The problem with the Chinese Room Argument

I'm not sure why this isn't brought up more. The extraordinary mistake in this argument is not realizing that the brain of a Chinese-speaking human—is also a Chinese machine. When Chinese goes into the ears or eyes of a Chinese speaker, what comes out is understanding of what that Chinese meant. The speaker has no idea how that happened. They simply look at the characters on the page, or hear the words, and they somehow know what they mean.

This is exactly as if those Chinese characters are being passed into another room inside of the Chinese speaker’s brain, and inside the brain there is someone in a room with actual Chinese understanding. We know for certain that this is what's happening inside the brain of every human who understands a language. Or anything else. What if your black box got replaced with another? Would you even know?

Once we understand something, the ability to produce out output from that understanding turns into a Chinese room. We throw input, and our brain throws back output. From where? We have no earthly idea. Somehow, we have forgotten this.

We've completely overlooked the fact that we haven’t a slightest idea where all this knowledge, and understanding, and creativity, is coming from when we pose problems to our own minds.