The Chinese Room gag asserts that, although the room behaves in every way like it is an intelligent Chinese speaker, we can see inside the room and determine th

The Chinese Room gag asserts that, although the room behaves in every way like it is an intelligent Chinese speaker, we can see inside the room and determine that there is nothing there that intelligently understands Chinese. Searle seems to see a distinction between the "substrates" (which means an LLM cannot be intelligent; it's running on regular computer hardware and there's nothing to be found which "understands"), but unless someone can point out exactly what part of the substrate is intelligent, I am going to continue to suggest that his substrate difference is exactly identical to having a soul or not having a soul. I, as a materialist, assert that, if you dug through my noggin down to the level of subatomic particles you will never find anything that is intelligent or which understands. (Quantum mechanics does not help here, by the way. It just replaces a (rather naive) determinism with randomness---see Bell's Inequality.) There is no magic going on there. You and your tree are both doing nothing but chemistry and physics (you share something like 50% of your genes, by the way). And that means that a computer could, in principle, behave as intelligently as I do. That's "substrate independence". Now, whether a given system does do so or not is another question entirely. :-)