> Overall, I'd say that you seem to be leaning pretty heavily on your own definitions.
This is just what intelligence involves if intelligence is to be intelligence. The terminology is common in the philosophy of mind. The attack - that these are just my definitions - is also fallacious. It doesn’t respond substantively to them.
> So tell me how human brains create this "aboutness" and "semantic content"?
The burden of proof is not mine. I am pinning down the thing that must be explained. How can you coherently deny aboutness and semantic content as central to intelligence? That is exactly what intelligence entails if it is to be intelligence, which is the capacity to apprehend reality. Otherwise, what are we even debating?
(FWIW, we can strongly argue that brains alone cannot account for concepts, because concepts are universal while matter is concrete and particular. We can have the concept Triangularity and talk about what is true of all triangles by analyzing the concept, but you never encounter Triangularity in the wild, as it were. You only ever witness particular triangles, each determined in ways that Triangularity is not. Triangularity is abstracted from them. So if matter is concrete and determined and can only be concrete and determined, and what a thing is is the substance of the content we apprehend - that must be the case, or else you deny the possibility of knowledge and render your claims incoherent - then these abstracted universal concepts cannot exist as such in matter without losing their universality, destroying knowledge in the process.)
> why can't sufficiently complex logic operations achieve the same outcome?
Why would they? This is magical thinking. These “logic operations” in question are purely syntactic operations - this is just definitional. Computational models are formalizations of effective methods, which are operationally mechanical and syntactic. You cannot pile on more syntax or more fancy looking syntax to get semantics. That makes no sense.
> Using brains to try to understand the emergent properties of brains seeme fraught with conceptual problems
Why? If a “brain” (let’s say mind) can understand reality at all, then why should brains escape the domain of things it can understand? Conversely, if a brain cannot grasp the brain, why should it be able to grasp anything at all? Is not a matter of complexity, because knowledge is about grasping the principles governing a thing, not holding some vast state diagram in your head.
> a potential to over-estimate the centrality of how it subjectively feels to be a brain. In a way it's understandable as, in the end, that feeling is all we have.
This has nothing to do with feelings, though the subjectivity of consciousness (again, intentional in nature) is a fact you cannot ignore and must account for. Otherwise, you are guilty of eliminativism, that is, the denial of the very facts that must be explained, because of a prior commitment to materialistic presuppositions.