Yes, I read what you posted and answered accordingly. Only, I didn't spend enough time dumbing it down further. So let me dumb it down.

Your main objection was the simplicity of the goal of LLMs- predicting the next word that occurs. Somehow, this simplistic goal makes the system stupid.

In my reply, I first said that self awareness occurs naturally after a system becomes more and more intelligent. I explained the reason as to why. I then went on to explain how a simplistic terminal goal has nothing to do with actual intelligence. Hence, no matter how stupid/simple a terminal goal is, if an intelligent system is challenged enough and given enough resources, it will develop sentience at a given point in time.