[roywiggins]

You could, I suppose, argue that the causal chains behind an LLM, are simply not the correct causal chains to produce reasoning, but that's a lot more complicated, mainly by the fact that we don't understand exactly what they are, and we don't understand the causal chains that produce human reasoning, so we can't confidently compare them other than on the largest of scales (LLMs are in silica, etc).

That, and it's not obvious why we should make this distinction. A cake that spontaneously assembles itself is still a cake, even if it doesn't have the usual causal history of a cake.

[TeMPOraL]

I don't want to make this distinction. I was just objecting to misusing the "colour of your bits" essay to try and support ideas that have absolutely nothing to do with what the essay is about.

Here, as you say, a cake is a cake, and an intelligence is an intelligence, regardless of how it came to be. We can revisit the relevance of causal history once we reach the point we can assemble organisms from from cells, and/or create cells out of dead matter - at which point the only difference between "born" and "made" will be the Colour of its cells.