The two types of loops you equivocate are totally different; saying that a computer executing a program, and an animal living, are actually the same, is very silly indeed. Like, air currents have a "core loop" of blowing around a lot but no one says that they're intelligent or that they're like computer programs or humans.
You’ve ignored my main complaint. I said that you treat LLMs and humans at different levels of abstraction:
No; you are analogizing them but losing sense of their differences in the process. I am not abstracting LLMs. That is all they do. That is what they were designed to do and what they accomplish.
You are drawing a comparison between a process humans have that generates consciousness, and literally the entirety of an LLM's existence. There is nothing else to an LLM. Whereas if you say "well a human is basically just bouncing electro-chemical signals between neurons and moving muscles" people (like me) would rightly say you were missing the forest for the trees.
The "trees" for an LLM are their neural networks and word vectors. The forest is a word prediction algorithm. There is no higher level to what they do.