In 1980 the philosopher John R. Searle published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences a simple thought experiment that he called the "Chinese Room Argument" against "Strong Artificial Intelligence (AI)." The thesis of Strong AI has since come to be called "computationalism," according to which cognition is just computation, hence mental states are just computational states:

Computationalism

According to computationalism, to explain how the mind works, cognitive science needs to find out what the right computations are—the ones that the brain performs to generate the mind and its capacities. Once we know that, then every system that performs those computations will have those mental states: Every computer that runs the mind's program will have a mind, because computation is hardware-independent: Any hardware that is running the right program has the right computational states.

The Turing Test

How do we know which program is...