It’s going to sound delusional, but my own understanding of my understanding is that there’s probably no such thing, only a feeling of familiarity and some heuristics.

All I do is invoke “pictures” of semantic blobs in my mind, and my unconscious parts pull up more “pictures” in connection to that. Which I verbalize in turn, apply logic checks, and thus get this feeling that I’m meaningfully thinking about something, a sensation of comprehension. I could be even blatantly wrong about something, misunderstanding doesn’t feel any different in the moment.

And reasoning models (try to) capture that. The underlying processes are certainly different, it’s a Chinese Room alright - but if my own understanding is an illusion, the fact that machine model of it isn’t how I do it myself (but only a statistical approximation) doesn’t seem to matter - at least not for inputs and outputs between two black boxes (me or model).

I just don’t believe in p-zombies any more than I believe in Santa, I guess.