> What these systems do, no more and no less, is to put together sequences of words, but without any coherent understanding of the world behind them, like forei

> What these systems do, no more and no less, is to put together sequences of words, but without any coherent understanding of the world behind them, like foreign language Scrabble players who use English words as point-scoring tools, without any clue about what that mean. And that is evidence for what exactly? That the Chinese room tought experiment is solved now, with the answer being "the mimicry is different than the real thing"? Who says that humans aren't just a spreadsheet for whatever they do? You can't "simply" away that. At some point you have to ask some qualitative questions about whether the spreadsheet might be sentient. Maybe it's not this one, but as we build more and more spreadsheets, the question will become more and more relevant.