That's because we're missing an abstraction, salience. LLMs and biological minds alike have salience functions that both use complex and seemingly inscrutable means to answer the question "why am i paying attention to this right now?" And those salience functions are tuned the same way, the way the Greeks worked out thousands of years ago and called logos, reason.
When you think about it that way, you can bridge the two types of cognition more usefully. The how of intelligence, what attention consists of, can remain completely different, while the why can feel so universal that humans can easily forget they're talking to a machine.
When you think about it that way, you can bridge the two types of cognition more usefully. The how of intelligence, what attention consists of, can remain completely different, while the why can feel so universal that humans can easily forget they're talking to a machine.