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.
Good point, and agreed. To me, that's the weakest part of the argument. Basically I would argue that the US is closer to Swampman than to something like a rabbit brain in this formulation:
"One might think that for an entity to have real, intrinsic representational content, meaningful utterances, and intentionality, it must be richly historically embedded in the right kind of environment. Lightning strikes a swamp and “Swampman” congeals randomly by freak quantum chance. Swampman might utter sounds that we would be disposed to interpret as meaning “Wow, this swamp is humid!”, but if he has no learning history or evolutionary history, some have argued, this utterance would have no more meaning than a freak occurrence of the same sounds by a random perturbance of air.[18] But I see no grounds for objection here. The United States is no Swampman. The United States has long been embedded in a natural and social environment, richly causally connected to the world beyond – connected in a way that would seem to give meaning to its representations and functions to its parts.[19]
I am asking you to think of the United States as a planet-sized alien might, that is, to evaluate the behaviors and capacities of the United States as a concrete, spatially distributed entity with people as some or all of its parts, an entity within which individual people play roles somewhat analogous to the role that individual cells play in your body. If you are willing to jettison contiguism and other morphological prejudices, this is not, I think, an intolerably weird perspective. As a house for consciousness, a rabbit brain is not clearly more sophisticated. I leave it open whether we include objects like roads and computers as part of the body of the U.S. or instead as part of its environment.One might think that for an entity to have real, intrinsic representational content, meaningful utterances, and intentionality, it must be richly historically embedded in the right kind of environment. Lightning strikes a swamp and “Swampman” congeals randomly by freak quantum chance. Swampman might utter sounds that we would be disposed to interpret as meaning “Wow, this swamp is humid!”, but if he has no learning history or evolutionary history, some have argued, this utterance would have no more meaning than a freak occurrence of the same sounds by a random perturbance of air.[18] But I see no grounds for objection here. The United States is no Swampman. The United States has long been embedded in a natural and social environment, richly causally connected to the world beyond – connected in a way that would seem to give meaning to its representations and functions to its parts.
I am asking you to think of the United States as a planet-sized alien might, that is, to evaluate the behaviors and capacities of the United States as a concrete, spatially distributed entity with people as some or all of its parts, an entity within which individual people play roles somewhat analogous to the role that individual cells play in your body. If you are willing to jettison contiguism and other morphological prejudices, this is not, I think, an intolerably weird perspective. As a house for consciousness, a rabbit brain is not clearly more sophisticated. I leave it open whether we include objects like roads and computers as part of the body of the U.S. or instead as part of its environment."
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
Communications are regularly attributed to the United States in law and diplomacy, and the humans who carry out those communications will often have personal views that are inconsistent with the state's position. The concept of a 'board decision' itself implies the attribution of intention, which is one aspect of consciousness, to a corporation. Any board resolution that is carried by majority reflects the will of a 'separate corporate mind' overriding the conscious decisions of the dissenting directors.
I disagree. You're still confusing goal seeking with consciousness. You can easily automate goal-seeking, so goal-seeking and intention are not nearly a sufficient condition for consciousness.
On your basis you could impute consciousness to any cybernetic system that takes a majority decision - such as the navigation systems on the old Shuttle.
And just because communications are attributed to a nation, doesn't mean you're dealing with anything more than a diplomatic convention. In practice you're still dealing with leaders and representatives, and the leaders will set policy.
Without the leaders there is no entity - and in fact it's also known in diplomacy that you can decapitate a country simply by killing its leadership, or define a new country by changing its leadership.
A change of leadership creates a change of identity and intention, even though the rest of the things it does remain broadly unchanged.
Compare that with human brain, where there are no "leadership neurons". There are broad areas of the brain that integrate experience and are involved in making decisions, but you can't point to one neuron and say "That's the president", or to one group and say "That's the ruling party."
More, there's no self-awareness. These arguments are kind of pointless without a final definition of consciousness, but it seems likely to me that entities that act in conscious ways have some internal representation of a persistent self which is perceived - somehow, in a magical way we don't understand - as a unified self-identity.
So you need two things for that. One is a persistent representation of self. And the other is the ability to experience that representation as a singular self-definition.
Humans are embodied, so we know what experience is. Corporations, countries, and bird flocks aren't.
If you invade a large land area, remove a source of profit, or trap half a flock of starlings in a net, no singular embodied experience corresponds to that loss. You can predict goal-seeking behaviours, and you can find individual responses to individual circumstances. But all of those fail the requirement for a single unified self-aware change in state.
Otherwise you'd have to argue that countries somehow feel pain when they're invaded. Citizens may feel pain, especially if they're killed, injured, or made homeless. But countries?
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.