I should think that all present-day philosophers of mind—and many others—are familiar with Ned Block’s “Chinese Nation” thought-experiment, first published in 1978,[1] and summarized here by Georges Rey in the Enyclopedia Britannica.
“There are more than one billion people in China, and there are roughly one billion neurons in the brain. Suppose that the functional relations that functionalists claim are constitutive of human mental life are ultimately definable in terms of firing patterns among assemblages of neurons. Now imagine that, perhaps as a celebration, it is arranged for each person in China to send signals for four hours to other people in China in precisely the same pattern in which the neurons in the brain of Chairman Mao Zedong fired (or might have fired) for four hours on his 60th birthday. During those four hours Mao was pleased but then had a headache. Would the entire nation of China during the new four-hour period be in the same mental states that Mao was in on his 60th birthday? Would the entire nation be truly describable as being pleased and then having a headache? Although most people would find this suggestion preposterous, the functionalist might be committed to it if it turns out that the functional relations that are constitutive of mental states are defined in terms of the firing patterns of neurons.”
A young and sophisticated Chinese philosopher recently told me that he had always supposed that the Chinese had been chosen for the example because there was a common conception that Chinese people were stupid. Has any person or culture ever been so foolish as to think this? What is somewhat alarming is that the Chinese philosopher could have formed this view in the first place. In fact (of course) the inhabitants of China were chosen for the thought-experiment simply because there were (in 1978) about a billion of them (we can put aside the fact that the number of neurons in the brain is currently estimated to be closer to 100 billion). How many other wild and unhappy misunderstandings are in circulation?
[1] Ned Block (1978) ‘Troubles with functionalism’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 9: 261-325.
The philosopher in question was wrong to suppose that China was chosen because Ned Block, or the cultural surrounding Ned Block and weighing on his choices, thought Chinese people were unintelligent. However, I still don't think the choice is entirely innocent, as it seems to have its roots in a widespread stereotype about China that had already taken hold in Europe by the 17th century -- namely, that the Chinese are, as Leibniz put it, “wise automata”, able to execute the right actions without conscious knowledge of the right reasons for these actions, and thus, as a collectivity, already very similar to a well-functioning reckoning engine. Incidentally, you might know that Liu Cixin riffs on this idea in the novel version of The Three-Body Problem, where he imagines a working computer instantiated by an army of men.