[sir_pudding]

As I said, either it's flawed or I don't understand it.

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

A Chinese speaker encompasses all parts of the Chinese language speaking process,

Why can't you say the same thing about the Chinese speaking AI?

even if in the case of the room the process is done by parts (the operator, the reference books, and the author) that individually don't have full comprehension or expression:

Can't you break the Chinese speakers brain out into parts too and equate those processes with the parts of the Chinese room, just as the original experiment attempts to equate the room with the parts of a Chinese speaking AI? Say that the speech centers are like the instructions and the hippocampus is like the filing cabinet and the lexical nodes are like the dictionaries, and the prefrontal cortex is like the operator and so on. So the Chinese speaker is just another kind of Chinese room (like the AI) and nobody "actually" speaks Chinese.

II. The operator can see what characters are coming and going and knows how to look them up and see what characters to respond with, but does not know what they mean, and

Your visual cortex alone doesn't know what written words mean, this is pretty clear from brain damage studies.

III. The books contain the rules for how to generate outputs based on inputs, but have no capacity to act.

Your speech centers alone appear to have the ability to generate outputs based on inputs but aren't capable of generating intention by themselves, as far as I understand the neurobiology. This is why so much human speech is able to be done with minimal conscious thought and people are able to "speak before they think", right?