>Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking.

If one could write a quadrillion-line python script of nothing but if/elif/else statements nested 1 million blocks deep that seemingly parsed your questions and produced seemingly coherent, sensible, valid "chains of reasoning"... would that software be thinking?

And if you don't like the answer, how is the LLM fundamentally different from the software I describe?

>Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because

There is no evidence here. On the very remote possibility that LLMs are at some level doing what humans are doing, I would then feel really pathetic that humans are as non-sapient as the LLMs. The same way that there is a hole in your vision because of a defective retina, there is a hole in your cognition that blinds you to how cognition works. Because of this, you and all the other humans are stumbling around in the dark, trying to invent intelligence by accident, rather than just introspecting and writing it out from scratch. While our species might someday eventually brute force AGI, it would be many thousands of years before we get there.