The American philosopher John Searle (1932-), a professor at the University of California at Berkeley since 1959, has described his own work as an attempt to reconcile the world of science with the human self-conception of mindful animals with free will. In his Intentionality: An Essay on the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Searle argued that mental states are both caused by and realized in neurobiological brain processes. He called this view “biological naturalism.”

In his Chinese room argument, he attempted to refute a broad Turing-inspired Strong Artificial Intelligence view that mind could be duplicated by the right computational device. Additional works by Searle, which advocate the non-reductionality of consciousness, while also acknowledging contemporary science, are: Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (1979), The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992), The Mystery of Consciousness (1997), and Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004).