It has been very well discussed before I don't understand how anyone sane can argue against it (and indeed you can see on Wikipedia that the replies to it are sparse and don't make any sense).
It's not simulating rain if it's making you wet by using sprinklers?
But I guess that was a distraction from the main point: If consciousness emerges from biological processes in the brain connected to the world with a body, why would it not emerge from a simulation of these processes connected to the real world with sensors and actuators?
It seems like circular reasoning to me: The simulation is not like the real thing because it lacks the special thing that enables consciousness (that's Searle's biological naturalism). And it lacks what enables consciousness because it's not the real thing (that's the weather analogy).
Today we know the program to do this is always going to be inscrutable to Searle. His role is no different from someone using Claude to write an email.
Speaking through Zarubin, Dneprov writes that "the only way to prove that machines can think is to turn yourself into a machine and examine your thinking process", and he concludes, as Searle does, that "even the most perfect simulation of machine thinking is not the thinking process itself."
That feels similar to what Chiang is saying. The physical state of being a human is part of human consciousness. An LLM would require many more "levels" that haven't been achieved yet. An LLM with a body, sense organs, physical tools, social dynamics, etc. would all be steps on the path to a "conscious" LLM.
