John Searle is a contemporary philosopher whose major work can be seen as consisting in three main efforts: a critique of computationalism and strong artificial intelligence (AI), the development of a theory of intentionality, and the formulation of a naturalized theory of consciousness. The best known example of Searle's critique of computationalism and strong AI is his Chinese Room Argument. The main thrust of this thought experiment is to show that the syntactic manipulation of formal symbols does not by itself constitute a semantics.
-- taken from kurzweilAI.net@