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The systems reply

No neuron understands English, and yet you understand: to look for understanding in the component is to look where it never is.

Objects to Not by program alone

Dennett · The Mind's I · 1981

1. The argument concludes from no part's understanding that the whole does not understand. It is a step refused everywhere else: none of your cells reads these lines, none of your neurons speaks English.
2. Understanding is therefore never in a component, but in the whole system, in the organization that links them: to look for it in whoever runs the rules is to help oneself to the answer in advance.
3. There remain the causal powers of the living brain, invoked to mark the difference. But so long as one does not say which ones, nor why another material would lack them, this is no explanation: it is a name given to the gap one wishes to preserve.
4. And the criterion turns around: our brain seems to us to understand because we know it from within. Seen from outside, it is only an assembly of components not one of which understands anything.

Therefore The middle position holds only by granting cerebral matter a privilege it does not define: either organization suffices, or one must name what is missing.