The argument in John Searle’s famous “Chinese room” experiment is that understanding or intelligence in general is not the same as teaching a computer symbols, recognition of them, or computations. In this experiment a man is instructed to translate a paper with squiggles by an answer key, through “if, then” statements such as if “squiggle” then “squiggle”. These squiggles are actually Chinese letters. But it is clear that the man does not understand or can even write Chinese, he is just following a set of instructions. It refutes that the computational theory of mind is true because it shows that we don’t need to understand something in order to carry out a task- a computation is different from understanding. He explains that even if there’s
