Chinese cerebellums and the systems reply
Okay, so this post isn’t about the cerebellums of Chinese people, but rather an article about cerebellums and John Searle’s “Chinese Room” argument. I wrote about it in my last post, here. The gist of the article, as I understand it, is that if we assume the cerebellum has cognitive function, then functionalism loses empirical support. To bolster their overall point, the authors use Searle’s Chinese Room argument. It is intended to show that functionalism doesn’t work, that even if we have input/output that normally accompanies understanding Chinese, we don’t always have what we’d call “understanding.”
Maschke and Timmann invite us to envision Searle’s Chinese room as described this way:The man who speaks English is the cerebrum. The room which contains the rules and basket of Chinese letters is the cerebellum. It’s pretty obvious that the man doesn’t understand Chinese–he needs the cerebellum to produce the correct output of characters. A systems reply to this objection replies, “So what? The system as a whole understands Chinese.” And further, the parallel we’re being asked to envision involving a tiny person inside a room is getting us confused–the modules in a brain do not “understand” or “see”, but rather are causal contributers to an agent’s “seeing” and “understanding.”
Then, let’s correct this levels confusion as Maschke and Timmann would like: does their adjustment to the thought experiment refute the systems reply? Below is their argument:
If the suppositions about information processing in the cerebellum are applied and if the cerebellar role in motor learning processes is also taken into consideration, then it is conceivable, that the rule book with instructions merely for the use of the characters could also be represented in the cerebellum. Although this would then mean a system with all the elements of the Chinese room united in one brain, it is apparent, that this person would possess no understanding of the Chinese language whatsoever.
On their revised thought experiment, “person” = “cerebrum.” Thus their rebuttal is that the cerebrum doesn’t have any understanding of the Chinese language, but only contains the speech centers. However, this does not refute functionalism.
First, their argument (unless I’m missing some subtlety) doesn’t refute the claim that the entire brain could understand Chinese. Second, functionalism isn’t necessarily committed to the claim that the mind is a computer program (or a Turing Machine). This kind of functionalism claims that whatever other thing is abstractly isomorphic with my brain will have the same functional output. Common rejoinders ask us to envision a large group of people acting as neurons. Do they have a “belief state”? Some, like David Chalmers, will bite the bullet and say that’s not impossible. Generally, though, it’s a pretty outrageous claim and is an argument against Turing Machine functionalism.
However, another way to understand function is not just computer programs or abstract machine states, but teleologically. I have one way of digesting food. Amoebas have another. Yet there is a functional commonality. This perspective has an added advantage in not assuming all conscious intelligence will have human physiology (couldn’t intelligent Martians be constituted of different stuff?).
So while the overarching complaint of the article (that the cerebellum has a cognitive function in humans, not animals, despite being structurally identical) is valid against a Turing functionalism, it doesn’t go through to functionalism more broadly construed. A simple example shows the fallacy. Suppose I have built a mousetrap. I set it in the corner of a room, load it with peanut butter and, voila!, it catches a mouse. But let’s assume that I hook the mousetrap up to a bigger machine. Once the mouse is caught (think Looney Tunes here), then the mousetrap springs a button and starts my toaster. Is the function of the trap the same?
The first example’s input is “mouse”, the output is “mouse is caught.” But the second example’s input is “mouse” and the output is “toaster is sprung.” Only as a means to the toaster is “mouse is caught” an output.
The same analogy could be applied to the cerebellum in (let’s say) primates versus humans. Even if the primate cerebellum is structurally isomorphic with my own, a different connection with the rest of the brain can give it a substantially different function. This is entirely consonant with functionalism.
For more on teleological functionalism, see Elliot Sober’s “Putting the Function back into Functionalism” In William G. Lycan (ed.), Mind and Cognition. Blackwell.
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