Not necessarily. I'm describing the current situation, as I understand it. There's nothing stopping a future system from having the same abilities as a human to

Not necessarily. I'm describing the current situation, as I understand it. There's nothing stopping a future system from having the same abilities as a human to decode meaning from words, or to do anything else. But I for one would like to know exactly how such a system would work, and why it would have the capabilities it would have. I don't think that's a particularly high bar to clear, for technology and science. The whole point of both is to figure out how things work, and how to make them work like we want.