Why Tononi Should Think That the United States Is Conscious

The is the fourth and probably last in a series of posts on why several major theorists of consciousness should attribute literal "phenomenal" conscious experience to the United States, considered as a concrete but spatially distributed entity at least partly composed by citizens and residents. Previous posts treated Dennett, Dretske, and Humphrey. Humphrey and I have an extended exchange in the comments field of my post on his work, and I have offered general considerations supporting the view that if materialism is true the United States is probably conscious here, here, and here (page 18 ff). A full-length paper is in the works but not yet in circulatable shape.

I chose Dennett, Dretske, Humphrey, and Tononi as my sample theorists for two reasons: First, they represent a diverse range of very prominent materialist theories of conscious. And second, they are theoretically ambitious, trying to explain consciousness in general in any possible organism (and not just human consciousness or consciousness as it appears on Earth, like most scientific and neural accounts), covering the metaphysics from top to bottom (and not, say, resting upon a relatively unanalyzed notion of "representation" on which it would be unclear whether the United States literally has the right sort of representations).

Of our four theorists, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi’s view (2004, 2008; Balduzzi and Tononi 2009) enables the quickest argument to the consciousness of the United States. Tononi equates consciousness with “integrated information”. “Information”, in Tononi’s sense, is abundant in the universe – present everywhere or almost everywhere there is causation. And information is integrated, at least in a tiny degree, whenever there are contingent causal connections within a system with a bit a structure – a system that is not collapsed into maximum entropy. Since integrated information is pervasive, so also, Tononi says, is consciousness. He says that “even a binary photodiode is not completely unconscious, but rather enjoys exactly 1 bit of consciousness” (2008, p. 236; cf. Chalmers 1996 on thermostats). Likewise, Tononi attributes “qualia” (that is, consciousness) to simple logical AND and OR gates (Balduzzi and Tononi 2009). On Tononi’s view, what distinguishes human consciousness from photodiode consciousness, OR-gate consciousness, and speck-of-dust consciousness is its richness of detail: The brain is massively informationally complex and integrated, and thus enjoys consciousness orders of magnitude more complex than that of simple systems.

Before we saddle Tononi straightaway with commitment to the consciousness of the United States, though, there is one issue to address: Despite the liberality of his view, Tononi does not regard every putative system as an “entity” that could be the locus of consciousness. If a putative system contains no causal, that is, informational, connections between its parts, then it is not an entity in the relevant sense; it is not, he says, a “complex”. Also, a putative system is not a conscious entity or complex if a larger, more informationally integrated system entirely subsumes it. For example, two disparate nodes do not constitute a conscious complex if a third node lies between them creating a more informationally integrated network. This restriction on the possible loci of consciousness is still extremely liberal by commonsense standards: Complexes can nest and overlap, for example, within the brain, where tightly integrated subsystems interact within larger less-integrated systems.

It seems straightforward that residents of the United States also form multiple overlapping, causally connected complexes. Despite Tononi’s general caveat about what can legitimately count as an entity or a complex, there seem to be no Tononian grounds for denying that the United States is such an entity or complex and thus a locus of consciousness. Its subsystems are informationally connected, and it doesn’t appear to be subsumed within any more tightly informationally integrated system. (I’m assuming the world community and the Earth as a whole are not more tightly informationally integrated than is the U.S., but doesn’t matter for my ultimate argument if we relax this assumption and grant that on Tononi’s view it would be the world community or planet as a whole that is conscious, rather than the United States.) This conclusion seems especially evident given Tononi’s assertion that conscious complexes exist “at multiple spatial and temporal scales” “in most natural (and artificial) systems” (2004, p. 19). Choose the right temporal and spatial scale and Tononi’s view will deliver group consciousness.

The only question that would appear to remain is whether the United States is informationally integrated enough to have a rich stream of conscious experience, or whether its consciousness is substantially impoverished compared to that of a normal human being. This matter is somewhat difficult to assess, but given the massive informational transfer between people and the highly sensitive complex contingencies in human interaction, including in large-group interactions over longish time frames, I would think a plausible first guess from Tononi’s perspective should be that the United States (or world community), when assessed at the appropriate time scale, has at least as rich a stream of conscious experience as does a small mammal.

Update April 3:
In the comments section, Scott Bakker has kindly pointed me toward a new paper by Tononi. This paper seems to reflect a substantial change in Tononi's position with respect to the issues above. While I think the view above accurately captures Tononi's view through at least 2009, it will require substantial modification in light of his most recent remarks.

Update June 6:
See here for my reaction to Tononi's updated position.