How do humans answer a question? I would argue, for many, the answer for most topics would be "I am repeating what I was taught/learned/read.
Even children aren't expected to just repeat verbatim what they were taught. When kids are being taught verbs, they're shown the pattern: "I run, you run, he runs; I eat, you eat, he eats." They're are told that there's a pattern, and it's that the "he/she/they" version has an "s" at the end. They now understand some of how verbs work in English, and can try to apply that pattern. But, even when it's spotting a pattern and applying the right rule, there's still an element of understanding involved. You have to recognize that this is a "verb" situation, and you should apply that bit about "add an 's' if it's he/she/it/they".
An LLM, by contrast, never learns any rules. Instead it ingests every single verb that has ever been recorded in English, and builds up a probability table for what comes next.
but most people are not taught WHY 2+2=4
Everybody is taught why 2+2=4. They normally use apples. They say if I have 2 apples and John has 2 apples, how many apples are there in total? It's not simply memorizing that when you see the token "2" followed by "+" then "2" then "=" that the next likely token is a "4".
If you watch little kids doing that kind of math, they do understand what's happening because they're often counting on their fingers. That signals that there's a level of understanding that's different from simply pattern matching.
Sure, there's a lot of pattern matching in the way human brains work too. But, fundamentally there's also at least some amount of "understanding". One example where humans do pattern matching is idioms. A lot of people just repeat the idiom without understanding what it really means. But, they do it in order to convey a message. They don't do it just because it sounds like it's the most likely thing that will be said next in the current conversation.