NOTE-131: Schwitzgebel — If materialism is true, the US is conscious

Contribution

The paper turns an objection to group minds into a dilemma for materialists. It builds a sorites-like chain of cases, from rabbits and human-like aliens to spatially distributed and group-composed aliens and then to the United States. If this chain holds, a materialist cannot keep criteria that credit rabbits and weird aliens and also deny the US consciousness, unless she finds a principled criterion nobody has yet supplied. The paper also gives the standard critique of anti-nesting principles: Putnam’s 1965 stipulation and Tononi’s IIT exclusion postulate. It argues that these principles are unmotivated except by the intuition they are meant to protect, and that they carry their own absurd consequences.

Key insight

Ask what brains have that makes them conscious. Materialists answer with organisational and functional properties: information processing, flexible goal-directed responsiveness, self-representation and self-monitoring, historical embedding. Those properties are not tied to spatial contiguity or to neurons. A nation has all of them, arguably to a greater degree than a rabbit. So “the US is not conscious” is not a fixed point that an independently motivated materialist theory delivers. It is an intuition that current theories can only protect with post-hoc restrictions (“post-hoc noodling”, p. 18). The bizarreness of the conclusion counts little, because common sense is “no rigorous index of reality” (p. 5).

Assumptions

These are the paper’s premises, stated conditionally, as the paper does (p. 5: “My claim is conditional and gappy”).

• P0 Materialism. Consciousness is present because material stuff is “organized the right way” (p. 3). “Material stuff” is assumed roughly understood (fn 2).
• P1 Rabbit premise (§3, p. 13). A materialist “probably” thinks, and “ought to” think, that rabbits are phenomenally conscious, because rabbits are “a lot like us, biologically and neurophysiologically” (p. 4). §3 assumes this explicitly (“I’ll assume you’re on board”, p. 13); §7 revisits denials of it.
• P2 Alien premise (p. 4, §1). Naturally evolved aliens that behave very much like us but differ physiologically would be conscious. Denying this is “insupportable Earthly chauvinism”.
• P3 Anti-contiguism (§1, pp. 5–9). Spatial contiguity is not a necessary condition of entityhood or of consciousness. The Sirian supersquids are naturally evolved, human-intelligent, Turing-test-passing, with a brain distributed over a thousand tentacles joined by light signals. They evolve detachable limbs that rove the sea while remaining “as cognitively integrated” as before (p. 8). They are “coherent entities … not mere collections” (p. 8). Physically possible, and in a large enough universe “not a bad bet” to be actual (pp. 8–9).
• P4 Group-composition premise (§1, pp. 9–11). Being composed of many individually sensing organisms does not block consciousness. The Antarean antheads look like woolly mammoths and act like humans. Their heads hold “ten million squirming insects”, each with its own sense organs and nervous system, and none approaches human intelligence. The antheads’ behaviour “arises from complex patterns of interaction among these individually dumb insects” (p. 10). Nothing in principle stops such a system from executing “any computational function that a human brain could execute” (p. 10). Gaps between the ants, and dispersal from and re-entry into the body, are argued not to matter.
• P5 Dumbing down (§3, pp. 13–14). If rabbits are conscious, so are rabbit-level distributed aliens. The Sirian squidbits have rabbit intelligence and cognition spread over detachable limbs. A continuum runs from squidbits through queen-and-hive forms to mammoth-shaped hives, with no “sharp, principled line between group and individual” (p. 14). Smarting up: the parts may be larger or smarter (house-sized Antareans full of naked mole rats, or even human-intelligent parts) “while the Antareans’ behavior still emerges in roughly the same way from the system as a whole”, and “this wouldn’t seem to affect the argument” (p. 14).
• P6 Type-materialism compatibility (pp. 14–15). The argument does not conflict with type materialism. Pain may be realised differently in different species, aliens may have “schmain”, or radically different substrates may be type-identical at a coarse level.
• P7 Telescopic premise (§§4–5). Viewed “as a planet-sized alien might” (p. 21), the US is a concrete, spatially distributed entity “with people as some or all of its parts” (p. 3). It meets the materialist marks listed under Key results. Not being a biological organism is no bar: reproduction and a life cycle are not plausibly required for consciousness, and the US arguably maintains homeostasis and reproduces by fission anyway (pp. 15–17).
• Methodological assumption. Bizarreness by commonsense standards is weak evidence in metaphysics (pp. 4–5, 35). Behaviour-level similarity should weigh more than micro-level differences that are “unreportable … unintrospectible … irrelevant” to the system itself (p. 26).

Key results

All are informal arguments. There are no theorems and no data.

• The chain (§8, p. 35). (i) There is “no principled reason to deny entityhood, or entityhood-enough, to spatially distributed beings if they are well enough integrated in other ways”. (ii) So the US is “at least a candidate” for real psychological states. (iii) “If those criteria are liberal enough to include both small mammals and highly intelligent aliens, then the United States probably does meet those criteria.”
• Candidate properties the US has (§5, pp. 17–22). Complex, high-order, low-entropy information processing; coordinating “sophisticated responsiveness to environmental stimuli”; perhaps the right historical and environmental embedding.
  • Quantity (pp. 18–19). The brain has about 10^11 neurons × about 10^3 connections, giving about 10^14. The US has about 3×10^8 people, each with about 10^8 photoreceptors. If even 1/300 of visual stimulation counts as person-to-person exchange, US “visual connectedness” is about 10^14. If 1/300 of the population streams video at 1 Mb/s, that is about 10^12 bits/s from that “one minor activity alone”. Mice manage consciousness “with under 10^8 neurons” (p. 19). Schwitzgebel concedes that quantity alone (a 10^17 bits/s download) would not suffice.
  • Type (pp. 19–21). The US is goal-directed and self-preserving. It shows quasi-perceptual responsiveness (“the army moves around the mountain”), self-monitoring (the Pentagon, the Census Bureau) and self-representation (State Department positions, Congressional resolutions). It is social and linguistic, with some reportable and some unreportable internal states. It is “no Swampman”: it is historically embedded, and that grounds content (pp. 20–21).
  • Degree. “In fact, it seems to have them in a greater degree than do some beings, like rabbits” (p. 22). “Is there less information, less coordination, less intelligence than in a hamster?” (p. 20).
• The argument does not depend on social-ontology anti-reductionism (pp. 21–22). The actions of the US may be reducible to those of its members without settling whether the US is phenomenally conscious, just as the brain-reducibility of human consciousness does not eliminate it.
• Anti-nesting principles fail (§2, pp. 11–13).
  • Putnam (1965) stipulates that “No organism capable of feeling pain possesses a decomposition into parts which are separately capable of feeling pain.” Putnam’s only motive is to rule out “swarms of bees as single pain-feelers” (p. 163). Corrected at v3: the first quotation is Schwitzgebel’s paraphrase, not Putnam’s words. Putnam’s condition (3) reads “parts which separately possess Descriptions of the kind referred to in (2)”. The paper first appeared in print in 1967, in the proceedings of a 1965 colloquium (LIT-396, NOTE-335), and “p. 163” matches no edition checked. Schwitzgebel calls it “a danglingly unjustified exception to his otherwise clean functionalism” (p. 11).
  • Tononi’s IIT exclusion postulate says that where integrated systems nest, consciousness occurs only at the level that integrates the most information. It is defended by Occam’s razor plus the apparent absurdity of a two-person group consciousness. This intuition sits oddly with Tononi’s “near panpsychism” (a photodiode or an OR-gate has one bit’s worth). Occam’s razor is “a tricky implement” in part–whole cases: “Is a hydrogen atom unnecessary once one admits the proton and electron?” (p. 12).
  • Counter-consequences. Block (1978/2007) argues against Putnam that if tiny conscious organisms took over the roles of your neurons, you would become nonconscious with no behavioural change. Corrected at v3: that is Schwitzgebel’s paraphrase. Block’s own counterexample is people the size of elementary particles taking over a body’s microphysics (p. 292). Of the neuron-level case, Block says intuition “seems to founder” (n. 17) (LIT-407, NOTE-366). On Tononi’s view, a large enough, well-organised election would make polity-level integration eclipse the brain’s, so all the voters would lose consciousness. Because “greater than” is dichotomous, there would be “an exact point” at which one more mail-in ballot extinguishes every voter’s consciousness with no detectable effect at the individual level (pp. 12–13, citing Tononi 2010 n. 9 and Tononi & Koch 2014 n. xii).
• §6 objections answered (pp. 23–31).
  • Clark: high-bandwidth neural synchrony. Raised to a necessity, this rules out swift serial processors and slow planet-sized parallel aliens that behave like us. No principled motivation is offered. “Analogous considerations will likely trouble most other attempts to exclude U.S. consciousness on broad architectural grounds” (p. 25).
  • Dretske (correspondence): representations must be natural, not dependent on the conscious states of others. The objection is apt for external users (a mercury column called a thermometer), but citizens are internal parts. On the antheads the criterion gives the wrong answer. It “is not exactly an anti-nesting principle” but “is subject to the same concerns”, including loss of consciousness “upon inhaling Planck-scale people” (p. 26). National representations are “eminently natural” viewed telescopically (p. 27). Dretske reportedly modified his 1995 criterion (p. 7) in light of the correspondence (fn 24).
  • Dennett (correspondence, pragmatic): ascription is misleading, because US behaviour is impoverished and its architecture unlike ours. Schwitzgebel gives three replies. The US is not behaviourally impoverished; it differs in this from the US+Germany+South Africa aggregate (p. 27). Hanging consciousness on fine architecture risks neurochauvinism. And one can be restrained in inference: US “anger” need not feel like ours (pp. 27–28).
  • Chalmers (correspondence, not endorsed). The principle is that a conscious system’s complex capacities must arise largely from the functional relations among its subsystems, not from the capacities of the subsystems; compare a “two-seater homunculus” anthead. To defeat US consciousness it needs (a) that the US has no complex capacities that arise largely from relations between people. That is “a strong, empirical negative existential” and “a risky bet” (p. 29). It also needs (b) that no conscious organism could be subsystem-driven. That is “even bolder”: rabbit vision and global-workspace or “fame” models of human consciousness are subsystem-driven. The two-seater case is not analogous, because the US has about 3×10^8 sub-entities with massive exchange (p. 30).
• Three ways out (§7, pp. 31–35).
  • Eliminativism. Nobody is conscious. The paper rephrases its claim for eliminativists: whatever “consciousness*” humans and rabbits have, the US has it too (p. 31). Leading eliminativists keep a stripped-down consciousness, and P.M. Churchland’s definitions seem to commit him to conscious cities (fn 27). Radical eliminativism “seems at least as bizarre” (p. 32).
  • Extreme sparseness. Most commonly, language is required, so dogs, apes and infants are not conscious. This is “highly counterintuitive” and does not even exclude the US, which “does seemingly speak as a collective entity” (pp. 32–33).
  • Neurochauvinism. Consciousness requires neurons “clumped together in the right way” (the US’s 3×10^19 neurons are not so bundled). It draws on Block’s China brain and Searle’s beer cans, but Block and Searle do not say which non-neural mechanisms would qualify (Searle 1992, p. 92). The commonsense standards that exclude beer cans admit Martians, and it is “un-Copernican neuro-fetishism” to suppose only neuron-bearers are conscious. So the view collapses back into “what is so special about brains?”, whose answers the US satisfies (pp. 33–35).
• Conclusion (pp. 35–36). “Large things are hard to see properly when you’re in their midst … The space between us is an airy synapse.” Moral questions are raised and left open: is Exxon-Mobil conscious, is an aircraft carrier, do they have rights? Schwitzgebel is not sure whether he has given (1) grounds for US consciousness, (2) a challenge to materialists to find excluding criteria, or (3) reasons to be wary of a universal metaphysics of mind (“Perhaps to some extent all three”, p. 36). He links (3) to his “crazyist” thesis: every well-developed metaphysics of mind has some bizarre implication, so high confidence in materialism is unjustified for the medium term.

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	If materialism is true, the US is probably conscious (“the most natural thing to conclude”, p. 5)	weak–moderate (conditional, “gappy”)	informal argument, a chain of thought experiments §§1, 3–5
C2	Spatial contiguity is not required for entityhood or consciousness	moderate	Sirian supersquids thought experiment §1; physical-possibility plus large-universe argument pp. 8–9
C3	A whole made of individually sensing, even individually conscious, parts can be conscious	moderate	Antarean antheads §1; “smarting up” p. 14; critique of anti-nesting §2
C4	Putnam’s anti-nesting principle is unjustified	moderate	textual: Putnam gives only the bees-absurdity motive (p. 11); Block’s counterexample (elementary-particle people, not neuron replacement; corrected at v3)
C5	IIT’s exclusion postulate has absurd consequences (voters lose consciousness at a sharp one-ballot threshold)	moderate as a reductio of the postulate as stated in 2012–14 IIT	informal argument pp. 12–13 from Tononi’s own dichotomous “greater than”; no formal Φ calculation
C6	The US has information exchange comparable in quantity to a brain (about 10^14 “connections”; about 10^12 bits/s from video alone)	weak	back-of-envelope Fermi estimate pp. 18–19 with a stipulated 1/300 factor; the author concedes quantity is not sufficient
C7	The US has materialist marks of consciousness (goal-directedness, self-monitoring, self-representation, embedding) “in a greater degree” than rabbits	weak–moderate	illustrative examples pp. 19–22 (Iraq, bin Laden, Census Bureau); nothing is measured
C8	No principled architectural criterion (synchrony, Dretskean naturalness, Chalmers’s relational-capacity principle) excludes the US without excluding admissible aliens or rabbits	moderate for the four objections considered; unsupported as a general claim	case-by-case rebuttal §6. The general form (“most other attempts”, p. 25) is asserted, not shown
C9	Eliminativism, extreme sparseness and neurochauvinism are each at least as bizarre as US consciousness	moderate	informal argument §7; the language criterion is shown not even to exclude the US
C10	On the “most natural interpretations”, Dretske’s, Dennett’s, Humphrey’s and Tononi’s theories imply US consciousness	assertion here	fn 23 only; the analyses are in 2012 blog posts, not this paper, and all four theorists protested
C11	No universal criterion is established; the result may instead be a reason to distrust universal metaphysics of mind	author’s own hedge	§8 p. 36

The abstract’s “the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings” is stronger than the body’s support. The body reaches it through examples and one Fermi estimate (C6, C7), and explicitly declines to apply any detailed theory (pp. 23–24).

Concepts

• Contiguism — prejudice against entities that are visibly spatially discontinuous, analogised to racism, sexism and speciesism (p. 6).
• Materialism — the reason you have a stream of experience is that your material stuff “is organized the right way” (p. 3).
• Anti-nesting principle — any principle that no conscious organism is constituted by, or decomposes into, conscious parts. Putnam’s is a stipulation. Tononi’s IIT exclusion postulate says consciousness occurs only at the most-integrating level of nested integrated systems (pp. 11–12).
• Telescopic view — evaluating the US “as a planet-sized alien might”, as a concrete, spatially distributed entity with people as some or all of its parts, analogous to cells in a body (pp. 15, 21). Whether roads and computers are body or environment is left open (p. 21).
• Entityhood-enough — the integration-based standard for being a candidate subject, used instead of spatial contiguity (p. 35).
• Dumbing down / smarting up — varying the intelligence of the whole (down to rabbit level) or of the parts (up to human level) without changing the argument (§3).
• Two-seater homunculus — the limiting case for Chalmers’s objection: a system whose capacities come almost entirely from two communicating homunculi (p. 28).
• Neurochauvinism — the requirement of neurons, or neuron-like biology, for consciousness; “un-Copernican neuro-fetishism” when unprincipled (p. 34).
• Consciousness* — the eliminativist-proof rephrasing: whatever unadorned property humans and rabbits have (p. 31).

Composition and mereology. The paper does not use formal mereology. It rejects spatial contiguity as a condition on composite objects as “foolish provincialism”. It sets aside, without endorsing, the liberal ontology that would admit a shoe + Eiffel Tower + rings of Saturn object (p. 6, citing Korman 2011 and Elder 2011). Its composition criterion is functional integration (“entityhood-enough”), not a general composition principle. On nesting, it holds that a whole composed of conscious parts can itself be conscious: antheads with human-intelligent parts (p. 14), and the US, whose parts are conscious people. It argues that forbidding nesting is unmotivated and produces its own absurdities (§2), and that Dretske’s criterion inherits the same problems (p. 26). The whole’s consciousness is “over and above the experiences of its members considered individually” (p. 3). The paper does not address the combination problem. It cites Chalmers’s “The combination problem for panpsychism” only in the bibliography and fn 25.

Connections

The paper sits in the functionalist-thought-experiment tradition of Block’s China brain (“Troubles with functionalism” 1978/2007), Searle’s Chinese room and beer cans, Lycan (1981) and Brooks’s “Brain City” (1986; most likely D. H. M. Brooks, “Group minds”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 64 (1986), not the roboticist Rodney Brooks of LIT-436). It departs from them by claiming an actual group entity rather than a hypothetical one (fn 21, p. 21). The anti-nesting discussion engages Putnam (1965) and IIT (Tononi 2008–2012; Oizumi, Albantakis & Tononi 2014; Tononi & Koch 2014). The IIT side of that exchange is held here as LIT-185 (a sympathetic-critical assessment of IIT). That note’s own dossier says it should be read against this paper’s critique of the exclusion postulate. Nagel’s “something it’s like” formula (LIT-096) is the notion of phenomenal consciousness the paper uses throughout, though Nagel is not cited. The indicator-properties approach of Butlin et al. (LIT-056) is exposed to exactly this over-generation worry, since it attributes consciousness from functional and architectural marks. Whether any of LIT-056’s theory-derived indicators (for example global-workspace broadcast, which Schwitzgebel invokes against Chalmers on p. 29) excludes nations is not addressed by either work. The paper touches the mereological questions surveyed in LIT-124 (restricted and unrestricted composition, contiguity) only informally. Schwitzgebel’s later work held here continues the line: LIT-191 (AI and Consciousness, 2025), on unresolvable uncertainty when mainstream theories disagree, and LIT-166 (with Sinnott-Armstrong, 2026), on radical conditionals in the moral circle. Both extend the “crazyist” moral of §8. Among other held AI-consciousness works, LIT-111 (Birch) and LIT-135 (Seth’s biological naturalism) bear on this paper: Seth’s view is a candidate for the “something like human biology” position that §7 says Block and Searle never spelled out.

Bearing on the record

It carries no instruction for ML practice, so nothing belongs in the Anthology of the SOTA. For the nucleation record, it is the reference argument that liberal functional or indicator criteria over-generate consciousness. Any THEORY-level claim that attributes consciousness from indicator properties (LIT-056-style) should acknowledge this and say whether its criteria exclude group entities. The §2 critique is the standard objection to IIT’s exclusion postulate and should be weighed with LIT-185. Two caveats for citing it. First, it is not a source for “Dretske’s/Dennett’s/Humphrey’s/Tononi’s theory implies US consciousness”; that analysis is only in blog posts (fn 23). Second, the page numbers here are the manuscript’s, not the journal’s.

Limitations

• The argument is explicitly conditional on materialism and “gappy” (p. 5). It establishes a dilemma, not the consciousness of the US, and the author ends undecided between three readings (p. 36).
• It applies no detailed theory of consciousness to the US. The author calls the four-theory analysis too complex for the paper (pp. 23–24), so the central claim is carried by examples and analogy.
• The information-quantity estimate (pp. 18–19) is a Fermi calculation with an arbitrary 1/300 factor. It equates retinal stimulation by human-made environments with synaptic connections, and the author himself says quantity is not the relevant variable.
• It rebuts four objections. “Analogous considerations will likely trouble most other attempts” (p. 25) is a generalisation the paper does not show.
• The IIT critique targets the 2012–2014 exclusion postulate. It makes no formal Φ comparison of a polity and a brain, so the “exact point” reductio assumes, without computing, that polity-level Φ could exceed a brain’s.
• Manuscript vs published. Springer body text was not read, and wording and page numbers may differ. Differences that are verifiable from the public Springer page:
  • The published acknowledgments drop Fiery Cushman and the William Paterson University audience.
  • The published version has 27 endnotes plus acknowledgments; the manuscript has 28 plus the acknowledgment footnote. The manuscript’s fn 12 (“For further discussion of Tononi’s exclusion postulate, see Schwitzgebel 2014”, a 16 July 2014 blog post) has no published counterpart.
  • Published note 10 adds that “Tononi (2010, note 9) discusses an anti-nesting principle without endorsing it”, in line with “the intuitions that each of us has a single, sharply demarcated consciousness”, and that “in his more recent article, Tononi does not repeat his appeal to that intuition”.
  • Published note 21 (manuscript fn 23) says “Tononi’s pre-2012 view”.
  • The published reference list lacks Oizumi, Albantakis & Tononi 2014 (IIT 3.0), Tononi & Koch 2014 and Schwitzgebel 2014. It adds Balduzzi & Tononi 2009 and Tononi 2012b (Phi).
  • So the §2 IIT passage evidently differs in print. In particular, the manuscript’s citation of Tononi & Koch 2014 n. xii for the sharp threshold cannot appear in the published text as-is. How it reads there is unverified.
  • Other changes are cosmetic: Huebner 2013→2014, Madden forthcoming→2012, and the crazyist paper “forthcoming”→“in draft” in note 3. The manuscript’s reference list also carries uncited entries (Carruthers 1996/1998, Dennett 1996/1998, Descartes 1649, Metzinger 2003, Sober & Wilson 1998) and omits Bechtel & Mundale 1999, which it cites.

Open questions

• Is there an independently motivated criterion that includes rabbits and the supersquids and antheads but excludes the US? Chalmers’s relational-capacity principle is the paper’s own nominated starting point. An empirical case for part (a) of it (that US-level capacities come mostly from individuals, not their relations) would settle much of the question.
• Does a formal IIT calculation actually put a polity’s Φ above a brain’s under any realistic model? The election reductio assumes it could. A computation, or a later IIT version that drops or reformulates exclusion, would decide the §2 argument. LIT-185 is the place to check.
• Does the conclusion extend to corporations, aircraft carriers or humanity as a whole (p. 27 suggests the US+Germany+South Africa aggregate may not qualify), and what moral standing would follow (p. 35)? Both are left open.
• How does the argument transfer to AI systems assessed by indicator properties (LIT-056, LIT-191)? The paper does not discuss AI.

Corrections to the seeded skim

• §6 does not test the conclusion against Dretske, Dennett, Humphrey and Tononi. The dossier and the skim NOTE-131 say it does, and so does this reading’s brief (“the criteria it tests”). The full text says the opposite. Schwitzgebel had wanted to apply “four prominent, metaphysically ambitious, top-to-bottom theories”, but found it “too complex to embed in an already long essay” (pp. 23–24). He names the four only in fn 23 and sends the reader to 2012 blog posts. §6 instead answers four objections: Andy Clark’s high-bandwidth neural synchrony (inferred from Clark 2009), and Dretske, Dennett and Chalmers in correspondence. Humphrey’s reply appears only as blog comments (fn 23). Tononi is handled in §2, not §6.
• The dossier leaves out Chalmers’s objection (pp. 28–30), which the paper treats most seriously. It is the one objection Schwitzgebel invites materialists to develop (“might be one start”, p. 30).
• The dossier leaves out §3 “Dumbing Down and Smarting Up”, §4 “A Telescopic View of the United States” and §5 “What Is So Special About Brains?”. The rabbit premise and the squidbits case are in §3. The US’s candidate conscious-making properties, including the information-quantity estimates, are in §5.
• “§1 … (p. 5ff.)” is right, but the Antarean antheads are also in §1 (pp. 9–11), not a separate section. The dossier’s “§6 (pp. 23ff.)” runs to p. 31.
• “Online date 8 Oct 2014” is confirmed from Springer’s page (citation_online_date 2014/10/08). The print issue is 172(7), July 2015, pp. 1697–1721.
• The dossier suggested the §6 treatment of Dennett and Dretske might differ in print. I cannot verify that, since the published body was not read. The differences I could detect lie elsewhere: the Tononi apparatus of §2 and fn 21 (see Limitations).