Questioning the implied autonomy of machine state in Putnam's computational hypothesis of the mind

Abstract

What appears as the main issue of debate between Putnam’s computational hypothesis and Searle’sChinese room experiment is whether or not machine state is sufficient to account for the nature of humanmental state. Putnam argues that the nature of machine states is synonymous to the nature of the mentalstates. For him, it follows that an understanding of the nature of Machine states is adequate to understandingthe nature of the mental states. Searle’s challenge against Putnam’s computational hypothesis isanchored upon the popular Chinese Room Experiment. The experiment shows that it is possible to satisfyPutnam’s requirements for having a particular mental state without actually having the mental states inquestion, although Boden to the contrary. However, the debate is built upon an implied autonomy ofmachine state. That is, it is assumed that machine state has an independent existence from the mentalstate. Correspondingly, it is argued that for machine state to be used as an analogy in understanding thenature of mental state, it must be autonomous to mental state. The question which is being engaged inthis paper is whether machine state is actually autonomous. For instance, how much can we understandby using the nature of the (mechanical) state of a wrist watch to study the nature of the mental state of thewatch maker? The paper maintains that this autonomy of machine states from mental state is questionable.This is because, (1) There is yet no self-created/programmed computer machine, (2) Machine stateis created or designed by human mental states and, (3) Only the nature of an autonomous entity couldsufficiently be used to study the nature of another autonomous entity. The paper further argues that ifan extreme position of the computational functionalism is maintained, then it raises more challengingquestions and leads to more complicated problems. The paper, therefore, concludes that the view thatintends to use the nature of machine state to study the nature of mental state is circular and the view thatequates machine state with mental state is trivial.Key words: Chinese room, Computational Hypothesis, autonomy, Symbols and Codes, Computermachine, Machine table.