I know Searle replied to this, but don’t remember what he said, except it seemed a little ridiculous to talk about sentient rooms. I think it’s much more plausible to just claim that the people who wrote the instructions know Chinese.
>it seemed a little ridiculous to talk about sentient rooms
That's part of the sleight of hand employed in the argument, of reducing it to one person in a room with a table stacked with symbols in front of them. He's misdirecting our intuition with a trick of scale. If instead I said the "room" was the size of Jupiter, and it had a vast army of people manipulating the symbols, and each input and output took millions of years (or you speed up the rate of manipulation arbitrarily), all of a sudden it seems less implausible.
I'd say the biggest slight of hand is that human's understand other humans "knowing" something as something happening internal to an individuals brain. Holding a biology book in front of you doesn't mean you know everything in the book. What you "know" are the things from the book that you've stored in your brain.
We can modify the thought experiment so that it's something internal to the persons brain. The person doesn't learn Chinese as most people do, but a computer rewires their mind to be the same as someone who did. Think of The Matrix, when Neo says "I know Kung Fu." Would people then say this person speaks Chinese? I imagine just about everyone would say yes.
