Comment by Zarathruster

I'd quibble with some of this, but overall I agree: the Chinese Room has a lot of features that really aren't ideal and easily lead to misinterpretation.

I also didn't love the "observer-relative" vs. "observer-independent" terminology. The concepts seem to map pretty closely to "objective" vs. "subjective" and I feel like he might've confused fewer people if he'd used them instead (unless there's some crucial distinction that I'm missing). Then again, it might've ended up confusing things even more when we get to the ontology of consciousness (which exists objectively, but is experienced subjectively), so maybe it was the right move.