Group Consciousness

I believe that you, dear human reader, have a stream of conscious experience. There is something it is like to be you; you have (as we call it) "phenomenology". Your dog does too. Maybe even the ants in my backyard. But, I have always been inclined to think, the United States does not have phenomenology. Individual people in the U.S. do, of course, but not the country itself. It's not as though there are three hundred million individual American consciousnesses and then one additional consciousness which is the group consciousness of the U.S.

But I find myself wondering: Why am I so sure of that?

Let's start with a thought experiment, adapted from Ned Block. Suppose that whatever functional contribution each of your brain cells makes to your consciousness could be implemented instead by an individually conscious being -- a miniature person, suppose, inside your skull. One by one, we replace your brain cells with miniature people, and by the end we have a "you" with no brain cells but with the same cognitive-functional brain structure you had before the experiment. If we ask this being: Do you still have conscious experience? It will say "yes, of course!" If we drop a rock on its toe, it will jump around and holler. If functionalism is true, then that being will be conscious.

Now let's populate your brain with miniature chairs and beds and kitchenettes for all these miniature folks. Maybe even we can expand your head to the size of a planet and connect it by remote control to the rest of your body. You should still be conscious, right? Now, let's suppose that these brain people can also engage in side-conversations with each other that don't disrupt their functionality as parts of your brain. Will they think you are conscious? Maybe not. Maybe they will say: We're implementing a complex architecture to control this body, and of course we are conscious as individuals, but the overall system is not conscious.

Functionalism is probably the dominant view in philosophy of mind and consciousness studies. And it suggests (if straightforwardly developed) that those brain-people would be wrong: There's a higher-level group consciousness of which they're unaware. Block finds this absurd and thus rejects functionalism -- but we can ride the conditional the other direction. Maybe functionalism is right.

Now of course we U.S. citizens are not implementing the functional architecture of a brain controlling a body. But is our situation really relevantly different? The body, for example, seems unnecessary: Most people think that a brain in a vat could be conscious. We're causally and functionally related to each other in a variety of ways. We talk to each other. We engage in group projects. We pay taxes to support the military. We vote. We pass laws and enforce them. We react to foreign threats. We trade. We explore Antarctica and the moon. Might that connectivity among us be enough to support a group consciousness? -- a real, literal group consciousness, with its own singular stream of experience, as singular and real as the stream of any biological human?

Let's suppose we're liberal about biological consciousness: We think that individual ants probably have a stream of experience -- a stream very different, presumably, from human experience, reflecting the radical difference in their functional architecture. Is the United States, as a functional structure, less complex, less interconnected, less reactive to its environment, less planful than an ant? In what functional respect do we fall short?

Maybe we're not tightly biologically integrated. But why should that matter? Maybe we didn't arise as a naturally selected species. But why should that matter? Maybe the boundaries of membership in the U.S. super-organism are vague. But why should that matter?

Of course it's unintuitive that the United States would be conscious. But why should we think our intuitions are a good guide here? (And in any case, such intuitions might not be stable across cultures.) If one carefully follows through the consequences of any general theory of consciousness, one will find, I think, something highly unintuitive. Functionalism has some seemingly crazy consequences. But so also do all competitor theories: substance dualism, idealism, panpsychism, biological chauvinism, etc. Something that seems crazy must, I think, be true about consciousness. (I call this "crazyism".) Why not this crazy thing rather than some other?