The problem with this analogy is that we know what birds are and what they're constituted by. But we don't know what thinking is or what it is constituted by. I

The problem with this analogy is that we know what birds are and what they're constituted by. But we don't know what thinking is or what it is constituted by. If we wanted to learn about birds by examining airplanes, we would be barking up the wrong tree. On the other hand, if we wanted to learn about flight, we might reasonably look at airplanes and birds, then determine what the commonality is between their mechanisms of defying gravity. It would be a mistake to say "planes aren't flapping their wings, therefore they aren't flying". But that's exactly what people do when they dismiss LLMs being presently or in the future capable of thinking because they are made up of statistics, matrix multiplication, etc.