Here's something Searle wrote in a reply to a letter in the New York Review of Books (2/16/89):
"The original Chinese room argument is so simple that its point tends to get lost in the dozens of interpretations, comments, and criticisms to which it has been subjected over the years. The point is this: a digital computer is a device which manipulates symbols, without any reference to their meaning or interpretation. Human beings, on the other hand, when they think, do something much more than that. A human mind has meaningful thoughts, feelings, and mental contents generally. Formal symbols by themselves can never be enough for mental contents, because the symbols, by definition, have no meaning (or interpretation, or semantics) except insofar as someone outside the system gives it to them."
So for Searle we're can't be Chinese Rooms because our minds contain meanings. But this leaves unanswered what "meanings" are, and regardless of what they might be, I'm not satisfied by his claim that machines that manipulate symbols cannot have them.
Curtiss