> If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties t

> If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings. This doesn't seem true. Surely, one of these properties is some level of near real-time rich interconnection between all of the various IO ports and computation centers. There is some separability, obviously. I can cut off my arm and remain conscious, but my arm (for the short period before it bleeds out and dies) is presumably not part of "me" any more even if it remains conscious as a separate entity. The overall network needs to remain more or less non-partitioned for the entirety of the time it is considered to be one individual. Groups of people definitely do not have this property, though we could in the future via direct brain interfaces to the Internet.