Raphaël Millière has a very useful term for this kind of vacuous dismissal, the redescription fallacy (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.03910, page 9):

> Recent debates have been clouded by a misleading inference pattern, which we term the “Redescription Fallacy.” This fallacy arises when critics argue that a system cannot model a particular cognitive capacity, simply because its operations can be explained in less abstract and more deflationary terms. In the present context, the fallacy manifests in claims that LLMs could not possibly be good models of some cognitive capacity because their operations merely consist in a collection of statistical calculations, or linear algebra operations, or next-token predictions. Such arguments are only valid if accompanied by evidence demonstrating that a system, defined in these terms, is inherently incapable of implementing . To illustrate, consider the flawed logic in asserting that a piano could not possibly produce harmony because it can be described as a collection of hammers striking strings, or (more pointedly) that brain activity could not possibly implement cognition because it can be described as a collection of neural firings. The critical question is not whether the operations of an LLM can be simplistically described in non-mental terms, but whether these operations, when appropriately organized, can implement the same processes or algorithms as the mind, when described at an appropriate level of computational abstraction.