One important nuance to the Chinese Room is to keep in mind that, even as a black box, there must be limitations on its behavior. We can infer those limitations

One important nuance to the Chinese Room is to keep in mind that, even as a black box, there must be limitations on its behavior. We can infer those limitations. We start with Aaronson's observation [0] that the Chinese Room's complexity can be analyzed. Let us assume that the Room responds in (N)P time, and in particular not EXP time. Then the dictionary must be poly-sized. Further, the dictionary is finite but the input strings are unbounded in length, so that we must be able to divide and conquer somehow. Therefore we only need log-many steps to walk the dictionary. The dictionary is ordered, and so indexed, and so walked in log-time. We can conclude that Searle's definition of intelligence is basically the ability to execute certain kinds of basic katamorphisms, akin to pregroup grammars [1] or other categorical grammars; in other words, Searle says that intelligence is merely the ability to talk convincingly like a human, and not necessarily any of the other features that we see across Mammalia. Searle might retort that the Room knows facts about the world. This would require us to augment our pregroup/category, enriching it with relational information. For example, in the utterance "I like cats", we might annotate each word with a relation or type, and then look them up in a secondary database-book. We can see here that it would then be the database-book which has an opinion on cats, since "I" becomes merely another symbol in the database. This is reminiscent of Hofstadter's critique of Searle (supported by his other work), in which he suggests that "I" is indeed merely a self-referent symbol which leads to a strange loop, or as he puts it, "I am a strange loop." Here, the strangeness of the loop is provided by the ability of "I" to be both a plain word in the textual language and also a referent symbol in the symbolic database. Edit: Forgot the main takeaway: When Searle and Turing measure intelligence based on a person's ability to respond to textual queries with textual answers, but the entire interface between the tester and the person is the ability to give textual answers to textual questions, then we aren't measuring intelligence anymore. We've struck Goodhart's Law [2] and we can imagine that the most successful people in these tests will be those who can abuse glitches in text-processing systems. [0] https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregroup_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregroup_grammar [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law