You're right to flag the distinction between symbols and substance, but I think you're misapplying it here.

I'm not conflating symbolic systems with the physical substrate: they're obviously different levels of abstraction. What I am saying is that symbolic reasoning, language, creativity, and knowledge all emerge from the same underlying physical processes. They're not magic. They're not floating in some Platonic realm. They’re instantiated in real, measurable patterns, whether in neurons or silicon.

You can't have metaphysics without physics. And we have solid evidence, from neuroscience, from pharmacology, from evolutionary biology, that the brain's symbolic output is fundamentally a physical phenomenon. Injuries, chemicals, electrical stimulation, they all modulate “metaphysical” experience in completely physical ways.

Emergence matters here. Yes, atoms aren’t thoughts, but enough atoms arranged the right way do start behaving like a thinking system. That’s the whole point of complex systems theory, chaos theory, and even early AI work like Hofstadter and Dennett. I recommend "Gödel, Escher, Bach", or Melanie Mitchell's "Complexity: A Guided Tour", if you're curious.

If you're arguing there's something else, some kind of unphysical or non-emergent component to knowledge or creativity, I'd honestly love to hear more, because that's a bold claim. But waving away the physical substrate as irrelevant doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.