Is there any evidence that you yourself are more than a 'next action predictor with a multi-modal context window'?

I don't think the nature of 'predicting the next token' is the problem. One could argue that any organism works the same way. The problem is that we've had million years of evolution to stabilize the platform such that the important parts of it work without that many hallucinations -- and even then that sometimes fails and you get failure modes like e.g. schizophrenia, where the context window gets confusing and the 'next actions' don't make that much sense anymore, seen from the outside.

An LLM never experienced evolutionary pressure the same way. There's no fundamental difference between how it was incentivized to answer correctly when asked about how many Rs there are in strawberry vs whether it is safe to leave a house through the second story window, even though for any physical organism, those two would be _very_ differently weighted during training.