These are not mutually exclusive. If you have a Markov chain that 100% of the time outputs "A cat is an animal", then it has knowledge that a cat is an animal.
I think the important part is information, the matter of 'awareness' can simply be ignored as a philosophical/religious disagreement which will never be resolved. What's important is: Does the system contain information? Can it reliably convey that information? In which ways can it manipulate that information?
2. "Belief" isn't any less of a quagmire than "awareness." Materialists and dualists will never agree on whether machines can have 'belief' or 'awareness', so discussions between the two will always be fruitless.
You're asking questions and then declaring the answers impossible to determine, I don't really see the point. You don't really avoid the question of belief in the line of questioning you propose. It just gets implicitly shifted into the observer.
Personally I don't care about whether this paradigm will ever reconcile with that one, I care about which I think is most appropriate to a given problem space.
If you mean to say that I've asked whether machines can know or believe, you're wrong. I have not asked whether it's possible for machines to 'know' or 'believe'. What I have asserted, not asked, is these questions are a waste of your time, because the divide between materialists and duelists will never be bridged. The the root of the disagreement is an irreparable philosophical divide, essentially religious disagreement.
To reiterate for clarity, these are the questions which I said are relevant: "Does the system contain information? Can it reliably convey that information? In which ways can it manipulate that information?" I haven't declared these questions impossible to answer. On the contrary, these are questions for engineers, not philosophers or theologians. They are mundane, practical questions:
The system is a spreadsheet: Does it contain information? Yes, assuming it isn't blank. Even a fraudulent spreadsheet contains information, false as it my be. Can it convey that information? Yes, given appropriate spreadsheet software and a user who knows how to use it. Can it manipulate that information? Certainly, a spreadsheet can sort, sum, etc.
The system is an AI: Can it contain information? Yes, plenty of information is fed into them during training. Can it reliably convey that information? That depends on the degree of reliability you desire. Can it manipulate that information? Yes, numerous kinds of manipulations have been demonstrated. The reliability of information conveyance and the manner of manipulations which are possible are important questions for any engineer who is thinking about creating or employing such a system. The answers to these questions are not impossible to determine.
But can an AI "know" things? Pointless question, like asking if a submarine can "swim". Important questions about submarines include: How deep can it go? How fast can it go? How quiet is it? These are questions for which empirical answers can be determined. Whether a submarine can "swim" is a pointless question, all it does is interrogate how much anthropocentric baggage the word "swim" has. Maybe that's an interesting question to linguists, poets or philosophers, but it isn't an important question to engineers trying to solve a real problems.
I know swimming submarines are cliche so here's another: Can a seat-belt hug you? That's a stupid question for poets or linguists who want to interrogate the anthropocentric implications of the word 'hug'. Can a seat-belt restrain you? That's a useful question for automotive engineers who want to build a car.
$ yes "a cat is an animal"
What really happened here is that a human wrote down, "a cat is an animal," and then another human read it, understood it, and believed it. And so the knowledge moved from one human to another. `yes` was only a conduit for that information to travel through.
If something was a conduit for knowledge wouldn't it make sense that it would have at some point contained the knowledge? The knowledge is stored into it by one human and extracted by another human.
It's ability to produce text containing true statements isn't sufficient evidence to conclude that it has beliefs, and it's easy to find cases where it contradicts itself (eg, if you play around with the wording you can find a prompt where it tells you that solving the trolley problem is a matter of harming the fewest people but proposes a solution that harms the most people). I take that as an indication it's primarily regurgitating text and rearranging the prompt rather than applying knowledge (which, to be clear, is useful for a number of tasks).