This is two different parts of the system.

> No you "know" what your name is and you retrieve that information.

The LLM has this (literally - most of it is a key value store). It outputs a probability for all possible next tokens.

> It's infinitely different to rolling a dice and picking a name based on what number comes up

The sampling algorithm running the LLM then does this part, and adds randomness to make it more "creative".

So if you want factual information then don't be so random you skip over the right answer.

I feel like I work in similar ways, if you ask my name there's a probability that I'll answer with the shorten version or the longer one pretty much randomly and there's no conscious effort about it.

While the LLMs do have hallucinations, basic stuff like this will never trigger any.

Where I feel the most differences are aren't in the token concept but rather on the deep reasoning (which we don't use as much in my opinion)

Sometimes I'm tempted to think that my brain is as fuzzy if not more than an LLM