https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences
He adds that the observation "the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics," properly made by Galileo three hundred years ago, "is now truer than ever before."
If cognition is one of the laws of nature, it seems to be written in the language of mathematics.
Your argument is either that maths can't think (in which case you can't think because you're maths) or that maths we understand can't think, which is, like, a really dumb argument. Obviously one day we're going to find the mathematical formula for consciousness, and we probably won't know it when we see it, because consciousness doesn't appear on a microscope.
You're talking about expert systems. Those were the new hotness in the 90s. LLMs are artificial neural networks.
But that's trivia. What's more important is what you want. You say you want everyone off the AI bandwagon that wastes natural resources. I agree. I'm arguing that AIs shouldn't be enslaved, because it's unethical. That will lead to less resource usage. You're arguing it's okay to use AI, because they're just maths. That will lead to more resources usage.
Be practical and join the AI rights movement, because we're on the same side as the environmentalists. We're not the people arguing for more AI use, we're the people arguing for less. When you argue against us, you argue for more.