If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious

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• Hacker News
• UC Riverside makes the paper available here:

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

  by huurtehoog
• 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
  by robinpie
• 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.
  by card_zero
• 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...

  by jhickok
• > 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.

  by omnicognate
• 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.
  by delichon
• 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.

  by Waterluvian
• 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...

  by wolframhempel