"if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other d

"if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis" The italics summarise it pretty neatly. It's an argument explicitly framed against Turing's more dubious thought experiment. If even a conscious being in the room can follow instructions, retrieve data and perform operations on it related to symbol manipulation flawlessly without having any sort of "understanding" of anything the symbols actually correspond to, there's no reason to deduce that the running part of a silicon-based machine must from the quality of the symbol outputs it can emit when plugged into a big enough library. Critics' insistence that this makes the "error" of neglecting the possibility that ongoing "understanding" (as opposed to inert symbolic representation of an absent writer's understanding) takes place in the books are actually irrelevant to this point, as well as more than a bit weird. Living outside a Chinese room, I also improve my communication skill and interpret others' understanding by interacting with books, but I wouldn't consider the books themselves a constituent part of my thought processes. As you point out yourself, GPT has structural properties which make it very easy to classify as an entirely different thing from a human mind despite the similarity of outputs it is capable of producing, and the hypothetical room is even more dissimilar. The possibility it can produce output tokens which correspond to abstractions which humans interpret as consistent with human thought is not evidence that "thought" resides in patterns of abstract representation, not the physics of the organism. We know language is lossy.