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I think Searle would agree with you that the room does in fact speak Chinese. His point is that the neither the person, the machine, or "the room" understands Chinese, at least in the usual sense of that word when it comes to understanding as implemented by humans.

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it's still a stupid argument because the brain itself is a chinese room. forget cells or atoms, none of your neurons or synapses understand chinese.

>forget cells or atoms, none of your neurons or synapses understand chinese.

And yet some people seem to understand Chinese just fine. How can you explain that gap? It's only a stupid argument if you first assume that functionalism is true.

How do i explain the gap ? Obviously emergence. It's everywhere in nature. a single ant does not display the complexity/intelligence of its colony.

The argument is supposed/or often used to disqualify machines from consciousness but it's stupid because biological neurons don't understand the bigger picture anymore than an artificial neuron sampled from a model.

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