I've read one of Searle's popular books (Rediscovery of the Mind) and many other shorter writings. I'm aware he rejects dualism - my point is that the Chinese R

I've read one of Searle's popular books (Rediscovery of the Mind) and many other shorter writings. I'm aware he rejects dualism - my point is that the Chinese Room argument wouldn't even make sense to someone who had never been contaminated by dualist notions. Searle rejects it, but it has crept back in, imo. His arguments against the "systems response" have to stand or fall on their own. The Chinese room doesn't have anything to add. If the "systems response" fails, then we already know a computer can't be conscious without any additional thought experiments. Lastly, I think he goes much too far in dispelling the mystery of the word "computer". As Dennett and others have pointed out, a working chinese room that displayed clear signs of consciousness would be an artifact far beyond current human comprehension, either in scale or sophistification or both. Searle asks you to imagine a human taking slips of paper and calmly consulting a rule book and producing new slips of paper, and claims that it is "obvious" that this system can't be conscious. Well, I agree, but it's equally obvious that the system couldn't possibly display conscious-seeming behavior. The best defense of the CR that I've heard is that it is only intended to prove that a _purely formal_ system (i.e. GOFAI) can't be conscious. I find this more plausible, but I still don't think the CR adds anything to that argument. And, to reiterate the previous paragraph, I think if you had a formal system that everyone agreed _seemed_ conscious, it would be such a complex artifact that it wouldn't be obviously unconscious in the way that, say, an eliza bot is.