Is the United States Phenomenally
Conscious? Reply to Kammerer
Eric Schwitzgebel
Department of Philosophy
University of California at Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521-0201
USA
April 28, 2016
Is the United States Phenomenally Conscious? Reply to Kammerer
1. Introduction.
In my article “If
Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious” (Schwitzgebel
2015), I argue that the United States, considered as a concrete entity with
people as some or all of its parts, meets all plausible materialistic criteria
for phenomenal consciousness, such as self-monitoring, complex internal
information processing, and sophisticated goal-directed behavior. François
Kammerer (2015) offers a thoughtful critique, defending materialism against
this unwanted conclusion by means of a sophisticated “anti-nesting principle”.
Anti-nesting principles are principles
according to which conscious beings cannot have conscious subparts. Consciousness, such principles say, can only
arise in one organizational level at a time.
If an entity is conscious, then none of its subparts are conscious, nor
is there any consciousness in any larger system to which that entity
belongs. Conscious beings cannot in this
sense “nest”. Restricted anti-nesting principles allow that conscious beings
might sometimes nest, while specifying a set of restricted conditions under
which they cannot nest. If an
appropriate anti-nesting principle is correct, then on the assumption that
individual citizens of the United States are conscious, the United States as a
whole could not be conscious.
Putnam (1967) and Tononi (2012) have both prominently advocated unrestricted anti-nesting
principles – which I critique in Schwitzgebel (2015) – but overall the
literature on this topic is sparse. Kammerer
offers the following restricted Sophisticated
Anti-Nesting Principle:
Given a whole W
that instantiates the functional property P, such that W’s instantiation of P
is normally sufficient for W to instantiate the conscious mental state S, W
does not instantiate S if W has at least one subpart that plays a role in its
functional organization which fulfills at the same time the two following
conditions:
(A)
The performing of this role by the subpart requires (given the nature of this
functional role and our theory of consciousness) that this subpart has
conscious mental states (beliefs, emotions, hopes, experiences, desires, etc.)
that represent W (what it is, what it does, what it should do). That is to say, this subpart has a functional
property Q, Q being a sufficient condition for the subpart having the conscious
mental state R (where R is a mental state representing W).
(B) If such a functional role (i.e., a functional role of
such a kind that it requires that the subpart performing it has conscious
mental states representing W) was not performed by at least one of the subparts
of W, W would no longer have the property P (or any other functional property
sufficient for the having of S). In other words: if no subpart of W had R, then
W would no longer have S (p. 1051).
Short, hopefully-not-too-oversimplified
version: If the reason a larger entity acts as if it’s conscious is that it
contains smaller entities within it who have conscious
representations of that larger entity, then that larger entity is not in fact conscious.
One
possibly attractive feature of Kammerer’s view is
this: It permits entities to contain conscious subparts in some intuitively
plausible cases, such as my “Antarean antheads” – mobile ant hives that exhibit highly
sophisticated behavior at a group level but insect-like intelligence at the
level of individual ants; and also in Ned Block’s (1978/2007) case in which a
traveler inhales a tiny conscious organism whose behavior is incorporated into
the normal functioning of her brain.
Another
possibly attractive feature of Kammerer’s view is
this: There’s something intuitively plausible about denying consciousness to an
entity whose behavior depends excessively, in the wrong way, on a conscious
entity inside who is directing it – a car-and-driver system, for example. (Presumably the driver is conscious but the
car-and-driver system is not also
conscious at a higher level.) Both Dretske’s and Chalmers’s
objections to U.S. consciousness, as I articulated those objections in my
original essay, are compatible with versions of this thought. Kammerer’s version
has the virtue of avoiding the concerns I raise about the Dretske and Chalmers
objections while retaining some of their spirit.
One
possibly unattractive feature of Kammerer’s view is
that it gives a major role to the conscious representation of complex group
entities, which one might resist if one either rejects complex cognitive
phenomenology (see Bayne and Montague 2011) or regards conscious representations
as functionally irrelevant to important cognitive tasks (Moore 2016).
2. Concerns.
I
have three main concerns about Kammerer’s
Sophisticated Anti-Nesting Principle.
First: Kammerer’s
principle is compatible, as he acknowledges, with the existence of group-level
phenomenal consciousness, including possibly in some actual or close-to-actual
conditions.
This
isn’t so much a concern about the principle itself as it is a concern about Kammerer’s deployment of that principle as an objection to my
argument. Although the title and
official thesis of my essay is “If Materialism Is True, the United States is
Probably Conscious”, the main point that I am really after is that if
materialism is true, some actual (or easily arranged) groups of people are
probably literally phenomenally conscious.
I choose the United States as my test case not because of any particular
interest in the U.S. in particular, but rather because it seems the most
plausible case to make. If Kammerer
would allow – as his argument seems to – that the United States is not a good
case but there are other actually
existing conscious entities that contain people as subparts, then Kammerer and
I can join in agreement on my intended main idea, disagreeing only about a
detail. (I doubt that Kammerer would in
fact allow that there are actual or nearby cases of
group consciousness, but nothing he says seems to preclude this possibility.)
Kammerer’s principle might
even allow the actual group-level phenomenal consciousness of “the United
States” in my intended usage of the term.
Whether Kammerer’s principle would allow this
appears to depend on some tricky issues about representation, reference, and
the ontology of groups. If people don’t have
conscious mental states that represent the entity that I am referring to with
the term “the United States”, then Kammerer’s
anti-nesting conditions will not be satisfied and the consciousness of this
entity will not be excluded. To settle
this point requires asking: Do people
have conscious mental states that represent “the United States” in the relevant
sense of the term?
In
the original paper, I defined “the United States” as “a spatially
distributed, concrete entity with people as some or all of its parts”
(Schwitzgebel 2015, p. 1698 and 1708). If
Kammerer’s new anti-nesting principle is to apply,
then people must have representations of that entity. But it’s not clear that they do. When people use the term “the United States”
they might refer to the United States government,
or they might refer to the nation, or
they might refer to the land mass plus
possibly the people on it, or maybe something else. My best guess is that the most helpful way to
conceive of “the United States” for purposes of the group consciousness
question is as a vague-boundaried entity that
includes all the citizens and residents of the United States, plus their
artifacts (especially their computers, and maybe also other household goods and
even roads), and maybe the air between people, but not including the terrain or
unharvested crops.
I’m not at all committed to that particular way of conceptualizing the
United States, but I think it’s one reasonable way to divide internal cognition
(such as messages traded via computer) from outside resource extraction (such
as farming and mining). The question is
then whether people succeed in consciously representing that thing, the thing I am claiming is probably conscious if
materialism is true, rather than some other ontologically related but different
thing, when they talk and think about “the United States”. It’s not clear. Maybe if it’s a good enough natural or
artificial kind, it will be a “reference magnet” for people’s representations (though
since reference magnetism is often treated as competitive it would have to be a
better magnet than the various competitors).
That seems a rather risky ontological-cum-referential proposition. And if people do not consciously represent “the United States” in the relevant
manner, then Kammerer’s anti-nesting conditions are
not met.
Second:
Kammerer’s principle appears to make the
consciousness of the group depend in an unintuitive way on the motivations of
its members. Now it’s my view that all theories in this area will have some
sharply unintuitive consequences (see also Schwitzgebel 2014), so this isn’t a
decisive objection. But if part of the
attraction of Kammerer’s principle is that it appears
to accord with intuition, then any unintuitive consequences should be clearly
noted and weighed up on the negative side of the ledger before deciding whether
to accept the principle.
According
to Kammerer’s Condition A the subpart (the person)
must not only consciously represent the whole, but that representation must
also be required for the subpart to
do its bit. The intuitive point here is
that if a bunch of conscious beings are already doing what’s necessary to
create group-level consciousness and then they discover that they are doing so,
and thus come to represent the whole at the group level, but nonetheless still continue
doing what they’ve always done, this should not cause consciousness at the
group level to suddenly cease. They
represent the whole, now, but that representation is not required for them to continue doing what they’ve always done to
bring about that group-level conscious experience.
“Required”
is a tricky word. It’s hard to know
exactly how to read it, or how far afield to go in thinking about
counterfactual cases, but on one possible flat-footed reading, proper
motivation can sometimes be “required” for a person to do something. So let’s suppose that Leo is a member of a
conscious group and he is responsible for one important task – a task, perhaps,
essential to the group entity’s “seeing” something in some region of its
environment. Maybe he manages the video
feeds from Sector 27A of the Tonga Trench.
On Monday, he did not know about or represent the conscious group to
which he belongs; he just did his business, making his contribution. On Tuesday, he learns about the existence of
this conscious group, and now he does represent it, but he keeps on doing his
thing. So far it seems plausible to say
that his representation of the group is not “required” for his contribution to
the group-level processes in virtue of which the group is conscious. So on Tuesday Condition A continues not to be
met and thus the group remains visually conscious of Section 27A of the Tonga
Trench. On Wednesday, however, Leo
becomes depressed. He momentarily
decides that he’s going to stop processing the video feeds. But then he thinks to himself that stopping
would cause the group to lose visual consciousness of that sector of the Tonga
Trench. On Monday such considerations
wouldn’t have occurred to him, but now that he represents the larger group as a group he feels obligated to
continue processing the feeds. No one
else in the group is aware of Leo’s hesitation, and it has no impact on how he
processes the feeds. Condition A is
arguably met: Leo’s representation of the group is (motivationally,
emotionally) required for him to contribute his part to the group’s
cognition. Thus, applying Condition A,
now the group is not visually
conscious of Section 27A of the Tonga Trench.
This, despite presumably no difference in group-level
self-report or behavior with regard to the Tonga Trench. Now suppose on Thursday Leo feels better, and
the group level representation is no longer required for him to feel motivated
to do his task. Consciousness would seem
to be restored, by Kammerer’s criteria as I am
currently interpreting them. Again,
there need be no change in the behavior or processing of the system as a
whole. This seems unintuitive.
I
have run the case in terms of emotional requirement, but I don’t think the
worry depends on casting it in exactly that way. The general form of my worry is this: If a
person who is a subpart of a larger conscious organism represents the conscious
whole, then depending on how one interprets the idea of “requirement”, there
will likely be possible cases where that representation is at first not required
for the person to participate and then something in the background conditions
changes so that the representation later becomes required – with no difference to the processing of information by the
whole. In such cases, by flipping back
and forth across whatever the dividing line is between “required” and “not
required”, it should be possible to construct bizarre flickering-qualia cases in which conscious experience at the group
level flips between present and absent despite a lack of any group-level functional
change (cf. Chalmers 1996).
Kammerer
could resist the Leo case by raising the bar for “requirement”. Since Leo was doing his job on Monday,
clearly there is some interpretation of “required” on which even on Wednesday
his conscious representation is not required for him or someone like him to
play the relevant functional role. Taken
to an extreme, raising the bar for “requirement” in this way threatens to
render the Condition A nearly impossible to meet. For example, applying Kammerer’s
own criteria, we might imagine the population of the United States being
replaced by non-conscious “people” who behave functionally identically to the
current population but who fail to consciously represent the U.S. as a whole
because they in turn are constituted by lower-level people. Kammerer allows that complex entities can
implement complex functional roles, roles normally sufficient to instantiate
consciousness, without themselves instantiating consciousness because some
different but related role is being played by a conscious entity at a lower
level. It seems to follow that consciousness
cannot be “required” of any particular functional state for a person to do her
part in the functioning of the U.S., if requirement is interpreted with a very
high bar.
If
it’s too easy for a conscious representation to be “required”, Kammerer runs
into the Leo case; if it’s too hard, his anti-nesting conditions risk being
impossible to meet because his own theory allows complex functional roles to be
filled nonconsciously. It’s not clear where between these two
extremes Kammerer would want to drive the stake. Regardless of where the stake is driven, any
theory that dissociates higher-level functional organization from the presence
or absence of phenomenal consciousness would appear to invite some variant of
flickering or fading qualia cases, if the purported conditions
for consciousness can be manipulated without changing higher-level functional
organization.
Third:
Kammerer suggests that his anti-nesting principle is well motivated and
non-ad-hoc, but I’m not sure that this is so.
Crucial to Kammerer’s non-ad-hocness claim is the idea that
In
particular, one should only ascribe consciousness to an entity when one cannot
explain the behavior and the organization that seems to justify this ascription
as the consequence of mental states of other, distinct subjects – notably
mental states of other subjects which bear on the very behavior and
organization of the entity…. Such a
principle can itself be justified (even though a satisfying justification would
require further reasoning) by appealing to the idea that the ascription of
consciousness is, amongst other things, supposed to play a role in the
explanation and justification of the behavior of the entities to which it is
ascribed. But, as for all explanations and justifications, one should always
choose the simpler explanation/justification when faced with many
explanations/justifications (p. 1055).
One problem with this
general type of reasoning is that it risks driving us headlong into the overdetermination or causal exclusion problem, which has
been a substantial source of trouble both in philosophy of mind (esp. Kim 1993)
and in the ontology of objects (esp. Merricks 2001; Thomasson
2007). If Kammerer’s
reasoning here is intended to apply generally, then it raises questions about
whether even normal human consciousness exists (since arguably human behavior
could in principle be explained at the cellular or molecular level) or whether
baseballs break windows (since arguably the breakage is explainable at the
lower level by appealing to the behavior of many individual particles arranged baseballwise). One common
answer to such concerns is to allow that higher level states, events, or
entities nonetheless exist or have causal/explanatory power – maybe because of
“emergent properties” or maybe without any type of special emergence. But if this kind of move is available in
general for defenders of baseballs and human consciousness, then it’s not clear
why a parallel move wouldn’t be available to the defender of group
consciousness.
Alternatively,
Kammerer might intend his claim not to depend on a general simplicity principle that applies also to human mental
state explanation and baseball causation.
But now the principle seems unmotivated.
Why commit to a specific
simplicity principle that applies only to the relationship between
consciousness and other mental states if one doesn’t wish to commit to similar principles
of a more general form? Without a
clearer explanation of the appeal of such a specific version of simplicity
principle, I worry that Kammerer’s principle is ad
hoc or question-begging after all – appealing to us only because it seems to rule
out U.S. consciousness.
A
second concern about Kammerer’s application of a
simplicity principle here is that group-level explanation is often arguably
simpler than individual level explanation.
Why did the army disembark here rather than there? Because that gave them the
clearest path to the capital. An
explanation in terms of individual generals’, sergeants’, and privates’ motives
would be vastly more complicated. So if
“one should always choose the simpler explanation/justification when faced with
many explanations/justifications”, then there might well be reason to prefer
group-level psychological explanations for group-level behavior.
3. Conclusion.
I
have not encountered a better defense of an anti-nesting principle than Kammerer’s defense here.
Anti-nesting principles ought to have considerable appeal as a means of
avoiding unintuitive consequences regarding both group consciousness and
consciousness at organizational levels lower than the individual organism. The difficulties that arise reveal how far we
still have to go in thinking through this relatively neglected but
fundamentally important issue for theories of consciousness.[1]
References:
Bayne, Tim, and Michelle Montague, eds.
(2011). Cognitive phenomenology. Oxford: Oxford.
Block, Ned (1978/2007). Troubles with functionalism.
In N. Block, Consciousness,
function, and representation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Chalmers, David J. (1996).
The conscious
mind. Oxford: Oxford.
Kammerer, François
(2015). How a
materialist can deny that the United States is probably conscious – response to
Schwitzgebel. Philosophia 43: 1047-1057.
Kim, Jaegwon (1993). Supervenience and mind.
Cambridge: Cambridge.
Merricks, Trenton (2001). Objects and persons.
Oxford: Oxford.
Moore, Alan T. (2016). The experience of reading. PhD dissertation, Department
of Philosophy, University of California at Riverside.
Thomasson, Amie L.
(2007). Ordinary objects. Oxford: Oxford.
Schwitzgebel, Eric (2014).
The crazyist metaphysics of
mind. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92: 665-682.
Schwitzgebel, Eric (2015).
If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious. Philosophical
Studies 172: 1697-1721.
[1] For helpful discussion, thanks to David Holiday (esp.
regarding the car and driver system), François
Kammerer, Jeremy Pober, and commenters on The
Splintered Mind blog.