It's a poor adaptation of the line in the original story (https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...)

The original:

>That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat.

I think it was adapted by an LLM which didn't quite get the meaning.

I noticed that jump too, but I also don’t think the interlocutor is supposed to be 100% logical and rational. The aliens in the original weren’t either.