Problems with this argument. Hardware may in fact matter a lot to nature of thinking, e.g. massively parallel neural networks. Similar mental states with different hardware may have different emergent properties, e.g. consciousness. The Chinese room argument 1. Your are locked in a room.
Chinese symbols come in a slot.
You look up the symbols in a book and then put other symbols out the slot. Unknown to you, you are holding a conversation in Chinese, but you clearly do not understand Chinese. Analogously, a computer is just a symbol processor and does not understand anything. Computer symbols have syntax but no semantics. Objections to Searle 1.