a Chinese room that merely appears to understand is doing. Therefore,  he says, thinking is essentially something different to following arbitrary rules. Alan Saunders : So, we have the Chinese fed in and you get not just answers but appropriate answers? James Franklin : Yes, it seemed to be appropriate answers to someone who understands Chinese. Peter Slezak : No, I think it's terrible, and in a way it surprises me that it's had such a long life, because I think what's wrong with it is more or less obvious if you don't describe it in the tricky way that Searle describes it. I mean, as Jim rightly pointed out, the story depends on a person, Searle, an intelligent person, in the room, and Jim didn't complete the story, although he implied it, that the contrast with getting the meaning to the symbols and not understanding them and mechanically as it were feeding out answers that look meaningful, the contrast that Searle makes is the case in which the messages that come into the room are in English, which he does understand, and so he says, 'Now, look at the difference between the case in which there's no understanding going on', and he's particularly of course focusing on the idea of symbolic computation, which is the model of computers, as Jim rightly said, and he contrasts that with a case in which he does understand the symbols by looking at them, because he's a speaker of English, and he says,