 On its tenth anniversary the Chinese Room argument was featured in the general science periodical Scientific American. Leading the opposition to Searle’s lead article in that issue were philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland. The Churchlands agree with Searle that the Chinese Room does not understand Chinese, but hold that the argument itself exploits our ignorance of cognitive and semantic phenomena. They raise a parallel case of “The Luminous Room” where someone waves a magnet and argues that the absence of resulting visible light shows that Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory is false. The Churchlands advocate a view of the brain as a connectionist system, a vector transformer, not a system manipulating symbols according to structure-sensitive rules. The system in the Chinese Room uses the wrong computational strategies. Thus they agree with Searle against traditional AI, but they presumably would endorse what Searle calls “the Brain Simulator Reply”, arguing that, as with the Luminous Room, our intuitions fail us when considering such a complex system, and it is a fallacy to move from part to whole: “… no neuron in my brain understands English, although my whole brain does.”