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

> 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.