> We know so far that human cognition and sense of self is still largely a mystery and no evidence exists to show that it's just mechanical remixing of absorbed things

I'm not saying that ChatGPT is comparable in either capability or design to a human's cognition. What I am saying is that a human brain is just input,process and output. There's no reason a model of sufficient size can't emulate human thought in such a way that there's not much difference in capability (even if the mechanics differ).

I also think you're overstating the uniqueness of "novel" suggestions from humans and that "novel" ideas are some kind of high-water mark of intelligence rather than a fuzzy mechanism with induced feedback.

I can think of a novel idea by randomly mixing concepts I know. What matters is if this idea is good, and that test is done via interacting with the world. This mechanism can be implemented in an LLM now.