I'd appreciate if you tried to explain why instead of resorting to ad hominem.

> I think it's entirely valid to question whether a computer can form an understanding through deterministically processing instructions, whether that be through programming language or language training data.

Since the real world (including probabilistic and quantum phenomena) can be modeled with deterministic computation (a pseudorandom sequence is deterministic, yet simulates randomness), if we have a powerful enough computer we can simulate the brain to a sufficient degree to have it behave identically as the real thing.

The original 'Chinese Room' experiment describes a book of static rules of Chinese - which is probably not the way to go, and AI does not work like that. It's probabilistic in its training and evaluation.

What you are arguing is that constructing an artificial consciousness lies beyond our current computational ability(probably), and understanding of physics (possibly), but that does not rule out that we might solve these issues at some point, and there's no fundamental roadblock to artificial consciousness.

I've re-read the argument (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room) and I cannot help but conclude that Searle argues that 'understanding' is only something that humans can do, which means that real humans are special in some way a simulation of human-shaped atoms are not.

Which is an argument for the existence of the supernatural and deist thinking.