> It's sleight of hand because the sentience of the human in the system is irrelevant. The human is following a trivial set of rules, and you could just as easily digitize the books and replace the human with a microcontroller. Voila, now you have a Chinese-speaking computer program and we're back to where we started.
Substituting the microcontroller back is... literally the point of the thought experiment. If it's logically possible for an entity which we all agree can think to perform flawless pattern matching in Chinese without understanding Chinese, why should we suppose that flawless pattern matching in Chinese is particularly strong evidence of thought on the part of a microcontroller that probably can't?
Discussions about the plausibility of building the actual model are largely irrelevant too, especially in a class of thought experiments which has people on the other side insisting hypotheticals like "imagine if someone built a silicon chip which perfectly simulates and updates the state of every relevant molecule in someone's brain..." as evidence in favour of their belief that consciousness is a soul-like abstraction that can be losslessly translated to x86 hardware. The difficulty of devising a means of adequate state tracking is a theoretical argument against computers ever achieving full mastery of Chinese as well as against rooms, and the number of books irrelevant. (If we reduce the conversational scope to a manageable size the paper-pusher and the books still aren't conveying actual thoughts, and the Chinese observer still believes he's having a conversation with a Chinese-speaker)
As for your alternative example, assuming for the sake of argument that the head scan is a functioning sentient brain (though I think Searle would disagree) the beleaguered paper pusher still gives the impression of perfect understanding of Chinese without being able to speak a word of it, so he's still a P-zombie. If we replace that with a living Stephen Hawking whose microphone is rigged to silently dictate answers via my email address when I press a switch, I would still know nothing about physics and it still wouldn't make sense to try to rescue my ignorance of advanced physics by referring to Hawking and I as being a union with collective understanding. Same goes for the union of understanding of me, a Xerox machine and a printed copy of A Brief History of Time.
Substituting the microcontroller back is... literally the point of the thought experiment. If it's logically possible for an entity which we all agree can think to perform flawless pattern matching in Chinese without understanding Chinese, why should we suppose that flawless pattern matching in Chinese is particularly strong evidence of thought on the part of a microcontroller that probably can't?
Discussions about the plausibility of building the actual model are largely irrelevant too, especially in a class of thought experiments which has people on the other side insisting hypotheticals like "imagine if someone built a silicon chip which perfectly simulates and updates the state of every relevant molecule in someone's brain..." as evidence in favour of their belief that consciousness is a soul-like abstraction that can be losslessly translated to x86 hardware. The difficulty of devising a means of adequate state tracking is a theoretical argument against computers ever achieving full mastery of Chinese as well as against rooms, and the number of books irrelevant. (If we reduce the conversational scope to a manageable size the paper-pusher and the books still aren't conveying actual thoughts, and the Chinese observer still believes he's having a conversation with a Chinese-speaker)
As for your alternative example, assuming for the sake of argument that the head scan is a functioning sentient brain (though I think Searle would disagree) the beleaguered paper pusher still gives the impression of perfect understanding of Chinese without being able to speak a word of it, so he's still a P-zombie. If we replace that with a living Stephen Hawking whose microphone is rigged to silently dictate answers via my email address when I press a switch, I would still know nothing about physics and it still wouldn't make sense to try to rescue my ignorance of advanced physics by referring to Hawking and I as being a union with collective understanding. Same goes for the union of understanding of me, a Xerox machine and a printed copy of A Brief History of Time.