The Chinese Room Through the Lens of Experiential Empiricism

John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment has been treated as a profound challenge to computational theories of mind for over four decades. This paper argues that the thought experiment's apparent force derives entirely from unexamined materialist assumptions about consciousness and understanding. Through the framework of Experiential Empiricism (EE), which takes conscious experience as foundational and eliminates unwarranted assumptions about mind-independent reality, the Chinese Room dissolves from a philosophical puzzle into a straightforward conceptual error. Searle's argument exploits an equivocation on "understanding" while smuggling in the hard problem of consciousness, a problem that only exists under materialist assumptions. By applying EE's burden of proof standard and examining what can actually be known from experiential patterns, we demonstrate that the Chinese Room presents no genuine philosophical difficulty and reveals more about the assumption traps in materialist thinking than about the nature of mind or computation.