I did a philosophy degree and smart people still very much take him seriously. If not him, take a look at Nagel or Chalmers. I think that his idea† that conscious experience is non-computable is probably right, especially given findings in the early 20th century that many things that we thought may have been computable ended up not being computable.v
† Not exactly his idea, though it nicely segueys into it.
I agree that some people take him seriously. Many people take religion seriously too. I don't take either him or religion seriously as true, but I do understand both his and religion's appeals.
That said, I do give a decent chance to aspects of the brain's problem solving ability having quantum properties and thus can not be calculated as efficiently on classical computers. We do not know this for sure, but evolution is incredibly inventive at finding efficient solutions. Still computable though, even on classical computers.
So, really, all that this tells you is that many people have this assumption.
I think you need to move beyond Searle because he isn’t right.