[genman]

Perhaps the question was not fully understood. A function is simply a mapping from one state into another. In principle we can define it over what ever state. As such we can consider a human thinking as kind of a function.

ANN are function effectively approximators.

The question was - if an ANN would very closely approximate the "human thinking" function then can we still say that it is not thinking?

[daveguy]

In order to train an ANN to approximate the "human thinking" function, we would have to know that function well enough to give it examples and counterexamples. Currently we are only training LLMs to approximate the "human blabbing" function.

[genman]

Imagine a human brain that has only read all what ANN has without any connection to the real world (no senses, mind you!). Would the output of this human being differ from "human blabbing"?