One thing that is clouding this discussion is that most people are mixing up a lot of different characteristics that animals like humans have as if they were all the same thing. So for many people they don't really distinguish between things like "reasoning", "self-aware", "conscious", "alive", "sentient", "intelligent", "has world model". They also don't distinguish between different types or varying levels of cogni…
I think the 'conceit' of LLM as AI advocates is that this model is just as (or at least nearly as) our own internal model - that the 'simplest' model to match the text is indeed our 'real' model that matches reality as a whole. A bit of a stretch surely!