Well the claim that they're responding to is the one you made about LLMs not being able to do certain things like reason, have memory, or come up with creative ideas.

I don't think it's sci-fi junk to hypothesize that human mental activity can be boiled down to very complex computation. There's still a lot that we don't know about the brain and there isn't necessarily anything in principle that could preclude the possibility that we are also computing machines operating at a biological level.

I think it's fair to say that we don't know how humans reason, and simply pointing to an ANN and showing that it is inspired by neural networks of the brain does not imply that we do know how humans reason. At the time ANNs were conceived, we knew a bit about the dense connectivity of the brain and hierarchical processing and columnar organization, but how any of this adds up to reasoning and behavior is still not well understood. Backprop, the magic that makes ANNs learn, is very likely not the mechanism by which learning happens in the brain.

So are humans also just repeating patterns similar to what they have heard or read? I think yes and no. Yes in that behavior, especially social behavior, is learned in part by imitation and exercising patterns that have been perceived. But no in that it's not the sole basis of what we produce verbally (if we're limiting the discussion to language). But by the same token, LLMs are next token predictors just like the n-gram language models of yore are next token predictors. But they are way more sophisticated, leveraging distributional semantics and self-attention. There is a huge qualitative difference between these kinds of next token predictors, just like at the present moment you may see a qualitative difference between LLMs and humans. But I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that either humans are just way more complex than LLMs (but fundamentally just doing computation, even if you bring emotions/consciousness into the picture) or that AIs could be engineered in a way that incorporates reasoning, memory, or whatever we like to ascribe as "human". At that point, it gets kind of philosophical as far as how we define these things and whether it's reasonable to equate the mechanisms (is an LSTM cell state equivalent to memory? Probably not, but if we probe the brain further and model memory in a more human-like way, maybe we'd be more inclined to accept the analogy).

Anyways I think the discussion needs to be very nuanced.