Consciousness is caused by the brain, Searle argued, but isn't itself computation

John Searle proposed that consciousness is an ordinary biological feature of the brain, caused by specific neural processes, the way digestion is caused by processes in the stomach, rejecting both the idea that the mind is a separate non-physical substance and the idea that any program-running system would thereby become conscious. He called this 'biological naturalism': consciousness is real and physical, just not reducible to the formal symbol-shuffling his own Chinese Room argument targets.

— John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science — Harvard University Press, 1984