If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015) | Hacker News Reader

If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)

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56 pointstosh78 comments

> If you’re a materialist, you probably think that rabbits are conscious...

But only someone who is coming from a perspective outside of materialism would find this "consciousness" some magical property.

The conclusion that "the United States is probably conscious" is only interesting or shocking if you come from a perspective that human consciousness is some special thing to begin with.

From a materialist perspective the idea that essentially 'all complex systems share a lot in common, including what we would call "consciousness"' is sort of the point.

When you regard consciousness as not particularly more interesting than any other complex system, such as a tornado, because it is just a material process like any other, driven by the same forces as any other, then all of the wind is taken out of this argument.

Only someone who already objects to materialism would find this claim remotely interesting.

As a materialist, I am not particularly taken by this particular argument (which is not to say that I would summarily reject other arguments to the same end.)

It's weakness, I think, is in the claim that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings.

If you favor some form of panpsychism (especially in the form that, for example, regards buildings with thermostats as conscious), I imagine you are probably well-disposed to this view, but if, like me, you feel that this is an unhelpful generalization that equivocates over some important differences between thermostats and self-aware organisms, then the problem with the author's thesis is that we do not really know what it is about the latter that is truly characteristic of conscious beings in a causal sense.

Here's an analogy: amyloid plaques seem to be characteristic of Alzheimer's disease, but we don't know if they are a cause, a consequence, an epiphenomenon or even just coincidental, so we cannot assume that a treatment clearing the plaques would cure the disease.

Therefore, I don't hold out much hope for the argument presented here contrubuting much towards our understanding of the causal mechanisms of self-aware consciousness.

I guess whoever controls the definition can do the required gymnastics.

However, even if we define "memory" in terms of artifacts like buildings and books, the place where these United States as such actually make decisions is unclear.

Jokes about Congress aside, those chambers are comprised of 535 arguably sentient individuals, not a single hive mind driving the country.

>Jokes about Congress aside, those chambers are comprised of 535 arguably sentient individuals, not a single hive mind driving the country.

So? Sentient individuals could just as well play the role of neurons (or similar) in a larger groupping - where their own sentiousness (sic?) doesn't matter at that level, it's their collective output that matters...

Roughly to the extent that plush toy proteins in one of Alton Brown's zanier food chemistry scenes from "Good Eats" are actual protein.

You have expressed my objections to this argument better than I can.

I have no particular a priori problems with the idea of a distributed consciousness---even for the US. But I find the evidence of conscious behavior in the article rather unconvincing. Is consciousness really the simplest explanation of its behavior?

If you’re a materialist, there is no reason to have hope, you’re just reacting to stimulus.

Not at all. Hope and love don’t need to have any meaning in the wider universe in order for them to have meaning to me.

Serious question—how does the notion of "hope" become any more concrete in the non-materialist view? Perhaps your immortal soul can "hope" that it hasn't been attached to a physical body with a physical brain tumour pressing upon its physical amygdala.

Personally I cannot see how non-materialism usefully solves any criticism of materialism. All the same problems exist, except you're just pushing them back to a different plane of existence where they can be conveniently disposed of with appeals to mysteriousness.

Either everything matters, or nothing matters. Choose one, and follow the resulting consequences.

Trite aphorisms don't matter, but I don't think that means nothing does.

Rejecting one aphorism is proclaiming the other

I really don't understand how you could come to that conclusion. Whether something matters or not is entirely subjective or depends on context. Like, what does that even mean? My happiness matters very much to me, but doesn't matter at all to someone who will never meet me, or to the orbit of the earth around the sun... Yet the mass of the earth objectively matters very much to its orbit around the sun, and to many other things that would be affected by earth having a different mass. Maybe you mean, does it matter to me personally? Even then, I can't possibly see any reason why it would have to be all or nothing. Some distant galaxy on the other side of the known universe doesn't matter at all to me and likely never will. The current temperature outside matters to me a fair bit though, because it'll influence how likely I am to want to avoid the cold, or how long I stay outside.

Like I'm just trying to figure out if you're actually trying to say something meaningful or just saying something vague and abstract to try and sound "deep".

That kind of statement is fairly routine from people whose world view presupposes godly origin. The unspoken inference is that there must be some objective source of mattering. Whereas if we're all just material, we're all just dust and nothing ultimately matters. It's a play on our emotions. It feels like things matter to us, so it seems intuitively wrong that things could ultimately not matter.

But it's just wordplay. Things DO matter to me. I can care about the fate of my descendents many centuries hence; or the fate of human civilisation in a few millennia. So what if human civilisation (or any biological life of Earth origin) might not survive after a billion years and nothing "ultimately" matters?

Besides, the way most human religions try to instantiate this "ultimate mattering" seems fairly horrid to me.

Matters to whom?

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent

I doubt that reality adapts to conform to one's beliefs, even if one of those beliefs is that it does.

What is hope other than a symbol in our symbolic reasoning, bound to a set of specific emotions (that is, specific activations inside the brain)?

I think groups of people are conscious in a sense. When I say conscious I'll use a definition where consciousness is the behavior of a physical system that is:

* directional/goal oriented

* exhibits higher order patterns / behaviors which are greater than the sum of its parts.

A riot would probably be the easiest example to start with. You get a group of mildly angry people together and they can become enraged and do things they wouldn't normally do. Not only that, the anger of the group can rise and fall together. It's like people synchronize with each other and the riot becomes this living agent of chaos. Basically a human is a higher order pattern on top of cells and biochemistry while a group of people can exhibit higher order patterns like a riot.

When you get to the nation state level you can see higher order patterns as well. For example the BLM protests. A single even triggered this burst of goal -oriented activity among millions of disparate individuals like a wildfire. Or it's like the country, not just the people in the country but the country itself, became enraged.

And I'm not just talking about protests and riots that's just an example. If you look at history, there are lots of other examples of collective, higher-order, goal-oriented activity at the nation state level. Groups building cities or opening up areas to farming or setting up trade networks or going to war. Sometimes these actions are based on the will of one person like a king but other times they are the result of thousands of individuals coordinating autonomously.

I don't know what it means to define consciousness without self awareness. Sounds like just emergent behaviors.

A lot of animals (such as insects) aren't self aware. I still think they have some form of consciousness.

Emergent behaviors by themselves aren't goal-oriented.

Or, from an insects perspective:

"The swarm doesn't think humans are swarm-aware. Swarm still thinks they have some form of consciousness"

I don't know what it means to define self-awareness without consciousness. Sounds like just emergent behaviors.

> I don't know what it means to define consciousness without self awareness

Any entity capable of suffering presumably counts as being conscious. (I'm not claiming the converse here, though.) I don't see an obvious reason why every entity capable of suffering must necessarily be capable of self awareness.

With the right blend of psychotropics, I suspect it would be possible to dissolve a person's sense of self while still causing them to suffer. They would still count as being conscious.

I don't think this captures most peoples' intuitive notion of consciousness at all. Most people think of it as their directly perceived experience.

I can't really discuss the directly perceived experience of anything other than myself since I have no way of accessing it. I have no way of knowing if you have directly perceived experiences, but I would assume you do since I can see certain characteristics in you.

For what it's worth, I actually do think that a collection of people (such as the United States) has directly perceived experiences. That's something that would be quite difficult to prove, and I believe those experiences would be very different from ours. Similarly, I think the directly perceived experiences of a housefly or an amoeba would be very different from my own as well.

I don't see that it follows that if you don't have access to something, you can't discuss it.

Appreciate your clarification in the second paragraph.

From the abstract it sounds like the author here is drawing a false equivalence between consciousness and intelligence. Reading more into the article, it really sounds like this is the case. More specifically, it sounds like the only connection between intelligence and consciousness comes out of some pretty strained definition usage.

Digging deeper, the issue I see with this essay is that to accept the end conclusion, you have to say "I'll allow it" to a lot of tenuous conjectures.

I think it's totally fine to say that the USA may have some form of emergent intelligence, however to make it out to be an organism is strained. This essay would have been a lot stronger if the author had tried to argue that the USA has emergent intelligence.

I think it’s even more complicated than you lay out. There are so many ways to exist on this earth and many of those ways approach consciousness or intelligence “but different”. We could say the brain is conscious but what about all the unconscious influences it apparently receives from gut flora? And gut flora are affected by what we eat and our culture. So where do we draw the line? Are you sad today because of brain chemistry, gut chemistry, a feud with a family member, cultural artifacts, the weather, or the machinations of the stars themselves?

Slime molds have a kind of intelligence that lots of people know about, but did you know that the vast majority of the mold lifecycle is spent as microscopic spores that permeate most of the world’s atmosphere? They exist in Antarctica, in deserts, and in underground caves. There are likely mold spores in your blood, certainly in your lungs. Any time conditions are right the spores in an area will activate and begin forming “intelligent” creeping sheets. There’s evidence that the cells in a sheet transfer “learned behavior” through as-of-yet not understood mechanisms to other cells. So is the entire atmosphere one giant hydra of fungal intelligence, with heads popping in and out of existence as the need arises? The sheet could be assigned a kind of consciousness as it seems to be self-modifying—-there is certainly something “like being” slime mold, but is there something “like being” the entire earth-spanning mold computer, with spores emitted from old sheets carrying memories of previous conquests in past lives?

I think any dichotomous distinction between conscious and non-conscious (or even living and non-living) systems on Earth falls apart upon closer inspection. The whole planet is a single interconnected system. So sure, the US is intelligent, what isn’t!?

You've made a lot of interesting points, but I disagree with you, let me try to explain why.

I'm generally of the understanding that consciousness is marked by being with reflexivity. That can definitely be applied to non-biological, not classically living entities.

That being said, I deeply disagree with your idea that "any dichotomous distinction between conscious and non-conscious [...] systems on Earth falls apart upon closer inspection". I don't think there's any compelling way to argue this in a way which is coherent, and does not involve breaking down the meanings of words to the point where they become meaningless. This is mostly why I disagree with the author. I find that on close inspection, their argument becomes nonsense in a lot of places. The way the definitions are strained render a lot of them meaningless, and as a result we can't reason with them anymore. That being said, a lot of these words are then used to infer other conclusions.

Your argument, to me, really implies that intelligence necessitates reflexive being, or another interpretation: is synonymous with consciousness. "The sheet could be assigned a kind of consciousness as it seems to be self-modifying" is one example where I see this inference. Simply because something is self modifying does not mean that it is conscious, this to me comes off as a false equivalency. Further, saying that "there is certainly something “like being” slime mold" does not mean that that being also has reflexivity.

I see the points you're making, and you've got a lot of interesting ideas for sure. That being said, I think you've fallen into a similar trap as the author in drawing a false equivalency in a few places.

My intuition is that consciousness, as an a priori concept, is not useful. Like the four humours in the medical world, it's a metaphor that captures just enough truth to be a blunt instrument. However it's a local maxima. And a honeypot in the neuroscience domain.

So much effort is spent trying to pin down a definition of consciousness. Ask five people and you'll get five definitions. And yet everyone is so sure they know who has it and who doesn't. Slugs don't have it, dogs don't have it, maybe elephants do? Apparently they can talk to each other and mourn the dead.

One possible motive behind humanity's fascination with consciousness, and our speed at assigning or withholding it, is that it gatekeeps the belief in an anthropocentric universe. The human experience is the one we understand, and if you don't have it you are not conscious. Consciousness then, is a Turing test for how passibly human you are. Slugs could get some of the consciousness table scraps if they'd only mourn their dead.

As we learn more about other species; and coming from the other end too as computers (big data really) reveal new sightlines on human determinism; consciousness as a metaphor is strained and loses adherence.

Jung made the more conservative claim that (US) entity is unconscious. [1] Like a baby in the womb.

If you subscribe to emergentist theory of mind or integrated information theory of consciousness [3][4], compared to what comes, still a dissolute level of being.

There is an argument of telos here. [4] I like to think of it as a cosmic historical process. Is it circular or linear? Maybe the geometric metaphors are lacking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument

(Also the frontispiece on Hobbes' Leviathan is great visual representation of this old idea.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)

Am I the only one who thinks that this essay appears to be mocking materialism by making a far fetched argument?

Probably not.

But the argument is not in fact a reductio ad absurdum. This is par for the course in contemporary philosophy of mind.

This author, as he mentions in the conclusion, has argued that all metaphysics of mind will have bizarre consequences according to our ordinary understanding. He remains uncommitted to whether or not the argument in question shows that the U.S. is conscious, or that materialism is false.

That's fair, and outside of this article I don't have any sort of grasp on the literature around this. So thank you for the comment!

I am not familiar with this topic, so of course there is something I don't understand:

I don't understand how the United States is reasonably bounded for this example. I'm bounded by my body, which travels together. I can communicate with others, temporarily, but then we separate and I am again alone to some degree. The United States is always in communication with other countries, it is never alone, so what are its bounds? I like the idea very much (that the Earth is conscious for example, or a classroom of students) but I don't understand how the US makes sense here. Maybe that is the point, it being spatially distributed?

Maybe in the sense that an ant colony seems to behave like a single entity extending appendages to find food, do battle, propagate itself, etc

Language and culture. The US citizens definitely have the us vs them mentality towards other countries, and so do intelligent beings realize this "me vs not me" concept. Perhaps when many small consciousnesses blend together in a certain way, a bigger consciousness emerges.

You appear bounded when examined at a macroscopic level but you aren't really. You constantly have skin cells sloughing off into the air (is that you?) and you're filled with bacterial cells that are not genetically related to you (are they you?). Not to mention half-digested food.

>I don't understand how the United States is reasonably bounded for this example. I'm bounded by my body, which travels together.

You are also comprised of billions of living cells (not to mention trillions (?) of other organisms like gut bacteria). And you're in constant interaction with your environment (e.g. inhaling more bacteria, oxygen, proteins, and so on). Cells also drop off you all the time.

Plus, doesn't America have borders? So, what if it interacts with other countries? You also interact with other people as you said...

But I am distinct from my dropped cells, and from other people, and from environments when I cease interacting with those things.

America has a physical border, but people within that border are constantly interacting with people outside of it.

>America has a physical border, but people within that border are constantly interacting with people outside of it.

To a much less degree than with those inside it. And they don't decide all together, or act all together to the degree America decides for itself (same with you and e.g. your family: you might make decisions together, but you take 1000x more decisions/actions by yourself every day).

> 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.

I do believe this, but I wouldn't say materialism was my path toward that belief. Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore

The author has perhaps overlooked CAP theorem. Consciousness requires both consistency and high-availability, thus it can't arise in situations of partitioned networks.

Brains (or, at least, most healthy brains) are unpartitioned. But any given community of brains is at best intermittently connected: I wave to my neighbour, then my neighbour disappears from sight. I call my parents on the phone, then the phonecall terminates. I have a tab open to a webpage, but then my attention shifts to another tab.

Perhaps consciousness could eventually arise from individual machines or the internet more broadly, but I can't see an argument for it happening in something as loose as "the United States".

We don't actually know how much the neurons in a given brain pay attention to each other. The part of me that learnt to ride a bicycle probably just sits there idle while I type this comment here. Logically, they might as well have been partitioned. Your example of switching between tasks is another great example of how parts of our brain don't really need high-availability.

In fact, many psychological studies from the last century contest this idea of consciousness requiring either consistency or high-availability.

Even when you switch tasks you still use most of your brain. You never really turn off any part of your brain, they're pretty much all always active, just at different levels.

This seems consistent with high-availability.

Switching off is not the only way for something to be unavailable, at least in the context of the CAP theorem. When a web server is unavailable, it is often because of connectivity problems rather than the server being switched off.

In the original example, the neighbors and parents don't turn off either when they are out of sight. They are still part of the collective society, just harder for a specific person to reach.

Where do you get the idea that consistency is necessary? I certainly think it’s not.

I'm not talking about consciousness adhering to logical consistency (I think it actually requires completeness). I'm talking about all parts of a given mind needing to agree on what the current focus of attention is. Failure to have such agreement is a hallmark of dreaming, psychosis, or just having two separate brains.

How do you explain split-brain phenomena if consistency is not required? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain

In that article, split-brain looks to be an extreme state of inconsistency, that is somehow still OK. In fact, from the examples there I would deduce, that we are mostly inconsistent.

> He also reported to have grabbed his wife with his left hand and shaken her violently, at which point his right hand came to her aid and grabbed the aggressive left hand. However, such conflicts are very rare. If a conflict arises, one hemisphere usually overrides the other.

It sounds like this person still refers to himself as a single mind. It is not uncommon for people without split brain to begin an action, that is quickly interrupted by opposite decision. I bet you this opposite decision does not always come from the same set of neurons.

I think all of us have these kinds of inconsistencies way, way more than most people imagine. It's just you don't necessarily perceive them. We might be eventually consistent, though, which still sacrifices the C in CAP.

Split-brain is just a more severe, permanent and larger-scale inconsistency. The difference between, say a database inconsistency or brief partitioning versus two subnets becoming physically disjoint.

> Consciousness requires both consistency and high-availability, thus it can't arise in situations of partitioned networks.

[Citation needed]

You'll figure it out eventually.

You can do better than that.

Everyone can do better.

There are times when my brain is neither consistent nor available for certain data. I conclude that these are not requirements for consciousness.

I don't know about you, but my consciousness availability is a lot closer to nine fives than it is five nines.

Wait, do materialists accept both that consciousness (in the sense of sense informally and very much nonmaterially stated as “experiencing qualia”, as opposed to the medical sense which is clearly a defined material state) exists and has a single accepted coherent materialistic definition that can could be applied here?

Because it's always seemed to me that “if you are a materialist, you probably think conscious is an interesting fuzzy idea that would be interesting to explore if it could be adequately defined to make that possible, which it clearly hasn't and doesn't seem likely to ever be” is more accurate.

There are many contexts where the same words mean many - often directly contradictory things.

Medical definition has a valid use. Does this one? I'm not sure which is whilst kind of true it falls into that class of observations and musings that are largely useless and meaningless until they can be exploited

I don't object to the proposition that the united states is an intelligent entity. But I don't think consciousness is yet sufficiently well-defined for us to apply it to anything other than animals.

In early school I was taught in the very fundamentals of sociology that the smallest unit in sociology is a group - whether it's a transient group walking the same area, or waiting at the bus stop; or people working the various food stalls at the mall. They react to presence of each other and influence each other. They have distinct (if transient) common goal.

In other words, I don't know what materialism in any sense of the word has to do with it.

I have no idea what is meant by materialism in this context

That consciousness arises from the physical world and not something like the soul.

Physical monism. Only one type of “thing” exists and it is physical/material. Contrast with dualism e.g Cartesian substance dualism (body and soul are different substances) or theories like idealism (monist, but only the mental exists).

This is kind of out there, but this book provides a cross-cultural overview of the idea of collective beings created by human religious practices, nationalisms, etc.

https://www.amazon.com/Egregores-Occult-Entities-Watch-Desti....

Complete utter nonsense. Humans are as conscious as the hands on a clock moving from the gears that control them. Yes, there's no reason for anyone to believe the electrons making the hands on a clock, aren't aware of forces interacting with them at any given moment and the same can be said about humans.

All of reality is fundamentally made up of atoms. If you are an atomist, you believe that consciousness is ultimately derived from a special arrangement of atoms. A rock is made of atoms, QED: rocks are conscious.

If this is true then the higher you go, the more lonely it becomes.

I have little doubt it is. The question is how do we actually contact it (obviously contacting an ambassador, a president or any other person is not the same).

I don't think we'd ever be able to, unfortunately. The difference between us and the theoretical United States super-consciousness is probably as different as our own consciousness and the cells we're composed of. Communication in either direction is impossible.

The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than whether a submarine can swim - Edsger Dijkstra.

But it keeps academic philosophers employed I guess.

> If you’re a materialist, you probably think that rabbits are conscious.

Can anyone explain this please? I don’t understand.

Materialists believe that what you can see and plainly interact with is what’s real, that there is no metaphysical ghost juice powering consciousness.

As a materialist, you don't require a "soul" to consider something conscious, much less so consider having one the unique province of humans.

So, with rabbits, their having brain matter makes them so.

What I like is the way everyone has just accepted the inference that the us is made of dumb parts

Consciousness is an illusion -,daniel c denett

Can someone explain what does that mean??

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26213693

If America is conscious, it stands to reason that Bitcoin is it's offspring

Sounds like the plot to Metal Gear Solid 2

Reminds me of this dialogue from Gödel, Escher Bach: https://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/110/Hofstadter....

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