction I'd make is that calculation or memorization is not reasoning at all. My TI-83 or Stockfish can calculate math or chess but they have no notion of math or chess, they're basically Chinese rooms, they just perform mechanical operations. They can appear as if they reason, even a chess engine purely looking up results in a table base and with very simplistic brute force can play very strong chess but it doesn't know anything about chess. And with the LLMs you need to be careful because the "large" part does a lot of work. They often can sound like they reason but when they have to explain their reasoning they'll start to make up obvious falsehoods or contradictions. A good benchmark if something can reason is probably if it can.. reason about its reasoning coherently.
I do think the very new chain-of-thought models are more of a step into that direction, the further you get away from relying on data the more likely you're building something that reasons but we're probably very early into systems like that.
What non-sentience based property do you think something should have to be considered reasoning. Do you consider sentience and reasoning to be one and the same? If not then you should be able to indicate what distinguishes one from the other.
I doubt anyone here is arguing that chatGPT is sentient, yet plenty accept that it can reason to some extent.