RashHeuristics
Strawman? What?
Programming languages running on turing machines are abstract entities, they only exist in your mind, not in reality. The physical machine just shuffles electrons around.
Abstract Thought -> Symbolic Representation -> Physical Implementation.
The right hand side is not the left hand side. Any right hand side implements an infinite left hand sides and there is no way for you to pick out the correct one simply from the physics. I have never written the word representation before in this exchange, yet you claim i have. Stop doing that.
You wont get it. This is a standard part of philosophy of mind. Look it up.
"thought = :triangularity"
That is simply some LCD pixels on my screen. What you define it to be has absolutely no bearing on the physical implementation of the pixels. You could likewise define it to be a partial sentence on 3d polygonal mesh generation from a math phd thesis or any number of other interpretations. Any interpretation you make is IN YOUR HEAD. Not in the physical instantiation (the LCD pixels or memory the transistors of the RAM).
The problem here is that you don't understand the point.
Us not knowing exactly how something works has never stopped us before from looking into it.
With "a simulation of digestion" I specifically mean a software simulation, not a hardware simulation. I assure you I had a meaning with the text I wrote, it is not meaningless. The meaning is for me to say, your interpretation of it (and this is the point) underdetermines the meaning of it. You fully determine what i meant simply from the characters on the screen. Physical instantiations of abstract items work the same way. An item needing to do something is irrelevant of it being able to, a software simulation of food does not actually digest food. A software simulation of abstract concepts do not actually instantiate them.
I am repeating myself again but any AI system you believe to have instantiated the abstract concept of triangularity is just an interpretation on your part to having done so, you might as well interpret it to simply being a room heating device or the implementation of some other algorithm that also matches the behaviour.
You can simulate digestion with a turing machine all you want, but that simulation wont digest any food. Likewise you can simulate the neurons in a brain but that simulation can not be an instantiation of the concept of triangularity.
It is what Aristotle called the intellectual soul, not qualia. Qualia is an experience and has no relation to holding abstract concepts. As I already wrote, Turing machines cannot do it for they suffer from multiple realizability, any abstract concept can be implemented in multiple physical constructs and any physical construct can be interpreted to be any number of different abstract items. I have not written that only "wetware" can do it, I have written that turing machines cannot do it and that no purely physical construct can do it (including purely newtonian/quantum wetware).
There is. The ability to instantiate one specific abstract into a physical item. An abstract can for example be the idea of triangularity and the physical substrate will be the brain.
No AI running on a typical Turing machine can do that. For any idea you believe you have instantiated into the machine you can come up with an alternative interpretation of what you actually have instantiated.
This means that any physical system alone underdetermines the abstract thing it is supposed to be an instantiation of. You can for example likely find a pattern within the atoms of the wall behind you that could be said to be an instantiation of the quicksort algorithm. Or it's just a wall. The physical item itself is silent on the matter.