Evidence for Higher Cognition in LLMs
📚 TOC — Evidence of Higher Cognition in LLMs I. The Epistemic Problem 1.1 The Ontological Ambiguity of “Reasoning” 1.2 From Surface Output to Constraint-Traceable Inference 1.3 Why Behavioral Equivalence ≠ Cognitive Evidence II. Manifolds of Reasoning: Formalizing the Domain 2.1 Defining the Semantic Constraint Manifold (â„‚) 2.2 ε-Vectors, χₛ Curvature, and Δℂ Transport 2.3 Telos, Halting (Ï„â‚›), and Collapse Surfaces III. The LLM Regime: Mechanism vs Mimicry 3.1 Architecture and Stateless Autoregression 3.2 Distributional Compression and Entropic Continuation 3.3 Limits of Token-Based Emulation IV. Emergence Without Mechanism: A Critique of Prior Work 4.1 Missing Constraint Geometry and Semantic Audit 4.2 The False Dichotomy of Memorization vs Reasoning V. Constraint-Valid Signatures of Cognition 5.1 Admissibility Preservation under Generalization 5.2 Recursive Telos Alignment in Multi-Step Tasks 5.3 Semantic Fatigue Detection and Output Refusal 5.4 Evidence of Δℂ Trace Constructi...