The explainer
Understanding is a crowded word: competence, grounding, relation, and felt sense get mashed together. This explainer pulls them apart so a reader who skipped the session can still follow why benchmark wins do not settle the meaning question.
Four things people mean by “understand”
Semantic accounts care about symbols and reference. Functional accounts care about what the system can do with a concept. Experiential accounts care about whether there is a felt grasp. Relational accounts care about a signal, a context, and an interpreter: meaning as something that happens between, not only inside.
The Chinese Room remains the stress test. Correct answers can show competence or rule-following without resolving whether the system has intentionality or a world. Fluent behaviour is evidence of skill. It is not proof of meaning, and it is not proof of experience. Embodiment and vulnerability show up here as candidate grounding conditions, not as decorations: a system that never has to be wrong in a shared world may never need the kind of meaning people are pointing at.
What a benchmark cannot close
A leaderboard can show transfer, explanation, or error detection. It cannot show that the system’s tokens are about the world in the way a person’s words are, or that anything is understood from the inside. Keep those claims on separate lines. Otherwise “the model understands” becomes a mood.
Session history
Deep Dive #9 (January 22, 2026, Harbour Centre, Vancouver) tested semantic, functional, experiential, and relational accounts. No single definition won. The public page is based on a recovered, anonymized organizer transcript and uses no participant quotations or attributed views. The Deep Dive #9 dossier on the microsite is the session shelf, not a second copy of this explainer.
Nearby questions in the series
If fluency is doing too much work, read whether LLMs understand or only simulate thinking. If grounding needs a body, see whether consciousness requires a body. If competence might run with no inner life, continue at p-zombies.
Further reading
Use the Library’s Chinese Room trail and the Deep Dive #9 shelf there. The Community Source Index keeps receipts. mac.bc-ai.ca remains a sibling surface.