The system instantiated by the book, the man performing instructions, his memory and/or external memory aids, etc. The key point is that there is a new system that produces and consumes semantic information that is entirely distinct from the man. For example, if a question was asked to describe a childhood experience, no experience from the man's childhood would be communicated.
Why do you think this? Each component of the system has physical embodiment and causal efficacy. It's just as "real" as the man himself.
>You seem to be arguing that consciousness arises whenever information is processed by whatever means
The Chinese room experiment isn't about consciousness specifically, its about semantics (meaning) vs syntax. Whether or not something that understands is conscious is a different question.
Note the distinction between "understand" and "knows what it is like to understand". I accept that the system of man + algorithm does understand Chinese. But it does no know what it is like.
There are several ways this experiment could go:
First, we could fail to produce a mind, because there's some secret sauce to it we're not aware of (eg a God-given soul).
Second, we could produce a zombie, indistinguishable from a conscious individual while actually not being conscious (though note that we'd have to treat it as if it were conscious, for reasons that should be obvious).
Third, we could produce a conscious mind.
I'm in the camp that thinks option three is plausible.
Let's assume I'm right. Now, instead of a supercomputer, give every one of the billions of humans on the planet an instruction manual, a pocket calculator and a phone to communicate results, and have them do the exact same calculations the supercomputer would do. Despite the latency, if option three were true, we should expect that this would still produce a conscious mind, albeit a rather slowly-thinking one.
This is addressed by the Turing Test: the point is that if there is no observable difference, does it matter? You can't tell if other people understand Chinese either.
Personally, the only logical conclusion I can draw is panpsychism. I think a rock rolling down hill experiences free will and perceives its random path as a series of choices.