> Do not confuse the mathematical description of physical processes as the world being made of math.

Again, this doesn't apply to information. A simulation of a computation really is equivalent to that computation.

> One is simple math that runs on electrified sand, and one is an unknown process that developed independently across a billion years.

Right, so you admit that it's an unknown process, which means you literally cannot conclude that it is different to what LLMs are doing.

> There are a billion trivial proofs that make the rounds as memes, like one R in strawberry, or being unable to count, etc.

No, none of these are definitive proofs that they are not thinking. LLM "perceptions" are tokens, the strawberry question is basically asking it to figure out something that's below it's perceptual range. This has literally nothing to do with whether the way it processes information is or is not thinking.

I am arguing against Searle's Chinese Room argument, I am not positing that LLMs are minds. I am specifically refuting that your brain and the Chinese room can be both subject to the same reductionist argument Searle uses - if we accept, as you say, that you are a mind inside a body, which neuron, or atom does this mind reside in? My point is, if you accept Searle's argument, you have to accept it for brains, including your brain, as well.

Now, separately, you are precisely the type of closet dualist I speak of. You say that you are a mind inside a body, but you have no way of knowing that others have minds -- take this to it's full conclusion: You have no way of knowing that you have a "mind" either. You feel like you do, as a biological assembly (which is what you are). Either way you believe in some sort of body-mind dualism, without realizing. Minds are not inside of bodies. What you call a mind is a potential emergent phenomenon of a brain. (potential - because brains get injured etc.).

> In any case LLMs most likely are not minds due to the simple fact that most of their internal state is static.

This is not a compelling argument. Firstly, you can add external state to LLMs via RAG and vector databases, or various other types of external memory, and their internal state is no longer static and deterministic (and they become Turing complete!).

Second if you could rewind time, then your argument suggests that all other humans would not have minds because you could access the same state of mind at that point in time (it's static). Why would you travelling through time suddenly erases all other minds in reality?

The obvious answer is that it doesn't, those minds exist as time moves forward and then they reset when you travel backwards, and the same would apply to LLMs if they have minds, eg. they are active minds while they are processing a prompt.