>Finally, why should a person communicating from the Chinese room sometimes be treated as simply themselves and other times as only a mouthpiece of the system?

>Finally, why should a person communicating from the Chinese room sometimes be treated as simply themselves and other times as only a mouthpiece of the system? If one of the participants simply responds to queries from outside the room with their own thoughts, how does that show sentience for the dinner party as a system? No offense, but you are illustrating exactly the confusion I was referring to in my original comment. The tendency is to assume that the whole is as sentient as the parts, and in the case of human organizations, that is not true. I think the short explanation is that the human participation is highly constrained---the members are employing a very small subset of their human potential to play their limited role in the organization. And the communication rate between these "slivers of a human" is much lower than that between the components of a single human mind. So the emergent behavior of the system as a whole is much simpler than the operation of a single human mind.