The gloves come off, though, when Mr Searle comes to two philosophical colleagues, Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers.

ECONOMIST: Philosophy of consciousness

"It looks like an opposite of a theory, because he doesn't explain how it happens at all, " Dennett says.

FORBES: Sciences and Medicine

Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Simon DeDeo, Massimo Pigliucci, Janna Levin, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Goldstein, David Poeppel, Alex Rosenberg and Don Ross.

FORBES: What Happens When You Lock Scientists And Philosophers In A Room Together

As well as the reviews, the book contains a fractious debate with Mr Dennett, and a somewhat more measured one with Mr Chalmers.

ECONOMIST: Philosophy of consciousness

Dennett and Terrence Deacon on Free Will and Consciousness.

FORBES: What Happens When You Lock Scientists And Philosophers In A Room Together

Dennett, a Tufts University philosopher whose work on consciousness and free will has fundamentally influenced many scientists who study the brain, says he does not think Lanza's thinking meets the standard of a philosophical theory either.

FORBES: Sciences and Medicine

"For the last 20 years, the buzz about consciousness has been such that all kinds of smart people in all kinds of fields say this is mount Olympus, " says Daniel Dennett, the Tufts philosopher whose work has helped guide cognitive science.

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Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens are in the new vanguard of authors articulating atheism (Mr Harris thinks that people who are more moderate in their religion still do harm through a religious habit of mind that is no less irrational than fundamentalism).

ECONOMIST: Don't mention God

The intensity of Mr Searle's criticism gives the impression that these philosophers' mistakes are even worse than Mr Penrose's even though Mr Penrose's extravagant hypothesis that there are three worlds (the physical, the mental and the mathematical) will seem quite as strange to most readers as anything from Mr Dennett or Mr Chalmers.

ECONOMIST: Philosophy of consciousness