John Searle’s thought experiment imagines a room receiving Chinese characters and producing appropriate replies by following a large table of rules. The responses may look intelligent even though no one inside understands Chinese. section 9.3.1
The argument challenges whether behavioral performance alone demonstrates understanding. Legg’s reply is that understanding matters only when it changes performance: if systems behave identically across environments, this framework offers no practical basis for treating one as more understanding than the other. section 9.3.1
