> If two thing cannot possibly be observed to be different then they are the same.

I think that suffers the same flaw as logical positivism: if my axioms can't find a difference, there isn't one, no way my assumptions are wrong. (Namely, my axiom is that external observations capture the entirety of reality, there is nothing subjective.)

If two people laugh at a joke, one faking and one actually finding it funny, what is the externally observable difference? Assume the faker has been trained in all manner of knowledge about what would make the joke funny, they just don't find it so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

The fake laugh can be observed to be different by the person faking it.

Exactly. And the person following the Chinese program also knows they don't speak Chinese and that they aren't understanding anything.

I don't really find the Chinese Room argument very compelling because there are too many "it's obvious that X can't really understand" in it.

Also, you can't derive from it that there can't be computed consciousness in some other form.

That feels off. It’s like me saying I don’t know English. I merely know the correct alghorithm to give the correct responses to things people give me as input.

There supposedly is a (semantic) process in your brain that makes you believe you understand the sentences you are reading and writing that is on top of the (symbolic) process that tells you what to say and how to say it. And that's the quid of the issue. Searle argues that symbolic computation cannot produce understanding at the semantic level.

It makes me thing about laughter yoga[1]. Just because you "fake" it doesn’t mean it won’t have a concrete measurable effect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_yoga

That would also apply to the Chinese room.

So a tree falling in a forest with noone around to hear doesn't make a sound?

I always thought the point of the Chinese room argument was that the man inside doesn't understand Chinese, but the whole system definitely does?

Yes. The "system" understands Chinese in the same way a native speaker does. It's two different implementations (room system and native speaker) of the same computation ("understanding Chinese"). There is no externally observable difference between actually understanding Chinese and a perfect simulation of a system that understands Chinese. The fact that the person inside doesn't speak Chinese as a result is irrelevant in the same way that the L2 cache alone without the rest of a computer cannot run Minecraft is. If anything the Chinese Room thought experiment is an argument in favor of consciousness being computation. It pains me greatly that someone could come up with it and conclude the opposite.

The point of the experiment is to think about the individual in the room. You can not say it's irrelevant, because it's the entire point.

The system's response is trivial: Sure, if the room+person combination leads always to a coherent response in Chinese, then the entire system understands Chinese. I'd go even further: If the person in the room does not understand Chinese, but the system does, then there is some entity that understands Chinese - either a person or an advanced AI, feeding the inputs. Then, from the systems perspective, the person in the room is largely irrelevant.

But this is not the argument: Despite no discernible difference from the outside, the person in the room may either understand Chinese, or they may not. And so there is a distinction - from the perspective of the individual in the room, that does not depend on the outside observation.

That's all there is to it. It shows that meaning and understanding are not the same as syntactic computation (an important point, to be sure), but it does not show that one can exist with or without the other. By extension, it does not otherwise disprove consciousness as being this or that.

You might as well conclude that my fingers typing this post aren't conscious. It's a weird argument.

The analogy might be more valid if arguing its not possible for a third party to actually determine whether an entity/system is conscious (irrespective of whether the entity is conscious or not)

The argument about a third party is trivial in my opinion. Someone responds correctly in Chinese, and the onus just falls on that element of the system to be conscious or not. It's another argument and I don't even see how this experiment is particularly enlightening in that case. I think in that case, people just confuse it with the Turing test.

Instead, the core matter is about form versus meaning - something that is indeed not observable from the outside, and yet is a distinction to the person inside the Chinese room.

I think that's the argument for why the Chinese room is not a particularly illuminating thought experiment after all.

Edit: Or as fouronnes3 said in a sibling comment, why it's actually evidence against Searle's original argument.