PDF with timestamp certificate for download and citation. Introduction Searle’s Chinese Room is a thought experiment which is supposed to prime our intuition against the possibility that the brain is simply some type of computer. It has a long history. First published in 1980, it came to my awareness only in the 1990s, when it was then mainly being discussed in the context of progress in things like early neural networks and whether such ‘sub-symbolic’ architectures made Sear