I don't understand why people get so up in the arms about the Chinese room. It's very clear that a major part of human intelligence is a mental model of the physical world, and linguistic concepts have an (often complex) relationship to that model. There's no magic here. Nothing about that argument implies anything about neurons. The process of forming a mental model of the world and mapping words onto it could easily take place within many many neurons within the human brain, because it does! It does not take place in an LLM. That does not imply that nobody will ever develop a positronic brain that could do the same. We just clearly haven't done so yet.

Saying, "if you can't point to the neuron that does X, then you can't prove X happens" isn't a scientific perspective. It's a willfully ignorant one. If you're confident in the scientific process, then we will eventually understand how all kinds of human mental processes make sense in the context of neural networks.