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 rabbi

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."