Rob says:

Actually, Searle's hypothetical scenario (it's not an "experiment" in any sense of the word) explicitly does *not* involve a computer. The room+person+books are meant to represent a purely mechanical process, such as a computer. The main thrust of Searle's argument is that nothing in the room understands Chinese, and that it's spurious to conclude that the room on the whole understands Chinese. (Putting a computer in the room makes this point much much less clear.)

Of course, I continue to be astonished that anyone takes Searle's contentions seriously. The room is supposed to contain books with answers to every possible question in Chinese. Well, then the books apparently understand Chinese, don't they? The premise "but books don't understand anything" is violated by the fact that real books are finite, while Searle's "books" seem to be infitely rich information sources, more like a query-response interface than a book.

Vaughan says:

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the clarification. I think I always imagine people typing things into computers because of the problem's frequent use in musings over AI.

One of my favourite responses to Searle's thought experiment was from philosopher Stephen Stich. He turned the whole problem on its head and said that since humans can do exactly what the 'Chinese room' can do, this suggests that we probably are conscious information processing entities!