<i>I&#x27;m sure most people would agree no conscious experience of understanding would emerge from the combination of man + rule set.</i><p>There&#x27;s a subtle dishonesty in the Chinese room experiment, because it&#x27;s asking you to imagine a system which is many orders of magnitude too small to have an intelligent conversation in Chinese (or in any other language).<p>Using some back-of-the-envelope numbers from Moravec, based on his research into visual algorithms that duplicate the human retina, the absolute <i>minimum</i> number of operations to do what the brain does would appear to be around 10^15 operations per second (and possibly much, much higher).<p>If we assume that man in the room can perform one operation per second, and that we need to provide at least 10 seconds of normal conversation, that means the man in the room will need to work non-stop for 310 million years. (If you said, &quot;No, more like 30 billion,&quot; I&#x27;d say, &quot;Sure, that&#x27;s totally plausible.&quot; Or even 30 trillion.)<p>Now, if we assume that the man spends, say, 5 million years working down one cortical column and up another, modelling complex patterns of visual recognition, language analysis, vocabulary selection, and so on, then my intuition no longer tells me whether or not there&#x27;s an immense, glacial consciousness playing out inside that room. While we wait for an answer new phyla will evolve, entire species will arise and go extinct, and so on. If we&#x27;ve even slightly underestimated the computation required, the sun will turn into a red giant and wipe out life on the planet before the Chinese room responds, &quot;Hey, how are you doing?&quot;<p>There&#x27;s a second possibility here: Maybe the Chinese room isn&#x27;t a very slow computer. Maybe it&#x27;s a giant lookup table, containing every possible Chinese conversation. I&#x27;m pretty sure a lookup table isn&#x27;t conscious. But if we use a lookup table, then it&#x27;s going to need to be <i>unimaginably</i> larger than our entire universe.<p>If Searle wants to appeal to intuition, he needs to make his appeals realistic. He can&#x27;t sweep 300+ million years under the rug, for example. Or hide a lookup table which makes the entire universe look like a speck of dust in comparison.