Re:4-bit calculator made from cardboard and marbles
by arjunnarayan on Monday November 21, 2016 @05:58PM
(#13010045)
Thank you for both these comments, this is the best explanation I've ever read about Searle (Searle is usually a punchline in my conversations with my friends[1]). I'm not completely convinced, and I think an effective rebuttal is along the lines of "there's no such thing as a privileged qualia", but I'm not smart enough to make it properly, and have much to think about for a few nights! :)
[1] For instance, most recent search in my Slack for Searle returns: "There are days when all i do is purely syntactic copy-pasting into stack overflow and copy-pasting back into my terminal, with absolutely no understanding of the underlying semantics of my actions, and have such surprisingly impressive results, that i've become more and more convinced by Searle."
If you want to up the geekery factor to eleven, you could probably think of the Chinese room as a sort of homomorphic encryption.