The substitution is not equivalent; people are more likely to agree whether something contains “random access memory” than whether it contains “a model”.
I think philosophers could easily blur the definition of “random access memory”, they just didn’t get around to it yet. A competent engineer can peek inside a device and tell you whether it’s running a model of its surroundings, so the word “model” does carry some meaning regardless of what philosophers say. If you want a formal definition, we could start with something like this: does the device contain independent correlata for independent external concepts of interest?
The substitution is not equivalent; people are more likely to agree whether something contains “random access memory” than whether it contains “a model”.
I think philosophers could easily blur the definition of “random access memory”, they just didn’t get around to it yet. A competent engineer can peek inside a device and tell you whether it’s running a model of its surroundings, so the word “model” does carry some meaning regardless of what philosophers say. If you want a formal definition, we could start with something like this: does the device contain independent correlata for independent external concepts of interest?