> It wasn't very long ago that scientists were certain that animals did not posses thoughts or feelings. Any behaviour which appeared to resemble thinking or feeling was simply unconscious autonomic responses, with no more thought behind them than a sunflower turning towards the sun. Animals, by definition, lack Immortal Souls and Free Will, and therefore they are empty inside. Biological automata.
It's cool that you can decide to take half-remembered incorrect anecdotes about what "scientists" are certain of at some indeterminate time in the past, sans citation, and use that to underpin your argument about a totally different thing.
> Of course this dogma was unfalsifiable...
...like your post's anecdata.
> Look, either cognition is magic, or it's math.
Yes, when you decide to draw a convoluted imaginary bounding box around the argument, anything can be whatever you want it to be.
LLMs have no mind and no intention. They are programmed to mimic human language. Read some Grice and learn exactly how dependent humans are on the cooperative principle, and exactly how vulnerable we are to seeing intent where none exists in LLM communication that mimics the outputs our inputs expect to receive.
Your cries of "dogma dogma dogma" are unpersuasive and lack grounding in practical reality.