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This is an excellent and thought-provoking article. I'm not entirely sold on the argument -- in particular, there's no reason to automatically assume that any s

This is an excellent and thought-provoking article. I'm not entirely sold on the argument -- in particular, there's no reason to automatically assume that any sufficiently complex system is conscious simply because of its complexity. If you looked hard enough, you could probably find lots of complexity in e.g. the interactions between billions of individual cells in a slime mold, but most people wouldn't use that as a basis for calling it conscious. Human brains aren't just an undifferentiated mass of connections that somehow bootstrap themselves to consciousness; they have definite functional units that are genetically determined. Countries have at most a few thousand years of development behind them, rather than billions of years of animal evolution, and it seems a bit implausible that they would have developed the complex processes of consciousness so much more quickly. We ascribe consciousness to humans by observing their behavior, not the structure of their brains. And it's true that countries do respond to stimuli and act with purpose, but (echoing Chalmers) I think a lot of that can be ascribed to individual people controlling a hierarchy, and not to the collective. If there's anything about a country that arises from the distributed connections between humans, it would be more likely to manifest as broad social trends, not specific actions like going to war. But those general trends seem to ebb and flow for their own inscrutable reasons; they certainly don't show obvious evidence of intelligent purpose. Nevertheless, the concept is fascinating. And I think the author makes an excellent point that even if it's wrong, the argument is worth considering if only to help us come up with better criteria for what it means to say an entity is conscious.

benbreen 11y ago
Good point, and agreed. To me, that's the weakest part of the argument. Basically I would argue that the US is closer to Swampman than to something like a rabbit brain in this formulation: "One might think that for an entity to have real, intrinsic representational content, meaningful utterances, and intentionality, it must be richly historically embedded in the right kind of environment. Lightning strikes a swamp and “Swampman” congeals randomly by freak quantum chance. Swampman might utter sounds that we would be disposed to interpret as meaning “Wow, this swamp is humid!”, but if he has no learning history or evolutionary history, some have argued, this utterance would have no more meaning than a freak occurrence of the same sounds by a random perturbance of air.[18] But I see no grounds for objection here. The United States is no Swampman. The United States has long been embedded in a natural and social environment, richly causally connected to the world beyond – connected in a way that would seem to give meaning to its representations and functions to its parts.[19] I am asking you to think of the United States as a planet-sized alien might, that is, to evaluate the behaviors and capacities of the United States as a concrete, spatially distributed entity with people as some or all of its parts, an entity within which individual people play roles somewhat analogous to the role that individual cells play in your body. If you are willing to jettison contiguism and other morphological prejudices, this is not, I think, an intolerably weird perspective. As a house for consciousness, a rabbit brain is not clearly more sophisticated. I leave it open whether we include objects like roads and computers as part of the body of the U.S. or instead as part of its environment.One might think that for an entity to have real, intrinsic representational content, meaningful utterances, and intentionality, it must be richly historically embedded in the right kind of environment. Lightning strikes a swamp and “Swampman” congeals randomly by freak quantum chance. Swampman might utter sounds that we would be disposed to interpret as meaning “Wow, this swamp is humid!”, but if he has no learning history or evolutionary history, some have argued, this utterance would have no more meaning than a freak occurrence of the same sounds by a random perturbance of air.[18] But I see no grounds for objection here. The United States is no Swampman. The United States has long been embedded in a natural and social environment, richly causally connected to the world beyond – connected in a way that would seem to give meaning to its representations and functions to its parts. I am asking you to think of the United States as a planet-sized alien might, that is, to evaluate the behaviors and capacities of the United States as a concrete, spatially distributed entity with people as some or all of its parts, an entity within which individual people play roles somewhat analogous to the role that individual cells play in your body. If you are willing to jettison contiguism and other morphological prejudices, this is not, I think, an intolerably weird perspective. As a house for consciousness, a rabbit brain is not clearly more sophisticated. I leave it open whether we include objects like roads and computers as part of the body of the U.S. or instead as part of its environment."
ArekDymalski 11y ago
>But those general trends seem to ebb and flow I'm quite sure that from the perspective of a cell in my liver, my whole life seem to be ebb and flow. Assuming that the cell would be able to observe and comprehend processes much broader and longer than itself. It's the same in case of possible consciousness of a large group - as parts of it we will face many difficulties just to notice and understand such phenomenon. Especially taking into account that it won't be exactly the same type of consciousness as human one.
- teraflop 11y ago
  That's kind of an argument from ignorance, though. It's conceivable that any kind of system whatsoever is conscious in ways that we can't understand or comprehend. But if the author's position is that the US should be provisionally considered conscious because it takes purposeful, intentional actions, then a lack of apparent purposefulness seems like a reasonable criticism of the argument.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    I think there's a fundamental confusion in the article between goal-seeking behaviour, and between communicable self-awareness. Clearly, large collectives of people can seek goals. Large collections of transistors can also seek goals, up to a point. But it's impossible to communicate directly with the United States as a self-aware entity, or to have a direct conversation with a collective. You can communicate with a representative of the US, but there's no way anyone can talk to, or email, or Skype, or send a paper letter to, or have a telepathic conversation with, any entity that would consciously describe itself as "The United States of America." This matters because you could ask ten representatives of the US for their opinion on something and get ten conflicting answers - without essentially damaging the concept of "US-ness." This clearly doesn't match the definition of a unified consciousness. It's not the same as a single consciousness changing its mind, because there is no recognisable single mind that changes. What about insect colonies, animal herds, bird flocks, and corporations? They simply amplify the goals and personalities of their leaders. I'm not aware of any instances where - for example - a separate corporate mind made its wishes known to override board decisions. (You could possibly argue this is what happened with Reddit. I'd say no - that was a conflict between factions with different goals, not evidence that there's a metaphysical Reddit-mind independently placing conference calls and tweeting to steer Reddit's future.)

benbreen 11y ago

Good point, and agreed. To me, that's the weakest part of the argument. Basically I would argue that the US is closer to Swampman than to something like a rabbit brain in this formulation: "One might think that for an entity to have real, intrinsic representational content, meaningful utterances, and intentionality, it must be richly historically embedded in the right kind of environment. Lightning strikes a swamp and “Swampman” congeals randomly by freak quantum chance. Swampman might utter sounds that we would be disposed to interpret as meaning “Wow, this swamp is humid!”, but if he has no learning history or evolutionary history, some have argued, this utterance would have no more meaning than a freak occurrence of the same sounds by a random perturbance of air.[18] But I see no grounds for objection here. The United States is no Swampman. The United States has long been embedded in a natural and social environment, richly causally connected to the world beyond – connected in a way that would seem to give meaning to its representations and functions to its parts.[19] I am asking you to think of the United States as a planet-sized alien might, that is, to evaluate the behaviors and capacities of the United States as a concrete, spatially distributed entity with people as some or all of its parts, an entity within which individual people play roles somewhat analogous to the role that individual cells play in your body. If you are willing to jettison contiguism and other morphological prejudices, this is not, I think, an intolerably weird perspective. As a house for consciousness, a rabbit brain is not clearly more sophisticated. I leave it open whether we include objects like roads and computers as part of the body of the U.S. or instead as part of its environment.One might think that for an entity to have real, intrinsic representational content, meaningful utterances, and intentionality, it must be richly historically embedded in the right kind of environment. Lightning strikes a swamp and “Swampman” congeals randomly by freak quantum chance. Swampman might utter sounds that we would be disposed to interpret as meaning “Wow, this swamp is humid!”, but if he has no learning history or evolutionary history, some have argued, this utterance would have no more meaning than a freak occurrence of the same sounds by a random perturbance of air.[18] But I see no grounds for objection here. The United States is no Swampman. The United States has long been embedded in a natural and social environment, richly causally connected to the world beyond – connected in a way that would seem to give meaning to its representations and functions to its parts. I am asking you to think of the United States as a planet-sized alien might, that is, to evaluate the behaviors and capacities of the United States as a concrete, spatially distributed entity with people as some or all of its parts, an entity within which individual people play roles somewhat analogous to the role that individual cells play in your body. If you are willing to jettison contiguism and other morphological prejudices, this is not, I think, an intolerably weird perspective. As a house for consciousness, a rabbit brain is not clearly more sophisticated. I leave it open whether we include objects like roads and computers as part of the body of the U.S. or instead as part of its environment."

ArekDymalski 11y ago

>But those general trends seem to ebb and flow I'm quite sure that from the perspective of a cell in my liver, my whole life seem to be ebb and flow. Assuming that the cell would be able to observe and comprehend processes much broader and longer than itself. It's the same in case of possible consciousness of a large group - as parts of it we will face many difficulties just to notice and understand such phenomenon. Especially taking into account that it won't be exactly the same type of consciousness as human one.

teraflop 11y ago
That's kind of an argument from ignorance, though. It's conceivable that any kind of system whatsoever is conscious in ways that we can't understand or comprehend. But if the author's position is that the US should be provisionally considered conscious because it takes purposeful, intentional actions, then a lack of apparent purposefulness seems like a reasonable criticism of the argument.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  I think there's a fundamental confusion in the article between goal-seeking behaviour, and between communicable self-awareness. Clearly, large collectives of people can seek goals. Large collections of transistors can also seek goals, up to a point. But it's impossible to communicate directly with the United States as a self-aware entity, or to have a direct conversation with a collective. You can communicate with a representative of the US, but there's no way anyone can talk to, or email, or Skype, or send a paper letter to, or have a telepathic conversation with, any entity that would consciously describe itself as "The United States of America." This matters because you could ask ten representatives of the US for their opinion on something and get ten conflicting answers - without essentially damaging the concept of "US-ness." This clearly doesn't match the definition of a unified consciousness. It's not the same as a single consciousness changing its mind, because there is no recognisable single mind that changes. What about insect colonies, animal herds, bird flocks, and corporations? They simply amplify the goals and personalities of their leaders. I'm not aware of any instances where - for example - a separate corporate mind made its wishes known to override board decisions. (You could possibly argue this is what happened with Reddit. I'd say no - that was a conflict between factions with different goals, not evidence that there's a metaphysical Reddit-mind independently placing conference calls and tweeting to steer Reddit's future.)