The notion that the Chinese room is 'mysticistic' is one of the most bewildering responses to it to the point where I don't think people who make that argument actually understood Searle.

Searle, simplified holds that consciousness is a property of very particular biochemical systems, not a disembodied thing that exists independent of the matter it inhibits.

It's the rational-oriented circles ironically enough who almost dabble in a Cartesian Dualism by positing "computation" or "minds" as distinct from matter. In fact with on occasion almost religious-sounding implications.

Come on, really? You think there's a significant subset of rationalists who are quasi-Dualists? Not just people who are bog-standard materialists who are just being sloppy with language when talking about emergent conscious systems because they don't care about or actively disdain most philosophy?

On the other hand, Searle confidently states that a perfect quantum mechanical simulation of a human brain would not be conscious. This is because it somehow lacks the intentional states of the brain it's perfectly simulating. He doesn't feel the need to justify that a human mind has these states, because our daily direct experience of consciousness cannot seriously be in question. The daily direct experience of consciousness that a perfect simulation of a human brain would assert that it feels is, somehow, different and we can't trust it.

At every step in his argument there's caveats, misleading allegory, and dismissals that are so much of a stretch it seems pretty obvious he's retroactively arguing from a position that our biological conscious minds are somehow special and mystic.

I agree that Searle is often too strong in his claims, but here is what I think people need to take away from the Chinese Room and why it is useful.

That solving a problem, or an array of problems that a conscious mind can solve may be perfectly able to be solved by a non-conscious machine. That the consciousness part may not be relevant in the problem-solving process, and that consciousness may be unique to living beings who have distinct physiology, anatomy, ways to process information, that computers as they exist now do not have. That a simulation is not necessarily the same thing as the thing it simulates, and does not have all of its properties.

These are good questions none of which are mystic and which following from Searle's argument. And I think you're really underestimating to what degree people are lured in by the 'magic' of neural nets because else we wouldn't be in this thread. A neural net that does some function approximation is not 'slightly conscious' unless we're going full in on panpsychism. Even from a functionalist perspective, the neural net performs nothing that is reasonably involved in what we consider to be responsible for consciousness. Nobody ever claimed a TI-83 is 'slightly conscious', or that Stockfish is merely because it plays exceptional chess.

The Chinese Room argument might have a number of problems, but it can be simplified. Put someone in a room who cannot see colours (an achromatope), and give them three different colour filters in the form of plastic sheets. A person outside the room passes sheets of paper of known colour into the room, the achromatope puts them under the colour filters, thereby determining each paper's colour, which he tells the person outside the room. The person outside the room thinks there's someone in the room who can see colours. But achromatopes can't see any colours, and will readily tell you that they have no idea what it's like to see colours.

That's a very different situation. It's not about consciousness, but qualia, and is more like the Mary's Room [0] argument (though not the same).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

If you think it's very different, can you tell me when, in people or animals that we'd agree are conscious, that there's consciousness but no experience of qualia, or experience of qualia without consciousness?

Experience of a stream of qualia is how I'd define consciousness. This is also consistent with the medical definition (leaving aside the other minds problem). If you have a different working definition, how does it differ from mine?

These are all vague terms that ultimately don't seem to map to anything grounded in reality.

But consciousness has something to do with seeing oneself as an agent in control, not simply executing an automatic script but being in control and knowing that one is in control, seeing the self also from the outside in a way and freely moving between these levels. I don't know if consciousness is possible without qualia. And anyone who claims to know probably also knows how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Yeah, there are definitely some holdouts for the functionalist position like Dennett. Searle goes through Dennett's objections in detail in the lectures.