Comment by hackinthebochs

>How does a person's brain containing all the facts, information, and skills that it needs to have a fluent conversation in Chinese imply that the person understands Chinese? How does it not!?

Notice that the man while having memorized the rulebook can't convey any fact of his childhood in Chinese. He can only convey facts encoded in the rulebook, perhaps of a hypothetical childhood. The point is there are different ways information is stored in the brain; one way is through rote memory, the other is something like semantic memory. The rulebook encoded as rote memory doesn't endow his semantic memory contact with the meaning of the symbols. Hence the man doesn't understand Chinese.

This doesn't render the Chinese argument successful. The system's reply still stands when understood properly. I like to call it the virtual mind objection. Physically executing the rules in the rulebook just instantiates a virtual mind. Whether the man is reading the rules from the book or just pulling them from memory is irrelevant.