> I disagree. I think the point is that the union of the human and the library can in fact do all of those things.

No, the "union of the human and the library" can communicate only the set of responses a programmer, who is not part of the room, made a prior decision to make available. (The human can also choose to refuse to participate, or hold up random symbols but this fails to communicate anything). If the person following instructions on which mystery symbols to select ends up convincing an external observer they are conversing with an excitable 23 year old lady from Shanghai, that's because the programmer provided continuations including those personal characteristics, not because the union of a bored middle aged non-Chinese bloke and lots and lots of paper understands itself to be an excitable 23 year old lady from Shanghai.

Seriously, this is madness. If I follow instructions to open a URL which points to a Hitler speech, it means I understood how to open links, not that the union of me and YouTube understands the imperative of invading Poland!

> The fact that the human in isolation can't is as irrelevant as pointing out that the a book in isolation (without the human) can't either. It's a fundamental mistake as to the problem's reasoning.

Do you take this approach to other questions of understanding? If somebody passes a non-Turing test by diligently copying the answer sheet, do you insist that the exam result accurately represents the understanding of the union of the copyist and the answer sheet, and people questioning whether the copyist understood what they were writing are quibbling over irrelevances?

The reasoning is very simple: if a human can convincingly simulate understanding simply by retrieving answers from storage media, it stands to reason a running program can do so too, perhaps with even less reason to guess what real world phenomena the symbols refer to. An illustrative example of how patterns can be matched without cognisance of the implications of the patterns

Inventing a new kind of theoretical abstraction of "union of person and storage media" and insisting that understanding can be shared between a piece of paper and a person who can't read the words on it like a pretty unconvincing way to reject that claim. But hey, maybe the union of me and the words you wrote thinks differently?!

> I think this is a much deeper point than you realize. It is possible that the very nature of consciousness centers around this dynamic; that evolution has produced systems which are able to determine the next appropriate response to their environment.

It's entirely possible, probable even, the very nature of consciousness centres around ability to respond to an environment. But a biological organism's environment consists of interacting with the physical world via multiple senses, a whole bunch of chemical impulses called emotions and millions of years of evolving to survive in that environment as well as an extremely lossy tokenised abstract representation of some of those inputs used for communication purposes. Irrespective of whether a machine can "understand" in some meaningful sense, it stretches credulity to assert that the "understanding" of a computer program whose inputs consist solely of lossy tokens is similar or "synonymous" to the understanding of the more complex organism that navigates lots of other stuff.