The Chinese room never made sense to me because, even though the person passing the arcane symbols through the door doesn't _understand_ what is being communicated doesn't mean that's not how it works in _our_ brain. Our individual neurons (or aggregate neurons depending on how they're working and firing based on symbol triggering) don't know what symbols they're processing either. So unless Searle is saying humans don't know any languages on some fundamental level, it's kind of useless because then we'd just end up admitting (something unsavory) that nobody knows anything barring some homunculus in our brains or even worse, we can never truly have free will. Those are scary implications.
To me, having part of the chinese-speaking-ability be in an almighty dictionary always looked like a sleight of hand; surely if you’re talking to the whole system that is the room, the person, and the dictionary, it is the system as a whole that has intelligence and knows how to speak chinese? It takes advantage of our identification with just the person to distract from that.
Wow. I never thought of it from that light. Honestly, that is a problem. You're smuggling in pre-formed language into the thought experiment with its own rich meaning.
