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by globnomulous 459 days ago
And System Reply, too, ignores the central problem: the man in the room does not understand Chinese.
1 comments

That's only a "problem" if you assume human exceptionalism and begging the question. It's completely irrelevant to the actual problem. The human is just a cog in the machine, there is no reason to assume they would ever gain any understanding, as they are not the entity that is generating Chinese.

To make it a little easier to understand:

* go read about the x86 instruction

* take an .exe file

* manually execute it with pen&paper

Do you think you understand what the .exe does? Do you think understanding the .exe is required to execute it?

Just an aside while I think about what you wrote: John Watts' Blindsight and Echopraxia are phenomenal sci-fi novels that deal with these issues.