I don&#x27;t think they are the same and that the idea mentioned by Smaug123 is not a refutation at all. A native Chinese speaker is also made and prepared by its parents and teachers and so on to understand Chinese but if you placed him in the room you would certainly not attribute its capability to understand the questions and reply to them to its parents and teachers, they past this capability to him and are no longer relevant. The same holds for the rule book, its creator codified his understanding of Chinese and the world in it but is itself no longer relevant. He is certainly not part of an entity that does the understanding in this setup because he has no knowledge of the questions past into the room and might as well be dead for a long time.