“The cogitation is happening in YOU” is just the philosophical zombie argument dressed up as a gotcha. Sure, there’s no ghost in the machine - but that’s true of your neurons too. Your brain is also “just” electrochemical signals on wet hardware. Does that mean your understanding is happening somewhere else?

The point isn’t whether there’s a homunculus sitting inside the GPU having feelings. The point is that the functional operations happening - maintaining context, resolving ambiguity, applying something structurally similar to inference across novel inputs - are more than pattern-matching in the (dismissive sense) people mean when they say “autocomplete.”