[Borealid]

Okay, understood. You are making a variant of the Chinese Room argument in which you allow some types of computer programs (but not others) to have reason/sentience. I'm not entirely sure what specific lines you're drawing between the programs (what makes a deterministic transformer with sampling temperature zero "not a recording" but a hash table "a recording"?) but that's not super important.

There is nothing wrong about having that philosophy, and I respect it, but personally I think if it's impossible to tell two things apart using any external observation there is not a meaningful difference between those two things. "Smells like a rose" and all that.