I am baffled that people have to continue making this argument over and over and over. Your rationale makes total sense to me, but the debate rages on whether or not LLMs are more than just words.

Articles like this only seem to confirm that any reasoning is an illusion based on probabilistic text generation. Humans are not carefully writing out all the words of this implicit reasoning, so the machine cant appear to mimic them.

What am I missing that makes this debatable at all?