Most of the confusion around the Chinese Room arises when people don't realize that "computer" and "computation" are not synonyms. Turing defined computation a

Most of the confusion around the Chinese Room arises when people don't realize that "computer" and "computation" are not synonyms. Turing defined computation as I/O behavior. The Church–Turing Thesis states that as far as their I/O behavior is concerned, all sufficiently general computational mechanisms (computers) are equivalent. The Chinese Room Argument presents a stupid computational mechanism with I/O behavior equivalent to a human communicating in Chinese. Some people then conclude that because the Chinese Room is clearly not intelligent and "because all computers are equivalent", computers cannot be intelligent. But that requires leaving out the qualifications from the Church–Turing Thesis. But maybe there is more to computers than their external I/O behavior. Maybe intelligence is a property of the internal behavior of a system rather than its external behavior. Then there could be some computers that are intelligent and others that are not, even if they have the same external behavior.