I had objections to this, but not because of the course, rather because I either disagree with or maybe don't quite understand Searle.

I believe that Searle would agree that the world consists of only matter; there is no magic soul or spirit or mental substance that is injected into humans (or anything else) to bring about consciousness.
Along with this, Searle is very much against the idea that consciousness is analogous to a program running on a digital computer.
Finally he, as I understand it, believes that consciousness is a specific consequence of the specific biology (and thus chemistry and thus physics) of the brain, that it is one of those things that happens when you put the right chemicals together, in the same way as life occurs.

OK, given these three starting points, my question would be "where exactly does he believe the difference lies between a human brain and a brain constructed in a computer?"

First: He is willing to concede (this is the Chinese room argument) that a program could be written that perfectly emulated a human, but the system running the program would, in spite of appearances, be a zombie. I'm not at all convinced by the claim that it would be a zombie, and I don't think the Chinese room works in this respect.
The essence of the Chinese room is that operations that would run reasonably fast, and in extreme parallelism, would run slowly and sequentially when done by Searle locked in his room, and that Searle would thus not be conscious of understanding Chinese.
However there are many situations where a large enough difference in speed or number leads to qualitatively different results, from the old reliable of how many molecules of water it takes to reach wetness, to evolution, plate tectonics, or plants viewed via time-lapse photography.

Second: He appears to be arguing not that it would be inefficient to simulate a brain on a digital computer, but that it is logically impossible. If this is so, where does the impossibility arise?
Is it that one cannot simulate (down to the last physical detail) a stochastic system; and so the pseudo-brain needs to be augmented with a genuine random access device?
Is it that a digital system cannot simulate a classical (but real number based) system because of truncations in numbers, space, and time, and that these truncations do not merely prevent the device from running for longer than a day (lets say), but prevent it from even getting off the ground?
Is it that the brain is irreducibly quantum, and so we have
all the same problems as the classical simulation, only with all the quantm vectors and correlation complications added?

Or to put it another way. Searle believes, I think, that computation as an abstract process is nothing but syllogisms, all syntax and no semantics; and that anything that is to be a
real brain has to have semantics. This is a claim, but it's not clear to me that it's true.
That is, is there anything to the semantics of "water" beyond a long list of statements about how water interacts with other things; in other words the sorts of factual databases being constructed for things like CyC? Searle talks about semantics as magic fairy dust, but I don't see this as a useful way of viewing semantics.

Finally I'd like to add my own little contribution to the debate.
In the early days of studying human minds, philosophers were fascinated by "intelligence", defined by things like Aristotelian logic, arithmentic, and playing chess. We've obviously
now learned that this is not a particularly useful way to study the mind.
Our current obsession is consciousness; but I think that's also not a fruitful object of study, at least not right now, because we simply don't know enough about it to get anywhere useful.
What I would like to propose as a useful item to study is attention.
Attention is like consciousness in some ways; in particular it is unitary in spite of the parallelism of the brain.
Moreover it certainly seems hooked up to consciousness in some way; it likewise vanishes when we sleep [or does it? can dreams be considered to involve attention but not consciousness?]
But the very concept seems (perhaps deceptively so) simpler
than consciousness, and it also seems that it should be more amenable to study in a varietyof animal models, and perhaps even in mathematical and robot models. ( )