The core to this plausibility rests on this postulate: that there is a meaningful sense in which "intelligence" is a function of the correlation of events, full

The core to this plausibility rests on this postulate: that there is a meaningful sense in which "intelligence" is a function of the correlation of events, full stop. A quote from Carl Sagan always comes to mind, which was memorably quoted in the _Glorious Dawn_ lofi track: "But the brain does much more than just recollect it inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes, it generates abstractions. The simplest thought like the concept of the number one has an elaborate logical underpinning. The brain has its own language for testing the structure and consistency of the world." He was not a cognitive scientist but as someone who got a degree in that, this is an elegant and accurate assertion. ML and LLM are systems whose architecture and behavior are derived from (however loosely and with whatever crutches today) inspection and theorizing about the way our own brains their work. As others have said, the inverse question is probably stronger—what might be missing from a general purpose and very large neural network, that makes what we do intelligent but them not? Personally I believe that questions and criticism of this bent will diminish remarkably quickly as large LLM become truly, richly, multimodal—i.e. become engines which correlate inputs beyond linguistic tokens. To answer my own question what is very obviously missing today in LLM as most experience them is agency, recurrence, and memory functions particularly the integration and consolidation of "short term" state/experience into long-term memory. Agency in an embodied sense will make models "correlate" primary and primal aspects of our own experience that will lead them to not just seem more like us but be more like us and more capable of reasoning in ways we recognize as like our own. There may well be emergent properties of recurrent networks and spiking neural networks which prove to add some sekret special sauce or from which higher-order properties of cognition (or "mind") emerge. My money is yes to the former and ehhhhh doubtful to the latter. But we're gonna find out.