What is it like to enforce an embargo?
June 15, 2022 12:20 PM Subscribe
In 2014, Eric Schwitzgebel, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, published the paper "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious", putting forward the idea that if you accept that matter and physical things are at the root of everything, then if that means you believe rabbits are (or at least, can be) conscious, then the United States is probably conscious, too.
Schwitzgebel's readable paper takes the reader through a couple of thought experiments that might be familiar to science fiction readers -- his paper references being inspired by Greg Egan's short story, Closer) -- and imagines conscious aliens whose evolution has taken them down a very different path from ours: supersquids of distributed brains, and woolly mammoths whose brains are composed of millions of ants.
One concept he introduces is contiguism, and that we might have a prejudice against non-contiguous conscious beings: another way of saying that swarm intelligences just aren't something we're comfortable with. Another, neurochauvinism, examines whether we have a prejudice against consciousness without neurons.
But his most provocative thought is about the United States itself being conscious -- in a way also brought to life in a smaller scale in N.K. Jemisin's 2016 short story, The City Born Great (and then the 2020 novel The City We Became). After all,
"The United States is a goal-directed entity, flexibly self-protecting and self-preserving. The United States responds, intelligently or semi-intelligently, to opportunities and threats – not less intelligently, I think, than a small mammal. The United States expanded west as its population grew, developing mines and farmland in traditionally Native American territory. When Al Qaeda struck New York, the United States responded in a variety of ways, formally and informally, in many branches and levels of government and in the populace as a whole. Saddam Hussein shook his sword and the United States invaded Iraq. The U.S. acts in part through its army, and the army’s movements involve perceptual or quasi-perceptual responses to inputs: The army moves around the mountain, doesn’t crash into it. Similarly, the spy networks of the CIA detected the location of Osama bin Laden, whom the U.S. then killed. The United States monitors space for asteroids that might threaten Earth. Is there less information, less coordination, less intelligence than in a hamster? The Pentagon monitors the actions of the Army, and its own actions. The Census Bureau counts us. The State Department announces the U.S. position on foreign affairs. The Congress passes a resolution declaring that we hate tyranny and love apple pie."
Ideas like this aren't new: Donna Haraway's concept of the Chtulucene approaches the idea of humans existing with biological group minds, plus there's the argument that trees are sentient, too. And in the worst case, perhaps corporations are already artificially intelligent and sentient.
Nagel asked What Is It Like to Be A Bat, and an easy reading of one of Searle's most famous ideas imagines a consciousness floating above a room containing a large-enough number of sufficiently instructed Chinese people that "understands Chinese".
Instead, though: what is it like to enforce an embargo? A nation state might not feel anger in the way that we do, but what sort of internal states does it have?
Schwitzgebel's readable paper takes the reader through a couple of thought experiments that might be familiar to science fiction readers -- his paper references being inspired by Greg Egan's short story, Closer) -- and imagines conscious aliens whose evolution has taken them down a very different path from ours: supersquids of distributed brains, and woolly mammoths whose brains are composed of millions of ants.
One concept he introduces is contiguism, and that we might have a prejudice against non-contiguous conscious beings: another way of saying that swarm intelligences just aren't something we're comfortable with. Another, neurochauvinism, examines whether we have a prejudice against consciousness without neurons.
But his most provocative thought is about the United States itself being conscious -- in a way also brought to life in a smaller scale in N.K. Jemisin's 2016 short story, The City Born Great (and then the 2020 novel The City We Became). After all,
"The United States is a goal-directed entity, flexibly self-protecting and self-preserving. The United States responds, intelligently or semi-intelligently, to opportunities and threats – not less intelligently, I think, than a small mammal. The United States expanded west as its population grew, developing mines and farmland in traditionally Native American territory. When Al Qaeda struck New York, the United States responded in a variety of ways, formally and informally, in many branches and levels of government and in the populace as a whole. Saddam Hussein shook his sword and the United States invaded Iraq. The U.S. acts in part through its army, and the army’s movements involve perceptual or quasi-perceptual responses to inputs: The army moves around the mountain, doesn’t crash into it. Similarly, the spy networks of the CIA detected the location of Osama bin Laden, whom the U.S. then killed. The United States monitors space for asteroids that might threaten Earth. Is there less information, less coordination, less intelligence than in a hamster? The Pentagon monitors the actions of the Army, and its own actions. The Census Bureau counts us. The State Department announces the U.S. position on foreign affairs. The Congress passes a resolution declaring that we hate tyranny and love apple pie."
Ideas like this aren't new: Donna Haraway's concept of the Chtulucene approaches the idea of humans existing with biological group minds, plus there's the argument that trees are sentient, too. And in the worst case, perhaps corporations are already artificially intelligent and sentient.
Nagel asked What Is It Like to Be A Bat, and an easy reading of one of Searle's most famous ideas imagines a consciousness floating above a room containing a large-enough number of sufficiently instructed Chinese people that "understands Chinese".
Instead, though: what is it like to enforce an embargo? A nation state might not feel anger in the way that we do, but what sort of internal states does it have?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokutai
国 = "state/kingdom/country" 体 = "body"
Excellent essay on kokutai here: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/the-meaning-of-kuni/
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 12:28 PM on June 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
国 = "state/kingdom/country" 体 = "body"
Excellent essay on kokutai here: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/the-meaning-of-kuni/
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 12:28 PM on June 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
Nagel asked What Is It Like to Be A Bat, .....Instead, though: what is it like to enforce an embargo?
ie What is it like to be a BATNA?
posted by lalochezia at 12:37 PM on June 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
One concept he introduces is contiguism, and that we might have a prejudice against non-contiguous conscious beings: another way of saying that swarm intelligences just aren't something we're comfortable with. Another, neurochauvinism, examines whether we have a prejudice against consciousness without neurons.
Maybe we just have a prejudice against conscious beings composed of other conscious beings? That is, that once you have units that are conscious, maybe they're just not going to be able to cooperate in "the right way" (whatever that is) to produce a second layer of consciousness. So: hive minds made of ants would be fine, hive minds of dogs would be iffy, and hive minds of humans would be right out.
Anyway, my very favorite group consciousnesses in fiction are Vernor Vinge's Tines.
posted by BungaDunga at 12:43 PM on June 15, 2022 [8 favorites]
Maybe we just have a prejudice against conscious beings composed of other conscious beings? That is, that once you have units that are conscious, maybe they're just not going to be able to cooperate in "the right way" (whatever that is) to produce a second layer of consciousness. So: hive minds made of ants would be fine, hive minds of dogs would be iffy, and hive minds of humans would be right out.
Anyway, my very favorite group consciousnesses in fiction are Vernor Vinge's Tines.
posted by BungaDunga at 12:43 PM on June 15, 2022 [8 favorites]
oh, I see, he does cover the no-nesting idea in section 2.
posted by BungaDunga at 12:44 PM on June 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by BungaDunga at 12:44 PM on June 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
I think the US is more likely several distinct entities. Like in Clive Barker's In the Hills, the Cities:
"In an isolated rural area of Yugoslavia, two entire cities, Popolac and Podujevo, create massive communal creatures by binding together the bodies of their citizens. Almost 40,000 people walk as the body of a single giant as tall as a skyscraper."
And then they fight.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 12:52 PM on June 15, 2022 [8 favorites]
"In an isolated rural area of Yugoslavia, two entire cities, Popolac and Podujevo, create massive communal creatures by binding together the bodies of their citizens. Almost 40,000 people walk as the body of a single giant as tall as a skyscraper."
And then they fight.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 12:52 PM on June 15, 2022 [8 favorites]
I guess I agree so much that I'm not really sure I see why it needs to be written down.
I don't claim to know what consciousness is. But, I can argue with individual mefites, and countries, and universities, and world religions about the aesthetics of specific artwork. That sure feels like consciousness to me.
posted by eotvos at 1:02 PM on June 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
I don't claim to know what consciousness is. But, I can argue with individual mefites, and countries, and universities, and world religions about the aesthetics of specific artwork. That sure feels like consciousness to me.
posted by eotvos at 1:02 PM on June 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
N.B. corporations are persons by law, conscious entities, and sociopathic by design.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:22 PM on June 15, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:22 PM on June 15, 2022 [9 favorites]
The United States responds, intelligently or semi-intelligently, to opportunities and threats – not less intelligently, I think, than a small mammal.
Yeah, I'm gonna have to point out a major fault with the argument right there...
posted by mystyk at 1:30 PM on June 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
Yeah, I'm gonna have to point out a major fault with the argument right there...
posted by mystyk at 1:30 PM on June 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
59% of the US is conscious.
posted by Splunge at 1:36 PM on June 15, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Splunge at 1:36 PM on June 15, 2022 [3 favorites]
I've been calling Corporations a Bread Mold AI for a while. Just smart enough to grow towards something, consume it, and move on.
posted by Slackermagee at 1:49 PM on June 15, 2022 [13 favorites]
posted by Slackermagee at 1:49 PM on June 15, 2022 [13 favorites]
Corporations were the most obvious one, to me. I mean, just think about it: you call up some big company to complain about something, to try to get a refund. You get the usual runaround - long time trying to reach a real human, that human can't help you but redirects your call to someone they think can address your complaint, that person redirects your call, etc., etc. - until finally you get frustrated and give up. Now: each individual person you spoke to did not make the conscious decision "frustrate this caller until they give up". Nobody said, or even explicitly thought, "no refund for you, buddy, and we're just gonna jerk you around in circles until you accept that". Nevertheless, the corporation got exactly what it wanted. Each of the individual parts of the corporation had a simple response (transfer the call) to a simple stimulus (unpleasant call) and out of that, and the way that responsibility and decision-making is distributed throughout the corporation, that simple reaction to simple stimulus resulted in a more complex result, that was also exactly the result that the corporation, if we posit it as both sentient and uninclined to give refunds to angry customers, would've wanted. That doesn't seem that different from how individual cells in a complex organism react to simple stimuli but can collectively produce a complex motion or reaction. It is also not lost on me that the competitive, dog-eat-dog capitalist economy produces a pretty powerful set of what we could call "evolutionary pressures" on corporations which are constantly forced to adapt as a result. (Nation-states, seems to me, have a generally longer life cycle and fewer evolutionary pressures most of the time, and consequently haven't evolved anywhere near as quickly.)
There was a time in my younger days when I saw the world becoming less and less hospitable to individual humans and individual-human-scale behavior, in favor of becoming more and more controlled by, and adapted for, such corporation-scale distributed intelligences. That was a pandemic and years of rising fascism and a decade or two of unchecked global warming ago so it's not still as high up on my list of "problems facing humanity" as it used to be - but I do think it's something we'll have to reckon with someday. Because to corporations and nation-states and other such entities, humans are a resource to be exploited and consumed; we cleverly designed our way right off the top of the food chain, invented our own human-devouring predators, and "rogue AI"/Skynet-type-scenarios had nothing to do with it.
I do wish Schwitzgebel had looked at nesting consciousnesses a little more, though. He's pretty dismissive of the counterarguments but he doesn't really explore the implications of his own theory that deeply. If you can be conscious, and also a part of the conscious entity that is [the country you live in], and also a part of the conscious entity that is [the company you work for], and maybe also [the major religious organization you're part of], and so on...then how do we disentangle the different entities? Does being a conscious entity require being distinct and separable from other conscious entities, or can they overlap? And if we accept that multiple conscious entities can physically overlap...well, what are the implications of that? Seems to me there are quite a few.
posted by mstokes650 at 1:50 PM on June 15, 2022 [14 favorites]
There was a time in my younger days when I saw the world becoming less and less hospitable to individual humans and individual-human-scale behavior, in favor of becoming more and more controlled by, and adapted for, such corporation-scale distributed intelligences. That was a pandemic and years of rising fascism and a decade or two of unchecked global warming ago so it's not still as high up on my list of "problems facing humanity" as it used to be - but I do think it's something we'll have to reckon with someday. Because to corporations and nation-states and other such entities, humans are a resource to be exploited and consumed; we cleverly designed our way right off the top of the food chain, invented our own human-devouring predators, and "rogue AI"/Skynet-type-scenarios had nothing to do with it.
I do wish Schwitzgebel had looked at nesting consciousnesses a little more, though. He's pretty dismissive of the counterarguments but he doesn't really explore the implications of his own theory that deeply. If you can be conscious, and also a part of the conscious entity that is [the country you live in], and also a part of the conscious entity that is [the company you work for], and maybe also [the major religious organization you're part of], and so on...then how do we disentangle the different entities? Does being a conscious entity require being distinct and separable from other conscious entities, or can they overlap? And if we accept that multiple conscious entities can physically overlap...well, what are the implications of that? Seems to me there are quite a few.
posted by mstokes650 at 1:50 PM on June 15, 2022 [14 favorites]
I've been calling Corporations a Bread Mold AI for a while. Just smart enough to grow towards something, consume it, and move on.
In the past I've seen Google described as slime mold.
posted by pwnguin at 2:03 PM on June 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
In the past I've seen Google described as slime mold.
posted by pwnguin at 2:03 PM on June 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
Ages ago I read Maneki Neko, a Bruce Sterling short story. It posited the idea of a distributed network of anonymous mutual aid as a kind of anti-corporation in a similar way as distributed corporate consciousness is posited above. It stuck with me, but as time's gone on the reasons why have changed. It feels like it'd be as far ahead of the possibility of its success as Project Cybersyn may have been, but there's a bit of me that hopes that something like that could succeed.
It might be what we need to operate at that level with someone on 'our' side.
posted by CrystalDave at 2:05 PM on June 15, 2022 [8 favorites]
It might be what we need to operate at that level with someone on 'our' side.
posted by CrystalDave at 2:05 PM on June 15, 2022 [8 favorites]
I have long thought that materialist panpsychism is the best explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness. There is simply no reason to posit a mental realm that exists apart from or arises out of matter: consciousness (not necessarily self-consciousness) seems to be everywhere I could plausibly look for evidence of it. The book that basically convinced me was Greg Egan's 1994 novel Permutation City. It seems to be slightly forgotten among hard sci-fi, I think partly because it has a singularly unlikeable cast of characters, as well as its massive shift mid-story, but in terms of exploring and expanding serious arguments about the nature of existence through science fiction, it has always seemed pretty astonishing to me.
posted by howfar at 2:06 PM on June 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by howfar at 2:06 PM on June 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
A materialist conception of consciousness that nevertheless disallows a conscious country would be that consciousness is a derivative or gradient of some quantity, as in the relationship of electric field to electric charge, or gravity to mass. If you take a finite quantity of electric charge and squish it into a small volume you get a stronger electric field than if you distribute over a larger one. If you take the same amount of mass and widely distribute it you get a gas and yet if you compact it enough you get something drastically different: a black hole. Take a lot of little magnetic dipoles and put them together aligned just right and you get a magnet, grind up that magnet and you have just metal dust.
So imagine there's some actual physical consciousness charge or consciousness moment, produced by each little grain of information processing or intrinsic to matter or whatever, then it might require spatial or temporal density or a specific spatial or temporal arrangement to produce what we call consciousness. A brain encoded into a big lookup table distributed across an unfathomable number of printed volumes might simply have such vanishingly low consciousness charge density as to be indistinguishable from its component books or the cosmic consciousness background radiation.
posted by Pyry at 2:35 PM on June 15, 2022 [6 favorites]
So imagine there's some actual physical consciousness charge or consciousness moment, produced by each little grain of information processing or intrinsic to matter or whatever, then it might require spatial or temporal density or a specific spatial or temporal arrangement to produce what we call consciousness. A brain encoded into a big lookup table distributed across an unfathomable number of printed volumes might simply have such vanishingly low consciousness charge density as to be indistinguishable from its component books or the cosmic consciousness background radiation.
posted by Pyry at 2:35 PM on June 15, 2022 [6 favorites]
I don't know if corporations dream of electric sheep, but our car dealerships fly the flag at half-mast when there is a mass shooting. I suppose this is a conscious display of empathy, however self-serving.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:50 PM on June 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:50 PM on June 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
Nation states and corporations, for example, are just collections of people. The people are real and material, these collections are abstractions. The reason corporations exist is to create an abstract entity that can assume all responsibility. Created by people to avoid having to take the blame. PG&E here in California is responsible for the death of something like 100 people, numerous injured people, and massive destruction through fire. PG&E committed crimes. But PG&E only exists because of a bunch of legal documents. I strongly doubt that these documents feel any guilt for the crimes they caused. There is no embodiment of consciousness in these documents either. For me these arguments for consciousness in abstract entities seems pointless. It’s people.
posted by njohnson23 at 3:01 PM on June 15, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by njohnson23 at 3:01 PM on June 15, 2022 [6 favorites]
It's weird* how a highly individual culture notices the collectivism for some things. "Greater than the sum of the parts" makes sense here, with some parts reaping greater benefit from the outcomes of the collective agency of the nation state. The only thing you have to lose is your place in the hierarchy of the power structure of your nation state...
*: It's not weird from where I'm sitting. Remind me, what does macroeconomics claim to study?
posted by k3ninho at 3:15 PM on June 15, 2022
*: It's not weird from where I'm sitting. Remind me, what does macroeconomics claim to study?
posted by k3ninho at 3:15 PM on June 15, 2022
"The United States expanded west as its population grew, developing mines and farmland in traditionally Native American territory."
That sentence is doing a hell of a lot of work, and most of it unpleasant. If the United States is conscious, then it's still basically a Puritan from the late 1600s. Its immune system is religious extremism and the infection is critical thought and democracy.
posted by krisjohn at 4:28 PM on June 15, 2022 [6 favorites]
That sentence is doing a hell of a lot of work, and most of it unpleasant. If the United States is conscious, then it's still basically a Puritan from the late 1600s. Its immune system is religious extremism and the infection is critical thought and democracy.
posted by krisjohn at 4:28 PM on June 15, 2022 [6 favorites]
produce what we call consciousness
Well there's the rub, innit. We don't really have a satisfactory account of consciousness, or indeed any component of it. We don't even have any solid evidence that it is a consistent thing. Maybe only I'm conscious, and only for the last 10 minutes at that. Or only one in ten people is conscious, and 90% of you are just zombies acting like you have an internal life.
Yes, it is possible that consciousness is dependent on a limited range of conditions in order to arise, but that seems to have the counterintuitive effect of suggesting that some entities which would pass a Turing test, and might even manifest a better understanding of the universe than our own, would nonetheless not be conscious as a result of their particular physical composition. That seems unsatisfactory both instinctively and to Occam's razor.
Is what we call consciousness a particularly special phenomenon? It may well be that this is a fairly limited part of a consciousness spectrum, with other minds experiencing the world in radically and unimaginably different ways, but experiencing nonetheless. Are there consciousnesses which experience the universe as having 4 spacial dimensions speculating about whether it's really possible for a consciousness to exist that perceives only 3? I think it's at the very least plausible.
I strongly doubt that these documents feel any guilt for the crimes they caused.
You won't find any guilty sections of brain matter, either. Falling into the trap of believing that the individual components of a thing have some sort of fundamental connection to that thing is closely related to where Searle's "Chinese Box" or "Chinese Room" argument against artificial minds goes wrong. A system's properties are not reducible those of its components: a cog can't tell me the time, but my watch still works.
posted by howfar at 4:44 PM on June 15, 2022 [6 favorites]
Well there's the rub, innit. We don't really have a satisfactory account of consciousness, or indeed any component of it. We don't even have any solid evidence that it is a consistent thing. Maybe only I'm conscious, and only for the last 10 minutes at that. Or only one in ten people is conscious, and 90% of you are just zombies acting like you have an internal life.
Yes, it is possible that consciousness is dependent on a limited range of conditions in order to arise, but that seems to have the counterintuitive effect of suggesting that some entities which would pass a Turing test, and might even manifest a better understanding of the universe than our own, would nonetheless not be conscious as a result of their particular physical composition. That seems unsatisfactory both instinctively and to Occam's razor.
Is what we call consciousness a particularly special phenomenon? It may well be that this is a fairly limited part of a consciousness spectrum, with other minds experiencing the world in radically and unimaginably different ways, but experiencing nonetheless. Are there consciousnesses which experience the universe as having 4 spacial dimensions speculating about whether it's really possible for a consciousness to exist that perceives only 3? I think it's at the very least plausible.
I strongly doubt that these documents feel any guilt for the crimes they caused.
You won't find any guilty sections of brain matter, either. Falling into the trap of believing that the individual components of a thing have some sort of fundamental connection to that thing is closely related to where Searle's "Chinese Box" or "Chinese Room" argument against artificial minds goes wrong. A system's properties are not reducible those of its components: a cog can't tell me the time, but my watch still works.
posted by howfar at 4:44 PM on June 15, 2022 [6 favorites]
I suppose this is a conscious display of empathy, however self-serving.
Or one of self-service, however empathic.
posted by y2karl at 5:03 PM on June 15, 2022
Or one of self-service, however empathic.
posted by y2karl at 5:03 PM on June 15, 2022
It's a really impressive argument. The headline seems almost like clickbait but Schwitzgebel does it justice and then some.
I'm wondering if he's read Ancillary Justice. It's a scifi book featuring a ruler who cloned herself, mentally linked all the clones, and then installed them in every government job. An less controversial example of a state/government being conscious.
One thing I'm curious about is the significance of ascribing consciousness to the United States. Initially seems counterintuitive, but on a practical level, I can't see it changing my behavior.
posted by Hume at 5:11 PM on June 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
I'm wondering if he's read Ancillary Justice. It's a scifi book featuring a ruler who cloned herself, mentally linked all the clones, and then installed them in every government job. An less controversial example of a state/government being conscious.
One thing I'm curious about is the significance of ascribing consciousness to the United States. Initially seems counterintuitive, but on a practical level, I can't see it changing my behavior.
posted by Hume at 5:11 PM on June 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
The US contains about as many people as a cat has neurons. So the putative US consciousness is a cat with a right to weapons and access to nuclear devices. Possibly a not a good thing.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 5:15 PM on June 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 5:15 PM on June 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
The idea that you can chop up a consciousness and move the parts wherever you want might be as fundamentally misguided as the idea that you can chop a bar magnet in half and end up with two monopoles.
posted by Pyry at 5:23 PM on June 15, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by Pyry at 5:23 PM on June 15, 2022 [5 favorites]
I love semantic arguments.
And by "love" I mean...
posted by AlSweigart at 5:30 PM on June 15, 2022 [3 favorites]
And by "love" I mean...
posted by AlSweigart at 5:30 PM on June 15, 2022 [3 favorites]
Hume: "I'm wondering if he's read Ancillary Justice. It's a scifi book featuring a ruler who cloned herself, mentally linked all the clones, and then installed them in every government job. "
Though the actual plot is mostly about tea sets.
posted by signal at 5:44 PM on June 15, 2022 [7 favorites]
Though the actual plot is mostly about tea sets.
posted by signal at 5:44 PM on June 15, 2022 [7 favorites]
"The United States is a goal-directed entity, flexibly self-protecting and self-preserving."
Is cancer conscious?
posted by MrJM at 7:56 PM on June 15, 2022 [5 favorites]
Is cancer conscious?
posted by MrJM at 7:56 PM on June 15, 2022 [5 favorites]
Hell, is Western philosophy conscious? I'm pretty sure it satisfies the same criteria for consciousness as the United States: goal-oriented activity, internal representational content, responsiveness to environmental stimuli... (Shut up, Hegel.)
Actually, though, I deny that there is any such entity as "the United States" as Schwitzgebel uses that term. When he says stuff like "The United States expanded west as its population grew," he's committing the fallacy of reification: treating an abstraction as real. No entity exists that has the attributes he ascribes to it; nothing experiences what-it-is-like-to-be-the-United-States in the way that a bat experiences what-it-is-like-to-be-a-bat. When we talk about the "collective experience" of 9/11 (for example), it's just a convenient shorthand for 300 million unintegrated individual experiences.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 8:30 PM on June 15, 2022 [8 favorites]
Actually, though, I deny that there is any such entity as "the United States" as Schwitzgebel uses that term. When he says stuff like "The United States expanded west as its population grew," he's committing the fallacy of reification: treating an abstraction as real. No entity exists that has the attributes he ascribes to it; nothing experiences what-it-is-like-to-be-the-United-States in the way that a bat experiences what-it-is-like-to-be-a-bat. When we talk about the "collective experience" of 9/11 (for example), it's just a convenient shorthand for 300 million unintegrated individual experiences.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 8:30 PM on June 15, 2022 [8 favorites]
Why does it matter if The United States is conscious? Possibility 1, it would affect how other entities choose interact with it, in order to obtain favorable outcomes. Possibility 2, it would indicate the moral duty of other entities towards The United States within a consistent moral theory.
I'll bite the bullet and say that if Schwitzgebel's argument is valid then Option 2 is false: some things that are conscious are owed no moral duty by conscious humans. (and philosophers would need to elucidate exactly why and how consciousness and moral duty are related) However, I'll accept that Option 1 could be true, though (having only read TFA years ago) I don't know what an example would be of how I'd interact different with The United States if I believed it was conscious vs. if I didn't, just to obtain a favorable outcome for myself.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 11:00 PM on June 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'll bite the bullet and say that if Schwitzgebel's argument is valid then Option 2 is false: some things that are conscious are owed no moral duty by conscious humans. (and philosophers would need to elucidate exactly why and how consciousness and moral duty are related) However, I'll accept that Option 1 could be true, though (having only read TFA years ago) I don't know what an example would be of how I'd interact different with The United States if I believed it was conscious vs. if I didn't, just to obtain a favorable outcome for myself.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 11:00 PM on June 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
Is cancer conscious?
That’s a great question.
Seems possible it could hijack your own consciousness to help it survive and spread within the body the way parasites do, but that cancers have as many tricks and dodges at their disposal as they do — completely without the ability to pass any effective adaptation they’ve evolved on to cancers in other individuals — is kind of mind boggling to me. Most of those tricks would have to be reversions to less differentiated states, probably, though maybe there could be atavisms too.
But cancers are typically infected with bacteria and viruses; for example, a couple of studies showed 59% of US women with breast cancer had Bovine Leukemia Virus DNA (it’s actually a retrovirus) in their breast tissue compared to 29% of controls, and figures for Australian women were 80% and 41% respectively, so it’s at least conceivable that viruses that pass between animals could "teach" cancers lessons picked up from cancers in others, I guess.
posted by jamjam at 12:17 AM on June 16, 2022 [3 favorites]
That’s a great question.
Seems possible it could hijack your own consciousness to help it survive and spread within the body the way parasites do, but that cancers have as many tricks and dodges at their disposal as they do — completely without the ability to pass any effective adaptation they’ve evolved on to cancers in other individuals — is kind of mind boggling to me. Most of those tricks would have to be reversions to less differentiated states, probably, though maybe there could be atavisms too.
But cancers are typically infected with bacteria and viruses; for example, a couple of studies showed 59% of US women with breast cancer had Bovine Leukemia Virus DNA (it’s actually a retrovirus) in their breast tissue compared to 29% of controls, and figures for Australian women were 80% and 41% respectively, so it’s at least conceivable that viruses that pass between animals could "teach" cancers lessons picked up from cancers in others, I guess.
posted by jamjam at 12:17 AM on June 16, 2022 [3 favorites]
Interesting article. I think he's reasonably good at answering objections, but not so good as actually making a case for the proposition. The closest he comes is arguing that the US does things that minds do— "When Al Qaeda struck New York, the United States responded". But no such thing was observed. People in the US responded. He doesn't make a case that the existing concept of "a bunch of people" doesn't explain some phenomenon we see. A bunch of people can do things, react to things, perceive things, precisely because it is composed of individuals who can do these things.
The US is made up of a lot of units, and there's a lot of information transfer. That is abstractly similar to a brain, but so are a lot of things. A library, for instance: there's obviously information in books, and those chunks of information are constantly moving around the library, as well as in and out of it. Or, since he actually argues that someone watching a video is an example of the conscious-US processing information, Amazon Web Services is conscious, since it involves mind-blowing amounts of information transfer.
It's an old sf idea that a group of conscious agents could make up a group mind— one classic example is Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker. Stapledon's group minds, unlike the Borg or Asimov's Gaia, did not erase the units' individuality. I don't know if we can tell for sure if a group mind exists, but surely a telltale would be that we cannot understand the group's actions at the individual-unit level, if for no other reason than that it would be unutterably tedious. E.g. we don't analyze computers at the level of voltage levels and individual transistors. It's a purely materialistic system, but it's far more helpful to understand it at a higher level (like, reading the code).
posted by zompist at 1:25 AM on June 16, 2022 [2 favorites]
The US is made up of a lot of units, and there's a lot of information transfer. That is abstractly similar to a brain, but so are a lot of things. A library, for instance: there's obviously information in books, and those chunks of information are constantly moving around the library, as well as in and out of it. Or, since he actually argues that someone watching a video is an example of the conscious-US processing information, Amazon Web Services is conscious, since it involves mind-blowing amounts of information transfer.
It's an old sf idea that a group of conscious agents could make up a group mind— one classic example is Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker. Stapledon's group minds, unlike the Borg or Asimov's Gaia, did not erase the units' individuality. I don't know if we can tell for sure if a group mind exists, but surely a telltale would be that we cannot understand the group's actions at the individual-unit level, if for no other reason than that it would be unutterably tedious. E.g. we don't analyze computers at the level of voltage levels and individual transistors. It's a purely materialistic system, but it's far more helpful to understand it at a higher level (like, reading the code).
posted by zompist at 1:25 AM on June 16, 2022 [2 favorites]
I think it's not clear that the United States, or any other similar abstraction, is self aware. I'm not sure whether that means that it is conscious or not, but I think it matters for how we treat and interact with it. As someone outside it, it clearly acts as a version of a legal person in the sense that it can sign treaties/contracts with other similar bodies and form more informal relationships with them and although there's not necessarily an enforcing jurisdiction things can be de facto enforced. But I don't think we need to give the United States as an entity the same consideration we would give to a human being.
posted by plonkee at 5:40 AM on June 16, 2022
posted by plonkee at 5:40 AM on June 16, 2022
Is cancer conscious?
Interesting question.
Cancer tissue is not singular, to begin with, but is usually made up of a population of cells with different sets of mutations, all vying for proliferation. I would certainly call cancer cells "motivated", but only because they are programmed to be so.
Further, once you take them out of the context of a human body and make tissue cultures from them, you are essentially extracting the biochemical essence of that program and often lose many other characteristics of that cancerous cell along the way.
Cancer cells are hungry and live to divide, but I would say that this exposes that they have no apparent awareness or consciousness of these needs outside of the environment they are in — or else they would all do whatever they humanly could to jump out of human beings and land a cushy job as immortal cell lines in a biomedical research facility, in order to fulfill that genetic program to the greatest extent possible.
If cancer cells are conscious, they are pretty dim.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:36 AM on June 16, 2022 [2 favorites]
Interesting question.
Cancer tissue is not singular, to begin with, but is usually made up of a population of cells with different sets of mutations, all vying for proliferation. I would certainly call cancer cells "motivated", but only because they are programmed to be so.
Further, once you take them out of the context of a human body and make tissue cultures from them, you are essentially extracting the biochemical essence of that program and often lose many other characteristics of that cancerous cell along the way.
Cancer cells are hungry and live to divide, but I would say that this exposes that they have no apparent awareness or consciousness of these needs outside of the environment they are in — or else they would all do whatever they humanly could to jump out of human beings and land a cushy job as immortal cell lines in a biomedical research facility, in order to fulfill that genetic program to the greatest extent possible.
If cancer cells are conscious, they are pretty dim.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:36 AM on June 16, 2022 [2 favorites]
I'd ask if consciousness requires intelligence, but we have no really good definitions for either, and certainly nothing people really agree upon, other than that they know it when they see it.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:41 AM on June 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:41 AM on June 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
The closest he comes is arguing that the US does things that minds do— "When Al Qaeda struck New York, the United States responded". But no such thing was observed.
Yeah, I didn't do anything when Al Queda struck New York. Someone funnier than me could probably write up a comedy bit about the big toe hearing about the the thumb being smashed by a hammer and being "too bad for you hombre", and keeping on doing the job of helping standing. And other body parts barely responding to their body-mates being injured.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:21 AM on June 16, 2022
Yeah, I didn't do anything when Al Queda struck New York. Someone funnier than me could probably write up a comedy bit about the big toe hearing about the the thumb being smashed by a hammer and being "too bad for you hombre", and keeping on doing the job of helping standing. And other body parts barely responding to their body-mates being injured.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:21 AM on June 16, 2022
Yeah, I dont think the premise that the United States is sentient can be supported by works of fiction.
posted by Billiken at 9:07 AM on June 16, 2022
posted by Billiken at 9:07 AM on June 16, 2022
When I was in graduate school the first time around, one of the geneticists there (and my least favorite professor ever) was an eccentric man studying bacterial interactions. We used to derail him when he got too mean-spirited with his in-class criticisms of us by asking him to tell us about how bacterial colonies were actually multicellular organisms--and potentially conscious in some way.
People either thought he was brilliant or insane. Maybe both?
Oh, and his mentor was Barbara McClintock, who is perhaps best known for being considered insane at first, then brilliant. So who knows...
posted by yellowcandy at 9:08 AM on June 16, 2022
People either thought he was brilliant or insane. Maybe both?
Oh, and his mentor was Barbara McClintock, who is perhaps best known for being considered insane at first, then brilliant. So who knows...
posted by yellowcandy at 9:08 AM on June 16, 2022
Philosophy for Corporations: I profit, therefore I am.
posted by Pouteria at 6:46 PM on June 16, 2022
posted by Pouteria at 6:46 PM on June 16, 2022
If I were to accept that the United States is conscious, I would then have no option but to conclude that it is also barking mad.
posted by flabdablet at 7:48 PM on June 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by flabdablet at 7:48 PM on June 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
Victims of QANON/FOX News/Newsmax/OANN addiction behave like one personality installed on multiple bodies. The Jan 6 insurrection was like an embodied botnet attack.
posted by othrechaz at 2:07 AM on June 17, 2022
posted by othrechaz at 2:07 AM on June 17, 2022
My objection would be rooted in the idea that human (and animal) brains are engineered to be conscious.
This is roughly based on the notion that consciousness is a narrative device -- brains are basically a bunch of thinking tools yoked together, and each of these components is capable of having ideas, logical inferences, etc completely independently without any kind of "conscious" involvement.
But all these independent, often conflicting components are contained in a single physical body that can only do (roughly) one thing at a time. So in order to enable an organism to actually function in the world, there has to be some way to wrap these into a coherent, unified whole, to provide a single "pilot" for the physical body.
Seen another way, thoughts and ideas "bubble up" from the unconscious, and these can (and pretty much do) operate everything on their own, but they have to be trained. And this requires some way to provide feedback "down" into the system, to figure out which connections are "working" and which aren't, ie. to learn.
In a very simple system, it's enough to wire the body's pleasure and pain receptors directly into the system, but as things get more complicated you need (or, rather, it's worth investing in, evolutionarily) a whole layer just to figure out what form this feedback should take.
For humans, at least, a very effective way to do this comes in the form of a "narrative," which allows the brain to simulate itself under various conditions and analyze its performance. Since the subject of the narrative is a singular entity (corresponding with the physical body) that's the self-image that this narrator projects for itself.
---
While it's pretty easy to analogize all of this with something like a nation -- especially a democracy, in which decisions "bubble up" from citizens to elected officials to official policies, which provide a "narrative" in the form of laws and official history that trickles back down to the citizenry -- I think (as people like Peter Watts are fond of pointing out) consciousness is fantastically expensive, so I would expect it to develop only where there really is no other possible mechanism. (Or at least, evolutionarily speaking, in billions of generations and trillions of attempts no better alternative emerged.)
This is partly to restate the nesting hypothesis, but it points to a definite mechanism -- namely, if something is made of intelligent agents, they can build the same capabilities in a far cheaper and more efficient way.
posted by bjrubble at 12:09 PM on June 17, 2022 [9 favorites]
This is roughly based on the notion that consciousness is a narrative device -- brains are basically a bunch of thinking tools yoked together, and each of these components is capable of having ideas, logical inferences, etc completely independently without any kind of "conscious" involvement.
But all these independent, often conflicting components are contained in a single physical body that can only do (roughly) one thing at a time. So in order to enable an organism to actually function in the world, there has to be some way to wrap these into a coherent, unified whole, to provide a single "pilot" for the physical body.
Seen another way, thoughts and ideas "bubble up" from the unconscious, and these can (and pretty much do) operate everything on their own, but they have to be trained. And this requires some way to provide feedback "down" into the system, to figure out which connections are "working" and which aren't, ie. to learn.
In a very simple system, it's enough to wire the body's pleasure and pain receptors directly into the system, but as things get more complicated you need (or, rather, it's worth investing in, evolutionarily) a whole layer just to figure out what form this feedback should take.
For humans, at least, a very effective way to do this comes in the form of a "narrative," which allows the brain to simulate itself under various conditions and analyze its performance. Since the subject of the narrative is a singular entity (corresponding with the physical body) that's the self-image that this narrator projects for itself.
---
While it's pretty easy to analogize all of this with something like a nation -- especially a democracy, in which decisions "bubble up" from citizens to elected officials to official policies, which provide a "narrative" in the form of laws and official history that trickles back down to the citizenry -- I think (as people like Peter Watts are fond of pointing out) consciousness is fantastically expensive, so I would expect it to develop only where there really is no other possible mechanism. (Or at least, evolutionarily speaking, in billions of generations and trillions of attempts no better alternative emerged.)
This is partly to restate the nesting hypothesis, but it points to a definite mechanism -- namely, if something is made of intelligent agents, they can build the same capabilities in a far cheaper and more efficient way.
posted by bjrubble at 12:09 PM on June 17, 2022 [9 favorites]
In the absence of a solid definition of consciousness the most this idea (that the US is itself conscious) can be is a metaphor. Metaphors, by their nature, are not true or false, they are useful or not useful.
This metaphor, however, is not a new one. The idea of a national consciousness has been around for a while - Hegel's volksgeist springs to mind.
So, beyond a certain scale-shift thrill that makes you go "Whoa! Have you ever like really looked at your nation state?" what is the usefulness of this metaphor and who does it serve?
posted by thatwhichfalls at 3:30 PM on June 17, 2022 [5 favorites]
This metaphor, however, is not a new one. The idea of a national consciousness has been around for a while - Hegel's volksgeist springs to mind.
So, beyond a certain scale-shift thrill that makes you go "Whoa! Have you ever like really looked at your nation state?" what is the usefulness of this metaphor and who does it serve?
posted by thatwhichfalls at 3:30 PM on June 17, 2022 [5 favorites]
Thanks bjrubble for bringing up Peter Watts; Searle’s Chinese room figures heavily in his novel Blindsight. For anyone who hasn’t read it, it’s a fantastic book; science fiction in the best sense, written by a scientist. One of Watts’ main themes has to do with the difference between intelligence and consciousness.
As you say, and as we’re doing here, constructing and sharing internal and external narrative is essential to what we understand as consciousness. It feels like recursion or self-modelling must be required for this. Whether a distributed entity like the US also has a self-modelling faculty, or a faculty for modelling other organizations, similar to the same way people model people seems up for discussion, but shucks if I’m not swayed by Schwitzgebel’s arguments in TFA that a good answer is “probably yes?”
posted by Verg at 8:00 AM on June 18, 2022 [1 favorite]
As you say, and as we’re doing here, constructing and sharing internal and external narrative is essential to what we understand as consciousness. It feels like recursion or self-modelling must be required for this. Whether a distributed entity like the US also has a self-modelling faculty, or a faculty for modelling other organizations, similar to the same way people model people seems up for discussion, but shucks if I’m not swayed by Schwitzgebel’s arguments in TFA that a good answer is “probably yes?”
posted by Verg at 8:00 AM on June 18, 2022 [1 favorite]
Yeah, I don't think the premise that the United States is sentient can be supported by works of fiction.
Let alone works of fact.
posted by y2karl at 7:23 PM on June 18, 2022 [1 favorite]
Let alone works of fact.
posted by y2karl at 7:23 PM on June 18, 2022 [1 favorite]
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