[glyco]

You and Searle both seem to not understand a simple, obvious fact about the world, which is that (inhomogenous) things don't have the same thing inside. A chicken pie, for example, doesn't have any chicken pie inside. There's chicken inside, but that's not chicken pie. There's sauce, vegetables and pastry, but those aren't chicken pie either. All these things together still may not make a chicken pie. The 'chickenpieness' of the pie is an additional fact, not derivable from any facts about its components.

As with pie, so with 'understanding'. A system which understands can be expected to not contain anything which understands. So if you find a system which contains nothing which understands, this tells you nothing about whether the system understands[0].

Somehow both you and Searle have managed to find this simple fact about pie to be 'the grip of an ideology' and 'metaphysical'. But it really isn't.

[0] And vice-versa, as in Searle's pointlessly overcomplicated example of a system which understands Chinese containing one which doesn't containing one which does.