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Notes -
I'm not confused about anything, and I meant it all literally.
I did touch on the why, but I also made some strong arguments. I will lower the level this time, let me know if I should lower it further.
There's many classes of equivalence. Simulating somethings output does not require having the same parts. An LLM which acts like a human is not conscious merely because it produces human-like output. Even if you cannot measure any differences, there might still be differences. If I tell you that I have a computer function which takes in "2" and returns "4", you won't be able to tell me the exact code of the function from this information alone.
You assume that, because a word exists, it actually points to something in reality. But a culture which never came up with the concept of randomness in the first place would not have philosophers who struggled with determinism and indeterminism. You assume that either one or the other must be "true", and yet such a culture would not know either concept, and it wouldn't even bother them or hinder their ability to think about other things. Now, this culture might think that reality depends on the nature of "flobx" (a word I just made up which means nothing to us) and that there's no more important concept than this. But because we never came up with that word, we don't think "flobx must be true or false", we don't think about flobx at all. In short, I want you to imagine minds so differently than your own that you realize that all the tokens you use for thinking are arbitrary rather than pieces of an objective reality.
Have you read Nietzsche's Will to Power? He says that our belief in cause and effect is because of quirks of our language. "There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks": this is the upshot of all Descartes' argumentation. But that means positing as "true a priori" our belief in the concept of substancethat when there is thought there has to be something "that thinks" is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate- Along the lines followed by Descartes one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a very strong belief. If one reduces the proposition to "There is thinking, therefore there are thoughts," one has produced a mere tautology: and precisely that which is in question, the "reality of thought," is not touched upon-that is, in this form the "apparent reality" of thought cannot be denied. But what Descartes desired was that thought should have, not an apparent reality, but a reality in itself."
So the fruits of all Descartes philosophizing ended up being a small sentence which was actually riddled with errors. I believe that you're assuming no such errors exist in your original post because you haven't done much in the way of questioning the language with which you think.
Do you disagree with this quote from "A short history of decay" (1949)? "The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something—anything. (...) From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people’s business you are so uneasy about your own that you convert your “self” into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game..." It seems to me like each human being is compelled to make their own values survive memetically, but this is merely a form of self-replication, not an instinct for truth-seeking. An instinct for knowledge-seeking might exist, but that's more of an instinct for increasing ones power and reducing uncertaincy (predictive processing theory).
I do realize that it's ironic to accuse you of being deceived by your own instinct and your own implicit knowledge, while also warning against the dangers of destroying these illusions. But I think this is an argument in my favor - that there exists truths which we're better off not knowing.
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