For that to be reductive there had to be something to reduce. What would that be, without resorting to tautology?
The simpler issue is that "mimic" doesn't apply to LLMs in the domain of biology. That would be like saying a digital recording of a bird's flight mimics the bird.
Whether or not the plumage on the bird is red (in both life and the video) is an entirely different question.
There 100% must be reductive approaches to consciousness because consciousness lives on a gradient.
If your definition of consciousness exists on as a point like an electron, something that only exists as a whole, then you've already flunked out of the study of consciousness. It is wildly complex. Has a great number of pieces. Manifests itself in different ways in different animals. You have to explain what consciousness is in that framework, and not from your own subjective experiences.
I don’t think you know what reduction means here and you don’t actually engage with what I write here and on other posts so I don’t care to explain.
So again: please, without resorting to tautology from which anything could be implied, define what consciousness is to you in a way you don't consider reductive, so we can clearly see what there would be to reduce at all.
‘Reductive’ means the assumption that all phenomena reduce to what represent them in an external model or linguistic description.
Science, language, and reason are fundamentally reductive. So in practice the reductive assumption is just denying that things have an existence which is not identical to our models of them. And since these are the respected modes of thought most people are unaware that they are committing to a non-trivial reductive assumption when reasoning about consciousness.