Dear Jonathan Boymal,

Thank you for your thoughtful exploration of the grounding problem and the Chinese Room thought experiment. Your analysis raises essential questions about AI’s role in education and human cognition. Building on your insights, I’d like to suggest that the tension you identify between preserving “historically valued” understanding and accepting functionalist views might be resolved through a complementary framework.

Embodied Experience as Necessary but Not Sufficient

One way to reconcile the various approaches you present is to consider that embodied experience serves as a necessary but not sufficient condition for understanding. This perspective honors the grounding requirement you emphasize while acknowledging that understanding requires multiple mechanisms working together.

Your Japanese dictionary analogy beautifully illustrates why embodied experience is necessary – without it, any system remains trapped in circular symbol manipulation. No amount of sophisticated pattern recognition can bootstrap a system out of that closed linguistic circle. This suggests why ChatGPT and similar systems, despite their impressive capabilities, may not achieve genuine understanding.

At the same time, embodied experience alone isn’t sufficient. The five approaches to meaning you outline – direct experience, object reference, linguistic relationships, social agreement, and systematic knowledge – can work together to build understanding from an embodied foundation.

Reframing AI’s Role

This perspective suggests an interesting reframing: rather than asking whether AI understands, we might ask how AI can enhance human understanding. If AI cannot achieve genuine understanding due to lacking embodied experience, its value may lie in serving as a sophisticated cognitive tool that assists human thinking.

AI might excel at:

• Processing and identifying patterns in information
• Offering analytical frameworks
• Presenting alternative perspectives
• Helping humans articulate and refine their insights

Educational Implications

For educators, this could help resolve some of the concerns you raise. Rather than worrying whether students using AI are “really understanding,” the focus might shift to how AI tools can be thoughtfully designed and used to enhance genuine human understanding – understanding that remains grounded in embodied experience but is amplified by computational assistance.

This approach could preserve the qualities of understanding we have historically valued while embracing AI’s genuine potential as a thinking partner that supports rather than replaces human cognition.