John Searle
Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley, United States
Profile – John Searle (b. 1932)
John Searle is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Berkeley, where he has been since 1959. He says he is, and always has been, ‘interested in everything’. As a student at the University of Wisconsin he resigned as president of the student board to study harder. He then went to Oxford where he spent three years as a Rhodes scholar and became a don at Christ Church. He has written books on language, rationality, and consciousness, including The Rediscovery of the Mind and Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception, and his books have been translated into more than twenty languages. His Chinese Room thought experiment is probably the best-known argument against the possibility of ‘Strong AI’, a term that he invented. He says that ‘brains cause minds’ and argues for ‘biological naturalism’.
More biographical information
Bio, CV, and courses, Philosophy department, UC Berkeley
Entry in Encyclopædia Britannica
It upsets me when I read the nonsense written by my contemporaries. Interview for NewPhilosopher, January 2014
The philosopher in the world. Interview for the New York Review of Books, June 2014
Twitter @JohnRSearle
Publications
Selected bibliography
Citations on Google Scholar
Quotes on Goodreads
Selected publications relevant to consciousness
Searle, J. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417–457 (incl. commentaries and author’s response). Open-access full text here.
Searle, J. (1992). The rediscovery of the mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Google Books preview here.
Searle, J. (1997). The mystery of consciousness. New York: New York Review of Books. Google Books preview here.
Searle, J. (1999). I married a computer. Review of R. Kurzweil, The age of spiritual machines: When computers exceed human intelligence. New York Review of Books, 8 April. Paywall-protected magazine preview here.
Searle, J. R. (2004). Mind: A brief introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Books preview here.
Video
Our shared condition – consciousness. Lecture on consciousness as a biological phenomenon, TEDxCERN, May 2013
Consciousness in artificial intelligence. Talk at Google, December 2015
Consciousness and causality. Talk at Evolution and Function Summer School, University of Montreal, July 2012
Contributions to Closer to Truth, including free will, the mind–body problem, and more
Audio
Three free courses on mind, language, and society, for Open Culture