I don't really understand the brain or AI enough to meaningfully discuss this, but I would wonder if there's some aspect of "intentionality" in the context of the Chinese Room where semantic search with embeddings still "doesn't count".
I struggle with the Chinese Room argument in general because he's effectively comparing a person in a room following instructions (not the room as a whole or the instructions filed in the room, but the person executing the instructions) to the human brain. But this seems like a crappy analogy because the better comparison would be that the person in the room is the electricity that connects neurons (instructions filed in cabinets). Clearly electricity also has no understanding of the things it facilitates. The processor AI runs on also has no understanding of its calculations. The intelligence is the structure by which these calculations are made, which could theoretically could be modeled on paper across trillions of file cabinets.
As a fun paper napkin exercise, if it took a human 1 second to execute the instructions of the equivalent of a neuron firing, a 5 second process of hearing, processing, and responding to a short sentence would take 135,000 years.
I struggle with the Chinese Room argument in general because he's effectively comparing a person in a room following instructions (not the room as a whole or the instructions filed in the room, but the person executing the instructions) to the human brain. But this seems like a crappy analogy because the better comparison would be that the person in the room is the electricity that connects neurons (instructions filed in cabinets). Clearly electricity also has no understanding of the things it facilitates. The processor AI runs on also has no understanding of its calculations. The intelligence is the structure by which these calculations are made, which could theoretically could be modeled on paper across trillions of file cabinets.
As a fun paper napkin exercise, if it took a human 1 second to execute the instructions of the equivalent of a neuron firing, a 5 second process of hearing, processing, and responding to a short sentence would take 135,000 years.