Do the critics of J. Searle take everything into account when leaving the Chinese Room?

This article is a critical response to Sergey B. Kulikov’s Did John Searle Take Everything into Account When Entering the Chinese Room? It seeks to examine not so much the soundness of the objection to Searle’s critique of strong artificial intelligence put forward by Kulikov as the adequacy of Sergey B. Kulikov’s proposed strategy of defending against objections of this kind.
First, it is shown why an appeal to progress and the emergence of qualitatively different architectures of intelligent systems, such as neural networks, cannot be rejected by invoking John Searle’s biological naturalism and his brain simulation reply. Then an attempt is made to relate Kulikov’s objection to the American philosopher’s thought experiment to other critical responses. On this basis, a distinctive way of classifying the variety of refutations of Searle’s argument is developed, and critiques that rely on new architectures of intelligent systems are located within the resulting types.
At the final stage, alternative ways are proposed different from those employed by Kulikov of defending John Searle’s intuitions against strong artificial intelligence. It is concluded that, without a renewal of the conceptual foundations of the Chinese Room argument, Searle’s original hypothesis remains in a vulnerable position.

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