When I read that analogy, I found it inept. Fire is a well defined physical process. Understanding / cognition is not necessarily physical and certainly not well defined.

>Understanding / cognition is not necessarily physical and certainly not well defined.

Whooha! If it's not physical what is it? How does something that's not physical interact with the universe and how does the universe interact with it? Where does the energy come from and go? Why would that process not be a physical process like any other?

I'd say understanding and cognition are at this point fully explainable mechanistically. (I am very excited to live in a time where I was able to change my mind on this!)

Where we haven't made any headway on is on the connection between that and subjective experience/qualia. I feel like much of the (in my mind) strange conclusions of the Chinese Room are about that and not really about "pure" cognition.

Simulated fire would burn down simulated building

That's debatable, but it is also irrelevant, as the key to the argument here is that computation is by definition an abstract and strictly syntactic construct - one that has no objective reality vis-a-vis the physical devices we use to simulate computation and call "computers" - while semantics or intentionality are essential to human intelligence. And no amount of syntax can somehow magically transmute into semantics.

Do you believe that there are things that are not physical? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And no, "science can't explain x hence metaphysical" is not a valid response.

But that acknowledgement would itself lend Searle's argument credence because much of the brain = computer thesis depends on a fundamental premise that both brains and digital computers realize computation under the same physical constraints; the "physical substrate" doesn't matter (and that there is necessarily nothing special about biophysical systems beyond computational or resource complexity) (the same thinking by the way, leads to arguments that an abacus and a computer are essentially "the same"—really at root these are all fallacies of unwarranted/extremist abstraction/reductionism)

The history of the brain computer equation idea is fascinating and incredibly shaky. Basically a couple of cyberneticists posed a brain = computer analogy back in the 50s with wildly little justification and everyone just ran with it anyway and very few people (Searle is one of those few) have actually challenged it.

Isn't that besides the point? The point is that something would actually burn down.