Why does the person in the Chinese room produce sensible Chinese answers without understanding Chinese?

The person in the Chinese room produces sensible answers without understanding the language because they are following a set of formal rules—a manual—that dictates how to manipulate symbols based solely on their appearance, or syntactic properties, rather than their meaning.12

In this thought experiment developed by John Searle, the person acts as a computer program. By matching input strings of Chinese characters to appropriate output strings using the provided instructions, the person can simulate the ability to communicate in Chinese.12

Searle argues that this process demonstrates that mere symbol manipulation is insufficient for genuine understanding. Even if the output is indistinguishable from that of a native speaker, the person remains ignorant of the language's semantic content because they are only processing the formal structure of the symbols, not their significance.12