And the reason the argument is absurd is that of course the room doesn't understand Chinese; it's a lookup table! No Chinese speaker interacting with the Chines

And the reason the argument is absurd is that of course the room doesn't understand Chinese; it's a lookup table! No Chinese speaker interacting with the Chinese room for any reasonable period of time would think it held a Chinese speaker, because all it accepts are questions, and it answers the same question the same way every time. Of course, Searle would say that the set of rules in the room is defined to be such that a Chinese person would think they were interacting with a Chinese speaker, but the very setup of the system prevents this from being possible. The thought experiment is fundamentally incoherent.