If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious

An onotlogical pivot I experienced in my late teens was recognizing that the taxonomy of life is not some immutable fact that we're uncovering. It's this Sisyphean task of providing structure to something that is everchanging. It's never complete, never correct, but it's often useful. In that way it's a lot like unicode!

When thinking about the evolution of the taxonomy of life, I think about how there's really no good reason to imagine a lifeform as being a singular, physically connected organism. We structure it that way because it's useful. We see trees and we imagine each one is a lifeform, but there are entire forests of just one tree. I don't think it's too bizarre to structure a model that demonstrates communities of lifeforms (whether ants, slime mold, or humans) as being effectively one conscious being.

I'm perfectly happy to believe that the United States has an awareness of itself in the abstract sense that its a complex system with emerging behaviors that are feedbackloops of itself. I'm also convinced that all mammals and most sea and air creatures have consciousness in this as well as the more general sense.

To me, the fact that an awareness of one self exists isn't particularly stunning - what's stunning to me is that we believe it is something incredibly special and we are the only ones endowed with it.

I think this assumption comes from the same human self confidence that decided it was the only thing "created in gods image" in the universe and so on...

No individual wrote the Constitution. It was a collective effort. Yet it has features of a work we would expect from a consciousness, such as a view of itself as embedded in a larger historical context. I don't have a hard time seeing that document as a form of speech emitted by a conscious collective. And not knowing exactly how human individual consciousness works, it isn't very clear whether such collective consciousness is a metaphor or an example. Especially when individual consciousness seems to emerge from a collective of neurons.

> something it's like to be you

This phrase comes up a lot in discussions of consciousness and I've never understood it and never seen why it's supposed to encapsulate the idea.

It isn't "like" anything to be me. There isn't something else I can compare it to. All I know is that I exist and experience and that there is an aspect of that experience that is impossible to communicate, define or share.

Not exactly the same but something that I think people here might find interesting philosophically regardless of their religious views:

There's an idea in interpersonal communication that when a couple are in a relationship, the relationship itself comes to act as a "third person". So for example, the couple might decide "Even though neither of us wants to do this, we need to for the good of our relationship" as though the relationship itself had needs and desires.

I've heard theologans make a similar argument about the Holy Spirit. That the relationship between the Father and Jesus is so strong that their "third person" is literally a person.

Again not trying to proselytize, just an idea that I think people might find intellectually interesting.

Yes, so is humanity as a collective species, and the Earth as a complete ecosystem. But also “consciousness” is different from what 99% of us believe it is, it’s much less special/magical and much more common. And also, the outward characteristics of a consciousness depend heavily on where it’s embodied. At least that’s my theory.

The author frames this as "either accept this highly counterintuitive result, or take it as a reason to doubt materialism, or find a principled criterion that excludes entities like this" but honestly this doesn't really strike me as highly counterintuitive

Materialism implies Panpsychism. Not a surprise, but this is put forward in a confrontational way.

The real question for Panpsychism is not whether something is or is not conscious, but conscious of what. If everything is aware, what is this thing we have that a rock doesn't seem to have (but LLMs might have)? I'm basically sold on the premise of Panpsychism, but we do have to recognize that when we say "consciousness", we aren't always talking about the same thing.

The cool thing about Eric and his work is that he consistently challenges "folk psychology" in ways that aren't just doom and gloom. I think the best way to understand his argument in the paper isn't as supporting panpsychism necessarily since the proliferation of "consciousness" might be because it's cheap and easy to get like an illusionist[0] might support. I think the universe might be conscious, but that's not entirely interesting because being conscious is just a behavioral disposition to get labelled conscious, i.e. it's more akin to a speech act than some deep metaphysical classification.

As always, reading Eric is a treat and if you enjoy reading about the oddities of our world and the weird conclusions that fall out of our best theories, then you would enjoy reading his work.

0: https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionis...

That's fine, but I'm a materialist and I don't think rabbits are conscious, so the whole thing falls apart. I'm down with Descartes, I think they're just a kind of proteinaceous Roombas, be they never so sweet. I don't think they have a clue what's going on, or any true ideas in their heads (probably rabbit memes though). So in my conception of consciousness, which is self-awareness, entailing understanding and explanations, they aren't conscious. Of course if you want to make consciousness into something more basic like reaction to a stimulus then sure, a rabbit is conscious, and so is the US, and a slime mold, and possibly a rock, since it will fall down when prodded. You could actually manufacture an argument for the United States being properly self-aware and understanding itself! But this isn't it. Besides, nobody really understands the United States.

> But a materialist who accepts consciousness in weirdly formed aliens ought also to accept consciousness in spatially distributed group entities

I guess this must be elaborated on in the article (without a subscription I can only see the abstract). But it seems like quite a leap. In particular we could believe in the possibility of consciousness in spacially distributed group entities, but that that possibility isn’t realized in the case of a country.

Which would make sense. For example if one believes that human consciousness somehow arises from signals shooting around from one neuron to another… sure, why not believe that some kind of ant-sized creature (or whatever, ants are just evocative) could be sending those signals between one another, and consciousness arises from that collective? But, human signal propagation might be too slow or error-prone to “close the feedback loop” so to speak.

How do they define consciousness precisely?

That's where all these discussions tend to break down, if you get accurate enough with your definition you end up saying that a thermostat is conscious in a sense or reach a point where you cannot define it well enough.

UC Riverside makes the paper available here:

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...

Schwitzgebel says “You might think, for example, that spatial contiguity is a necessary condition of objecthood, so that it makes no more sense to speak of a spatially discontinuous entity than it makes sense – unless you adopt some liberal views about ontology – to speak of an entity composed of your left shoe, the Eiffel tower, and the rings of Saturn”

The cybernetician Ranulph Glanville speaks of Gordon Pask’s conception of spatially discontinuous entities composed of bodies and minds in this way:

“A p-individual is a psychological individual and an m-individual is a mechanical individual. So an m-individual is a body and a p-individual is a mind. But it’s saying that one person, one body, one brain even, does not have just one person in it, one p-individual – one persona, to use that dramatic term. What it says is that we can take on different roles, which clearly we can. So as someone who draws and as someone who listens I am not the same persona, I’m a different p-individual in Pask’s terms but in one m-individual, but I can also have – incidentally for instance in a group action I can have a lot of m-individuals that become one p-individual. So this is one of Gordon’s clever inventions: The distinction between the m-individual and the p-individual. What that allows is that if I have a room with seven people in it, all busy working at something together, you know, and just lost in that thing where we’re working together, you have seven m-individuals forming one p-individual – one psychological individual that is getting on with the work. And that’s the experience that we have. ... So, m-individuals and p-individuals, they’re bodies and minds. M is body, P is mind. They stand for ‘mechanical individual’ and ‘psychological individual’.”

https://ranulphglanville.org.za/pasks-p-and-m-individuals/

EDIT: added link

I only read the abstract, but this sounds a lot like the dust theory from Greg Egan's books.

This is one of the main things that made me seriously doubt my prior assumption that consciousness supervenes over computation.

So are companies, right?

I’m a materialist. I believe rabbits are conscious. And I can belive there’s a kind of consciousness for a group of humans like a nation state.

However, the United States isn’t just a group of humans. It’s also a group of bison. Wild horses. Flies. Bacteria. Bats. Dung beetles. And whatever entity occupies the White House.

If the United States is conscious, it’s unclear why it’s consciousness stops at its fictitious, human imagined border. Except for humans, no other animal cares or knows when they cross the border.

So a much better claim can be made for the Earth and the entire web of life.

At which point we’re at Gaia hypothesis/Earth Systems science territory, and I’m fine with that too.

I still remain a materialist. And don’t consider the United States to be particularly conscious as an entity.

Pretty sure this is basically the plot to Tales of Arise.

This is one of my all time favorite posts on HN it’s been here before and I link about it often.

One thing I’ve considered it the corollary: if the United States is conscious, it suffers from bipolar I disorder and is currently deep in a manic psychosis.

One of the strangest implications of the idea that a computer simulation of a human brain would be conscious is that you can also just have humans do the same math manually trillions of times slower and it would still be conscious.

Here's a non-paywalled version with some relevant videos as well: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.ht...

The argument is fun, but silly. Saying 'it has some aspects that consciousness also has therefore it is consciousness' is like saying 'if it's liquid it must be water.'

It either matches some, but not all of the criteria or the criteria are wrong.

Most anti-materialism arguments just boil down to "because Jesus" or "because it makes me feel icky" once you strip away the rhetoric.

Commenting without reading the article, as is tradition, since it requires logging in to read.

I don't think this follows. We have no idea how consciousness happens. We can't even describe what it is without a bunch of vague handwaving. I know what it is because I have it. You presumably know because you have it. But we can't define it in a way that lets us ask the question "does X have consciousness?" in any sensible way. Certainly not in the way that we can ask "does X have mass?"

There's a really common materialist theory that consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems with certain properties. I like this theory. It seems reasonable, although it's still frustratingly vague. But it is not synonymous with materialism. I would agree with the statement that "if consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems with certain properties, the United States is probably conscious." But that's not what the title of this paper says.

Materialism would admit many other possibilities. Maybe it's an emergent property but there's a size limit, or a time limit. Maybe there's a special consciousness particle that hasn't yet been detected by physicists. Who knows, when you can't even ask the question properly, it's hard to come up with potential answers.

I feel like the conversation around consciousness gets ahead of itself. It's too focused on how consciousness works. But first we need to know what it even is. Otherwise you're effectively asking the question, "How does Florb work?" Where everybody kind of has an idea of what Florb is but nobody can really define it.

Absurdist. The Ship of Theseus in modern prose.

Post modernism abhors objective truth, and now this? Consciousness compressed to conscious compressed to acts like must be like?

Intelligence is not compression, proof of point.

Nothing has been “figured out” here, only mulched for compulsive and over saturated appetites.