Still somehow the question keeps coming up- "what is reasoning". I'll be honest and say that I imagine it's mainly folks who skipped CS 101 because they were busy tweaking their neural nets who go around the web like Diogenes with his lantern, howling "Reasoning! I'm looking for a definition of Reasoning! What is Reasoning!".
I have never heard the people at the top echelons of AI and Deep learning - LeCun, Schmidhuber, Bengio, Hinton, Ng, Hutter, etc etc- say things like that: "what's reasoning". The reason I suppose is that they know exactly what that is, because it was the one thing they could never do with their neural nets, that classical AI could do between sips of coffee at breakfast [3]. Those guys know exactly what their systems are missing and, to their credit, have never made no bones about that.
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[1] e.g. see my profile for a quick summary.
[2] See all of Russeel & Norvig, as a for instance.
[3] Schmidhuber's doctoral thesis was an implementation of genetic algorithms in Prolog, even.
it pertains to the source of the inference power of deductive inference. do you think all deductive reasoning originated inductively? like when some one discovers a rule or fact that seemingly has contextual predictive power, obviously that can be confirmed inductively by observations, but did that deductive reflex of the mind coagulate by inductive experiences. maybe not all deductive derivative rules but the original deductive rules.
but im getting at a few things. one of those things is neurological. how do deductive inference constructs manifest in neurons and is it really inadvertently an inductive process that that creates deductive neural functions.
other aspect of the question i guess is more philosophical. like why does deductive inference work at all, i think clues to a potential answer to that can be seen in the mechanics of generalization of antecedents predicting(or correlating with) certain generalized consequences consistently. the brain coagulates generalized coinciding concepts by reinforcement and it recognizes or differentiates inclusive instances or excluding instances of a generalization by recognition properties that seem to gatekeep identities accordingly. its hard to explain succinctly what i mean by the latter, but im planning on writing an academic paper on that.
If they did not actually, would they (and you) necessarily be able to know?
Many people claim the ability to prove a negative, but no one will post their method.
