Searle takes that experience seriously. For him it's real and, in order to have that experience, you need machinery somewhat similiar to what we have. He can't bring himself to believe that a list of instructions and a person dumbly executing them have that sensation of understanding even if they produce the correct output.

Neither does Searle. He says that humans are such machines. Per Searle, if you want to build a system that has subjective experiences of consciousness and understanding, it would have to have physical parts that correspond to some degree to the physical parts that give rise to our subjective experiences (or an animal's subjective experiences). It couldn't be a list of instructions to be executed.

I don't know if Searle is right about this but I find myself unable to dismiss his argument as obviously wrong.