That’s not how our brains work though, or how must examples of human reasoning play out. When asking “do LLMs reason” we are asking whether the action being performed is similar to regular humans, not some platonic ideal of a scientist/rationalist.

> When asking “do LLMs reason” we are asking whether the action being performed is similar to

Very certainly not. We ask if the system achieves the goal.

"When we ask if the coprocessor performs floating point arithmetic, we ask if the system achieves the goal (of getting accurate results)". Not, "does the co-processor ask if we have a spare napkin".