I think this is my main point- isn't it amazing that a thing that predicts words other humans have previously written manages to appear intelligent, or, more pointedly, have utility in communicating real thoughts and ideas?

If you've ever asked an LLM a question and gotten a satisfying answer, that means that there is some human-level intelligence somewhere in the token filtering / recombinating that an LLM does.

Specifically I think the test of human-like intelligence is literally the output- If we get utility from the arrangements of the tokens it outputs, that in and of itself demonstrates that some portion of human intelligence could be this same token generation mechanic.