My take is that the whole chinese room argument rests on extremely nebulous and shaky definitions/assumptions, rendering it worthless.
It seems fairly obvious to me that the system of operator + rulebook does "understand" chinese, for every practical definition of "understanding".
Another counterargument would be simple physical simulation: If you built a computer program that could simulate a human by the atom, then you would either have to concede that the resulting machine does "understand" for all definitions that matter, or you have to admit that you believe in magic [1].
[1]: or desperately grasp for loopholes, like nondeterminsitic physical micro-interactions, but might as well call that magic.
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I fully agree with your view.
My take is that the whole chinese room argument rests on extremely nebulous and shaky definitions/assumptions, rendering it worthless.
It seems fairly obvious to me that the system of operator + rulebook does "understand" chinese, for every practical definition of "understanding".
Another counterargument would be simple physical simulation: If you built a computer program that could simulate a human by the atom, then you would either have to concede that the resulting machine does "understand" for all definitions that matter, or you have to admit that you believe in magic [1].
[1]: or desperately grasp for loopholes, like nondeterminsitic physical micro-interactions, but might as well call that magic.