Just because you partially understand something like the ancient farmer partially understands plants by knowing to plant seeds, that doesn't mean you fully understand it and can thus reproduce all the properties of it synthetically like you are trying to reproduce a brain synthetically from scratch inside a computer with LLMs.

You can reproduce part of it, the intelligence, but consciousness and intelligence are not necessarily the same thing. This is why I compare it to cargo-culting. The Melanesian tribesmen thinks the coconut looks like a microphone, and he can use it as a paperweight just like a microphone and that's useful, but it is not actually a microphone.

Nobody is claiming we can recreate it fully.

The crux of the matter seems to be that you think it isn’t worth our effort researching just because it isn’t identical.

But that isn’t how research and discovery happens.