If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious | Hacker News Reader

If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious

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35 pointsashergill103 comments

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...

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?

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.

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.

I think it's more that humans have put a man on the Moon, whereas we're highly impressed with other animals when they are capable of doing something productive with a twig or make gestures or noises that can be reasonably interpreted as some form of simple communication.

The point of that is that humans obviously are exceptionally special relative to absolutely everything else we know in this universe. And while consciousness and intelligence are two different concepts, it's not unreasonable to think things which are 'natural' for a human are anything but for other species.

Did humans put a man on the moon using tools or did the USA put a man on the moon using humans?

It's no surprise humans are most impressed by human-ish things, selfish as they are. But I bet a chimpanzee would be highly impressed with you if you could survive even a single day in the jungle.

> doing something productive with a twig

or if you could climb a simple tree

> noises that can be reasonably interpreted as some form of simple communication

Do you think most animals just... never communicate? Why does it have to be something dumbed down enough that humans can interpret it? I bet a dog would be impressed with you if you could emit a scent that can be reasonably interpreted as some form of simple communication.

> The point of that is that humans obviously are exceptionally special

Not really. They're squishy and weak and quite fragile. Tardigrades are the only exceptional lifeform in this galactic neighborhood.

A day in the jungle is easy to survive, a year less so.

I don’t know a lot about dogs but cats have specialized scent communication mechanisms that are entirely outside the human range. I mean they tend to leave a streak of ‘cat oil’ around their feeding areas when they rub their cheeks on corners. I stick my nose right into the gland and I sense nothing but the soft touch of fur.

On the other hand we do share many languages with cats including general mammal body language (“pointing” at things) as well as what we negotiate, like the yowling cats learn to get our attention.

These are hardly human-ish things. The reason they're found novel is because their behaviors that demonstrate some basic degree of interaction with the world or each other, outside of pure instinct. And by the standards of most animals, that's impressive. But by the standards of any sort of intelligent being, including humans, these actions are quite absurdly trivial. But for instance if and when we encounter an alien intelligence, it's fairly certain that they will have achieved many of the things that humans have. In fact that will be largely a prerequisite to encountering them.

And no a chimp would not be impressed to find tribes of humans living in the forest for millennia, as is already the case. They lack the higher order thinking in order to have such a feeling. If they had it then impression naturally gives way to 'hmmm I wonder if I could do that' and the next thing you know, you'd have chimps on the Moon. Suffice to say, that's not happening now, or ever.

I’ve read some hubris on this site, hell probably exhibited it myself. But this? This takes the cake.

There are many meatbags on this world that are not human, but are alive, conscious, and intelligent. Crows, dolphins, and so on are the usual suspects. But to place one’s self above all the rest of creation is absurd. We are a part of creation and it is a part of us. Seems to me that consciousness specifically is a property of all life. I am really not sure how one would think otherwise, but I would be pleased to hear the explanation?

Crows are one example I alluded to above. One of the 'most telling' signs of their intelligence is their ability to stab grubs with twigs. If a human demonstrated that as the peak of his cognitive ability, it would only be due to extreme mental disability. Yet when we see a bird do such a thing, we frame it as an act of brilliance. The reason the bar is set so low is because other species lack any sort of meaningful intelligence, so we find ourselves grasping at straws, or twigs as it may be, to discover it.

Even amongst humans I'm not entirely convinced that all are conscious, in the manner that we are speaking. A rather large chunk of humans claim to have no inner dialogue, and there are those that further claim a complete inability to visualize anything. If you're not having an inner dialogue, and lack any visualization ability - what is driving one's behaviors? It's hard to see it as anything other than animalistic instinct - a philosophical zombie. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

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.

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.

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.

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!).

It's a fucking berry.

No, I quite agree, I don't know what the point of saying that is either.

Oh, let's link to "lumpers and splitters"! This comes up over and over again in a million contexts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters

> 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.

Fuzzy edges don't render the centers un-useful. Philosophical debates about the edges consume all the oxygen, but regardless of whether you think an iPhone is a phone or a computer or a television, it is definitely not a cricket bat. An inability to draw a sharp boundary doesn't mean classification has broken down, and it's nihilistic to conclude that real, meaningful distinctions cannot be drawn.

> it is definitely not a cricket bat.

My son has empirically disproven this when he was four.

He's also disproven that it's not a cookie.

The problem is that we think of categories as this binary thing, when they're not. We recognize it with adjectives like "Tall"—most people wouldn't say "something is either Tall or it's Not Tall". But the truth is, every word is like that. The solution isn't more and more rigid delineations—the solution is accepting that the borders are wide, and plenty of object straddle them.

To bring up an even more argued about example—is a hot dog a sandwich? Some people say yes, some people say no, but the answer can be (and most likely is) "kinda".

You might like process philosophy.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/

I might! Thanks for a thread to pull. I’ve never heard of the concept.

Yeah - my joke (that's only somewhat joking) is that you can think of nations as "planetary coral".

Then why do I feel like me and not this larger structure?

Maybe you just feel like your brain and its dominance over the other organs. What does your heart say? Or your spleen?

A materialist might imagine consciousness is made up of constituent parts, like the organs of perception and the cells that make up those organs.

So perhaps you are a constituent part of the larger consciousness, and you feel your part of it (e.g. your roles and relationships in society)

Because your brain is an “antenna” for the consciousness of your soul. It can only feel a certain way because of the limits of flesh coded into each of us.

No individual wrote the Constitution. It was a collective effort. Yet it has 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 whether such collective consciousness is a metaphor or an example. Especially when individual consciousness seems to emerge from a collective of neurons.

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?

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

> 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.

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...

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.

Maybe you have some other definition of "conscious" in mind but dogs and bats certainly seem far more sentient to me than then the linear algebra box is. My dog wants food, and he doesn't forget he wants food if I tell him he already ate a whole bowl of food.

Oops, my mistake and you're right to call me out for that. I'll make a note in my MEMORIES.md highlighting that one whole bowl of kibble has been consumed. That requirement is satisfied.

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.

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.

It's not saying there's something material out there which is relatable—it's saying that there's some ontological category, i.e. some Platonic or geometrically congruent notion, that is representative (if not constitutive) of the experience of being you.

It refers to a simple issue. If you write a program to add 2+2, do you imagine some entity whiffs into existence, perceives itself deciding to add 2+2, and then whiffs out of existence at the conclusion? It seems fairly absurd. So the implication is that there is no consciousness behind the action, there is nothing like being a program adding 2+2.

Yet if somebody takes an entirely materalistic take of the world, that is to say that all things are the result of purely physical processes, it leads to an odd scenario because a human would also just be a series of ongoing physical processes - neurons firing in response to stimuli leading the brain to some inevitable 'reflex', and so on. Yet we, or at least I, certainly am aware of this world and imagine myself being the driver of all my actions. In other words I am conscious.

So the implication, if one accepts materalism, would be that if you make something complex enough - then at some point consciousness just whiffs into existence somehow.

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_Illusionis...

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?

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...

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.

Yes, another assumption is that our thought process is what leads to an action, when it fact it could possibly be a ride-a-long confabulation that doesn't materialize until needed, i.e. we are asked about why we did what we did.

Yes. I remember the "passenger" episode of Westworld.

And that is EXACTLY what LLMs do. They will entirely confabulate a reason for something they have no idea about, if they think they should know about it.

They do an incredible job of replicating human behavior.

Please disprove the inner dialogue so mine will shut the fuck up sometimes.

I wish I could help, but there are inconsistencies in my inner monologue that does assist in making it retreat into the background a little. For example, I interrogate my inner voice to find out what it *sounds* like; does it sound like me? Does an inner monologue actually make any sound? To me, it doesn't sound like anything, and helps reinforce the fleeting, slippery notion of an inner voice. It makes if feel, to me, as if that inner voice is the smoke from the underlying fire, as it were.

You can also disrupt an inner voice by speaking a word out loud. It does seem to impair working memory, unfortunately. Actually, thought suppression in general is associated with causing the target thought to recur more.

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.

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?

So, not dogs? The mirror test is balls, and "mourning", give me a break, it's anthropomorphism don't you think?

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.

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.)

That's the big question. What do we mean by conscious?

I think the key thing is qualia. That is, there's some subjective experience. If you prick us, not only do we bleed, but we feel it.

This is pretty vague, which is the whole problem. But if you feel it when you're pricked, you know what I'm talking about.

This can't be measured or even observed except from the inside. Nobody even has the slightest idea of how it could be measured, even theoretically. The existence of this phenomenon in people other than myself is something I have to take largely on faith. (But, as I mentioned, not entirely, since the existence of this concept shows at least some other people have it.)

It would certainly make it less baffling how many people seem to insist they're not aware that they exist when Star Trek transporters etc come up.

I do not mean this in an insulting way whatsoever, but have you ever been evaluated for psychopathy? To me it is profoundly obvious that almost all humans are conscious.

No, and from what I know of the diagnostic criteria, it doesn't fit.

The main reason I think this is because there are people who don't seem to get the concept. These threads often have people arguing that consciousness is no big deal, it's just your brain making decisions based on sensory input, etc. I can't imagine an entity with qualia making that sort of argument. This might just be a failure of imagination on my part, but that's what it looks like.

It's very tempting to apply this idea to e.g. idiots who stand in the middle of a doorway and chat while others struggle to get past them, but I recognize this is just an irrational desire to diminish people who annoy me in the moment.

When you say "almost all," is that just to accommodate people in comas and such? Or does that mean you also think there are people who are walking and talking but don't have consciousness, and you just don't think there are very many?

Can a rabbit suffer? I don't think a rock can. I doubt slime moulds can either (though I admit I don't know a huge amount about how their internal makeup). But I suspect rabbits can.

I am not at all impressed by the concept of suffering, which I ascribe to Jeremy Bentham, who I have down as a silly person and responsible for a lot of confusion.

May I ask why? If one can suffer, one by definition can have subjective experience. And I understand that for you, that is not sufficient for consciousness, which is fine: one of the biggest problems of the whole consciousness debate is what is actually meant by the word. But it does indicate that there is something going on inside rabbits that isn’t going on inside rocks (assuming that rabbits can indeed suffer and rocks cannot).

I'm a materialist and man your opinion is going to give materialists a bad name. It is easy to jump from "rabbits are not conscious" to "rabbits can't suffer" to "it is OK to skin rabbits alive".

I believe we are all just bags of chemicals playing out the laws of physics, no libertarian free will at all. Consciousness is an orthogonal issue. Humans have it, and if you have ever lived with a dog you'd agree they have it too despite not being verbal ... hell, it isn't rare for humans to have no internal dialog yet nobody would say they are not conscious.

Consciousness is a continuum and there is no bright line where it starts/stops. Bacteria react to their environment but they are conscious in the same way that one minute after shaving I have a "beard" -- technically the hair stubble rises above the surface of my skin, but it isn't a beard. Wait a month and clearly I do, but there is no bright line where I transition to having a beard.

I don't think it's OK to skin pet rabbits alive. As soon as a human is in a relationship with a rabbit, or a pigeon (pigeons are lovely), the animal acquires rights, in my worldview, and I want to emphasize that point lest people think I'm a cunt. I mean they're going to think I'm a cunt anyway but I want to perform whatever damage limitation I can. The same applies to your beloved plushie too though (mine is Iron Man), it's all about the human really.

This really doesn't make it better.

The brain of a rabbit is many orders of magnitude closer to a human than the USA or a rock. Do you really think the specific form of human cognition is core to the definition of consciousness? This seems like an arbitrary place to draw the line, especially since you define qualia as central to consciousness. Human cognition is less clearly tied innately to qualia than the feelings we may have in conjunction with that cognition

Rabbits are closer than a rock to a human, but clearly something is missing from the rabbit that (waking, socialized) humans have. A core part of phenomenal consciousness is being able to think about the fact that you are an awareness separate from your surroundings. Exactly what it is that humans have that rabbits do not, in the physical sense of what causes this awareness of awareness, is not as clear.

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

UC Riverside makes the paper available here:

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Not true at all - consciousness appears to rely on an extremely limited set of configurations, relative to all possible.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

"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.

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.

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-intellectu...

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.

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.

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?

Kind of my point?

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.

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.

So are companies, right?

SCOTUS seems to believe so.

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/invader...

[2]: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

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.

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.

https://archive.org/details/if-materialism-is-true-the-unite...

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

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.

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/

EDIT: added link

Also we are not discontinuous. Internet lines, satellites, pressure waves, etc.

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).

Here's a non-paywalled version with some relevant videos as well: 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.

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