There is a philosophical understanding of what we mean by the word 'flying' though. It's still a little bit obtuse of an argument, since flying and thinking are quite different conceptual categories (maybe birds would argue different), but the point that we should not limit our definition of thinking (and knowing, believing, etc) to exactly how human's do it is spot on since i) many humans' thinking can't really be explained either and ii) I've met many humans whose output was purely a result of fine-tuning a base statistical phenotype on temporally adjacent stimuli.