If you want examples of this, see the recent book "The AI Con"
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/217432753-the-ai-con
which describes LLMs as "souped-up autocomplete", complex statistics that cannot truly understand anything. A more recent example is this paper:
https://zenodo.org/records/20071869
which says,
> [LLMs], as turbo-charged statistical models (recall their formal relation to logistic regression) can only but provide correlations.
And, of course, the Stochastic Parrot paper is the classic example in this area. It is from 5 years ago, but "LLMs only do statistics / can't understand" is very much alive and active among academics, even if it is a minority position.
None of those arguments claim "LLMs could not possibly be good models of some cognitive capacity"
The "some cognitive capacity" that's relevant to the current discussion is "consciousness".
What about the cognitive capacity of understanding?
The use of the term "understanding" in the quote you mentioned is a claim about metaphysics, not cognitive capacity.
From Merriam-Webster:
cognitive: as in reasonable; of, relating to, or involving conscious mental activities (such as thinking, *understanding*, learning, and remembering)