> Regular meat-and-bone people lose consciousness all the time, and regain it later. No big deal.

So what? There are lots of REAL physical processes that are disrupted in a human being when they lose consciousness.

The point of the Chinese Room is to show that information processing alone is insufficient for consciousness. For example is information processing happening when the person pauses for a minute - or not? For a second, for a millisecond? What about when the pen comes off the paper? What about when he's sharpening his pencil? How exactly does the consciousness=information processing idea work for these situations? It's a nonsense idea that doesn't hold up to careful inspection.

And it's exactly akin to saying we get nuclear power by simulating a nuclear power plant in a computer.

On the other hand, if we believe that consciousness is like an ordinary physical property of the universe, either emergent or fundamental, then it should be related to other physical properties, just as electromagnetism is to mass and energy.