The Chinese room is a silly example, in which a highly simplified physical system that doesn't appear to have conscious thought is extended to the idea that no merely physical system has conscious thought. If the structure of the Chinese room was not a simple catalog of questions and answers, but hundreds of billions of complicated cardboard-and-marble apparatus, each processing some amount of data in a way that individually seemed meaningless, but together produced cogent speech... would you still be so sure it wasn't conscious?
This is a good point. The chinese room seems to stem from a more antiquated system of serial processing and the analogy doesn't quite hold when we look at the massive parallelism that occurs in the human mind that gives us consciousness. Furthermore humans can still think in the absence of understanding. In fact id argue a majority thoughts by people are conjugated without full understanding of the subject of the thought.
