a lot of control theory goes into steam train locomotive, you don't say it explicitly but the way people typically make the same reference they evoke the image of a simple steady state steam engine, and insinuate that people compared brains to whatever was the novelty. I don't think that was ever the case, and comparing the brain with the intricate feedback systems, regulators and more general control theory facets of an actual steam train locomotive is a lot more apt than people make it out to be as if people were comparing it to a simple steam engine proper (i.e. not a locomotive).
also if you look at lifeforms with and without brains, and lifeforms that do or don't do locomotion, there is a clear correlation between mammals, birds, reptiles, spiders, insects, ... which have brains and are motile, versus plants, fungi, ... which don't have brains and aren't significantly motile.
the moment you need to move (not just grow in this or that direction) you need a lot of things: muscle control, inverse kinematics, interpretation of the environment, speedy reactions, routing, planning, memory, ...
I would argue that both are correct, because as McLuhen pointed out the things we build come to change the way we perceive the world.
"We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." -- Father John Culkin on McLuhan
That said, LLM's were modeled on the human brain so the entire idea that we shouldn't compare ourselves to them is daft. They are similar to use because that is exactly what they're designed to be.
Regardless of the degree to which the human mind works like an LLM, my reductionist tendency has always imagined that the human mind will be found to be built from simple enough principles (but at scale, of course). In that regard, LLM as model for the human brain (or at least one aspect of it) is attractive to me. I admit it.
It's interesting that it's easier to construct the argument† that a mind like an LLM would have an easier time capturing mind as steam engine than a mind like a steam engine would have capturing mind as LLM.
†: come up with each token after the other that induces a graspable interpretation of a sequence of tokens representing a potential judgement
There's something really interesting here with Goguen Institutions. Also sometimes an argument just "clicks" into place fully-formed, rather than being generated token-by-token? Is that "knowing like a steam engine?"
100 years ago, horror stories featured wizard-like scientists using electricity to perform magic. A few decades after that, it was nuclear fission. Then quantum mechanics decades after that.
also if you look at lifeforms with and without brains, and lifeforms that do or don't do locomotion, there is a clear correlation between mammals, birds, reptiles, spiders, insects, ... which have brains and are motile, versus plants, fungi, ... which don't have brains and aren't significantly motile.
the moment you need to move (not just grow in this or that direction) you need a lot of things: muscle control, inverse kinematics, interpretation of the environment, speedy reactions, routing, planning, memory, ...