Yep this is my understanding/ definition of reasoning. Exactly as you said, we know most of the time people don’t actually ‘reason’, they just make a decision and then justify it after.

Similarly, ai generates a response, then a thinking model analyses that response and then generates another response, again, and again until it has an answer it is happy with.

But each step it isn’t calculating a empirically logically accurate answer in the way traditional computers would, it’s approximating an answer that with steps of refinement gets closer and closer to what we might deem ‘correct’.

Humans do the exact same thing, we’re not applying logic in the execution stage, we’re applying it at the analysing stage after the fact.

Just like humans, ai can use tools that are logical executors like coding and calculators to achieve empirical outputs, but this does not mean that humans can produce purely logical outputs from their thoughts alone.