Why Dennett Should Think That the United States Is Conscious

If you're reading this, you probably know who Dan Dennett is. His book Consciousness Explained is probably the best-known contemporary philosophical work on consciousness from a materialist perspective. Today I'll argue that Dennett should, by his own lights, accept the view that the United States is conscious -- that is, the view that the United States has a stream of subjective experience over and above the individual experiences of its residents and citizens, the view that there's "something it's like" to be the United States, as truly as there is something it's like to be you and me.

I offer these reflections not as an attempted refutation of Dennett's view. I think that the literal consciousness of the United States is a real possibility that merits serious consideration.

To start, Dennett is liberal about entityhood. In his essay "Real Patterns", Dennett accepts the real or real-enough existence of things like the his "lost sock center", the center of the smallest sphere than can be inscribed around all the socks he has ever lost. Dennett also appears comfortable with spatially distributed thinking subjects whose parts are connected by radio signals (e.g., Ned Block's Chinese Nation, accepted as conscious in Consciousness Explained, and a fictionalized version of himself in his essay "Where Am I?"). Dennett should have no trouble granting that the United States is a real or real-enough entity that could at least potentially have mental states.

And Dennett is similarly liberal about the ascription of beliefs and desires. In Dennett's view, as long as an entity is usefully describable as possessing beliefs and desires and acting rationally upon them -- as long as belief-desire ascriptions capture some pattern in the entity's behavior that would be left out or much more difficult to see without the help of belief-desire ascriptions -- then that entity has beliefs and desires. Even chess-playing computers qualify. (See especially his book The Intentional Stance.) It seems clear that the United States is usefully describable as having beliefs and desires. The United States wants Iran to cease pursuing nuclear technology. The United States believes that stable democracies make better international partners than do Islamic theocracies.

Thus, it seems clear that Dennett should accept that the United States is a real entity with real beliefs and desires. Ascribing attitudes to this entity helpfully captures "real patterns" in world politics. This isn't an especially unusual view in contemporary philosophy. What's highly unusual is ascribing literal consciousness to group entities.

And about consciousness Dennett is conservative. He's hesitant to ascribe full-blown consciousness even to non-human mammals. He argues that consciousness is a vague-bordered concept from folk psychology that begins to break down when applied to their simpler minds (e.g., here).

Why does consciousness-talk break down, exactly, on Dennett's view? Dennett argues that consciousness requires being an agent with a point of view. That is, consciousness requires "private, perspectival, interior ways of being apprised of some limited aspects of the wider world and our bodies' relations to it"; and this point of view should be conceivably shapable into a narrative if the entity could talk (for the quote, see here, p. 173). That sounds pretty fancy! But it's clear that Dennett intends "private", "perspectival", and "point of view" minimalistically in remarks of this sort, rather than with the full trappings of robust humanocentrism. This minimalism is evident from his assertion that even cherry trees and microphones meet a first-pass application of these criteria. For Dennett, what distinguishes human beings, fully capable of conscious experience, from beings incapable of consciousness and beings in the gray zone, is that the kind of environmental responsiveness possessed by cherry trees and simple robots is directed simply outward, whereas our own responsiveness is also directed at our own states, in complex, recursive, self-regulating loops.

So the question, then, for the Dennettian view, is whether the United States is a gray-zone case in this respect, or whether it has a sufficiently sophisticated perspective on its own internal states. Is its play of representation and responsiveness massively simpler than that of a conscious human being, on the order of the organization of a non-human mammal? Or is its recursive, complex self-sensitivity roughly human magnitude or more? The latter seems the more plausible. The United States, considered as a single, massive system, is vastly complex, arguably embracing within it much of the complexity of each human being who helps compose it. The complex and self-referential structures internal to citizens' minds, and between citizens in conversation, feeds our choices of President, our decisions to war, our environmental policies. That the people of the United States don't agree but adopt multiple competing perspectives is no objection here, and in fact fits very nicely with Dennett's remarks about consciousness involving multiple drafts and "fame in the brain". Both in the U.S. and in the individual human mind, subsystems with inconsistent perspectives compete for control of behavior and meaning-making.

Dennett emphasizes the importance of language and narratives in generating the complexities necessary for consciousness. And the United States exudes language. It apologizes to the descendants of slaves. It announces official foreign policies. It promises to reduce global warming. This isn't the same thing as any single individual apologizing, announcing, or promising, or any several individuals doing so in unison. It's one thing for Obama to apologize and quite another for the U.S. to apologize, even if the U.S. does so using Obama's mouth.

The U.S. even seems to generate "heterophenomenological" self-reports about the processes by which it reaches its beliefs and decides among its actions. We can ask the Census Bureau about its methods for counting residents. We can ask the National Archives and Records Administration how the President is chosen. Congressional leaders sometimes (dubiously) describe the methods by which the governing body has reached its decisions. Dennett seems happy to count even simple computer outputs as "heterophenomenological reports", if they present themselves as descriptions of the computer's internal workings (e.g., "Shakey" in Consciousness Explained, "Cog" in "The Case for Rorts" -- though actually existing robot systems may still be too simple to be literally conscious on Dennett's view). I see no Dennettian grounds for excluding bureaucratic self-descriptions as heterophenomenological reports, by the United States, of its internal workings. Indeed, few if any of us achieve bureaucratic heights of linguistic self-report.

Since Dennett has a generally pragmatic attitude about mental-state ascriptions, one potential Dennettian hesitation is that ascribers might too swiftly leap from what they think they know about human consciousness to conclusions about the conscious experiences of the United States. If you're upset about Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology, there might be some physiological changes in your stomach that contribute to your experience. If the U.S. is upset about Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology, its internal changes will be structurally rather different. But the correct advice here should be pragmatic caution in our heterophenomenological explorations. The same caution would be required if we met cognitively sophisticated aliens very structurally different from us. The same caution would be required in evaluating robots capable of outputs that are linguistically interpretable as sophisticated self-reports of their internal workings -- robots that Dennett argues should be viewed as conscious (e.g., in "The Case for Rorts").

I conclude that philosophers of a broadly Dennettian bent should accept that the United States has a stream of experience in the same sense that you and I do. That we tend to think otherwise, they should say, is merely evolutionarily and developmentally comprehensible, but theoretically ungrounded, morphological prejudice against discontiguous entities.

[Revised Feb. 10.]