New Paper in Draft: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious
Regular readers will have noticed over the past year a so a variety of posts on group consciousness. I have finally synthesized my thoughts into a full-length paper draft, which I have posted online here.
Here's the core argument: There seems to be no principled reason to deny entityhood to spatially distributed but informationally integrated beings (such as Martian Smartspiders or Betelgeusian beeheads). The United States can be considered as a concrete, spatially distributed but informationally integrated entity. Considered as such, the United States is at least a candidate for the literal possession of real psychological states, including consciousness. The question, then, is whether it meets plausible materialistic criteria for consciousness. My suggestion is that if those criteria are liberal enough to include both small mammals and alien species that exhibit sophisticated linguistic behavior, then the United States probably does meet those criteria. The United States is massively informationally interconnected and responds in sophisticated, goal-directed ways to its surroundings. Its internal representational states are functionally responsive to its environment and not randomly formed or assigned artificially from outside by the acts of an external user. And the United States exhibits complex linguistic behavior, including issuing self-reports and self-critiques that reveal a highly-developed ability to monitor its evolving internal and external conditions.
I leave it open whether we should (a.) do modus ponens and accept the conclusion, (b.) do modus tollens and deny the antecedent, (c.) see this as a challenge to find a good justification for accepting the antecedent while denying the consequent, or (d.) see this exercise as supporting skepticism about a certain style of metaphysics.
As always, thoughts and comments welcome.