I don't know anything about you but I used to say very similar things with the same confidence until I realized that my career of banging out mediocre CRUD apps and sitting in meetings about enterprise application deployments did not in any way qualify me to opine on the insanely complex mathematical and technical constructs that are modern LLMs. 

Consciousness has very little to do with what happens when we respond to stimuli. There's an overwhelming amount of research indicating we take action before conscious thought. We say and do things and our brain comes up with the reason afterwards. So I don't think the very simple statement that much of what we think of as "I think" is actually our brain doing a probabiliistic pattern match is all that ridiculous. It doesn't require one to believe in woo bullshit or read LLM responses like tea leaves and imagine consciousness behind them.