u/Best_Highlight_2517

I posted Ned Block’s chinese nation thought experiment and most people got lost on ‘how would you made this realistically’ instead of the logical conclusions, so I’ll put a more extreme and direct example.

Under pure materialism, if consciousness is nothing different than very complex physical information processing, then any sufficiently equivalent computational structure must be capable of feeling pain, pleasure, colours or orgasms, while having a human mind exactly the same as yours. This is not a refutation of materialism because most materialists just accept this (refutation would develop the‘why is consciousness necessary if eveything is explained hy physics etc’) but I saw lots of people claiming to be materialists but trying to escape this inconsistently.

If you deny this by adding ‘special’ properties, substrates, or irreducible features, you’ve quietly abandoned pure materialism and smuggled in extra ontology; the important thing about consciousness (or its illusion, if you prefer) is the information organization, not the neurons (this is what Daniel Dennet calls ‘carbon chauvinism’ if only neurons can ‘feel’ you’re introducing properties about consciousness since the important thing is no more the autorreference, the modelling of ‘self’ etc).

Only way to defend that Google Sheets can not feel orgasms is to make neurons special, and if you still claim to be materialist after that, youve emptied materialism of any meaningful content. Thats as if I claim to be dualist and accept Dennet illusion saying that the illusion is res cogitans.

TL DR: under materialism either computation is enough for consciousness, granting Google Sheets the ability to feel orgasms as soon as we map the human brain, or you are granting special ontological status to biology thus abandoning materialism

Original argument from Ned Block.

The “Chinese Nation” thought experiment seems devastating for strong functionalism / illusionism.

Assume:
- Consciousness is entirely a matter of functional organization.
- A conscious brain is just neurons exchanging signals in the right causal structure.

Now replace each neuron with a human in China communicating via walkie-talkies. The entire nation collectively reproduces the exact causal topology of a human brain.

By functionalist standards, the system must now:
- see red,
- feel pain,
- have self-awareness,
- possess a unified first-person perspective.

But here’s the problem:

No individual Chinese citizen experiences the system’s “global redness.” Each person merely passes signals mechanically. Yet the theory claims that, somehow, a new subject of experience emerges at the level of the whole nation.

So either:

1. The Chinese Nation literally has a conscious inner life.
   - Meaning gigantic bureaucratic signal networks can feel pain and see colors (NOT each chinese individually: the system see colors and feel pain exactly as we do)
   - Which implies consciousness substrate-independence to an absurd degree (beer cans + pulleys, spreadsheets, water pipes, etc.).

OR

2. Functional equivalence is not sufficient for consciousness.
   - In which case strong functionalism/illusionism fails.
   - And consciousness depends on something beyond abstract causal organization.

The deeper issue:
Functionalism seems excellent at explaining behavior, reports, information flow, and self-modeling.

But it never bridges the gap from:
“the system acts as if it experiences red”
to
“there is actually something it is like to experience red.”

At that point, either:
- you accept absurd conscious systems,
- or you admit the hard problem never disappeared.