Rebuttal to the rebutt... (sigh)
I suppose the place to start is in response to fondue. While it is true that the system (chinese room) doesn't understand what it is doing, this does not rule out sentience of the system itself. My brain is a system of cells performing lots of stupid (as in non intelligent / x86 computer reproducible) jobs, and the way these jobs are performed does not vary; cellular processes are constant. However, I am sentient and I'm only the sum of my neurons...
Its an interesting debate. I am sentient, which is to say self-aware, and I myself am really only this collection of dumb cells. The two ways out of this that I can see are :
There is a non materialist solution to the dillemna; souls exist, and I had durned well better start going to mass again.
The materialist answer : all matter and all possible combinations/collections of matter are self aware in the same way that I am.
The second possibility is more interesting to me. If we assume that there is nothing in the universe beyond the rules of physics and that all matter is essentially the same (ie one lump of carbon has as much "soul" as the next, by which we mean zero) then that means that there is no good explanation why the brain inside my body is self aware if it merely a complex system of matter. If there are no properties outside of the properties of physical matter as materialism would hold, then there is no reason why my brain should be conscious / sentient and a rock should not.
Thus, either all systems are sentient, or none of them are. I'm sentient... so I guess according to the materialist perspective so is everything else, and all possile combinations of matter in the universe if considered as systems. Eek. I guess this means that some interpretation of the universe knows about it every time I download pr0n.
However, as raised in NSA's post, it may be that while everything is conscious, only some systems may be sapient. Could rocks be self aware, yet entirely unable to give responses to questions, other than sitting there and being hard?