IMHO the Chinese room thought experiment is essentially a tautology which hinges on the validity of the key assumptions it implies, namely, that such a room is

IMHO the Chinese room thought experiment is essentially a tautology which hinges on the validity of the key assumptions it implies, namely, that such a room is possible. So, Searle supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with encoded instructions that supposedly allow him to communicate in Chinese; and he also supposes that being able to convince the Chinese-speaker that they're speaking to a human (i.e. passing a Turing test) is sufficient to demonstrate "understanding" - for whatever definition of "understanding" Searle wants to use. If we discount the second assumption (which might be the case - IMHO humans could be tricked in a Turing test by something that makes zero pretense at understanding anything), then there's no paradox, then it's just an experiment that's too weak to say anything about "understanding" whatsoever; but since Searle considers the experiment valid, let's assume that this holds, and if someone/something can convince the Chinese person of "proper understanding", then that someone/something would really have "proper understanding". So it comes down to whether simply blindly following instructions a book can achieve proper understanding. If yes, then Searle must concede the argument. And if not, then Searle's room simply doesn't work - apparently such a book is impossible to make or have, the Chinese room can't exist and the impossible experiment can't have any results. In essence, it's a tautology - no matter how ridiculous you consider encoding "proper understanding" in a book of instructions, if you start with an assumption that you do have such a book, then you obviously have assumed a world where the combination of instructions+mindless executor can have "proper understanding"; and if you start with an assumption that a machine like that definitely can not be thinking "properly" (as Searle does) and Strong AI is impossible, then you have thrown away the key thing required for the thought experiment - the possibility for such a Strong-AI-enabling book to exist. If you make two assumptions and find out that they are incompatible - like Searle does here - then you can deduce that at least one of them is wrong, but it does not say anything at all about which one of them is wrong, so I don't see much value in this thought experiment.