[neilk]

I've read up a little more on the Chinese Room and I retract my argument. I misunderstood the idea.

I thought Searle was asserting that a human mind can be simulated by a dumb program that only provided cached responses. It's easy to show there are more than 10e50 possible conversational paths in a 15 minute conversation (even a chess game has that many, and conversation is more complex than chess), and there are only 10e50 atoms on earth.

But it seems Searle's real argument was that the man inside the box is performing all the actions of an artificially intelligent computer program, just with pencil and paper. Humans clearly perform such actions with just a few pounds of brain matter. Even if the Chinese Room operator requires continent-wide resources, such difficulties don't address the essence of Searle's argument.

He seems to be asserting there's something special about the brain called "intentionality" which is unlike a computer running an algorithm. He might be right, but there seems to be no evidence for such a thing, or any way to prove that an entity which claimed "intentionality" didn't really have it.