 CRA is based on a thought-experiment in which Searle himself stars. He is inside a room; outside the room are native Chinese speakers who don’t know that Searle is inside it. Searle-in-the-box, like Searle-in-real-life, doesn’t know any Chinese, but is fluent in English. The Chinese speakers send cards into the room through a slot; on these cards are written questions in Chinese. The box, courtesy of Searle’s secret work therein, returns cards to the native Chinese speakers as output. Searle’s output is produced by consulting a rulebook: this book is a lookup table that tells him what Chinese to produce based on what is sent in. To Searle, the Chinese is all just a bunch of – to use Searle’s language – squiggle-squoggles. The following schematic picture sums up the situation. The labels should be obvious. \(O\) denotes the outside observers, in this case the Chinese speakers. Input is denoted by \(i\) and output by \(o\). As you can see, there is an icon for the rulebook, and Searle himself is denoted by \(P\).