Comment by tsukikage

What does “understand” mean?

Turing complete systems can be built out of matrix multiplications, out of attention, out of key/value lookups. The Chinese room is Turing complete. By claiming it cannot understand things because it is built out of components computing devices can be built out of, we are claiming no computer can because no computer can. This is a very bold claim indeed, and also we’re assuming the conclusion! The claim is no more convincing than “brains cannot understand things because they are made out of neurons”. The system may or may not have some particular properties, but we have to do more work than just gesturing at the components the system is made of when making claims about it; the alternative is, at best, a world where we prove too much and conclude that humans, too, are not conscious.

For starters, we need to pin down the terms under discussion enough that they don’t just mean whatever we need them to in the moment.