"Thought" would indicate it knows what the words mean - I highly doubt it, even with the massive size of the network. It just knows which word is coming next, given the previous one.
We have strong reason to suspect that GPT-3 has at least some model of what words mean, from experiments people have done where they asked it to use words in novel contexts and ascribe properties to them, which GPT-3 is surprisingly good at.
That's body/mind dualism, which went out of fashion with Freud.
Your brain also just "creates the illusion" of understanding. It's slightly better it to the outside world, and a lot better to itself. But it's really just a matter of degree.
