Eric Schwitzgebel (2016), Philosophia 44(3), 877–883 — DOI-10.1007/s11406-016-9725-8. Author’s manuscript (28 April 2016) at https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/KammererReply-160428.htm.
Key takeaways
- Concern 1: it may not exclude actual groups. Kammerer allows some group consciousness, so he and Schwitzgebel may agree on the main point, that some actual groups of people are conscious if materialism is true. Even the US may escape: condition A needs citizens to consciously represent the entity at issue, a vague-boundaried concrete whole of residents and their artefacts. When people think “the United States” they may refer to the government, the nation or the land instead.
- Concern 2: flickering group consciousness. If “required” in condition A is read loosely, a member (Leo) whose motivation to keep working comes to depend on representing the group switches the group’s consciousness off and on with no change in group-level processing. If it is read strictly, Kammerer’s own theory lets non-conscious parts fill the roles, so condition A is never met. Any theory that lets consciousness vary without higher-level functional change invites fading or flickering qualia cases (cf. Chalmers 1996).
- Concern 3: the justification. Applied generally, the simplicity rule (“ascribe consciousness only when other subjects’ states cannot explain the behaviour”) is the causal-exclusion problem, and would threaten human consciousness and baseballs breaking windows. Applied only to consciousness, it is ad hoc. And group-level explanation is often simpler (why the army landed here).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, as the reading THEORY-043 names next on its seam (“would be the next reading on this seam”). NOTE-381 is the close reading of the same day, and it placed the work: Active.
Where it sits. It answers Kammerer’s “How a materialist can deny that
the United States is probably conscious” (LIT-409, read in NOTE-362),
which answered Schwitzgebel’s “If materialism is true, the United States
is probably conscious” (LIT-159, read in NOTE-131). It is a reply that
contests the principle, not one that builds on it, so no extends: is
declared: the paper does not present itself as carrying Kammerer’s work
further, and it does not show the principle false, so corrects: would
overstate it. In order of the record’s numbering of Kammerer’s claims
(NOTE-362):
- Against C2 (the US verdict). NOTE-362 says the verdict rests on an asserted counterfactual, condition B. This reply presses condition A instead: whether citizens represent the right entity at all. The two objections are independent, and either alone defeats the verdict.
- Against C3 (the principle allows some group consciousness). Schwitzgebel takes the concession as agreement on his main point, which is about some actual groups, not the US in particular.
- Against C6 (the Occam-style justification). The reply’s third
concern is the strongest attack on it in the record. It is the half of
THEORY-043’s
promote_whenthat asks for “the Occam-style rule Kammerer gestures at, worked out”.
The flicker argument and organisational invariance. The second concern has the form of Chalmers’s fading and dancing qualia argument (“Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia”, LIT-392, read in NOTE-347), which Schwitzgebel cites only as Chalmers 1996: consciousness that varies while function stays fixed. THEORY-043 records that organisational invariance “leaves Kammerer’s principle standing”, because the US is not an isomorph of anything. This reply finds a variation in which group-level function is held fixed by construction, and so turns an invariance-style argument against the principle after all, at least on a loose reading of “required”.
The book’s later reply. The Weirdness of the World (LIT-216, read in NOTE-188) answers Kammerer again, more briefly, as “motivated post-hoc”, with the Planck-sized-person case. That is this paper’s third concern compressed, plus a new counter-case; the reference argument and the Leo case are not repeated there by NOTE-188’s account.
It carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and it does not belong in the anthology.