Ummm, no one has ANY idea how our brains work at the level of consciousness. Full Stop.

Please lets all try to resist this temptation.

Physiology, neural dynamics, sensory input and response, all lead to levels of functionality that exist even in fruit flies. Of which we have practically 0 comprehensive knowledge.

Higher order processing, cognition, consciousness, and conscious thought processes all build on top of these fundamental biological processes and are far Far FAR from having any level of understanding currently, at all.

Human cognition has nothing in common with LLM operation. They are at best 10,000 monkeys typing from training sequences (that were originally generated by humans). There is a new emerging issue with so much content of the internet being LLM generated text, which becomes included into training data, that the risk of model collapse is increasing.

Its very easy to anthropomorphize what's coming out of a language model, it's our job as s/w engineers to try to understandably explain what's actually happening to the lay public. The LLM is not "understanding" anything.

Let's do our best to resist to urge to anthropomorphize these tools.