I would love to talk to someone who actually believes in the Chinese Room argument. To me it seems to be ignoring the existence of emergent behavior, and the same argument could prove that a human Chinese speaker doesn't understand Chinese either: his neurons are just reacting to produce answers depending on the input and their current state (e.g. neurotransmitters and action potentials).

The Chinese Room argument is fairly transparently circular; if you assume understanding involves something more than applying a sufficiently complex set of deterministic rules, then a pure system of deterministic rules cannot ever achieve understanding.

Of course if you accept the required premise of the argument, you must accept that either, one, we don't live in a universe that is a pure system of deterministic rules, or, two, nothing in the universe can have true understanding.

The Chinese Room argument, scientific materialism, or the existence of true understanding—you can have at most two of those in a consistent view of the universe.

John Searle came up with that argument to conclude that despite a hypothetical Chinese room being able to have a conversation with someone, it doesn't truly have understanding, so N seems to be at least 1.

To your point though, the more interesting case is people who would disavow the Chinese Room argument, but then end up using reflecting its views while argue against the intelligence of this or that system.

Practically everyone in my online bubble feels similarly, it seems, though I do think steelmanning it is a great way to explore the topic. Same with the Mary's Room argument.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/

Peter Watts explores this in the novel Blindsight. I don't want to give the plot away, but the main idea is really interesting, and relevant to this discussion.

I'm posting to second the recommendation for the novel. It is the most interesting exploration of the Mind's I (not a typo) that I've come across in modern sci-fi.

It can be read in its entirety at the author's site: https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Threads like these are the reason why I keep coming back to HN !

Recently finished my second read of Blindsight. Enjoyed it more the second time than the first.