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 bein