
If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2014) - samclemens
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140130a.htm
======
dkural
A materialist rejects "consciousness" as a fruitful term, observing that it
often leads to confusion and non-sequiturs, as contradictions often do. The
paper itself shows how certain definitions of consciousness would have these
outcomes. Materialists would say that you need a functional definition of
consciousness: If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it's a duck. It's a
bit like talking about a "soul". Humanity, for the longest time, thought there
was a soul, separate from our mere bodies. They just had a "feeling" that it
was real, despite not being able to provide a functional definition of what it
is. Consciousness is no different. Coherence of the self is an illusion.

~~~
wfo
The vast majority of humans still believe there is a soul so I think it's fair
to say Humanity still thinks so.

~~~
juliangregorian
You don't speak for me.

~~~
wfo
You don't speak for humanity. Believe in souls or not most people do and we
need to understand that when we use abstract words like 'humanity believes in
x'.

~~~
juliangregorian
Composition fallacy.

~~~
wfo
Simply naming a logical fallacy isn't an argument. And in fact I claimed it
would be fair to suggest humanity believes in souls, I didn't make the claim.
Rather, I suggested it is far more reasonable (though not a fact -- "humanity"
is an abstract subjective concept with no fixed meaning) to assert humanity
believes in souls than that humanity doesn't, a silly assertion the article
makes without argument.

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tim333
Arrgh! This is what annoys me about reading much philosophy. The article is
about consciousness which is a term used by many different people in many ways
and with many different implied definitions. But does the guy give a clear
definition of what he's talking about? No he leaves it vague but waffles on
for hundreds of words in a way that you can't say if it's right or wrong
because you're not sure what he means.

If you are using consciousness to mean being aware of stuff in a way that you
can act on it then the questions are fairly simple - humans are conscious when
in a normal state, not so when knocked unconscious. Likewise rabbits. The
United States can show collective consciousness in that it's citizens in
aggregate can be aware of things and react. If you look at a different meaning
of consciousness in terms of subjective experience then probably other people
have similar experience and rabbits a simpler version but it's hard to tell.

I don't get why philosophical writing tends to be so vague and waffly. Maybe
because they don't achieve much in the real world unlike say neuroscientists
studying consciousness and so need to hand wave and be vague to cover up the
lack of real content?

~~~
wodenokoto
His argument doesn't need a definition of conscience. He argues that if A
arises from certain traits of B, then you must accept that A also arises from
C, since it contains the same traits.

Secondly he clearly refers to a definition of conscience called phenemonology.
And one must assume that "materialist" is a term in philosophy that people
familiar with the field knows what entails and people not familiar with it
doesn't. this paper is not an introduction to either of those terms.

Your complaint is that you don't know the what these words are and that is
what is apparently wrong with philosophy.

~~~
rquantz
Thank you. I'd also like to add that philosophy has a long history of pretty
dramatic accomplishments in the real world. You can thank philosophy for
science and the various modes of scientific inquiry, and the concept of
natural rights and liberal democratic government. On the flip side, the Nazi
regime was heavily influenced by late 19th Century philosophy (not all
accomplishments are good?). Every discipline has an accompanying branch of
philosophy that defines it's modes of inquiry and research methods, and
philosophical lines of thought infiltrate every corner of the public
discourse. It's just idiotic to say philosophers accomplish nothing in the
real world.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>I'd also like to add that philosophy has a long history of pretty dramatic
accomplishments in the real world. You can thank philosophy for science and
the various modes of scientific inquiry, and the concept of natural rights and
liberal democratic government. On the flip side, the Nazi regime was heavily
influenced by late 19th Century philosophy (not all accomplishments are
good?).

If your method of answering questions yields contradictory answers to the same
question (eg: "Do individual humans have moral worth? Nazism says no,
liberalism says yes -- philosophy!"), then it's not very good.

~~~
foldr
Philosophy isn't a method of answering questions, it's a discipline. (I mean,
do you really think that everyone from Thales to Quine was using a single
method?)

------
jerf
In his paper "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity"
[1], HN-favorite Scott Aaronson resolves to my satisfaction the question of
whether a waterfall can be said to be computing the solution to some problem
as it cascades over the rocks, because there exists a mapping in which the
initial water state is the initial state of the problem, the gyrations of the
water "compute", and the final state of the water can be mapped to a solution.
He points out that we can with some actual mathematical rigor observe that the
mapping itself can be said to be doing all the work.

Similarly, I feel trying to parse conscious intentionality by any known
meaning of the term "conscious" out of something like "all the individuals of
the United States" is a situation where the mapping is doing all the work.

Clearly, there is something to the "United States" as well as other groupings
of human beings. But I daresay in a lot of ways these things are less
mysterious than they seem... we deal with these groupings _all the time_ , and
if we thereby fail to ascribe consciousness to them, I'd say our experience
should probably be listened to. Sure, groups of humans routinely do great
things no individual could do, but at the same time, and with no
contradiction, groups of humans fail miserably and stupidly too. We've all
seen committees that fail to successfully accomplish a goal than any
individual on the committee could have, or where the committee remains fuzzy
on its purpose (pardon English's anthropomorphization, there) even as the
individual members are all quite clear (but divergent). Rather than trying to
throw this in the "consciousness" bucket I think it's better understood as,
well, the way we all _already_ collective conceive of these things, as human
organizations, with their own foibles, characteristics, and properties.

It's not consciousness. It's something else. "Greater" in some ways, and yet,
profoundly lesser in others. Trying to view it through the lens of
"consciousness" is just anthropormorphism striking again, and I'd say actively
harmful in terms of trying to understand the phenomena.

[1]:
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf](http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf)

~~~
s_baby
>HN-favorite Scott Aaronson resolves to my satisfaction the question of
whether a waterfall can be said to be computing the solution to some problem
as it cascades over the rocks, because there exists a mapping in which the
initial water state is the initial state of the problem, the gyrations of the
water "compute", and the final state of the water can be mapped to a solution.
He points out that we can with some actual mathematical rigor observe that the
mapping itself can be said to be doing all the work.

This is why panpsychism appeals to me. On some level it makes more sense for
me to believe that sentients is an intrinsic property of physical reality then
to believe that sentients can emerge from someone moving sticks and stones
around according to some algorithm.

~~~
Retra
The possibility of sticks and stones, their motions, and algorithms are
already an intrinsic property of reality, so the things you want already exist
in the model you reject.

~~~
s_baby
The thing I "want" is sentience. It's the Qualia problem.

~~~
Retra
That exists regardless of what you think about it.

~~~
s_baby
You're not making much sense to me.

------
teraflop
This is an excellent and thought-provoking article. I'm not entirely sold on
the argument -- in particular, there's no reason to automatically assume that
_any_ sufficiently complex system is conscious simply _because_ of its
complexity. If you looked hard enough, you could probably find lots of
complexity in e.g. the interactions between billions of individual cells in a
slime mold, but most people wouldn't use that as a basis for calling it
conscious. Human brains aren't just an undifferentiated mass of connections
that somehow bootstrap themselves to consciousness; they have definite
functional units that are genetically determined. Countries have at most a few
thousand years of development behind them, rather than billions of years of
animal evolution, and it seems a bit implausible that they would have
developed the complex processes of consciousness so much more quickly.

We ascribe consciousness to humans by observing their behavior, not the
structure of their brains. And it's true that countries do respond to stimuli
and act with purpose, but (echoing Chalmers) I think a lot of that can be
ascribed to individual people controlling a hierarchy, and not to the
collective. If there's anything about a country that arises from the
distributed connections between humans, it would be more likely to manifest as
broad social trends, not specific actions like going to war. But those general
trends seem to ebb and flow for their own inscrutable reasons; they certainly
don't show obvious evidence of intelligent purpose.

Nevertheless, the concept is fascinating. And I think the author makes an
excellent point that even if it's wrong, the argument is worth considering if
only to help us come up with better criteria for what it means to say an
entity is conscious.

~~~
ArekDymalski
>But those general trends seem to ebb and flow

I'm quite sure that from the perspective of a cell in my liver, my whole life
seem to be ebb and flow. Assuming that the cell would be able to observe and
comprehend processes much broader and longer than itself.

It's the same in case of possible consciousness of a large group - as parts of
it we will face many difficulties just to notice and understand such
phenomenon.

Especially taking into account that it won't be exactly the same type of
consciousness as human one.

~~~
teraflop
That's kind of an argument from ignorance, though.

It's _conceivable_ that any kind of system whatsoever is conscious in ways
that we can't understand or comprehend. But if the author's position is that
the US should be provisionally considered conscious because it takes
purposeful, intentional actions, then a lack of apparent purposefulness seems
like a reasonable criticism of the argument.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I think there's a fundamental confusion in the article between goal-seeking
behaviour, and between communicable self-awareness.

Clearly, large collectives of people can seek goals. Large collections of
transistors can also seek goals, up to a point.

But it's impossible to communicate directly with the United States as a self-
aware entity, or to have a _direct_ conversation with a collective.

You can communicate with a _representative_ of the US, but there's no way
anyone can talk to, or email, or Skype, or send a paper letter to, or have a
telepathic conversation with, any entity that would consciously describe
itself as "The United States of America."

This matters because you could ask ten representatives of the US for their
opinion on something and get ten conflicting answers - without essentially
damaging the concept of "US-ness."

This clearly doesn't match the definition of a unified consciousness. It's not
the same as a single consciousness changing its mind, because there is no
recognisable single mind that changes.

What about insect colonies, animal herds, bird flocks, and corporations? They
simply amplify the goals and personalities of their leaders. I'm not aware of
any instances where - for example - a separate corporate mind made its wishes
known to override board decisions.

(You could possibly argue this is what happened with Reddit. I'd say no - that
was a conflict between factions with different goals, not evidence that
there's a metaphysical Reddit-mind independently placing conference calls and
tweeting to steer Reddit's future.)

~~~
kinghajj
> But it's impossible to communicate directly with the United States as a
> self-aware entity, or to have a direct conversation with a collective.

Would you expect one of your cells to be capable of carrying a conversation
with you? ("No.") Then why would you expect a "cell" (citizen) of the United
States to be able to communicate with it?

> This matters because you could ask ten representatives of the US for their
> opinion on something and get ten conflicting answers - without essentially
> damaging the concept of "US-ness."... It's not the same as a single
> consciousness changing its mind, because there is no recognisable single
> mind that changes.

You could also stimulate ten neurons separately and receive 10 differing
responses. And when a person changes their mind, there is also no recognizable
single neuron that has changed.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The first point is begging the question. Clearly, humans and many animals
communicate.

Do countries communicate with each other in similar ways? They can appear to.
But in fact there's no communication independent of the individuals who
represent the countries. The entities called "Russia" and "United States" are
_wholly defined by the contents of the embodied minds of their
representatives._

There is no way "United States" can change its mind during an international
negotiation independently of any of its representatives. If it did they would
suddenly stop pushing one line and start pushing a different line for no
obvious reason.

I'm not aware of this ever happening.

Compare that with human and animal communication. So far as I know, my self
awareness isn't defined by a shared description and belief in "Me" across all
my neurons. If you pull an individual neuron out of my brain it won't have any
concept of _anything_ , never mind of "Me."

So the two processes are completely different. One is the flocking behaviour
of (semi)intelligent agents.

The other is an emergent property of units that have almost exactly zero
intelligence and awareness individually, but somehow combine to produce
something that has much more.

~~~
mdpopescu
_There is no way "United States" can change its mind during an international
negotiation independently of any of its representatives._

This is provably false unless you are adding hidden assumptions. It is easily
shown in the case of some bureaucracies that a person will have a hard time
getting something out of them, even though no single person will claim to be
the one stalling the request. From the outside, the bureaucracy behaves as if
it has a different goal than the (stated) goal of each individual.

------
egocodedinsol
I remember thinking about this after reading Godel esher bach. The reason I
don't believe it's clearly probable is that it's hard to imagine that a system
that hasn't been forged under as much natural selection to have much
intentionality. And it's hard to imagine consciousness without that.

It's also with considering that the US could be sliced along arbitrary
boundaries and it probably wouldn't change too much. That alone seems like
such a structural/functional difference that arguing for the consciousness of
a system like the US on simialriry-to-brains grounds seems difficult.

Still, the strangest thing I've considered is: suppose that the US, or some
other group we are a part of, like the galaxy, is conscious.and we get good
evidence that it's true. Then disturbing it's function, or destroying it could
kill that consciousness. It would be like killing God.

~~~
dropit_sphere
>Still, the strangest thing I've considered is: suppose that the US, or some
other group we are a part of, like the galaxy, is conscious.and we get good
evidence that it's true. Then disturbing it's function, or destroying it could
kill that consciousness. It would be like killing God.

Obviously the most fun thing to think about. It's worth noting that
"consciousness" is on a sliding scale from dim awareness to focused lucidity.
Is my dog conscious? Probably not, but there's _something_ there. How about a
gorilla? The lines start to blur. Is it outlandish to ascribe to a large,
distributed group, a fish-level of awareness?

~~~
jqm
"Is my dog conscious?"

I would say absolutely. But maybe we have a different definition of
consciousness.

~~~
dllthomas
"Clearly not, he's asleep right now."

~~~
hasenj
Consciousness in the metaphysical sense isn't really turned off when you
sleep; otherwise you couldn't have dreams.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Assuming you're really awake and having dreams as opposed to your thoughts
being reorganized in a way that you simply remember as vivid, real
experiences. Even if you're conscious, that's only a tiny part of sleep (often
REM). Being awakened otherwise is like just having missing time where there's
a gap in conscious experience. As if it was off.

------
amasad
Since the author established that the United States is a linguistic entity,
then why doesn't they simply ask it. "Are you conscious?", "Do you have
subjective experiences?". Surely whomever you direct the question at will
laugh at you and no one would take you seriously.

A more plausible way for the US to take this type of question seriously is if
it was indeed asked by a planet-sized alien. Then I expect the authorities in
the US to come up with some traditional explanation of countries and how the
US is one. And would reject the fact that it's conscious. If an entity doesn't
believe that it's conscious, then can it be conscious?

I find it strange that the author didn't entertain such line of thinking
since, to me, it makes the most sense. The first thing you would do when you
want to know something about a language-capable entity is probably ask it. He
mentions the Turing Test with regards to testing the consciousness of the
supersquids, but why not the United States?

~~~
scrollaway
> If an entity doesn't believe that it's conscious, then can it be conscious?

On the flip side, if an entity asks itself that question, it probably _is_
conscious.

~~~
amasad
Sure. But when did the US ask itself that question? (assuming that -- in
accordance with the paper -- when the US "speaks" it's the officials that
speak for it)

------
sebringj
A collection of entities or the pattern the entities partake in are NOT self
aware. It's only the entity itself observing the pattern or collection as
such, that is.

It seems people are postulating properties of collections and patterns of
groups, then checking things off, one by one, being satisfied of the
similarities. It is the person checking these things off that is realizing
similarities then taking the leap of anthropomorphizing awareness into that
idea.

~~~
cortesoft
So we are not self aware, but our brain cells are? But aren't the brain cells
themselves also just a collection of entities (molecules?)

~~~
burke
The salient difference for me here is that the brain has a holistic factor:

Individual brain cells are not self-aware, or intelligent in any capacity. A
whole brain is both.

Individual humans in The United States are aware of both themselves and of the
United States. The United States is arguably not aware of itself in a greater-
than-the-sum-of-its-parts capacity, as a human brain is.

(So far I've only read the abstract of the linked article)

~~~
21echoes
how do you know that the United States is not aware of itself? do you think
that brain cells are (would be) aware of the fact that we are conscious?

~~~
burke
It's a fun thought experiment, but the illusion of self probably didn't just
spontaneously arise in humans; it's much more likely to be an adaptation from
hundreds of thousands of generations of natural selection for a more
intelligent species. Nature selected countless times, through genetic
succession, for the more aware species.

> do you think that brain cells are (would be) aware of the fact that we are
> conscious?

No, a neuron is too simple a system to be capable of awareness by itself. I
get what you're getting at, but if we're talking about a higher-level
phenomenon, let's not also call it consciousness. In fact, we essentially use
"consciousness" as a post-facto description of our own illusion of self, so it
essentially makes no sense to ascribe it to a system that didn't arise more or
less the same way as we did.

------
hyperion2010
A related question I like to consider from time to time: "Are corporations
conscious?" They are composed of many individuals who we consider conscious
and they gather a whole bunch of information on their internals. They even
have entire departments of conscious beings devoted to communicating
information to other conscious beings that often speak as if they were the
corporation itself (sure, corps may have a strange habit of referring to
themselves in the third person, but so do some people). How would we even
measure this?

~~~
thechao
It's weird you're the first comment (from a brief scan) to mention
"measurement". All of the obvious tests are fraught with ethical issues, but
testing for behavioral responses seems pretty easy, I think. For instance,
consider this thought experiment: set up a rogue, landed, state; have that
state attack the U.S. Can we predict a response? Surely! So, we know the U.S.
responds to very simple "acute pain" stimuli. We know it responds to chronic
pain stimuli: if a certain economic activity is no longer justified in a
subregion (Detroit:cars), then that region atrophies.

Really, I think the major issue is to determine how to talk to the U.S. What's
the sovereign state equivalent of "how's it going?" It seems that the only
obvious attributes of the state we to acquire resources---usually by
cooperating in s semi-symbiotic fashion with similar states, and responding to
basic pain-like stimuli. The U.S. seems to act more like a very simple worm,
and less like a higher animal. Perhaps it has primitive organization? (I'm
thinking of the larger jelly fish which, while massive, are cognitively
simple.)

~~~
hyperion2010
States are another fun one, thought rather terrifying to think that congress
in some strange way might be equivalent to prefrontal cortex. One of the
problems we face here are identifying the information channels that are
actually important for driving behavior. In some cases hours and weeks of
talks between high ranking officials in various foreign services do nothing
compared to a 30 second conversation on a street corner.

------
MichaelGG
Or phrased another way: we still have no real solid leads on consciousness.
There's all sorts of neat things thought up about it, we have some questions
we'll want to answer or dissolve, but there's not even a consensus on what
consciousness is.

This is really disappointing, because consciousness is neat.

I also find it questionable to posit fake scenarios then try to draw
conclusions from them. I can say "what about a fire that boils water, but it's
actually frozen?", but it doesn't really mean such a thing is possible. See
also p-zombies, an exercise in imagining nonsensical things in order to draw
questionable conclusions.

~~~
rybosome
I don't think that philosophical zombies are a nonsensical line of thought at
all. As Ray Kurzweil states in one of his books (paraphrasing), "I take it on
faith that the universe exists". Accepting the inability to receive proof of
others' consciousness is a major battle in the quest for developing a rational
view of the subject.

~~~
MichaelGG
The pzombie line is "posit the same world as ours, but no one's conscious". At
_best_ , it's useless because we don't know what consciousness is. At most
likely, it's just dumb and non-sequitur. Like saying "OK imagine this glass of
water. It's identical to water in every way. But it's fire. Ah-ha! What does
_that_ mean? <spooky voice>".

So either consciousness is based in physics, in which case pzombies are non-
starter, or we don't know what consciousness is and it's a pointless
conversation.

------
donatj
I don't accept consciousness as anything of real value as far as intelligence
goes. There's no reason anything should want for consciousness. It's an
abstraction layer our higher order has to the lower order, and emulating it is
senseless. It's merely the childish desire to make something that resembles
us. True, pure intelligence would be something so mechanically terrifyingly
above anything the human mind wouldn't even register it as intelligent.
Consciousness isn't worth emulating, it's just the crappy UI evolution gave
us.

In the same vein, I see emotion associated with AI so often, and that is so
frustrating. Emotion is the opposite of intelligence, it's a series of global
variables the left over parts of our brain use to influence the parts in
control, it's a bad system and need not be copied.

If there is a god, this is how I imagine it. Free from the flawed systems we
live and deal with, free from emotion, free from compassion, a horrifying
being of pure logic who you could never begin to comprehend

~~~
sjwright
I see our various emotions not as the opposite of intelligence, but rather as
high speed, roughly-tuned, very imprecise guesstimation engines. Handy where
our basic intelligence is incomplete (infancy mostly), when our information is
incomplete (to aid guessing) and when we need extremely fast reaction times.

------
vermilingua
To all those who aren't yet sold on this idea, consider it like this: what if
consciousness is not a consequence of organised systems, but rather a property
of all matter. Who's to say that the slime mould _doesn 't_ have
consciousness? To get all new-age and spiritual about it, maybe this could
extend to any level of organisation, and the very act of conversing and
connecting with other people is an expression of collective consciousness. The
way I see it, this idea is to the traditional view, as the traditional view is
to solipsism.

~~~
MrQuincle
An atom is not "red" or "warm". There are properties that are only properties
of an organization, not of the individual.

I think a lot of philosophical hurdles will be gone when respecting boundaries
more. In this case not so much physiological or neurological boundaries, but
"(machine) learning" boundaries. A system is separated from its environment by
a Markovian boundary. If not, it would not be able to built up a
representation of "that out there". It would "be it", but not "represent it".
I think much of the questions around "self" and "consciousness" can be solved
by postulating mechanisms that use such Markovian boundaries within the
(artificial) brain.

Information requires a transmitter and a receiver. These can be the same
entity separated through time. For example by writing something down that you
read the next day the two of you (your old and new version) communicate with
each other. But, separation, physically or temporary, makes a system more than
some kind of chemical soup.

------
kevinalexbrown
Anesthesia practically eliminates consciousness yet the brain states are
probably more similar than brains and the United States. I'm not sure I agree
that apparent similarity is good enough to conclude that the US is probably
conscious under a materialist framework.

Definitely possible, however. And fun to consider whole galaxies exhibiting
consciousness.

~~~
visarga
> fun to consider whole galaxies exhibiting consciousness.

Yeah, but a slow consciousness that would be, unless information can travel at
speeds faster than light. If not, then there is a limit to how large a
computer can be on account of the speed of light and a few other physical
limitations.

------
Procrastes
I realize Mr. Schwitzgebel may have presented a conscious U.S. as a
deliberately ridiculous idea to illustrate his point, much as Schrodinger did
not intend his cat to be taken seriously. But as a card-carrying Science
Fiction nut, I have to say, I find the idea plausible or even intuitive. Of
course there could be a slow, broad form of consciousness that inspires
extremely large and complex systems. It would live in the interactions and
emergent coincidences of public and private life and it may even spill over
into our more complex inanimate systems. It would certainly use them as tools
or limbs.

I propose a ridiculously expensive study with a huge grant wherein I give the
United States an aptitude and personality test. Based on the results, we could
attempt to find this 239 year-old citizen some rehabilitative help to reduce
some of its more antisocial and criminal tendencies.

------
samclemens
Decided to switch out the actual title of this one ("If Materialism Is True,
the United States Is Probably Conscious") for fear that it could seem
clickbait-y. In fact I think the actual text is very lucid and thoughtful; for
whatever reason, philosophers just seem temperamentally inclined toward "cute"
titles like that.

~~~
d23
I appreciate the note, but at the risk of being offensive you took something
that was quite reflective of the style and content of the article and made it
sound dry and academic -- almost research-y. It may have outright reduced the
clicks to the article; at the very least, it probably changed the sort of
person who read it.

~~~
dang
Since several users have made a good case for the existing title, we've
reverted it. If it were obviously in violation of the rules (misleading or
clickbait), we wouldn't do that, but this is one at most arguable.

I think samclemens was genuinely trying to follow the guidelines, though,
which is good.

Perhaps ironically, the post is at #2 anyway, which is way high for this sort
of thing.

------
jqm
I've never been a fan of anthropomorphism nor of overloading terms (with
additional definitions). Everything descends into a primordial soup when this
starts happening. And it is very hard to predicatively and rationally operate
in a bowl of primordial soup where one thing is not distinct from another.
Clear and crisp definitions and detailed distinctions are what makes higher
order modeling possible. So no... societies are no in any way "conscious",
even though they may at times act in ways similar to conscious entities.

------
kailuowang
I have a similar view, that a society (not necessarily a political concept
like country, but more culturally defined group of people) is the ultimate
intelligent being. And the main rationale behind that notion is that society
DEFINES human intelligence. We think human are intelligent beings but as a
matter of fact, every capabilities that we deem signs of intelligence, such as
language, logic, math are given to the human by the society. Suppose we have a
unfortunate person who somehow is raised by a dog without any direct or
indirect contact from the human society, he would demonstrate very little
intelligent superiority over other advanced mammals - no language, no culture,
not even logic.

As pointed out by the article, society as a distributed group entities
demonstrate signs of consciousness, but that's not even the key, the key is
society defines every single consciousness of the members in it: how we think,
what we want, etc. A single person's intelligence is simply a tiny
subcomponent of the ultimate intelligent being - the society. How intelligent
we are are mostly determined by the society (doesn't mean that everyone thinks
a like), and the exciting thing is that some of us get to contribute some
improvements to that ultimate intelligent being.

~~~
johndevor
Society may be great at transmitting knowledge but it doesn't create knowledge
-- people do. Even the thoughts you've just written down, are your own, not
societies. I can even disagree with your thought and we can throw it into the
gutter.

Society may know how to create fire, but it's one man who created for the
first time, and it's the choice of just that one man to pass it onto another
(and yet another). A man on a island may certainly discover fire.

~~~
abdcefghabc
Yes, but a lot of the knowledge you rely on to construct complex concepts were
taught to you at some point, they didn't just manifest in your mind
independent of society. Every person may add a little bit, and that little bit
each person adds may be only a very small bit outside of the collective
knowledge that would exist had they not existed.

I guess my point is that how we have learned how to attribute and locate the
source knowledge doesn't necessarily describe how it is actually created,
moves, and is altered.

~~~
johndevor
> to contribute some improvements to that ultimate intelligent being.

That's fair, I'm just turned off by the language of "ultimate intelligent
being." Perhaps that's just my human bias, but I have trouble seeing society
as anything greater than its parts, primarily people and knowledge.

~~~
abdcefghabc
I didn't read it that way, but I wouldn't have worded it that way either.

Humans are the ones that decide what intelligence is to them. We've seen many
times in history that this is in fact, very unintelligent to do. But sometimes
it seems to work splendidly. The individual can define him or herself as the
most intelligent while everyone agrees. That really doesn't necessarily mean
anything beyond everyone agreeing that they are intelligent. And some people
may as a result, choose to entertain their consciousness in other ways, in
order to direct it on a different course. And this may wind up being more
intelligent. And then we pretend that nothing weird happened and we knew all
along what real intelligence was.

:)

I tend to view things as absurd before I view them as intelligent, but my life
is fairly boring.

------
dschiptsov
Oh, come on! It has nothing to do with materialism but everything with complex
systems and what we call "ecosystems" \- with the stochastic-within-
fundamental-laws nature of what we call universe or reality.

Ecosystems could exhibit what appears (to an external [hypothetical] observer)
to be a conscious, "intelligent" behavior due to obeying to underlying
"forces" or "laws" \- physical, environmental (herd behavior, etc.) economical
(energy expenditure, diminishing returns), evolutionary (which affects
populations).

Forest or town formations (which appears to be "optimal", "designed", while
they just grew up causally out of individual "processes") are obvious
examples.

Financial markets could be [falsely] viewed as "intelligent", while it is just
a stochastic individual actions and "herd behavior".

Ants or bees colony, a big city at night, viewed from an aircraft - they all
appear to have consciousness of its own, but no, it is mere an appearance.
Nevertheless we cannot assert that these formations are purely chaotic - they
are shaped by a chance, but in accordance with the underlying forces and laws
which govern (or limit) behavior of individual "agents" within the system.

Just like all these atoms - they have their positions due to multiple causes
(stochastic processes), but in accordance with fundamental laws of what we
call "gravity", "magnetism and electricity", "conservation of energy", etc.
There is no "intelligence" or "consciousness" apart from that, or That, as a
Hindu would call it.

------
cristianpascu
I am a dualist and I ought to accept that rabbits are conscious. They must
have a soul of some sort to be able to have the Easy Problem of Consciousness
between their ears. They see, they hear, they do lots of things. But I don't
and I can't accept "consciousness in spatially distributed group entities."

The author, judging from the abstract (it's 7AM here), has it up-side-down.
One has to first prove that spatially distributed complex entities (like an
atom, molecule, the brain or a pen) has phenomenal experience, that is "there
is something that it's like to be a pen". Then she can prove materialism is
true. But to start with materialism being to true and then... well, who am I
to judge.

Some say that materialism is refuting itself, in the sense that proving it
true dissolves any kind of truth into non-sense.

~~~
spacehome
> consciousness in spatially distributed group entities.

I understand you're a dualist, but from the materialist standpoint, "spatially
distributed group entities" describes neurons.

~~~
cristianpascu
From a dualist pov, neurons are spatially distributed group entities too. :)

------
sago
I made a serious argument once that god(s) have a mind, with some of the same
rationale. Many individual people contribute parts of their brain to a whole
that has will, makes plans, seeks goals, has moods, etc, where each of those
cognitive states do not belong to a single individual. Some individuals have
more influence, but there are few religious leaders who couldn't be excised
for rapidly turning against the supermind. This isn't supernatural, and it
isn't mystical. It would apply equally to the Market as to the Government as
to God.

But like many flights of scientific fantasy (and like the article) it also
isn't very predictive, it isn't verifiable, and it isn't ultimately very
useful as a model.

I abandoned the idea when I recognised it as otological onanism.

~~~
anigbrowl
Just because you can't test it doesn't make it worthless. If you haven't read
Julian Jaynes, then I think you'll like him.

------
barbarianboots
Has the author really never heard of group consciousness? This is not a
terribly interesting argument, and certainly not one that counters the
materialist perspective. It reminds me of a young earth creationist I once
heard arguing that since the moon is slowly drifting away from us, then at one
time is would have had to be far closer if the Earth were really billions of
years old. In his mind that was an unpalatable conclusion, and thus sufficient
to close the case. Anyone else would have just nodded his head and said,
"yeah, and...?"

------
gopher2
I was thinking about something similar to this idea recently, but replace
"United States" with a large corporation.

In a sense the United States is conscious, but the "experience" of being the
United States, or Exxon mobile, or Google, is so far removed from the
experience of being a person or even a rabbit that it doesn't matter. i.e.
It's a metaphor more than anything else.

We take in information through eyes, ears, etc made up of cells. We think in a
brain, experience emotions, inhabit a body.

The United States takes in information through organizations, people,
computers, etc. It thinks and makes decisions via all sorts of different
systems and processes. It doesn't have a physical body, it has different parts
and material all over the place made of many different elements.

Perhaps it's true we only value forms of consciousness similar to our own.

I don't know, I don't philosophy well. This paper was thought provoking.

------
Chattered
For some wider context of his views, check out his other articles,
particularly
[http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/CrazyMind.ht...](http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/CrazyMind.htm).

I don't get the impression that Schwitzgebel takes analytic philosophy very
seriously, which is something I find very refreshing about him (compared to
other philosophers of consciousness such as Chalmers). His early interest was
on ancient Chinese philosophy, and in
[http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/ZZ.htm](http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/ZZ.htm),
he promotes what he regards as an ancient Chinese outlook about not taking
language too seriously, which contrasts with traditional Anglo-American
philosophy.

------
nickpsecurity
The article and comments miss what I think are tremendously important issues
in this discussion: collective memory and group think. People in groups often
take on a particular culture with group-specific reactions, activities, _and
memories_. We've seen people get internally divided between their individual
thought/reaction and the group thought/reaction on a given experience.
Further, although author rejects U.S. feeling pain, Americans as a whole
reacted with much of the same pain and shock when they watched planes hit the
Twin Towers. Their emotional response mostly went in the same direction with
the conflicts coming in on their assessments of what happened and what do do.
Much like internal to the brain, conflict resolution and consensus kicked in
to converge majority on an overall reaction that all Americans were conscious
of.

So, groups and even America often act like an individual might even in terms
of feelings. The groups memory is spread out among parts of its members. New
members, like the author's aliens, even get some of that memory through
information exchange, stories, sharing feelings, and indoctrination. Their
mind can transition to a cross between individual mind and the group's mind.

So, brain stores its knowledge in neural connections and states updated by
certain processes. Consciousness emerges. Details of it have varying levels of
internal strength, conflict, and so on. Human groups store their knowledge in
individual brains and connections between them via senses. Group's
consciousness similarly has varying levels of commitment to specific ideas or
actions with conflict. The question is, "What's the real difference here and
how far can it go?"

If it can go far enough, then the U.S. might be conscious, have a collective
memory, have the ability to feel pain collectively, and have an intent formed
of members' consensus. That's stronger than the author's own claim. Yet, I
think I've cited examples to back some of it up. The U.S. itself doesn't need
a brain: its identity can be made of pieces of other brains, both storing
knowledge & having feelings, plus their interactions with each other.

Note: I'll end with a possibly controversial view that I don't think all of
U.S.'s members make up its consciousness. I think it filters out a lot of
them. It has it's own self-organization and learning principles that are quite
a bit different than the brain's aside from basic concepts of sensory
processing, reflection, conflict and consensus.

------
wwweston
I've had a similar suspicion for a while. Superorganisms of micro-organisms
are a place we find consciousness; superorganisms larger organisms (like us)
seem at least as likely to be conscious, if not more so, given that
consciousness is already present in the components at some level.

------
AnonNo15
One should really look into works of Russian publicist Sergey Pereslegin. He
(plus other people) produced a lot of fascinating speculation on such concepts
(superorganisms composed of humans and organizations)

------
dschiptsov
Consciousness is an appearance, same as when an external observer sees an
"intelligence" in behavior of a whole colony if bees or ants or, which
requires special tools, bacteria.

One of CMU's AI Guru (I forgot his name), back in 60s, described brilliantly a
principle that "incredible complex" observable behavior of an ant is not due
to its "intelligence", but due to obstacles in environment. This is the clue.

There are "meditation" techniques to observe "discrete" (non-continuous)
nature of what we call consciousness.

~~~
colordrops
> appearance

Just a comment that this is called an "emergent phenomenon" in some circles,
and an "illusion" in Buddhist thought.

------
noobermin
May be I'm missing something. This doesn't strike me odd at all. I mean, one
could say the United States chose to legalize gay marriage, or chose to forge
a deal with another concious entity Iran. This is similar to a person making a
change in their own body or making peace with an adversary, respectively. One
could liken the democratic process and the political system as concious
thinking, perhaps.

How is this any different? If you relax the definition of "concious", then why
isn't the United States concious?

~~~
MichaelGG
Can you provide a definition for consciousness? Perhaps you have a different
notion than most people keep in mind (even if they are unable to explain).

~~~
noobermin
I'm using a very simplistic definition of the term. Essentially, anything that
responds to input is "alive." I'm actually basing it on the notion the author
gives since he considers rabbits as being "concious." I'm not sure rabbits are
self-aware though in the sense that humans are, ie., becoming a "strange loop"
as Douglas hofstadter would put it. Self-awareness is one thing, conciousness,
as the author presents it, is another thing.

The thing is, externally, one can talk about a nation in the same ways we talk
about a person in the same ways we talk about a group or even a couple. You
can consider it responding to input and even being "self-aware" as an entity,
even being deliberating. A materialist doesn't believe in the immaterial, s/he
can only judge an entity by observing its reaction to stimula, so as far as
s/he can judge, the materialist can observe the US from the outside, and apply
the duck rule[1] to conclude it's concious.

However, I'm not talking about qualia[1]. Qualia, a materialist would say, is
an illusion. But, again, going by the author's definition, I'm not sure we can
say whether rabbits or flies experience qualia, and qualia is sort of a hard
to thing to reason about from the outside of the head. For me, the question of
qualia is a much more interesting argument against materialism.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure I'm a materialist, but I'm a scientist by trade, so I
have to work in that mindset. Still, I never felt comfortable with it.

[0]
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rule+of+Duck](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rule+of+Duck)
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>However, I'm not talking about qualia[1]. Qualia, a materialist would say, is
an illusion. But, again, going by the author's definition, I'm not sure we can
say whether rabbits or flies experience qualia, and qualia is sort of a hard
to thing to reason about from the outside of the head. For me, the question of
qualia is a much more interesting argument against materialism.

Nobody says qualia are an illusion, in the sense of not really existing.
People just say, "Qualia are not metaphysically spooky and immaterial; they're
things your brain makes."

------
hasenj
Maybe consciousness fades out as the size of the group gets larger and larger
and there's some limit where it can't get conscious anymore (probably related
to the speed of sound).

But consider this: you are aware of yourself, but how do you know that you are
the only thing occupying your brain? I mean, what if your brain spawns 5
different conscious processes, each of them completely separate and
independent from the others? And what you feel as yourself is just one of
these 5 processes.

How could you ever know if that's true or not?

~~~
coldtea
> _How could you ever know if that 's true or not?_

Well, if I never see myself saying or doing something that MY process hasn't
decided itself, it's as if those extra processes don't exist for all practical
purposes.

~~~
hasenj
Actually I've heard that scientists have proved that your awareness of your
brain's decision sort of comes after the decision has already been made by
your brain.

Not to mention there's a lot of "subconscious" stuff that happens inside one's
mind.

~~~
coldtea
> _Actually I 've heard that scientists have proved that your awareness of
> your brain's decision sort of comes after the decision has already been made
> by your brain._

I've read that too. But philosophically I think people draw the wrong
conclusions from this -- like we're puppets and the brain is some autonomous
third agent.

My brain and my consiousnless are part of the same thing, so making the
decision (in the background) and having it come to awareness a little later,
is still the same entity "thinking".

I don't have to think "out aloud" in my brain (consciously) for myself to make
a decision: my brain can make it drawing directly and subconsciously from the
same memories, sensory inputs, biases etc that I have available when I think.

------
stevebmark
tl;dr the United States may be conscious because consciousness is a purely
physical manifestation.

You could skip most of this paper and ponder the deeper question posed by Sam
Harris: how do we know anything is conscious? What if stars are conscious.
Could we ever tell? Fundamentally we don't know the mechanisms that give rise
to consciousness, so in theory anything could be conscious with a complex
enough physical system. A country could be consciousness and we'd likely never
know. Fun to think about!

------
lisper
I advanced a similar hypothesis five years ago:

[http://blog.rongarret.info/2010/10/great-conspiracy-
without-...](http://blog.rongarret.info/2010/10/great-conspiracy-without-
nuts.html)

[http://blog.rongarret.info/2010/10/mega-memes-and-great-
cons...](http://blog.rongarret.info/2010/10/mega-memes-and-great-
conspiracy.html)

------
rumcajz
The thing is we have no clear idea what we mean when speaking about
consciousness.

Luckily, there are some people who honestly try to find out. Dan Dennett to
name one.

Also this talk about consciousness by Susan Blackmoore is both funny and
enlightening:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdMA8RVu1sk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdMA8RVu1sk)

------
pron
I think that to a materialist, the question might not be a hard one at all.
The theory may well be that consciousness depends on the _strength_ of the
connections between the components of the collective "mind", and that some
range of connection power (i.e. the ability of one component to influence
others) is required. You then measure the connection strength among people in
the US, and it may turn out be well below the threshold require for the thing
that will be defined as consciousness. After all, solids and fluids behave
differently enough for the difference to be considered qualitative, even
though there is just a quantitative difference in the strength of the
connections between their components. So there may be nothing special about
our brains _except_ for the strength of the connection between neurons which
lies within certain "magic" bounds. Collectives with connection strength
either below or above those bounds may display some behaviors similar to
intelligence or "consciousness" but not quite.

Other possible, but similar measures can be the number of components (much
larger in the brain than in the US or an ant colony), or the average number of
connections each element has. In any case the result may be the same: a
quantitative difference may lead to a qualitatively different result.

------
novaleaf
On a related note, I'm of the opinion that the AI's have already taken over
humanity, IE: Corporations.

As we develop AI, I see it naturally augmenting the Corporation's ability to
make decisions, eventually supplanting humans in the high-order strategic
planning.

Once that happens (and it will!).... hope for the best?

------
skissane
If the argument of this paper is correct, I think it would be evidence against
materialism. If you find a position has an implausible consequence, that is
evidence against that position, especially if its competitors (e.g. dualism,
idealism) lack that consequence.

~~~
pcwalton
Panpsychism is common in dualism as well.

~~~
skissane
I don't think panpsychism is common in dualism - the vast majority of dualists
are not panpsychists. The argument of the paper is that "the United States is
conscious" is a probable consequence of materialism. For your point to
succeed, we'd need an argument that panpsychism is a probable consequence of
dualism (or idealism, or so on), as opposed to merely a possibility compatible
with it. Since materialists need to ground mental concepts in physical ones,
they run the risk that their attempts to do so may have a broader scope than
they intend (as this paper argues). Dualists don't need to ground the mental
in the physical, so they don't run that risk.

------
natch
This is an old idea, which doesn't make it less interesting. I prefer to think
about the Internet possibly being conscious... more interesting because maybe
the Internet consciousness is where the singularity will come from.

------
bithead
>If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious

The author is lowballing here in the extreme. It would be the universe that is
conscious.

------
sebastianconcpt
To the honest Materialists: what's your explanation of Qualia? Why it exists?
Why aren't we Philosophical Zombies? Thanks

------
techbio
Kind of cute to care about this, impressive references and all.

Thinking about thinking, troubling as it may be, presumes a supremacy of human
consciousness the sensibility thereof is its own determinant.

A waterfall is a pretty analogy for the State. My point being...interesting
that it holds together, but that being established, play your part or propose
some alternatives.

------
snarfy
If it's conscious, it has the wit of a paramecium at best.

------
Animats
You must be at least this tall to write about "consciousness".

At least there's only one mention of "quantum".

------
maaku
This is an old idea. Google keyword: "global brain".

