If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2014)

To say this is quite ignorant of the past few (24?) centuries of philosophy, including those centuries and thinkers when philosophy was part of religious thinking.

Of course there is something intuitively bothersome about that: somehow, we don't believe that there is something it is like to be the United States, but we do believe there is something it is like to be xenophon. That's why the core question isn't absurd at all -- the author is trying to understand what truly differentiates a conscious system.

Some certainly do, more specifically eliminative materialists: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/

But my read is that this article is intending to throw a challenge in the direction of philosophers who advocate a materialist understanding of consciousness, but who aren't eliminative about the concept of consciousness. I.e. they believe it's meaningful to call humans "conscious", and they also believe that the phenomenon has a materialist explanation. This article aims to force them to either drop the concept, or accept that it can be applied very broadly.

If you think it's hard to define what a soul is, try defining what it is for something to be "material".

But while materialists may reject consciousness as a fruitful term, there's a problem with finding a functional definition of consciousness -- or even one that agrees enough with what we colloquially understand consciousness to be -- as consciousness, as we understand it, plays absolutely no observable function. Dismissing offhand as an illusion something that is not just perceived to be real but perceived to be the realest thing there is, is just waving away a really hard problem. I can accept that consciousness may be an illusion, but that doesn't make it any less elusive, as illusion itself pre-supposes consciousness.

And suppose that you come up with a theory of when consciousness -- or its illusion -- emerges. How can you possibly test that?

There is a huge difference between, "we can't talk about it in a scientifically meaningful way" and "there is no it to talk about". The former most certainly does not imply the latter.

consciousness (atman/soul) is self-existent, ever-blissful non-material energy. it has no beginning and no end. It never born so never dies. it's the absolute truth because it's not subjected to change, death and decay. Material reality is only a relative truth because it's always changing. Whole of our body cells recycle every year. But we're still aware of the body as before. that awareness is the non-material atman, which associates, itself with this body as long as it's bound.

Yogis for ages have been able to go to the source – atman – by silenting the mind and its modifications (vritis) and have been able to observe the causal, subtle and gross planes of existence along with wheel of time. Hence Upanishad declares: "That which cannot be observed through mind rather through which mind gets the ability to observe is atman"

And saying that consciousness is a fruitless concept is a bit short, when this very concept is unavoidable when trying to know what is humanity. It's so fruitless that hundreds of books have been written to try to grab a part of it. It is also central to psychoanalysis, and to many major novels of the last century. Fruitless you said?

Describes in greater detail the exact problem with philosophy you are lamenting!

Secondly he clearly refers to a definition of conscience called phenemonology. And one must assume that "materialist" is a term in philosophy that people familiar with the field knows what entails and people not familiar with it doesn't. this paper is not an introduction to either of those terms.

Your complaint is that you don't know the what these words are and that is what is apparently wrong with philosophy.

Precise philosophy already has a name: it's called physics.

(In the end I transferred and finished off my degree doing mathematics and computer science.)

This is why panpsychism appeals to me. On some level it makes more sense for me to believe that sentients is an intrinsic property of physical reality then to believe that sentients can emerge from someone moving sticks and stones around according to some algorithm.

There is no mathematical rigor whatsoever in that portion of the paper. He just conjectures that there would be no efficient algorithm for encoding (e.g.) chess positions as states of a waterfall. This actually seems fairly unlikely. You only need to be able to specify a set of physical states that compose in such a way that you can, e.g., incrementally push items onto a stack, and you're basically done. How can we possibly be confident that there is no state description of a waterfall that makes that possible? Note that we have to allow the state descriptions to be very complex, since the physical states corresponding to the computational states of a microprocessor are also extremely complex. This complexity happens to be easier for us to deal with because microprocessors have been designed to make it easy for us to put them into particular computational states. But the relevant states of a waterfall, while much more difficult for us to manipulate, will not obviously be any more complex. And to make the key point, we need only find one suitable inanimate physical system. It really doesn't seem so unlikely that there are a few of them out there.

On top of all this, why should it matter if there's no efficient encoding algorithm? It would obviously lead to an infinite regress if we say that a physical state has to have been "encoded" in order to count as a bona fide computational state (since then the input to the encoding algorithm would itself need to have been encoded).

"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."

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.

Obviously the most fun thing to think about. It's worth noting that "consciousness" is on a sliding scale from dim awareness to focused lucidity. Is my dog conscious? Probably not, but there's something there. How about a gorilla? The lines start to blur. Is it outlandish to ascribe to a large, distributed group, a fish-level of awareness?

However the same restriction don't apply to corporations, and indeed those are heavily competing over their means of existence (money). Which gives an interesting perspective to the current tendency of large corporations to improve their own chances of survival by dodging taxes, influencing politics etc. In some sense it does seem like corporations have become 'intelligent' and are attempting to change their environment to suit them. I'm not too sure what the end result will be, but I fear it's unlikely to be beneficial to humans.

To stop this we may have to, as you say, kill "God".

Still, the strangest thing I've considered is: suppose that the US, or some other group we are a part of, like the galaxy, is conscious.and we get good evidence that it's true. Then disturbing it's function, or destroying it could kill that consciousness. It would be like killing God.

I absolutely believe in universal conscioussness (as instances of networks across many different substrates running at different speeds and with varying topologies and so on). But whatever you do will disturb its function, and it will be relatively trivial in the overall scheme of things - to quote Peter Greenaway 'A great many things are dying and being born all the time.' If you can conceive of an entity like 'the United States' or 'humanity in general' being conscious on a different scale than oneself, then one can consider oneself as the superposition of a variety of different ideas of varying intensity, as a multiplexed signal whose sample rate is a function of the underlying cellular processes. 'You' may not be the sum of your networked parts, but rather the algorithm that defines the travesal of said network.

I too thought of G.E.B. wasn't there a story in there where someone was talking to an ant colony? Not the ants, but the colony as a whole. I've long considered the similarity between cells:people and people:society. A society can have behaviors and a sort of personality. Consciousness seems a stretch, but not impossible. The thing I tend to think more about is cancer, or the fact that a person can pick a scab or that people with various psychological issues can harm themselves or parts of themselves (see cutting, eating disorders, etc).

On the flip side, if an entity asks itself that question, it probably is conscious.

But, then, do you consider that the entity may actually lie about it? It may be psychopathic enough to say, "I am not conscious, that's ridiculous", and yet be conscious.

Another possibility is that it wouldn't understand words in the way we understand them. Asking a nation state "are you conscious?" may be like asking a child "do you have knee-jerk reflex?". How would you know without prior experience?

However, asking in a different manner, say like in a referendum in Greece, you can get a very emphatic response which hints at consciousness at national level.

I'm sure there are brain-damaged people who have a single bit stuck flipped causing an aversion to talking about that concept and fully claim to not be conscious but are otherwise high-functioning and really do have the same sort of internal experiences as the rest of us. Classifying them as "not conscious" wouldn't be useful at anything besides making them stop arguing with you. At that point, "conscious" is just a word for people who meet some minimum intelligence and happen to also call themselves "conscious". We might as well use any other word.

I don't think the word "conscious" has enough of an agreed-upon definition for this question to be even as productive as the classic question-that's-really-about-definitions "does a tree falling with no one around make a noise?". I think the question "is X conscious" is mixing many different questions together. Does the US have a subjective experience? (Who knows. I think we only assume other humans even do because we realize we're probably not the one special person to have one, but it's hard to generalize that solution to things very physically different than ourselves.) Does the US think like us? (It clearly takes a stupidly long time to come to any decisions and then changes its mind every 4 or so years on certain things.)

Just for fun as a little tangent, here's an absurd example possibly closer to the US: imagine you have a person that acts just the same as any other, except somehow their neurons in addition to carrying simple signals each have human intelligence and awareness and rich inner lives that they mostly keep private, but when you ask the person if they're conscious, their neurons stir from their own thoughts at hearing a familiar word and break protocol by answering individually instead of following their proper neural behaviors to allow the person to answer the question themselves. (If that seems a little too disconnected from reality to even picture, then it might help to imagine a natural born human who undergoes a surgical process involving nano-machines that replaces their original neurons with the described self-aware neurons one at a time.)

Really, I think the major issue is to determine how to talk to the U.S. What's the sovereign state equivalent of "how's it going?" It seems that the only obvious attributes of the state we to acquire resources---usually by cooperating in s semi-symbiotic fashion with similar states, and responding to basic pain-like stimuli. The U.S. seems to act more like a very simple worm, and less like a higher animal. Perhaps it has primitive organization? (I'm thinking of the larger jelly fish which, while massive, are cognitively simple.)

But that would, apparently, be far too much of a downer for most people, finding out that questions can be answered with evidence.

I think a lot of philosophical hurdles will be gone when respecting boundaries more. In this case not so much physiological or neurological boundaries, but "(machine) learning" boundaries. A system is separated from its environment by a Markovian boundary. If not, it would not be able to built up a representation of "that out there". It would "be it", but not "represent it". I think much of the questions around "self" and "consciousness" can be solved by postulating mechanisms that use such Markovian boundaries within the (artificial) brain.

Information requires a transmitter and a receiver. These can be the same entity separated through time. For example by writing something down that you read the next day the two of you (your old and new version) communicate with each other. But, separation, physically or temporary, makes a system more than some kind of chemical soup.

Yeah, but a slow consciousness that would be, unless information can travel at speeds faster than light. If not, then there is a limit to how large a computer can be on account of the speed of light and a few other physical limitations.

You added your opinion to the title, rather than leaving it alone.

Ed:

In fact, your title less accurately reflects the material of the paper, which specifically deals with:

> Finally, the United States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort. 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.

Your title completely omits the key focus of the paper, and its examination, which the original title included.

You did this because you disagreed with the paper, and used the pretense of the nebulous notion of "clickbait" to edit in your disagreement.

The original title was more accurate as to the article contents.

Society may know how to create fire, but it's one man who created for the first time, and it's the choice of just that one man to pass it onto another (and yet another). A man on a island may certainly discover fire.

I understand you're a dualist, but from the materialist standpoint, "spatially distributed group entities" describes neurons.

Just a comment that this is called an "emergent phenomenon" in some circles, and an "illusion" in Buddhist thought.

Well, if I never see myself saying or doing something that MY process hasn't decided itself, it's as if those extra processes don't exist for all practical purposes.