this goes into the heart of what it means to "know".
All human knowledge is "symbolic". that is, knowledge is a set of abstractions (concepts) along with relations between concepts. As an example, by "knowing" addition is to understand the "algorithm" or operations involved in adding two numbers. reasoning is the act of traversing concept chains.
LLMs dont yet operate at the symbolic level, and hence, it could be argued that they dont know anything. LLM is a modern sophist excelling at language but not at reasoning.
All human knowledge is "symbolic". that is, knowledge is a set of abstractions (concepts) along with relations between concepts. As an example, by "knowing" addition is to understand the "algorithm" or operations involved in adding two numbers. reasoning is the act of traversing concept chains.
LLMs dont yet operate at the symbolic level, and hence, it could be argued that they dont know anything. LLM is a modern sophist excelling at language but not at reasoning.