Beautiful article. One thing to note though is that humans are often trained in exactly one language (with additional ones, if any, mostly acquired later). This might be relevant for the decoupling between meaning and language- if meaning is expressed in a single language, the two could end up more strongly coupled than in an LLM that has been trained across tens of languages at the same time and was under a stronger pressure to abstract its representations.

If that were the case, it's funny that the argument "it's just a language processor manipulating words" might apply more strongly to humans than to LLMs.