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He imagined a man locked in a room, correctly answering questions in Chinese by following a rulebook without understanding a word of it: his argument that no computer, however cleverly programmed, truly understands anything either.
He named the hard problem of consciousness, why physical processes feel like anything at all, and no one has solved it yet.
Connection
John Searle biological naturalism versus the hard problem David Chalmers — Searle and Chalmers directly engaged each other's arguments in the consciousness debates of the 1990s, Searle insisting consciousness is a straightforward biological property of brains against Chalmers's case that the hard problem resists any such easy naturalization.
Ideas
Words
“Whatever purely formal principles you put into the computer, they will not be sufficient for understanding, since a human will be able to follow the formal principles without understanding anything.”
“Speaking a language is engaging in a rule-governed form of behavior.”
“Consciousness is at once the most familiar and the most mysterious aspect of our lives.”
“Why does the performance of these functions feel like something from the inside?”
Key Moments
1980
Publishes the Chinese Room argument
2019
Stripped of emeritus status
1994
Names the hard problem of consciousness
2004
NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness
Works
Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language
The Conscious Mind