Thanks, but that makes his arguments even less valid.

He argues that computer programs only manipulate symbols and thus have no semantic understanding.

But that's not true - many programs, like compilers that existed back when the argument was made, had semantic understanding of the code (in a limited way, but they did have some understanding about what the program did).

LLMs in contrast have a very rich semantic understanding of the text they parse - their tensor representations encode a lot about each token, or you can just ask them about anything - they might not be human level at reading subtext, but they're not horrible either.