Searching this thread for the string "just because it only uses some basic math, it cannot be sentient/conscious/intelligent" I can only find it in your comment. That's your interpretation of what the OP said, not what they said, is that correct?

I think you should not try to interpret in that way and only stick to what the other person has said, otherwise we will all lose the thread of the conversation.

In any case, nobody here has said anything about brains having, or not having, to do something with matrix multiplication, except for your comment, so I still don't understand what you are saying.

Are you saying that the OP's brain is doing "something that couldn't be done with "matrix multiplications", or are you saying it isn't doing something like that?

Maybe we don't know it in the limit, but we've had langauge models for a very long time and nobody ever said anything about, say, n-gram models, or Hidden Markov Models, being "intelligent" or "conscious". Even the people who first proposed the idea of language modelling (precisely as an alternative to trying to model meaning, which we have no idea how to do) didn't propose them as models of intelligence, or sentience, or anything like that; just models of "language", which really means text, and even more precisely "text corpora". Sorry that I don't have a reference for that, other than my private conversations with my tutors when I was studying for my Master's (data science with a heavy dose of neural nets and NLP).

In any case, at some point one has to observe that the people who are leaning most heavily on agnosticism (the fact that we don't know what intelligence is) are the ones who say that we can't say whether those LLMs are intelligent or not because we don't know what intelligence is. In other words, agnostitism itself is used as evidence: we can't define intelligence, the thinking goes, therefore LLMs may be intelligent. There is no other evidence of any sort that LLMs may be intelligent (or any number of synonyms).

Note that this is exactly Russel's Teapot:

Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot