If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2015)

Even when you switch tasks you still use most of your brain. You never really turn off any part of your brain, they're pretty much all always active, just at different levels.

This seems consistent with high-availability.

> Consciousness requires both consistency and high-availability, thus it can't arise in situations of partitioned networks.

[Citation needed]

As a materialist, I am not particularly taken by this particular argument (which is not to say that I would summarily reject other arguments to the same end.)

It's weakness, I think, is in the claim that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings.

If you favor some form of panpsychism (especially in the form that, for example, regards buildings with thermostats as conscious), I imagine you are probably well-disposed to this view, but if, like me, you feel that this is an unhelpful generalization that equivocates over some important differences between thermostats and self-aware organisms, then the problem with the author's thesis is that we do not really know what it is about the latter that is truly characteristic of conscious beings in a causal sense.

Here's an analogy: amyloid plaques seem to be characteristic of Alzheimer's disease, but we don't know if they are a cause, a consequence, an epiphenomenon or even just coincidental, so we cannot assume that a treatment clearing the plaques would cure the disease.

Therefore, I don't hold out much hope for the argument presented here contrubuting much towards our understanding of the causal mechanisms of self-aware consciousness.

Physical monism. Only one type of “thing” exists and it is physical/material. Contrast with dualism e.g Cartesian substance dualism (body and soul are different substances) or theories like idealism (monist, but only the mental exists).

I think it’s even more complicated than you lay out. There are so many ways to exist on this earth and many of those ways approach consciousness or intelligence “but different”. We could say the brain is conscious but what about all the unconscious influences it apparently receives from gut flora? And gut flora are affected by what we eat and our culture. So where do we draw the line? Are you sad today because of brain chemistry, gut chemistry, a feud with a family member, cultural artifacts, the weather, or the machinations of the stars themselves?

Slime molds have a kind of intelligence that lots of people know about, but did you know that the vast majority of the mold lifecycle is spent as microscopic spores that permeate most of the world’s atmosphere? They exist in Antarctica, in deserts, and in underground caves. There are likely mold spores in your blood, certainly in your lungs. Any time conditions are right the spores in an area will activate and begin forming “intelligent” creeping sheets. There’s evidence that the cells in a sheet transfer “learned behavior” through as-of-yet not understood mechanisms to other cells. So is the entire atmosphere one giant hydra of fungal intelligence, with heads popping in and out of existence as the need arises? The sheet could be assigned a kind of consciousness as it seems to be self-modifying—-there is certainly something “like being” slime mold, but is there something “like being” the entire earth-spanning mold computer, with spores emitted from old sheets carrying memories of previous conquests in past lives?

I think any dichotomous distinction between conscious and non-conscious (or even living and non-living) systems on Earth falls apart upon closer inspection. The whole planet is a single interconnected system. So sure, the US is intelligent, what isn’t!?