Yes, I'm diving a bit too deeply because I don't really know what "thinking" is and therefore I don't understand how we can so confidently say that LLMs don't think, even though they definitely LOOK like they're thinking. They even have a "Thinking" section in their responses! If I say that a rock doesn't think, it's pretty convincing: does a rock look like it's thinking? No — it doesn't even do anything! But an LLM does look like it's thinking, at least while generating a response. When it's "offline" it's just a bunch of "dead" bytes, sure.

So when it's not active, not responding to a prompt, it's of course not thinking. I'm pretty sure nobody actually questions this. Is your computer "thinking" when it's powered off? Can a piece of metal think? Probably not. So there are no thoughts between prompts, this seems obvious.

Thus, this is a question of "discrete time vs continuous time". LLMs "live" from prompt to prompt. Humans are alive continuously. In some sense, we're prompted by a lot of things all the time. As I'm writing this, I'm seeing stuff, I'm hearing stuff, I can feel various parts of my body, I'm thinking about my problems, my goals, other people's problems and goals, etc. When I'm in a sensory deprivation tank, my brain keeps "entertaining" me by "self-prompting", like a recurrent neural network (I guess it literally is a massive RNN).

So it seems like your definition of "thinking" hinges upon the LLMs being discrete-time and single-threaded (can't think about multiple things in parallel).

IMO a more interesting question is whether an LLM is thinking WHILE IT'S GENERATING A RESPONSE, while it's "alive".

I want to say I really appreciate that you are putting a lot of thought into this, you certainly have interesting concepts here. However I think it seems a bit far off from the discussion I'm trying to have, and I do not have the bandwidth to fully understand and charitably respond to your points.

We don't know what thinking is but pattern matching is definitely a big part of it. That's why people see Jesus on a piece of burnt toast.