If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2014)

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...?"

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.

For some wider context of his views, check out his other articles, particularly http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/CrazyMind.ht....

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, he promotes what he regards as an ancient Chinese outlook about not taking language too seriously, which contrasts with traditional Anglo-American philosophy.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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?

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?

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!

I advanced a similar hypothesis five years ago:

http://blog.rongarret.info/2010/10/great-conspiracy-without-...

http://blog.rongarret.info/2010/10/mega-memes-and-great-cons...

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

>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.

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

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.

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