> But we don't usually believe in both the bullshit and in the fact the the BS is actually BS.
I can't parse what you mean by this.
> LLM don't care about anything.
"Care" is ill-defined. LLMs are functions that have local optima (the outputs); those functions are trained to approximate other functions (e.g. RLHF) that optimise other things that can be described with functions (what humans care about). It's a game of telephone, like how Leonard Nimoy was approximating what the script writers were imagining Spock to be like when given the goal of "logical and unemotional alien" (ditto Brent Spiner, Data, "logical and unemotional android"), and yet humans are bad at writing such characters: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan
But rather more importantly in this discussion, I don't know what you care about when you're criticising AI for not caring, especially in this context. How, *mechanistically*, does "caring" matter to "learning abstract thought", and the question of how closely LLMs do or don't manage it relative to humans?
I mean, in a sense, I could see why someone might argue the exact opposite, that LLMs (as opposed to VLMs or anything embodied in a robot, or even pure-text agents trained on how tools act in response to the tokens emitted) *only* have abstract "thought", in so far as it's all book-learned knowledge.