I could describe the electrical and chemical signals within your neurons and synapses as proof that you are merely a series of electrochemical reactions, and can only mimic genuine thought.
It wasn't very long ago that scientists were certain that animals did not posses thoughts or feelings. Any behaviour which appeared to resemble thinking or feeling was simply unconscious autonomic responses, with no more thought behind them than a sunflower turning towards the sun. Animals, by definition, lack Immortal Souls and Free Will, and therefore they are empty inside. Biological automata.
Of course this dogma was unfalsifiable, because any apparent evidence of animal cognition could be refuted as simply not being cognition, by definition.
Look, either cognition is magic, or it's math. There really isn't a middle ground. If you want to believe that wetware is fundamentally irreducible to math, then you believe it's magic. If that's want you want to believe, then fine. But it's dogma, and maintaining that dogma will require increasingly willful acts of blindness.
All I'm saying is that the argument that "It's not consciousness, it's just <insert any tangentially mathematical claim here>", is dogma. Given everything that we don't know, agnosticism is the appropriate response.
It's cool that you can decide to take half-remembered incorrect anecdotes about what "scientists" are certain of at some indeterminate time in the past, sans citation, and use that to underpin your argument about a totally different thing.
> Of course this dogma was unfalsifiable...
...like your post's anecdata.
> Look, either cognition is magic, or it's math.
Yes, when you decide to draw a convoluted imaginary bounding box around the argument, anything can be whatever you want it to be.
LLMs have no mind and no intention. They are programmed to mimic human language. Read some Grice and learn exactly how dependent humans are on the cooperative principle, and exactly how vulnerable we are to seeing intent where none exists in LLM communication that mimics the outputs our inputs expect to receive.
Your cries of "dogma dogma dogma" are unpersuasive and lack grounding in practical reality.