Actually, I take that back. >A program ... knows where to put the symbols and how to move them around, but it doesn't know what they stand for or what they mea

Actually, I take that back. >A program ... knows where to put the symbols and how to move them around, but it doesn't know what they stand for or what they mean. At a certain level of complexity, it must "know what they stand for or what they mean" in its encoding of how to move them around in order to move them around correctly. Axiom failed. This sounds like it might be a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake Edit, references to refutations of Chinese Room argument: Hofstadter, D., 1981, ‘Reflections on Searle’, in Hofstadter and Dennett (eds.), The Mind's I, New York: Basic Books, pp. 373–382. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#ReplChinRoomArgu https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#ReplChinRoo... "Margaret Boden (1988) raises levels considerations. “Computational psychology does not credit the brain with seeing bean-sprouts or understanding English: intentional states such as these are properties of people, not of brains” (244). “In short, Searle’s description of the robot’s pseudo-brain (that is, of Searle-in-the-robot) as understanding English involves a category-mistake comparable to treating the brain as the bearer, as opposed to the causal basis, of intelligence”. Boden (1988) points out that the room operator is a conscious agent, while the CPU in a computer is not – the Chinese Room scenario asks us to take the perspective of the implementer, and not surprisingly fails to see the larger picture."