As per the electron thing, there’s a level where there is symbolic manipulation and a level where there isn’t. I don’t understand why it’s symbolic manipulation for electronics but not for neurons. At the right abstraction level, neurons too manipulate symbols.
It is not the symbols that are the problem. It is that the semantic content of the symbol used in a digital computer is observer relative. The circuits depend on someone understanding their meaning. The meaning provided by the human engineer that, since he possesses the semantic content, understands the method of implementation and the calculation results at each level of abstraction. This is clearly not the case in the human brain in which the symbols arise in a manner that allows for intrinsic semantic content.
It is not the symbols that are the problem. It is that the semantic content of the symbol used in a digital computer is observer relative. The circuits depend on someone understanding their meaning. The meaning provided by the human engineer that, since he possesses the semantic content, understands the method of implementation and the calculation results at each level of abstraction. This is clearly not the case in the human brain in which the symbols arise in a manner that allows for intrinsic semantic content.