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In the ‘China brain’ thought experiment, articulated by Lawrence Davis in 1974 and then again by Ned Block in 1978, each citizen of China is imagined playing the role of a single neuron, using telecommunication devices to connect them to one another in the same way that axons and dendrites connect the neurons of the brain together. In such a scenario, would China itself become conscious? In 1980, in turn, John Searle imagined the ‘Chinese room’, which was meant to show the falsehood of ‘strong AI’, that is, of the view that machines can never be made to literally understand anything. A machine that could be shown to convincingly display ‘understanding’ of Chinese would be indistinguishable from a room in which Searle himself, or some other human being, was holed up, receiving sentences in good Chinese written on paper and passed through a slit in the wall, to which he would then respond, in equally good Chinese, by simply consulting various reference works available in the room. But Searle assures us that he does not himself understand Chinese. Therefore, the machine does not either.

It is difficult not to wonder: What is it with China, exactly, in analytic philosophy's thought experiments, which is to say fantasies, about automated thinking? Why choose this nation in particular? It is not enough to say that only China has, or had forty years ago, a population large enough to simulate the human brain: the human brain has around 100 billion neurons, and so the world's most populous nation is only about one percent of the way to being able to furnish one person per neuron. Given this shortage, it would have made just as much sense to let each citizen of Estonia, say, stand in for ten thousand neurons, as have each citizen of China stand in for one hundred. Or the experiment could have been imagined in a cosmopolitan vein, with each human being alive contributing to the ‘earth brain’ – a scenario which would have brought us at least a small step closer to a one-one correspondence between people and neurons. In the case of the Chinese room, Searle seems to have chosen this language in particular because he could attest that he did not know a single word of it.