In your first post in this thread you wrote "the Chinese room needs to be taken super-literally" - a sentiment I agreed with - but since then (starting immediat

In your first post in this thread you wrote "the Chinese room needs to be taken super-literally" - a sentiment I agreed with - but since then (starting immediately afterwards, in fact) you seem to think that Searle is restricting the capabilities of the room to those of a hash table. I am pretty sure that a close reading of his paper will fail to reveal any such restriction, and, in fact, if it did, that would count against his argument. Similarly, nothing you say, here or elsewhere among these replies, about the limitations of hash tables, supports Searle's argument (or more general arguments against Hard AI.) Nor is Searle arguing that the Chinese room, if it could be implemented, must use language (beyond the capabilities that he does require of it, which is answering questions from an ill-defined domain.) And as far as I can tell, he does not require it to, as you somewhat vaguely put it, "act in the world with words" beyond this. The systems reply does not need to do anything more than show that Searle is making some unargued-for assumptions about what Hard AI would imply - and Searle's response to it so completely misses the point of that reply that he is actually helping make it clear! (For more details, see the second paragraph of my previous post; as far as I can tell, no argument has been raised against the points I made there.) The limitations of Turing machines are similarly beside the point. A computer, such as those involved in the composition and delivery of this reply, is not just a Turing machine (not even a universal one), even though it is capable of implementing one (up to the physical limits of memory). In particular, a computer (as opposed to a Turing machine) can incorporate environmental inputs, including physically-derived entropy, and can use these in simulating physical processes. You are evidently fond of the phrase "[Reality/the world] is not a computer"; that may be so, but rather more definitively, I think, one can say that the mind is an information processor. I understand that it seems inconceivable to you that a mind could be produced by a suitably-programmed computer of any power, and I am aware that I can only offer hand-wavy arguments for that proposition. I think you are mistaken, however, to read Searle's Chinese Room argument as being about, let alone supporting, the broader intuitions you have expressed in your reply to me and to others. Searle, who is, after all, a philosopher of considerable stature, is well aware that you need something more than just one's intuitions to make a respectable argument; that alone would not pass peer review.