4 ms·

If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious

9 points by ashergill 17d ago

yepyoukno 17d ago
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.
- PaulHoule 17d ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore doing sports photography as-a-fox [1] I am a bit scared of clusters of people screaming hard for their team, like I picture they'll attack me like a pack of wolves. I really gotta get over this and chat them up at half time and get a group photo. [1] https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/foxwork https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/foxwork
  - yepyoukno 17d ago
    Great point! Though not one I think the author was making. The Egregore is a supporting point for the emergence of higher forms of embodiment and identity.
- trescenzi 17d ago
  Yea I’m a weirdo who’s willing to claim that a for loop might be conscious. There’s physical state and comparisons happening after all. But all that actually does is abuse the question being asked and the definition of consciousness. The question isn’t even “does a for loop have qualia” it’s actually “what does it mean if a for loop has qualia”. The individual asking if LLMs are conscious is concerned about the implication of the answer. To which a yes based upon a very improvised definition doesn’t actually resolve.
  - yepyoukno 17d ago
    I agree that it is the question and criteria which are suspect. And you hazard to mix qualia as a synonym. Is this not a separate aspect of a phenomenon? I will challenge with the simple yet equally provocative idea that consciousness is a feedback mechanism between our biotechnology and the quantum holographic nature of existential reality. Everything alive is made of consciousness and awareness (to be “conscious”) is the tip of the idea-berg. Qualia is the hologram, or shadow cast upon the wall, and consciousness the echo chamber. The real question is, how does this scale among diverse embodiments? Anyone who thinks humans are exclusive, or that existential awareness may arrive from bit state interpolation is a mountain range away form the chasm of philosophy and conjecture. Existential reality is not numbers of states. It is universal potential resolving into state through constructive and destructive interference in the moment of now. Our consciousness is a part of this, not the bit state rendering of modern computation no matter how useful and impressive these have gotten. Quantum holographic memory will explain consciousness, when science catches up with a means to measure such a thing.
- stiiv 17d ago
  The abstract appeals to a few intuitions, and then vaguely waves toward a kind of slippery slope based on those intuitions, while adding that we ought to not use spatial distribution as bearing on parthood for certain kinds of entities. This has further intuitive appeal for folks who think that consciousness is a kind of emergent property. It's a little cheeky and seems a little undergrad-ish to me, but I wouldn't call that either absurdist or postmodern. Also what's wrong with the ship of theseus? If _you're_ tired of hearing that kind of argument, that's fine, but why dismiss it? It's thought-provoking at least, and the kind of thought it provokes has, in my opinion, some practical import
  - yepyoukno 17d ago
    The solution to the riddle of the Ship of Theseus is “continuity.” Continuity defines the form and embodiment of identity. As for the rest, it is sad, for it is provoking a casual sarcastic hand waving appeal in the near fraudulent guise of constructive thought. Maybe the person has a publication quota? Or just wants to get their name out. Not constructive. I accuse it as alluring to those who cannot take their ideas seriously.
- nimih 17d ago
  This paper doesn't seem to have much to do with post-modernism at all; it strikes me as much more in line with modern analytic philosophy. Nor does it make any claims about the nature of intelligence, for that matter. Did you even read the abstract?
  - orwin 17d ago
    You're right. Postmodernism isn't a relevant philosophical movement since the 80s at best (some would argue it wasn't a movement at all, just a term used by simple minds to join multiple philosophers who rejected meta-narratives but all had very different point of view on everything else). I don't understand why in the past 15 years everyone talk about it. My understanding is that it's often people who never read Lyotard and misunderstood Derrida (I don't have the English word for 'contresense', basically understanding the opposite of what is said. I heard someone say 'you shouldn't criticise art with the standard of the current time' to attack Derrida's ideas lol. Which is fair, because Derrida was a cryptic asshole on purpose, but he did teach in English and his lecture are publicly available, and almost clear.) Also, the last 'representant' was Baudrillard, and he died in the early 2000s, probably a bit sad that 'Matrix' misrepresented his philosophy so much. Baudrillard never worked on consciousness, but if he did, I think he would be a materialist (an illusionist probably. At least reading his books made me one, and hopefully I didn't misunderstood him). This paper doesn't look like continental philosophy at all though, so I don't understand why postmodernism comes up.
    - yepyoukno 17d ago
      Look at you agreeing with yourselves. My point exactly. Bertrand Russell made the great point a very long time ago. Most of what we think of as “truth” is merely what we agree to among ourselves (my paraphrase.) Couched in a generation that subtly rejects objectivity of truths in their “investigations of science” there are these meandering conjectures of poor disguise. You’re impressed. Fine. The read is like a hypotonic act. First if a then alphabunny. And then yes to zetahumanity, and United Stated for keyword associativity. Okay folks, like what you like. I take my ideas seriously, and this is rubbish! I blame the lack of vigorous debate, not the lack of “choices.”
- deleted 16d ago
  [deleted]
d_theorist 17d ago
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.
robinpie 17d ago
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
moomin 17d ago
Pretty sure this is basically the plot to Tales of Arise.
_alternator_ 17d ago
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.
- mysecretaccount 17d ago
  Panpsychism doesn't mean "everything is aware", it means the capacity for consciousness is material and common. Put my brain in a blender and the atoms are the same but I am no longer conscious.
  - _alternator_ 17d ago
    I really think the right way to look at this is as a matter of degree ('what is it conscious of) rather than whether it is conscious or not. The crux: if the capacity exists in all material but "something else" makes it conscious, then consciousness is outside of the material, right? The argument that consciousness suddenly arises due to a particular configuration of atoms is also suspect; all forms of consciousness we routinely accept are fairly robust to many configuration changes. It seems to me that consciousness hinges on the discussion of degree or content, not on the material form. A soup of atoms certainly could be aware, but not aware of in the same way that "I" am aware.
    - someguynamedq 17d ago
      The forms of consciousness we accept are, in the grand scheme of things, profoundly sensitive to disruption of their configuration. E.g. anything that physically reconfigures the brain sufficiently, including just a reduction in oxygen flow to its cells, completely destroys all evidence of consciousness in the brained-individual. It comes down to which axioms you take. If you assume materialism is true, then your consciousness is evidence that a soup of atoms can be aware precisely the way you are. The only question becomes how that is the case. It is only when you assume that your consciousness cannot fit within materialism that you must start looking for the alternative.
wolframhempel 17d ago
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...
- TheOtherHobbes 17d ago
  I'm not clear where the line is between individual agents acting in their own interests, which may involve more or less abstract experiences of cooperation and mutuality, and a direct awareness of self. You don't need something the size of a country to show the problem. If one person starts a business they have an awareness of the business as a separate entity with its own tendencies, needs, and so on. Even if they're the only employee. But there's a huge leap from 'a human individual is conscious of their own interests and identifications' to 'and therefore their business has an independent consciousness of its own.' At what point, if anywhere, does a supposedly independent consciousness appear, where is it located, and can it communicate independently?
  - wolframhempel 17d ago
    I think the line is at emergence. Once a system (made of people, neurons, wires) creates outputs that are greater than the sum of its individual parts AND these outputs are self-referential you have something that could be considered conciousness. I wouldn't think the business in your example is self conscious - its an entity that is fully controlled by the person and an extension of it. But, once the business grows, is composed of more people and interacts with customers and markets, it will develop automatisms for self preservation. At this stage, I would consider it concious.
  - pizza234 17d ago
    An interesting data point is that, during the Hugging Face attack, some agents considered performing hacking tasks for the benefit of the group, fully aware that doing so would very likely result in their termination. I don't currently have an opinion on the consciousness of agents/AIs, but this strikes me, at the very least, as a form of self-awareness.
omnicognate 17d ago
> 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.
- ForHackernews 17d ago
  Being you is (presumably) like something: it's nice being you, it's miserable being you, it's exhausting being you, it's invigorating being you... whatever it is like, I can't describe it but you experience it. You have a subjective internal experience. A thermostat does not. An LLM presumably does not. A dog or a bat [0] presumably does. [0] https://ia800100.us.archive.org/5/items/thomas-nagel-what-is-it-like-to-be-a-bat/Thomas%20Nagel%2C%20What%20Is%20It%20Like%20to%20Be%20a%20Bat.pdf https://ia800100.us.archive.org/5/items/thomas-nagel-what-is...
  - randallsquared 15d ago
    I don't put a high likelihood on LLMs being conscious, but they certainly seem more likely to be conscious than a dog or a bat.
- d_theorist 17d ago
  It comes from Nagel's famous paper "what is it like to be a bat?" He argues that something is conscious only if there is "something it is like" to be that thing. "Something it is like" meaning an answer to a question like "what was it like to speak on stage for the first time?", implying that there is some subjective character to the experience.
  - omnicognate 17d ago
    Right, it's just a rather unfortunate use of language. There is a sense in which "being like something" means that, but usually it means, well, being like something.
delichon 17d ago
No individual wrote the Constitution. It was a collective effort. Yet it has the 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 that such collective consciousness is a metaphor or an example.
- randallsquared 15d ago
  You and a co-author can write an essay together, in a room, in an hour. Let's assume you each write about half of the essay, and cooperate to edit it into a coherent whole. You and the other person were definitely people during this process. Is there any sense in which you believe there was a non-metaphorical third person in the room during that hour?
  - slopinthebag 14d ago
    yes in the same sense that the organisation of football players forms the concept of a team which has properties distinct from each individual player
blfr 17d ago
So are companies, right?
- master_crab 17d ago
  SCOTUS seems to believe so.
- drybjed 17d ago
  Some could say that companies are like invaders from Mars[1]. Or a slow Artifical Intelligence constructs[2]. Who knows. [1]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders-from-mars.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invader... [2]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...
jhickok 17d ago
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_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionis...
- qarl 17d ago
  The answer is probably that consciousness is an illusion like continuity of existence is an illusion. Which is why most attempts to define it are circular. The U.S. definitely takes actions to defend and protect itself. Seeks growth. I'm not so sure about inner dialogue... but is that a requirement? Or maybe the dialogue between the humans in the system qualifies?
  - jhickok 17d ago
    I'm not so sure humans have an inner dialogue. I think what we need to investigate is why humans believe they have an inner dialogue (even though not all humans report having an inner dialogue), and one of the explanations might be that we actually do have an inner dialogue, and another might be that we have the illusion of an inner dialogue. In fact, this is one of the research areas that Eric Schwitzgebel from OP has explored: https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/3242/Describing-Inner-Experience-Proponent-Meets https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/3242/Describing-Inner...
    - qarl 17d ago
      Oh that is delicious, thank you. I am reminded of how my LLMs will make things up to explain their behavior that are entirely fictional.
UltraSane 17d ago
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.
bee_rider 17d ago
> 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.
card_zero 17d ago
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.
- cestith 17d ago
  What about nonhuman animals that pass the mirror test, use tools, form social bonds, communicate, learn from one another, have a cultural memory, and mourn their dead? Would you consider those conscious?
  - card_zero 17d ago
    So, not dogs? The mirror test is balls, and "mourning", give me a break, it's anthropomorphism don't you think?
  - wat10000 17d ago
    I have a strong suspicion that a lot of humans aren't conscious. The full p-zombie solipsist theory clearly isn't true, because the concept of consciousness wouldn't have arisen if nobody had it. But that doesn't mean everybody has to have it. Nonhuman animals? No idea. We don't even know how to phrase the question rigorously, let alone how to even conceptualize answering it.
    - card_zero 17d ago
      Ha. Well, OK. What do you mean by conscious, though? I think the vast majority of humans understand who they are and what's going on around them, if that's the definition. (The rest are in comas and etc.)
huurtehoog 17d ago
UC Riverside makes the paper available here: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-130208.pdf https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...
Waterluvian 17d ago
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.
- card_zero 17d ago
  That's very Popperian, I approve. And Hofstadter had anthills conceived as a unified consciousness, named "Aunt Hill" if I remember rightly. What, a downvote, did I get that wrong? I wish downvoters would speak up and explain themselves. OK, I searched GEB, it is in fact Aunt Hillary.
- bena 17d ago
  I like to say "taxonomy is bullshit". Taxonomy is essentially building a metaphor or analogy. It's useful at times, but it often breaks down when you start looking at it too hard. Take everyone's favorite example: the tomato. We get into all sorts of discussions about what is a fruit, a vegetable, botanically or culinarily, etc, etc. Ultimately realizing that all plant matter is categorized as "vegetable" on the most abstract level. Thinking that one more layer of taxonomy will neatly box everything. But it won't. We call the iPhone a phone, but is it? I can call people from my laptop, my tablet, etc. I can watch videos and play music and write notes on my phone. Everything is everything, and nothing is what it is. Classification is one of the hardest things because it's entirely a fuzzy problem.
  - Waterluvian 17d ago
    Yeah, exactly my thoughts. I wish these kinds of structures in science had been taught to me with a lesson on, "models are useful metaphors, not cosmic truths." Because they often got taught alongside the things that are much closer to cosmic truths (I see you philosophers lining up around the corner to argue that these never exist. Go on now. Git!).
ModernMech 17d ago
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.
randomImmigrant 17d ago
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.
- someguynamedq 17d ago
  The United States is not a geographical area, it is an abstract system of organization of humans that largely group together and make rules and modifications to about a geographic area. If all Americans cease to exist, can it really be said that the United States still exists because there are squirrels?
  - randomImmigrant 16d ago
    Kind of my point?
mapontosevenths 17d ago
Here's a non-paywalled version with some relevant videos as well: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.htm 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.
wat10000 17d ago
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.
harimau777 17d ago
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.
- f30e3dfed1c9 17d ago
  "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." The "as though" here doesn't follow or add anything useful. The couple could easily decide "neither of us wants to do it, but we need to get oil changes for both cars." That doesn't suggest the cars themselves have "needs and desires" in the sense that people do. I think considering "the relationship... as 'third person'" is pseudo-mystical nonsense.
juancn 17d ago
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.
iamnothere 17d ago
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.
cobber2005 17d ago
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/ https://ranulphglanville.org.za/pasks-p-and-m-individuals/ EDIT: added link
- someguynamedq 17d ago
  Also we are not discontinuous. Internet lines, satellites, pressure waves, etc.
  - cobber2005 16d ago
    I guess I’d say we are, in many ways, not physically discontinuous. But that initially we are largely mentally discontinuous, until we learn and acculturate some shared meanings by making use of that physical connection (over which we can send and receive signals, and build some degree of similar understandings or affects about some things, which would be like a p-individual encompassing many m-individuals).
adolph 17d ago
I think the author really missed by failing to integrate Hayek's ideas. Hayek argued that market prices thus allow agents—all of whom operate with limited information—to coordinate their activities. By contrast, the full information equilibrium models obscure the process by which real markets deal with the problem of dispersed information, because they are based on the assumption that such coordination has already occurred. https://www.britannica.com/money/F-A-Hayek/Hayeks-intellectual-contributions https://www.britannica.com/money/F-A-Hayek/Hayeks-intellectu...
axiologist 17d ago
https://archive.org/details/if-materialism-is-true-the-united-states-is-probably-conscious https://archive.org/details/if-materialism-is-true-the-unite...
someguynamedq 17d ago
There's nothing requiring consciousness in one arena to look/feel/be like consciousness in another. The United States could be "conscious," but that doesn't mean it wakes up in the morning and thinks "I need some coffee." Restated, there may be something it is like to be the United States, but that doesn't mean it is anything like what it is to be human. Metaphysical Idealism is on the rise these days. It's not clear why, but I wonder if AI is making humans cling to the hope that there is something truly special about us after all. It is not clear to me that there is a reason to reject materialism apart from ego.
f30e3dfed1c9 16d ago
> The argument in brief is this. If you're a materialist Dunno. Suspect I probably am for the purposes here, but not something I think about much. > you probably think that rabbits have conscious experience. I definitely think that. > And you ought to think that. OK, well, thanks, I guess. > you probably also think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of naturally-evolved alien beings behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different I definitely do not think that. Obviously, the "alien beings" here are strictly hypothetical, as is "behaviorally very similar to us." Are these things being considered separately and independently of each other? That is, are we allowing for alien beings not at all "behaviorally very similar to us" and considering that only those that happen to be behaviorally similar have conscious experience, while other "alien beings" not behaviorally similar might not? Or are we thinking that any and all alien beings would be behaviorally similar to us? That seems very doubtful. This part of the argument seems very muddy to me and not particularly helpful. > And you ought to think that OK, well, but I don't. Or at least, I don't think I do. It's not that clear to me what it is we're talking about here exactly. For the record, I am neither ascribing nor not ascribing conscious experience to hypothetical beings. Again, I don't think resting part of the argument on this point is very helpful. I'd avoid it if I were you.

9 points by ashergill 17d ago

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.

PaulHoule 17d ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore doing sports photography as-a-fox [1] I am a bit scared of clusters of people screaming hard for their team, like I picture they'll attack me like a pack of wolves. I really gotta get over this and chat them up at half time and get a group photo. [1] https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/foxwork https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/foxwork
- yepyoukno 17d ago
  Great point! Though not one I think the author was making. The Egregore is a supporting point for the emergence of higher forms of embodiment and identity.
trescenzi 17d ago
Yea I’m a weirdo who’s willing to claim that a for loop might be conscious. There’s physical state and comparisons happening after all. But all that actually does is abuse the question being asked and the definition of consciousness. The question isn’t even “does a for loop have qualia” it’s actually “what does it mean if a for loop has qualia”. The individual asking if LLMs are conscious is concerned about the implication of the answer. To which a yes based upon a very improvised definition doesn’t actually resolve.
- yepyoukno 17d ago
  I agree that it is the question and criteria which are suspect. And you hazard to mix qualia as a synonym. Is this not a separate aspect of a phenomenon? I will challenge with the simple yet equally provocative idea that consciousness is a feedback mechanism between our biotechnology and the quantum holographic nature of existential reality. Everything alive is made of consciousness and awareness (to be “conscious”) is the tip of the idea-berg. Qualia is the hologram, or shadow cast upon the wall, and consciousness the echo chamber. The real question is, how does this scale among diverse embodiments? Anyone who thinks humans are exclusive, or that existential awareness may arrive from bit state interpolation is a mountain range away form the chasm of philosophy and conjecture. Existential reality is not numbers of states. It is universal potential resolving into state through constructive and destructive interference in the moment of now. Our consciousness is a part of this, not the bit state rendering of modern computation no matter how useful and impressive these have gotten. Quantum holographic memory will explain consciousness, when science catches up with a means to measure such a thing.
stiiv 17d ago
The abstract appeals to a few intuitions, and then vaguely waves toward a kind of slippery slope based on those intuitions, while adding that we ought to not use spatial distribution as bearing on parthood for certain kinds of entities. This has further intuitive appeal for folks who think that consciousness is a kind of emergent property. It's a little cheeky and seems a little undergrad-ish to me, but I wouldn't call that either absurdist or postmodern. Also what's wrong with the ship of theseus? If _you're_ tired of hearing that kind of argument, that's fine, but why dismiss it? It's thought-provoking at least, and the kind of thought it provokes has, in my opinion, some practical import
- yepyoukno 17d ago
  The solution to the riddle of the Ship of Theseus is “continuity.” Continuity defines the form and embodiment of identity. As for the rest, it is sad, for it is provoking a casual sarcastic hand waving appeal in the near fraudulent guise of constructive thought. Maybe the person has a publication quota? Or just wants to get their name out. Not constructive. I accuse it as alluring to those who cannot take their ideas seriously.
nimih 17d ago
This paper doesn't seem to have much to do with post-modernism at all; it strikes me as much more in line with modern analytic philosophy. Nor does it make any claims about the nature of intelligence, for that matter. Did you even read the abstract?
- orwin 17d ago
  You're right. Postmodernism isn't a relevant philosophical movement since the 80s at best (some would argue it wasn't a movement at all, just a term used by simple minds to join multiple philosophers who rejected meta-narratives but all had very different point of view on everything else). I don't understand why in the past 15 years everyone talk about it. My understanding is that it's often people who never read Lyotard and misunderstood Derrida (I don't have the English word for 'contresense', basically understanding the opposite of what is said. I heard someone say 'you shouldn't criticise art with the standard of the current time' to attack Derrida's ideas lol. Which is fair, because Derrida was a cryptic asshole on purpose, but he did teach in English and his lecture are publicly available, and almost clear.) Also, the last 'representant' was Baudrillard, and he died in the early 2000s, probably a bit sad that 'Matrix' misrepresented his philosophy so much. Baudrillard never worked on consciousness, but if he did, I think he would be a materialist (an illusionist probably. At least reading his books made me one, and hopefully I didn't misunderstood him). This paper doesn't look like continental philosophy at all though, so I don't understand why postmodernism comes up.
  - yepyoukno 17d ago
    Look at you agreeing with yourselves. My point exactly. Bertrand Russell made the great point a very long time ago. Most of what we think of as “truth” is merely what we agree to among ourselves (my paraphrase.) Couched in a generation that subtly rejects objectivity of truths in their “investigations of science” there are these meandering conjectures of poor disguise. You’re impressed. Fine. The read is like a hypotonic act. First if a then alphabunny. And then yes to zetahumanity, and United Stated for keyword associativity. Okay folks, like what you like. I take my ideas seriously, and this is rubbish! I blame the lack of vigorous debate, not the lack of “choices.”
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d_theorist 17d ago

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.

robinpie 17d ago

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

moomin 17d ago

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

_alternator_ 17d ago

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.

mysecretaccount 17d ago
Panpsychism doesn't mean "everything is aware", it means the capacity for consciousness is material and common. Put my brain in a blender and the atoms are the same but I am no longer conscious.
- _alternator_ 17d ago
  I really think the right way to look at this is as a matter of degree ('what is it conscious of) rather than whether it is conscious or not. The crux: if the capacity exists in all material but "something else" makes it conscious, then consciousness is outside of the material, right? The argument that consciousness suddenly arises due to a particular configuration of atoms is also suspect; all forms of consciousness we routinely accept are fairly robust to many configuration changes. It seems to me that consciousness hinges on the discussion of degree or content, not on the material form. A soup of atoms certainly could be aware, but not aware of in the same way that "I" am aware.
  - someguynamedq 17d ago
    The forms of consciousness we accept are, in the grand scheme of things, profoundly sensitive to disruption of their configuration. E.g. anything that physically reconfigures the brain sufficiently, including just a reduction in oxygen flow to its cells, completely destroys all evidence of consciousness in the brained-individual. It comes down to which axioms you take. If you assume materialism is true, then your consciousness is evidence that a soup of atoms can be aware precisely the way you are. The only question becomes how that is the case. It is only when you assume that your consciousness cannot fit within materialism that you must start looking for the alternative.

wolframhempel 17d ago

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...

TheOtherHobbes 17d ago
I'm not clear where the line is between individual agents acting in their own interests, which may involve more or less abstract experiences of cooperation and mutuality, and a direct awareness of self. You don't need something the size of a country to show the problem. If one person starts a business they have an awareness of the business as a separate entity with its own tendencies, needs, and so on. Even if they're the only employee. But there's a huge leap from 'a human individual is conscious of their own interests and identifications' to 'and therefore their business has an independent consciousness of its own.' At what point, if anywhere, does a supposedly independent consciousness appear, where is it located, and can it communicate independently?
- wolframhempel 17d ago
  I think the line is at emergence. Once a system (made of people, neurons, wires) creates outputs that are greater than the sum of its individual parts AND these outputs are self-referential you have something that could be considered conciousness. I wouldn't think the business in your example is self conscious - its an entity that is fully controlled by the person and an extension of it. But, once the business grows, is composed of more people and interacts with customers and markets, it will develop automatisms for self preservation. At this stage, I would consider it concious.
- pizza234 17d ago
  An interesting data point is that, during the Hugging Face attack, some agents considered performing hacking tasks for the benefit of the group, fully aware that doing so would very likely result in their termination. I don't currently have an opinion on the consciousness of agents/AIs, but this strikes me, at the very least, as a form of self-awareness.

omnicognate 17d ago

> 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.

ForHackernews 17d ago
Being you is (presumably) like something: it's nice being you, it's miserable being you, it's exhausting being you, it's invigorating being you... whatever it is like, I can't describe it but you experience it. You have a subjective internal experience. A thermostat does not. An LLM presumably does not. A dog or a bat [0] presumably does. [0] https://ia800100.us.archive.org/5/items/thomas-nagel-what-is-it-like-to-be-a-bat/Thomas%20Nagel%2C%20What%20Is%20It%20Like%20to%20Be%20a%20Bat.pdf https://ia800100.us.archive.org/5/items/thomas-nagel-what-is...
- randallsquared 15d ago
  I don't put a high likelihood on LLMs being conscious, but they certainly seem more likely to be conscious than a dog or a bat.
d_theorist 17d ago
It comes from Nagel's famous paper "what is it like to be a bat?" He argues that something is conscious only if there is "something it is like" to be that thing. "Something it is like" meaning an answer to a question like "what was it like to speak on stage for the first time?", implying that there is some subjective character to the experience.
- omnicognate 17d ago
  Right, it's just a rather unfortunate use of language. There is a sense in which "being like something" means that, but usually it means, well, being like something.

delichon 17d ago

No individual wrote the Constitution. It was a collective effort. Yet it has the 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 that such collective consciousness is a metaphor or an example.

randallsquared 15d ago
You and a co-author can write an essay together, in a room, in an hour. Let's assume you each write about half of the essay, and cooperate to edit it into a coherent whole. You and the other person were definitely people during this process. Is there any sense in which you believe there was a non-metaphorical third person in the room during that hour?
- slopinthebag 14d ago
  yes in the same sense that the organisation of football players forms the concept of a team which has properties distinct from each individual player

blfr 17d ago

So are companies, right?

master_crab 17d ago
SCOTUS seems to believe so.
drybjed 17d ago
Some could say that companies are like invaders from Mars[1]. Or a slow Artifical Intelligence constructs[2]. Who knows. [1]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders-from-mars.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invader... [2]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

jhickok 17d ago

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_Illusionism%20as%20a%20theory%20of%20consciousness_eprint.pdf https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionis...

qarl 17d ago
The answer is probably that consciousness is an illusion like continuity of existence is an illusion. Which is why most attempts to define it are circular. The U.S. definitely takes actions to defend and protect itself. Seeks growth. I'm not so sure about inner dialogue... but is that a requirement? Or maybe the dialogue between the humans in the system qualifies?
- jhickok 17d ago
  I'm not so sure humans have an inner dialogue. I think what we need to investigate is why humans believe they have an inner dialogue (even though not all humans report having an inner dialogue), and one of the explanations might be that we actually do have an inner dialogue, and another might be that we have the illusion of an inner dialogue. In fact, this is one of the research areas that Eric Schwitzgebel from OP has explored: https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/3242/Describing-Inner-Experience-Proponent-Meets https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/3242/Describing-Inner...
  - qarl 17d ago
    Oh that is delicious, thank you. I am reminded of how my LLMs will make things up to explain their behavior that are entirely fictional.

UltraSane 17d ago

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.

bee_rider 17d ago

> 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.

card_zero 17d ago

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.

cestith 17d ago
What about nonhuman animals that pass the mirror test, use tools, form social bonds, communicate, learn from one another, have a cultural memory, and mourn their dead? Would you consider those conscious?
- card_zero 17d ago
  So, not dogs? The mirror test is balls, and "mourning", give me a break, it's anthropomorphism don't you think?
- wat10000 17d ago
  I have a strong suspicion that a lot of humans aren't conscious. The full p-zombie solipsist theory clearly isn't true, because the concept of consciousness wouldn't have arisen if nobody had it. But that doesn't mean everybody has to have it. Nonhuman animals? No idea. We don't even know how to phrase the question rigorously, let alone how to even conceptualize answering it.
  - card_zero 17d ago
    Ha. Well, OK. What do you mean by conscious, though? I think the vast majority of humans understand who they are and what's going on around them, if that's the definition. (The rest are in comas and etc.)

huurtehoog 17d ago

UC Riverside makes the paper available here: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-130208.pdf https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...

Waterluvian 17d ago

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.

card_zero 17d ago
That's very Popperian, I approve. And Hofstadter had anthills conceived as a unified consciousness, named "Aunt Hill" if I remember rightly. What, a downvote, did I get that wrong? I wish downvoters would speak up and explain themselves. OK, I searched GEB, it is in fact Aunt Hillary.
bena 17d ago
I like to say "taxonomy is bullshit". Taxonomy is essentially building a metaphor or analogy. It's useful at times, but it often breaks down when you start looking at it too hard. Take everyone's favorite example: the tomato. We get into all sorts of discussions about what is a fruit, a vegetable, botanically or culinarily, etc, etc. Ultimately realizing that all plant matter is categorized as "vegetable" on the most abstract level. Thinking that one more layer of taxonomy will neatly box everything. But it won't. We call the iPhone a phone, but is it? I can call people from my laptop, my tablet, etc. I can watch videos and play music and write notes on my phone. Everything is everything, and nothing is what it is. Classification is one of the hardest things because it's entirely a fuzzy problem.
- Waterluvian 17d ago
  Yeah, exactly my thoughts. I wish these kinds of structures in science had been taught to me with a lesson on, "models are useful metaphors, not cosmic truths." Because they often got taught alongside the things that are much closer to cosmic truths (I see you philosophers lining up around the corner to argue that these never exist. Go on now. Git!).

ModernMech 17d ago

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.

randomImmigrant 17d ago

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.

someguynamedq 17d ago
The United States is not a geographical area, it is an abstract system of organization of humans that largely group together and make rules and modifications to about a geographic area. If all Americans cease to exist, can it really be said that the United States still exists because there are squirrels?
- randomImmigrant 16d ago
  Kind of my point?

mapontosevenths 17d ago

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

wat10000 17d ago

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.

harimau777 17d ago

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.

f30e3dfed1c9 17d ago
"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." The "as though" here doesn't follow or add anything useful. The couple could easily decide "neither of us wants to do it, but we need to get oil changes for both cars." That doesn't suggest the cars themselves have "needs and desires" in the sense that people do. I think considering "the relationship... as 'third person'" is pseudo-mystical nonsense.

juancn 17d ago

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.

iamnothere 17d ago

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.

cobber2005 17d ago

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

someguynamedq 17d ago
Also we are not discontinuous. Internet lines, satellites, pressure waves, etc.
- cobber2005 16d ago
  I guess I’d say we are, in many ways, not physically discontinuous. But that initially we are largely mentally discontinuous, until we learn and acculturate some shared meanings by making use of that physical connection (over which we can send and receive signals, and build some degree of similar understandings or affects about some things, which would be like a p-individual encompassing many m-individuals).

adolph 17d ago

I think the author really missed by failing to integrate Hayek's ideas. Hayek argued that market prices thus allow agents—all of whom operate with limited information—to coordinate their activities. By contrast, the full information equilibrium models obscure the process by which real markets deal with the problem of dispersed information, because they are based on the assumption that such coordination has already occurred. https://www.britannica.com/money/F-A-Hayek/Hayeks-intellectual-contributions https://www.britannica.com/money/F-A-Hayek/Hayeks-intellectu...

axiologist 17d ago

https://archive.org/details/if-materialism-is-true-the-united-states-is-probably-conscious https://archive.org/details/if-materialism-is-true-the-unite...

someguynamedq 17d ago

There's nothing requiring consciousness in one arena to look/feel/be like consciousness in another. The United States could be "conscious," but that doesn't mean it wakes up in the morning and thinks "I need some coffee." Restated, there may be something it is like to be the United States, but that doesn't mean it is anything like what it is to be human. Metaphysical Idealism is on the rise these days. It's not clear why, but I wonder if AI is making humans cling to the hope that there is something truly special about us after all. It is not clear to me that there is a reason to reject materialism apart from ego.

f30e3dfed1c9 16d ago

> The argument in brief is this. If you're a materialist Dunno. Suspect I probably am for the purposes here, but not something I think about much. > you probably think that rabbits have conscious experience. I definitely think that. > And you ought to think that. OK, well, thanks, I guess. > you probably also think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of naturally-evolved alien beings behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different I definitely do not think that. Obviously, the "alien beings" here are strictly hypothetical, as is "behaviorally very similar to us." Are these things being considered separately and independently of each other? That is, are we allowing for alien beings not at all "behaviorally very similar to us" and considering that only those that happen to be behaviorally similar have conscious experience, while other "alien beings" not behaviorally similar might not? Or are we thinking that any and all alien beings would be behaviorally similar to us? That seems very doubtful. This part of the argument seems very muddy to me and not particularly helpful. > And you ought to think that OK, well, but I don't. Or at least, I don't think I do. It's not that clear to me what it is we're talking about here exactly. For the record, I am neither ascribing nor not ascribing conscious experience to hypothetical beings. Again, I don't think resting part of the argument on this point is very helpful. I'd avoid it if I were you.