If we knew just what thinking is, there would be less nonsensical debate about AI, and less nonsense produced by the latest kind of AI.However, with the production of publicly available LLM AI's working as what is, essentially for most people, random oracles; we have less and less chance of finding out what thinking is. We have more and more chance of computers doing less and less useful work, consuming ever greater quantities of energy and, making thinking about thinking harder then ever.
This is because all an LLM does is auto-complete and elicit more input. For some reason, this makes some people think that, they are the most transformational of all technologies. I disagree, so does anyone who hits an auto-complete "sweet spot" when they are typing an essay on a modern word processor, one that is designed to hint as to the spelling of new input. At one stage I had the experience of myself deciding what words to use and the word processor deciding the spelling, as I typed. It did not last long, about a minute or so. I did not think that it would change the world.
What has this to do with my title and my rabid opening paragraph? Until the 20th cent. and the discovery of a unified aerodynamics and hydrodynamics; people were in the position of , not just ignorance about, but impossibility of explaining, why the phenomena of my title were just examples of the, then known, physics of traction and displacement.
In the 20th century what was then a harmless eccentricity, grew up around computers.They were brains. They were thinking when they solved problems. They had wills of their own. Most people of the 21st century, who have lost a phone down the sewer, and who have spent some time learning how to programme a computer and, have seen just how crude an AI is ,internally, would not agree. As we get closer and closer to the facts behind this factotum; I believe it is called "the Pathetic Fallacy" in works on the philosophy of science, now impedes us, in understanding what thought really is, when "what brains do" is now no longer good enough.