I have to push back on this. It's the people who constantly assert that LLMs “don't think” who are not engaging in a conversation. It's a thought-terminating cliché.
Unfortunately, even those willing to engage in this conversation still don't have much to converse about, because we simply don't know what thinking actually is, how the brain works, how LLMs work, and to what extent they are similar or different. That makes it all the more vexing to me when people say this, because the only thing I can say in response is “you don't know that (and neither does anyone else)”.
>It's the people who constantly assert that LLMs “don't think” who are not engaging in a conversation.
I'm responding to the conversation. Oftentimes it's engaged on "AI is smarter than me/other people". It's in the name, but "intelligence" is a facade put on by the machine to begin with.
>because we simply don't know what thinking actually is
I described my definition. You can disagree or make your own interpretation, but to dismiss my conversation and simply say "no one knows" is a bit ironic for a person accusing me of not engaging in a conversation.
Philosophy spent centuries trying to answer that question. Mine is a simple, pragmatic approach. Just because there's no objective answer doesn't mean we can't converse about it.