That's a very difficult question to answer. It's an open problem in academia.

To tease out something often it can be useful to approach problems from the opposite end. For example what is NOT the way in which human cognition works?

We know how LLM's function, humans certainly do not function in a similar fashion. For one I can reason well enough that next year is 2026 without having most all human literary output fed to me. It's amazing how much the human mind does with so little information.

> I’m curious what your mental model is for how human cognition works. Is it any less mechanical in your view?

human cognition is not constrained to pattern recognition and prediction of text and symbols.

Animal cognition is comprised of many intricate, quasi-redundant, deeply coupled systems that, among other things, can learn, form memories, interact with its environment, and grow. It is not remotely comparable to a computational neural network in any sense except that they both include "neural" in their jargon, albeit to mean vastly different things.

Human cognition comes bundled with subjective experience.

There is no mechanism known, even in principle, that explains the taste of strawberry.

We have no justifiable reasons to believe that our cognition is in any way similar to a bunch of matrix multiplications.