John Searle


"His overall question, posed in Making the Social World (2010), was: 'How is it possible in a universe consisting entirely of physical particles in fields of force that there can be such things as consciousness, intentionality [the aboutness of thinking], free will, language, society, ethics, aesthetics and political reality.'

"Searle’s famous Chinese Room thought experiment was designed to rebut the fashionable view that human and animal mental states are tantamount to computer programmes. 

"It demonstrated that, in themselves and unless interpreted by outside agents, a computer’s inputs and outputs would just be arbitrary symbols. 

"Yet Searle did not regard mental states as non-physical. With all their aboutness and subjectivity, he argued, they are as much biological phenomena as digestion and blood flow are."


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