[joefourier]

The Chinese Room is a fallacious bait-and-switch argument that should stop being brought up. It, along with the Russian game from the TFA, don’t actually provide any insight - all they do is have the computer program be executed by humans instead of a classical computer, and then trick you by focusing on the humans. The “understanding” isn’t in the substrate but the program itself, and it doesn’t matter if it’s executed by transistors, vacuum tubes, relays or a human in a room with infinite amounts of pencils, paper, and time.