Comment by famouswaffles

Your reasoning may lower your confidence, but until it connects to observable differences, it is still at least partly a story you are telling yourself.

More importantly, the question is not whether LLMs work the same way human brains do. You may care about that, but many people do not. The relevant question is whether they exhibit the functional properties we care about. Saying “they are structurally different, therefore not really intelligent” is a lot like insisting planes are not really flying because they do not flap like birds.

And on your last point: in practice, it is not testable. There is no decisive intelligence test that sorts all humans into one bucket and all LLMs into another. So if your distinction cannot be cashed out behaviorally, functionally, or empirically, then it starts to look less like a serious difference and more like a metaphysical preference.