Searle puts a man who doesn't speak Chinese into a room with a rulebook. The man receives prompts in Chinese and has to manipulate these given symbols, according to this rulebook, to produce plausible sounding responses in Chinese. The people on the outside are convinced that the person inside the room can understand Chinese, but the man inside, as we’ve stated, doesn’t.

I wonder if the Chinese, confused by the sudden appearance of a mysterious box with a man inside, might at least be somewhat concerned with this man's wellbeing. Did Searle leave him with any food or water? How long has he been in there for?

Maybe the Chinese do just that—they send in a prompt that asks if he's hungry—"奇怪人，你饿吗?"—and then, hold on, how does the man reply? Let's see what the rulebook has to say.

Maybe the rulebook says that whenever a question is asked of the person inside the room, then the person in the room should just respond with how they are feeling. So, upon receiving this prompt in Mandarin enquiring if the strange man inside hungry, the rulebook guides the man to say yes, yes he is hungry, thank fucking god for food. And if the Chinese then follow up with a question on what food he likes—does the rulebook then let him say that he loves peking duck with extra hoisin sauce?

This has to be a slippery slope to something outside of Searle's original experiment. For the room to demonstrate this kind of understanding of Chinese, the rulebook would need to take the man’s internal states as a semantic input. But that will no longer be a view of language as pure, syntactical manipulation.

So the rules would probably have to be more deterministic. What if Searle chose one possible answer for each of the possible questions in the world, and wrote all of them down in the rulebook. In that case, the rulebook should probably lean towards more ambiguous answers, like:

'Are you okay?' — 'I don't know’.
'Why are you in China?' — 'I don't know’.
'Who put you in this box?' — 'I don't know’.

But can this (or any other set of deterministic mappings) still constitute an understanding of Chinese? I can't figure out how to rescue Searle's room from these two failure modes. The way I see it, the room holds perfectly fine for questions like

'What is the colour of the sky?' — ‘Blue'
'What is two plus two?' — ‘Four'

but breaks down in questions which refer to the subjectivity of the person inside the room. I...

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