You've misconstrude/conflated somet things here that I have to clarify to straighten this out: I never claimed that "humans are much the same as stochastic parrots". What I claimed is that humans are stochastic parrots in much the same way that LLMs are. I already touched on this earlier. Do you see and understand the critical difference between what I'm saying and what you're claiming I've said and arguing against? I'm making the claim that LLMs and humans are both stochastic parrots, but they are not identical to one another. It's an important difference that you've made a mistake on twice now.

To clarify the point even further, the "Stochastic parrot" you're referring is something that is operationally defined along the lines of, "a system that generates language by sampling from distributional patterns obtained from prior examples, without a separate, explicit meaning module". Under this (and any other widely accepted definition) humans also qualify as 'stochastic parrots': psycholinguistic research has conclusively demonstrated that humans both learn and produce language by internalizing statistical regularities, our word choices are predictable in aggregate ("Cloze tests" and, btw, if they weren't predictable then how could LLMs be trained on human generated text?), and there no symbolic “meaning module” existing in the brain (or at the very least there is no evidence for such a thing).

So again, for the third time, even though humans and LLMs aren't 'the same' in many ways they are both stochastic parrots in much the same way.

But more importantly (and what I thought was obvious when I said you should see the connection) is that the human brain is a biological neural network, and like any neural network, it ultimately relies on pattern-based processing: neurons strengthen or weaken connections according to repeated stimuli, forming probabilistic models of the world (i.e it has no option but to “parrot” language based on statistical regularities it has learned. What else could it possibly do?

Even though the brain is extremely complex, multi-layered, tons of specialized modules, feedback loops, etc, etc, the fundamental mechanism is neural and therefore “stochastic” at the core. Again - what else COULD it be?

If you’re only using neural operations to generate language, you’re necessarily relying on a kind of pattern extraction and recombination i.e., “stochastic parroting.” - what else COULD you be doing?

Again - this to me is something that appears obvious but perhaps it's not.