4 ms·
I think groups of people are conscious in a sense. When I say conscious I'll use a definition where consciousness is the behavior of a physical system that is:
by elindbe3 6y ago
I think groups of people are conscious in a sense. When I say conscious I'll use a definition where consciousness is the behavior of a physical system that is:
* directional/goal oriented
* exhibits higher order patterns / behaviors which are greater than the sum of its parts.
A riot would probably be the easiest example to start with. You get a group of mildly angry people together and they can become enraged and do things they wouldn't normally do. Not only that, the anger of the group can rise and fall together. It's like people synchronize with each other and the riot becomes this living agent of chaos. Basically a human is a higher order pattern on top of cells and biochemistry while a group of people can exhibit higher order patterns like a riot.
When you get to the nation state level you can see higher order patterns as well. For example the BLM protests. A single even triggered this burst of goal
-oriented activity among millions of disparate individuals like a wildfire. Or it's like the country, not just the people in the country but the country itself, became enraged.
And I'm not just talking about protests and riots that's just an example. If you look at history, there are lots of other examples of collective, higher-order, goal-oriented activity at the nation state level. Groups building cities or opening up areas to farming or setting up trade networks or going to war. Sometimes these actions are based on the will of one person like a king but other times they are the result of thousands of individuals coordinating autonomously.
- metalliqaz 6y agoI don't know what it means to define consciousness without self awareness. Sounds like just emergent behaviors.
- elindbe3 6y agoA lot of animals (such as insects) aren't self aware. I still think they have some form of consciousness. Emergent behaviors by themselves aren't goal-oriented.
- grassmudhorse 6y agoOr, from an insects perspective: "The swarm doesn't think humans are swarm-aware. Swarm still thinks they have some form of consciousness"
- grassmudhorse 6y agoI don't know what it means to define self-awareness without consciousness. Sounds like just emergent behaviors.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago> I don't know what it means to define consciousness without self awareness Any entity capable of suffering presumably counts as being conscious. (I'm not claiming the converse here, though.) I don't see an obvious reason why every entity capable of suffering must necessarily be capable of self awareness. With the right blend of psychotropics, I suspect it would be possible to dissolve a person's sense of self while still causing them to suffer. They would still count as being conscious. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24910009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24910009
- sullyj3 6y agoI don't think this captures most peoples' intuitive notion of consciousness at all. Most people think of it as their directly perceived experience.
- elindbe3 6y agoI can't really discuss the directly perceived experience of anything other than myself since I have no way of accessing it. I have no way of knowing if you have directly perceived experiences, but I would assume you do since I can see certain characteristics in you. For what it's worth, I actually do think that a collection of people (such as the United States) has directly perceived experiences. That's something that would be quite difficult to prove, and I believe those experiences would be very different from ours. Similarly, I think the directly perceived experiences of a housefly or an amoeba would be very different from my own as well.
- sullyj3 6y agoI don't see that it follows that if you don't have access to something, you can't discuss it. Appreciate your clarification in the second paragraph.