Reasoning
Reason is one of those concepts we all seem to agree on, I’ve casually tossed my fair share of “please be reasonable”s, but when pressed for details and definitions we resort to the good old you’ll know it when you see it or some other made up definition on the spot, lest you think of me as unreasonable this is all mostly good and fine but if we are to endow AIs with reason we need to look deeper, so whats reason anyways ?
Would you believe me if I told you that we do not have an agreed upon and clear definition of reason !? What we have instead are approximations:
“Reason is the cognitive capacity to think logically, solve problems, make decisions, and form judgments based on available information, often involving abstract concepts and critical analysis.” ( cobbled from LLMs )
“Reason is the capacity of applying logic consciously by drawing conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. “ ( from the wiki )
Unfortunately most definitions are vague in the details and anchor themselves with auxiliary concepts like logic, meaning, consciousness.
Maybe it is that reason is relative to those defining it and thus incomplete, but let’s keep things practical and try to use reason to understand reason, one way is to list…
