Very often with arguments like these I wonder whether philosophers aren't just talking past each other.

Where I think Searle gets into trouble compared to, say, Pat Churchland (whose philosophical views comport fully with neuroscience research), is that it leaves rather unspecified what consciousness is.

In Churchland's view (as far as I can tell), among the brain's computations includes a computation that we (i.e. our brains) identify as "consciousness". Despite being high-level and distributed (like multiplication in a CPU's arithmeti unit), it is very much caused by the physical processes that are doing the computation. We can identify it as different in kind from vision and proprioception and ability to dance the tango and whatever, and talk about it, just like we talk about our other cognitive capacities.

It is not clear, as Dennett says, that this is what Searle has in mind. If it is what Searle has in mind, others explain it better. If it isn't what he has in mind, he's probably mistaken.

When you place a table on a rug, the force from the table's leg squashes the rug, temporally, until the rug's restoring force matches the force from the table's leg (due to gravity acting on the table and forces transmitted within the table). Then it stays static. But of course it is the mass of the table that caused the intentation in the first place, and if the table suddenly became massless, the rug would expand--the notion of temporal causality is something of a red herring here. The indentation is constantly being caused by constant gravitational force and chemical bond energies continuously resisting that force.

So, while I don't understand what Searle means, I think the conclusion is that we should just read Churchland instead.