Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 85 of 138
The Chinese room threatened the citadel of functionalism
Forget about consciousness, which is scientifically irrelevant anyway. What matters about the mind is its capacity for information processing, and the modern computer at long last gives us the right model for understanding the information processing capacities of the mind. This conception in modern materialism that consciousness could be set on one side, while we concentrated on intentionality, is why there were so many more attacks on the Chinese Room than on the other arguments. It threatened the very citadel of the functionalist-computationalist account, which is the idea that if you had the right input-output relations, and if you had the right program mediating those relations, then you would have all there is to intentionality. The Chinese Room Argument shows that there are two things going on in the human being, one is the actual symbols that the human is aware of when he or she thinks, and second, there is the meaning, or interpretation, or sense that attaches to those symbols.