Are you familiare with Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment? He makes more or less the same argument as Ellerman. The point is that there really is something fundamentally different between semantics and syntax, some difference that syntax alone is unable to provide. Do you really contend that semantics are no more than associations between symbols? That view is subject to all sorts of reductionist arguments that pretty quickly take the umph out of being human. If you really believe that, I won't begrudge it to you. But the premises that there is meaning in life and that my intentions mean something are so fundamental to my worldview that, like G.E. Moore and his proof of an external world, if a premise leads to the conclusion that there is not and they do not, then I must weigh that premise against the first and see which is the more plausible. I haven't found one yet.