The point isn't to capture what it's like to be a biological organism, but rather the necessary functional/computational dynamic for sentience. It's plausible t

The point isn't to capture what it's like to be a biological organism, but rather the necessary functional/computational dynamic for sentience. It's plausible that sentience is a class of phenomena, of which biological sentience is but one. An LLM processes tokens represented as vectors embedded in a meaning-space, which is then transformed according to various semantic attributes. This is analogous to how organismal cognition operates on the semantic properties carried by its various sensory states. If cognition represents a kind of functional/computational dynamic over semantic states then learning the dynamic necessary to produce the kinds of texts cognitive systems produce may recover the necessary dynamic for cognition. It certainly won't be equivalent to a biological organism's cognition for the reasons you mention, but the space of cognitive entities may be much broader.