[과제] On Block's Chinese Nation Thought Experiment

Suggestion: Spatiotemporal grain of functional/causal realization?

 

I do think that Block presents a strong intuitive (="prima facie") reason not to accept functionalist accounts of mental states. As is defined, it seems that functionalism, or machine-state functionalism, cannot adequately provide reasons for rejecting that the homunculi-headed brain or the system of Chinese nationals have mental states, which render it guilty of liberalism.

 

Although it is not on Block to then provide how exactly the two systems differ from our human brains that allow for mental states, I thought I might take a shot and suggest a condition. It seems that a tractable distinction can be drawn between how "strongly" the component elements of a system are interconnected for these two systems. "Strongly" is an ambiguous word, but I believe that something like spatiotemporal grain or a measure of causal powers can capture this "strength" of the integration between components that make up a candidate mental system. Therefore we might say, to have a certain degree of spatiotemporal causal integration is a necessary condition for systems to have mental states. Or better yet, instead of setting an arbitrary threshold degree of integration, we might say that the level of the system that has the most causally integrated components among the many possible levels of grain is the level that allows mental states to exist. With this criterion, we can easily reject homunculi-headed brains or the Chinese nation system, since both of them are composed of elements (homunculi, or Chinese nationals) that have more strongly integrated mini-systems than the large system as a whole.

 

A remaining question may be. then, what justifies the introduction of this condition? This is actually similar to condition (3) that we saw in Putnam, that was introduced to prevent saying that a swarm of bees could constitute a mental state. It seems to be a condition that cannot be derived from functionalist views, and as such might be considered arbitrary. At this point, I do not have a satisfactory answer as to what might justify this condition. However, my vague intuition is that if we are to ever account for how the Chinese nation system differs from the human brain, we do have to appeal to this difference in the strength of causal integration between components of the system.