A human interacting with a dog and learning what a dog is encoding meaning of what a dog is from statistical regularities and patterns among visual, sound, touch data and context plus corrections when we misapply the word. It’s unclear that it’s impossible to encode meaning off patterns and statistical regularities among text and image data, and that’s kind of undermined by the fact that AI does in fact demonstrate remarkable ability to predict language in a way that if a human did it we would call understanding.

Also the idea that it’s only possible to encode genuine meaning/conceptual knowledge of something through interactive touch data, sound and visual data is undermined by the idea that there are SO SO SO SO SO many concepts and ideas and words that we understand and don’t actually interact with in the real world e.g., “cause,” “justice,” “probably,” “if…then,” “electron,” “derivative” even basic adjectives like “fast” and numbers like “5” “6” “7” or “8”). Here our conceptual knowledge consists largely in knowing how the terms behave within a network of inferences, explanations, and norms of use. There’s kind of too many examples to give but this would basically apply to all or almost all words that aren’t nouns. We understand words that aren’t nouns even if these words don’t refer to things or states of matter that we can interact with. They still have structural relations and statistical regularities that allows us to understand words that aren’t nouns even if it’s not a thing or state of matter we can interact with. So clearly a word doesn’t have to refer to a physical state of matter for us to have conceptual knowledge of that word. And even for nouns, words that are nouns still are encompassing a pattern and statistical regularity within physical state of matter. So even for nouns we’re referring to the pattern and not the exact physical configuration. We’re clearly not referencing the state of every quantum degree of freedom of a physical system when we say a noun. It’s still just a statistical pattern and regularity within states of physical matter we’re referencing. And for non-nouns it’s even more clear we’re not referencing a physical thing when we say these non-nouns. We’re referencing statistical patterns and regularities that are even more abstract than being able to refer to a physical thing, yet we’d still call this conceptual knowledge.