Comment by IanCal

I'd be fine if Searle just very simply said "we have a non-material soul and that's why we understand. Anything doing the exact same job but without a soul isn't understanding because understanding is limited entirely to things with souls in my definition".

> A bunch of valves, like an LLM, could mostly successfully mimic human responses,

The argument is not "mostly successfully", it's identically responding. The entire point of the chinese room is that from the outside the two things are impossible to distinguish between.