> allows a person to interact with someone in a language they don't speak Here is the flaw in your reasoning. The human who is following the directions in the

> allows a person to interact with someone in a language they don't speak Here is the flaw in your reasoning. The human who is following the directions in the book certainly isn't the consciousness we need to be thinking about any more than the mitochondria in our brains are conscious. In Searle's analogy, the human in that room is simply the power source. The consciousness is in the state of the room. Searle's analogy also seems to hide the importance of state. The agent just looking up symbols in a book, and that page tells them what to do with the next symbol is essentially a combinational circuit, a static function. If those are the rules then I'd agree there is no consciousness there. But I'd also say it is impossible for a computer to translate C++ source code to machine language ... if it cannot retain state. If Searle's room has enough rule books and means for storing enough state, then I'd say consciousness would be possible. The best reverse argument is that if human consciousness is not the result of a naturalistic, physical process and requires some extra-physical process to make it all work, at some point the laws of physics must be broken which causes the purely physical brain to do something other than what the laws of physic dictate it should do. Where are the violations of physics? Penrose waves his hands and says quantum physics, but that is not an explanation, just an obscuring smoke screen. How does the addition of apparently random events make something more likely to be conscious? Are there sufficient degrees of freedom for this extra-physical conscious agent to manipulate quantum fluctuations to force the physical outcome it desires in a consistent manner? If it is theoretically possible, is it practically possible to compute what quantum butterflies should flap their wings?