Now it gets interesting.

When I last left you with Searle, I felt disappointed and short changed. It seemed as though he had dropped the ball, and didn't have a firm grasp of the topic, and furthermore wasn't going to take consciousness seriously.
Ah, but there's a twist! The last two chapters have been materialism bashing. First he goes through the history materialism, which is very interesting. Essentially starting with psychology and behaviorism which really brought on the return in popularity of the view, and then moving on to functionalism which is basically just a more in depth view. Essentially the development of the computer, and the idea that the brain is just like a computer, our brain being the hardware and our thoughts being the software, was probably the climax and biggest triumph of the materialists. They now had an explanation for cognition and thought, because they had an example that worked in the real world. Pretty fascinating actually and it makes a lot of sense.
And so materialism has become the dominant philosophy among psychologists, scientists and philosophers and it has become quite the popular world view. Among intellectuals it is considered a guaranteed fact really. And science, and the way it has worked for science, and the way science has unfolded has brought us some extremely convincing evidence towards this theory. However, it ignores one extremely important feature of reality, consciousness. Many dismiss in an Occam's Razor fashion, as useless, and since it doesn't seem to accomplish anything it either a. is an illusion or b. is a waste of time. However both of these are clearly false, a. it is the only guaranteed real thing in existence, b. if it is real it is not a waste of time.
Essentially Searle spends most of these chapters disarming materialism with the normal devices, like the ones I used in the argument with my friend, the Zombies, the Inverted colors, et cetera. But he brings up one new one I kind of like that I'm going to share. This one particularly picks on people who love the computer related to the brain example.
He calls this "the Chinese Room." So say you are like me and you don't speak a lick of Chinese. You are put in a room and given a test in Chinese. You have all these dictionaries and books on how to answer these questions, how Chinese is structured and how to put what symbol where. After however long you finish the test and are able to get all the right answers. You still can't speak a lick of Chinese, but you can get the right answer on tests as though you understand Chinese. You understand all the syntax, but know nothing of the language. This is what computers are like, they need to be given a context, but they do not understand meaning. Anyway it's a really interesting example.
Alright, so Searle has bashed Dualism, he's bashed Materialism, the question is now, what the hell is left? Way to go Searle, you've turned what I thought was a disappointment into a freaking page turner. At the end of this last chapter he said he's going to reconcile Dualism and Materialism, so have at it what's next!