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If someone internalizes the system in his head, ignoring practicality (which makes it hard to properly imagine the situation), then he's acting as a dumb CPU executing a Chinese program. The answer is still "the man doesn't know Chinese, the system does". The answer feels strange because "the man" is in the man's head and "the system" is also in the man's head, but that doesn't make them the same thing or mean that they both have the same knowledge.
Of course, in Searle's time, "come on, he's running a virtual machine" isn't something you could really say because people weren't familiar with the concept.
Virtual machines were a thing since 1965, and Searle wrote his nonsense about intentionality in 1983, and the Chinese Room in 1980.
If someone has the gall to claim to disprove the possibility of artificial intelligence, as he set out to do, it would help to have some understanding of computer science. But alas.
I agree with you but Searle and his defenders wouldn't. As far as I'm concerned, it matters not a jot if the system is embedded inside a brain, up an arse, or in the room their arse is resting in.
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