The Chinese room thought experiment is based on logically unsound reasoning and I don’t understand why it has taken hold as widely as it has. The logical argume

The Chinese room thought experiment is based on logically unsound reasoning and I don’t understand why it has taken hold as widely as it has. The logical argument is that a composite object of a book, room, and person following directions cannot understand Chinese, but there is no justification for this claim—it is, as far as I can tell, a complete non-sequitur. Perhaps I just misunderstand it? Because the logic underlying the Chinese room argument is unsound, it naturally leads to some bizarre conclusions. I think it’s a bit of a tragedy that it’s a staple of philosophy 101 courses, unless you use it as an example for teaching logic by dissecting it and showing how it is unsound. Personally my view is that as much as we need our scientists and ML researchers to study epistemology, we need our epistemologists to study science and mathematics. Any coherent and comprehensive epistemological system in the future will have to somehow synthesize things like substance monism, post-Fisherian / post-Bayesian statistics, post-Popper science, and computational complexity theory. Just as too many ML researchers are reluctant to dip into philosophy and reinvent a poorer version of old philosohpical arguments, there are too many philosophers that would rather e.g. rehash some ideas of Hegel rather than step outside their own field long enough to synthesize new ideas.