Language models like GPT are fundamentally brute-force approaches to thought: they train on the entire internet of human thinking and when given sufficient data and scaling, the approximation becomes indistinguishable from actual reasoning in many circumstances, achieving effects no individual human could produce (rapid sifting of massive texts), but the limitation is that they're mimicking patterns rather than understanding, and they lack the real-time world coupling, embodied grounding, and self-organization that make consciousness necessary.