Mark Pharoah
This is an excerpt from a podcast recorded for Philosophybites.com. Nigel Warburton is interviewing Daniel Dennett on the Chinese Room. The excerpt is discussed in detail at http://mind-phronese.co.uk/intentionality
Source
Dennett Chinese Room excerpt from PhilosophyBites.com
Miri… huh?
I'm with Dennett on this, but just to play Devils's Advocate:
Suppose the Chinese Room is equipped with a lookup table for every possible question (so its size is not just astronomical, it's cosmological). In that case, Searle finds that question in the index, copies out the answer ("rainy, like today", even though he can't read it) and drops it into the OUT slot. The system is not manipulating images, and definitely not doing what a human brain would do.
Now does the system understand?