You misunderstand. The outcome of asking an LLM to think about an apple is the token 'Okay'. It probably doesn't get very far into even what you claim is 'thought' about apples, because when someone says the phrase "Think about X", the immediate response is almost always 'Okay' and never anything about whatever 'X' is. That is the sum total of its objective. It does not perform a facsimile of human thought; it performs an analysis of what the most likely next token would be, given what text existed before it. It imitates human output without any of the behavior or thought processes that lead up to that output in humans. There is no model of how the world works. There is no theory of mind. There is only how words are related to each other with no 'understanding'. It's very good at outputting reasonable text, and even drawing inferences based on word relations, but anthropomorphizing LLMs is a path that leads to exactly the sort of conclusion that the original comic is mocking.

Asking an LLM if it is alive does not cause the LLM to ponder the possibility of whether or not it is alive. It causes the LLM to output the response most similar to its training data, and nothing more. It is incapable of pondering its own existence, because that isn't how it works.

Yes, our brains are actually an immensely complex neural network, but beyond that the structure is so ridiculously different that it's closer to comparing apples to the concept of justice than comparing apples to oranges.

In fact, since we do know the basic fundamentals of how brains work, it would seem that’s exactly what’s happening.

I encourage you to try to find and cite any reputable neuroscientist that believes we can even quantify what thought is, much less believes both A) we ‘know the basic fundamentals of how brains work’ and B) it’s just like an LLM.

Your argument isn’t a line of reasoning invented by neuroscientists, it’s one invented by people who need to sell more AI processors. I know which group I think has a better handle on the brain.

Citation needed.