The argument doesn’t have to go that far. I think most people have the intuitive, ha, understanding that “understanding” is grounded in some kind of conscious certainty that words have meanings, associations, and even valences like pleasantness or unpleasantness. One of the cruxes of the Chinese Room is that this grounding has physical causes (as all biological phenomena do) rather than computational, purely abstract causes.
There has to be a special motivation to instead cast understanding as “competent use of a given word or concept,” (judged by whom btw?). The practical upshot here is that without this grounding, we keep seeing AI, even advanced AI make trivial mistakes and requires the human to give an account of value (good/bad, pleasant/unpleasant) because these programs obviously don’t have conscious feelings of goodness and badness. Nobody had to teach me that delicious things include Oreos and not cardboard.
There has to be a special motivation to instead cast understanding as “competent use of a given word or concept,” (judged by whom btw?). The practical upshot here is that without this grounding, we keep seeing AI, even advanced AI make trivial mistakes and requires the human to give an account of value (good/bad, pleasant/unpleasant) because these programs obviously don’t have conscious feelings of goodness and badness. Nobody had to teach me that delicious things include Oreos and not cardboard.