I feel like it might be strengthened by a machine that actually does implement the core of the argument (even passes the turing test?) but is also just matrix multiplication. Previously the idea of a device that could respond to input with human-like output was a fantasy, now it's reality which removes one of the arguments against the Chinese Room on the basis of plausibility.
But yes, I would like to see a modern philosophers take on it.
I'm more interested in whether the uninformed intuitions have changed, whether someone who used an LLM before graduating from school and entering university has a more forgiving stance than an "ignorant" college entrant from ten years ago. From my experience of the field, I would really doubt many philosophers of mind have changed their view based on this. The major questions of interest concern qualia, it ha been so for many years.
Plausibility was never an argument against Searle's Chinese Room Argument ... that's a very deep confusion, since Searle was arguing against the possibility of Strong AI, whereas advocates of Strong AI of course thought it was plausible and that's why they were working to create it. That you conflate the Chinese Room Argument with "the Chinese Room" is one aspect of the confusion.
It’s absolutely about the plausibility of mechanistic intentionality, given the implausibility of intentionality where the person in the experiment doesn’t understand chinese
Searle's argument may well be about the plausibility of "mechanistic intentionalty", whatever exactly that means ("mechanistic" just sounds like bigotry to me ... we are all mechanisms and Searle didn't say otherwise, just that we are meat mechanisms and not purely syntactic mechanisms ... and his argument was intended as a logical proof, not just a plausibility argument), but that's not what the previous comments were about. Apparently you mechanistically see the word "plausibility" and think that any and all statements about it refer to the same thing.
There are arguments made specifically about the implausibility of such a room making the argument itself invalid. Or I guess I should say “we’re”, because that position is now much less tenable with LLMs.
"For [John Searle's] part, he has one argument, the Chinese Room, and he has been trotting it out, basically unchanged, for fifteen years. It has proven to be an amazingly popular number among the non-experts, in spite of the fact that just about everyone who knows anything about the field dismissed it long ago. It is full of well-concealed fallacies. By Searle’s own count, there are over a hundred published attacks on it. He can count them, but I guess he can’t read them, [...]"
Every significant argument has plenty of detractors, that doesn’t mean they’re right. Every argument I’ve heard to the contrary is unconvincing to me, and to the majority:
I’d be REALLY curious to see a survey of philosophy 2015 vs 2025 UG entrants on mind-brain connection intuitions