Their areas of expertise and research are not areas that offer insight into mechanisms of cognition, they are not a neurobiologist or a computer scientist involved in machine learning. Their high standing in related areas is being used to give credence to an argument that is no better than a gut feeling.

You also have no ideas what conflicts of interest exist here, there may be none or the professor could be heavily invested in LLM companies.

LLMs dont think and the "trains of thought" is just strapping a bunch of LLMs together to try and tidy up and correct if one of the models in the chain outputs nonsense which they are wont to do. They are useful tools, they don't spontaneously generate output or request input. It's a very complicated auto complete that is capable of generating plausible valid output (when considered by humans) to a given natural language input.