Ah, now we are making some progress on where the confusion lies (not that saying "you're confused" without justification was ever much of an argument.) The fir

Ah, now we are making some progress on where the confusion lies (not that saying "you're confused" without justification was ever much of an argument.) The first thing to note is that it is not necessary to dispute the notion that semantics come from a conscious observer in order to demonstrate that Searle's argument fails, as that argument is precisely about whether that conscious observer could be an entity deriving its consciousness from a digital computation. As things stand, the only thing saving you from formally begging the question is that you have still not presented a specific argument against my objection[1] to Searle's response to the simulation reply; you still seem to be trying to insinuate that it fails without being specific. Maybe you also mistakenly think that what I am saying in this thread is supposed to be an argument for computationalism? It is just an argument that Searle failed to make his case against computationalism on account of (among other things) an unsuccessful response to the simulation reply. (I suspect that computationalism is essentially correct, but I do not claim to know that it is.) [1] It's not just my objection; Dennett, the Churchlands, even Putnam and David "hard problem" Chalmers have raised similar objections.