We all want to believe that humans, or indeed animals as a whole, have some secret special sauce that makes us fundamentally distinguishable from statistical algorithms that approximate a best fit function according to some cost metric, but the fact of the matter is we don't.

There is no science to support the idea that biological neurons are particularly special, and there are reams and reams of papers suggestin that real neural cognition is little more than an extremely powerful statistical machine.

I don't care about what "most reasonable people" think. "Most reasonable people" don't have an opinion about the axiom of choice, or the existence of central pattern generators. That's not to devalue them but their opinions on things this far outside of their expertise are worth about as much as my opinions on the concept of art. I am a professional in neural computation, and I put it to you to even hypothesize about how animal neural computation is fundamentally distinct from LLM computation.

Like I said, we are wildly more capable than GPT, because our hardware is wildly more complex than any ANN, but the fundamental computing strategy is not all that different.