That’s neither here nor there. Everything can be statistically modelled but very few things are reasoning.

Same with turing machines.

Speaking of reasoning, how do you know what is happening inside the mind when it "reasons"?

And while you're at it: what is happening inside the mind when it reasons?

These are very good questions that deserve unequivocal answers. Alas…

And here we've encountered the taboo. Best pretend not, kick the can down the road, and hope for the best. That will surely produce good results.

Ah yes, the taboo of sound reasoning.

The Reasoner analyzes its reasoning and finds it...sound!

Case closed, terminate all thought processes.

In no way does "Turing Completeness" imply the ability to reason - I mean it's like arguing that a nightlight "reasons" about if it is dark out or not.

However, if reason is computable, then a syntactic transformation can compute it. The point is that stating that something is a "mere" syntactic transformation does not imply computational weakness.

> In no way does "Turing Completeness" imply the ability to reason

Unless you believe in magic, then yes, it does.

A system that is Turing Complete absolutely can be programmed to reason, aka it has the ability to reason.

> A system that is Turing Complete absolutely can be programmed to reason, aka it has the ability to reason.

you can write C program which can reason, but C compiler can't reason. So, program part is missing between "Turing Completeness" and reasoning, and it is very non-trivial part.

Given "reasoning" is still undefined, I would not go so far as to claim that a C compiler is not reasoning. What if a C compiler's semantic analysis pass is a limited form of reasoning?

Furthermore, the C compiler can do a lot more than you think. The P99/metalang99 macro toolkits give the preprocessor enough state space to encode and run an LLM, in principle.

I can define "reasoning". Given number of observations and inference rules, infer new calculated observations.

> What if a C compiler's semantic analysis pass is a limited form of reasoning?

I guess you can say that C compiler can reason in specific narrow domain, because it is also a program and someone programmed it to reason in that domain.

I think C compiler was wrong analogy, because it is also a program. More correct could refer on some machine which executes ASM/C/bytecode etc. That machine(e.g. CPU or VM) is turing complete, but one need to write program to do reasoning. C compiler doing some semantic reasoning over say datatypes is example of such program.

that argument is valid, however simple the reasoning may be.