causal mechanism for successfully picking out the referent of a category name can in principle be solved by cognitive science. But the problem of explaining how consciousness could play an "independent" role in doing so is probably insoluble, except on pain of telekinetic dualism. Perhaps symbol grounding (i.e., robotic TT capacity) is enough to ensure that conscious meaning is present, but then again, perhaps not. In either case, there is no way we can hope to be any the wiser—and that is Turing's methodological point (Harnad 2001b, 2003, 2006). Formulation To answer this question we have to formulate the symbol grounding problem itself (Harnad 1990): Functionalism There is a school of thought according to which the computer is more like the brain—or rather, the brain is more like the computer. According to this view (called "computationalism", a variety of functionalism), the future theory explaining how the brain picks out its referents, (the theory that cognitive neuroscience may eventually arrive at) will be a purely computational one (Pylyshyn 1984). A computational theory is a theory at the software level. It is essentially a computer algorithm: a set of rules for manipulating symbols. And the algorithm is "implementation-independent." That means that whatever it is that an algorithm is doing, it will do the same thing no matter what hardware it is executed on. The physical details of the dynamical system implementing the computation are irrelevant to the computation itself, which is purely formal; any hardware that can run the computation will do, and all physical implementations of that particular computer algorithm are equivalent, computationally. A computer can execute any computation. Hence once computationalism finds a proper computer algorithm, one that our brain could be running when there is meaning transpiring in our heads, meaning will be transpiring in that computer too, when it implements that algorithm. How would we know that we have a proper computer algorithm? It would have to be able to pass the Turing test. That means it would have to be capable of corresponding with any human being as a pen-pal, for a lifetime, without ever being in any way distinguishable from a real human pen-pal. Searle's Chinese room argument John Searle formulated the "Chinese room argument" in order to disprove computationalism. The Chinese room argument is based on a thought experiment: in it, Searle stated that if the Turing test were conducted in Chinese, then he himself,