I think the extent to which you’re being reductive here reduces human reasoning to some kind of blind interpolation.

Both brains and LLM’s use nodes to store information, patterns, and correlations as states, which we call upon and modify as we experience new situations. This is largely how we acquire skills, define ourselves, reason, forecast future expectations, etc. Yet what stops me from saying “yeah, but you’re just interpolating from your enormous corpus of sensory data”? Of course we are - that’s largely what learning is.

I can’t help but think that if I was an objective observer to humans and LLM’s, and therefore didn’t have human biases, that I would conclude that both systems are intelligent and reason in analogous ways.

But ultimately, I get nervous seeing discussion go this long without direct reference to the actual model architecture, which I haven’t seen done but which I’m sure would be illuminating.