Editing Chinese room (section)

==== Eliminative materialist reply ====
Several philosophers argue that consciousness, as Searle describes it, does not exist. [[Daniel Dennett]] describes consciousness as a "[[user illusion]]".{{sfn|Dennett|1991|loc={{page needed|date=February 2011}}}}

This position is sometimes referred to as [[eliminative materialism]]: the view that consciousness is not a concept that can "enjoy reduction" to a strictly mechanical description, but rather is a concept that will be simply ''eliminated'' once the way the ''material'' brain works is fully understood, in just the same way as the concept of a [[Demon (thought experiment)|demon]] has already been eliminated from science rather than enjoying reduction to a strictly mechanical description. Other mental properties, such as original intentionality (also called "meaning", "content", and "semantic character"), are also commonly regarded as special properties related to beliefs and other propositional attitudes. Eliminative materialism maintains that propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires, among other intentional mental states that have content, do not exist. If eliminative materialism is the correct scientific account of human cognition then the assumption of the Chinese room argument that "minds have mental contents ([[semantics]])" must be rejected.{{sfn|Ramsey|2022}}

Searle disagrees with this analysis and argues that "the study of the mind starts with such facts as that humans have beliefs, while thermostats, telephones, and adding machines don't ... what we wanted to know is what distinguishes the mind from thermostats and livers."{{sfn|Searle|1980|p=7}} He takes it as obvious that we can detect the presence of consciousness and dismisses these replies as being off the point.