Eric Schwitzgebel (2014), Philosophical Studies 172, 1697–1721 (2015 issue) — DOI-10.1007/s11098-014-0387-8
Key takeaways
- Any materialist criterion liberal enough to count rabbits and behaviourally human-like aliens as conscious will also count a spatially distributed, richly integrated, self-monitoring and environmentally responsive group entity such as the United States, unless one accepts eliminativism, extreme sparseness or an unprincipled neurochauvinism.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-131. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Materialists should think rabbits are conscious, since rabbits are biologically and neurophysiologically much like us. They should also accept consciousness in naturally evolved aliens that behave like us but are built very differently, on pain of “Earthly chauvinism”. Schwitzgebel argues that someone who accepts weirdly built aliens should also accept spatially distributed group entities, and someone who accepts rabbits should accept even fairly unintelligent group entities. The United States seems to be such an entity. Once our prejudice against spatially scattered beings is set aside, it has all the kinds of properties materialists usually treat as marks of consciousness.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 25 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-131 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — read in full (manuscript) 2026-09-26; the canonical over-generation argument against liberal materialist criteria of consciousness, and the standard critique of anti-nesting and exclusion principles, worth reading for anyone who attributes consciousness from functional or indicator properties.
The paper reappears, revised, as a chapter of Schwitzgebel’s The Weirdness of the World (LIT-216): chapter 2 of the 2022 manuscript, chapter 3 of the 2024 book. The book moves the anti-nesting critique into an end appendix, adds a reply to Kammerer, greatly expands the IIT footnote, and replaces the paper’s three-way indecision with four choices. The book’s reading gives the details.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-131, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — t=25 s, but it is a much-cited, load-bearing argument in debates about consciousness attribution. The skim captures the structure, and §6’s theory-by-theory analysis is the part worth reading in full.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-131 is that reading):
- It is the canonical argument that liberal materialist criteria over-generate consciousness. It bears directly on AI-consciousness notes (LIT-111 Birch, LIT-135 Seth, LIT-185 IIT): any indicator-property approach inherits this problem.
- The §2 critique of IIT’s exclusion postulate connects to LIT-185’s defence of IIT and should be read against it.
- Check the published version against the manuscript. Page numbers and possibly wording differ, and the §6 treatment of Dennett and Dretske may have changed.
Access when seeded: The Springer version is paywalled (it returned the landing page only). Read the author’s manuscript PDF (dated 21 July 2014, 46 pp.) linked from his UCR page, which calls it the manuscript version of the Philosophical Studies paper: abstract and keywords, introduction, section heads, §2 (anti-nesting), the setup of §6, §7 (three ways out) and §8 Conclusion. Page numbers below are the manuscript’s. Online date 8 Oct 2014 per Crossref (published-online); the print issue is 2015.