Chinese Room Argument and Searle

To explain the Chinese Room argument, Searle asks you to imagine yourself a monolingual English speaker locked in a room. You are given a large batch of Chinese writing, a second batch of Chinese script, and a set of rules in English for correlating the second batch with the first batch. The rules correlate one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols. A third batch of Chinese symbols and more instructions in English enable you to correlate elements of this third batch with elements of the first two batches and instruct you, thereby, enabling you to retort an answer with more Chinese symbols. The people feeding you input call the first batch a script, the second batch a story, and the third batch questions. Finally, the symbols you give back are answers to the questions. The set of rules in English are in fact the “program” of which you yourself know nothing of it. However, you get so good at following the instructions that your responses are indistinguishable from ...