My thinking is that we humans have some ability to do things by rote until we have a good statistical understanding, at which point we use the statistical understanding mostly, and fall back to rote where we have to be careful. But, mostly, we're stats machines too.
By contrast, GPT-3 only has a knowledge of text. To the extent you could say that it thinks, it thinks in terms of textual symbols that it has seen before - that is its world.
It is theoretically possible that if we found a way to encode experiences of the world of the world in a dataset and used the same training mechanisms and models that we used for GPT-3, we would get an AI with a decent model of the world. But it is magical thinking to imagine that we can get there by training a model on raw text.
No, GPT-3 has no "understanding" whatsoever - we at least have a conscious engagement with the topics you cite and a genuine understanding that we lack a directly relatable perspective.
Our understanding in many circumstances - like those you mention, may be severely constrained, but it exists as part of a sentience that there is no reason to believe GPT-3 or any other current AI tool - possesses.