a system that simulates some process or system is not the process or system it simulates.<p>Just take writing programs: Can we simulate the process of writing programs?  Could we create a system that writes and compiles programs? What about writing programs which contain errors? Could that system recognize the errors in those programs it wrote and correct the errors? could it write programs and then optimize those programs? Or rewrite the programs to make them more efficient or tweak them to do other tasks? Does &quot;simulation&quot; actually help us create a computer that can write programs at all? If so, how?<p>If you know how to write a program that can write and optimize programs, Google will hire you tomorrow!  And it can&#x27;t be that hard. It&#x27;s just combining ascii characters together into combinations based on some rules...<p>Error making is the essence of actual learning, because it is a component of comprehension.  Simulation, automata theory, mathematics itself, do not address issues of comprehension or error recognition.  How can a computer system make, recognize, and correct errors?  Errors do not actually &quot;exist&quot;.  Errors are things we apprehend but which have no obvious physical counterpart.<p>We do some simulation of atoms, but it is laughably inefficient. Think about the simulations we do to figure out protein folding. Protein folding is going on in every neuron with each synaptic firing. Protein folding not performed by a rule or an extrinsic function, but is an intrinsic process of the molecule itself. For instance, how do a few molecules of LSD produce such an incredible change in actual experience?  How would you go about simulating psychedelic phenomena?  How would you go about simulating wave lengths of light as colors?  How would you simulate colors (as in dreams or imagination) without the corresponding wavelengths of light?  How would you simulate what sound is?<p>We can certainly produce and record vibrations with speakers and microphones attached to computers.  But what is the experience of sound?  when you hear someone&#x27;s voice in your head, what is that?  it&#x27;s not a vibration, it&#x27;s not a string of ascii characters, it&#x27;s not a wav file.<p>What you experience looks easy because experiences occur effortlessly to you. Now try to write a program that can be aware of something, that can think about something, that has experiences.  That is Searle&#x27;s point, our computers have no experiences at all.<p>If I say: &quot;Don&#x27;t forget to brush your two teeth with your toothbrush.&quot;  You will understand what the &quot;twos&quot; mean.  A computer has no comprehension of to, too, two, 11, or 2.  It&#x27;s not just too hard for a computer to do, it&#x27;s a categorically different problem.  To get a better understanding of these problems you could read about qualia <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Qualia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Qualia</a>.  and then wonder how you could get a computer to see magenta. And then wonder how you could get it to like Pink (the singer).