NOTE-362: Kammerer — How a materialist can deny that the US is probably conscious

Contribution

Schwitzgebel (LIT-159, §2) argued that anti-nesting principles are both unmotivated and refuted by cases: the antheads, whose insect parts may be conscious, and Block’s tiny conscious organisms taking over neuron roles. Kammerer replies with a principle that keeps both cases conscious and still excludes the US. He does this by moving the criterion from whether parts are conscious to what the parts are conscious of and whether the whole needs that. It is built specifically to survive Schwitzgebel’s counterexamples, and is the only principle in the record that is.

Key insight

A whole should not be credited with a conscious state when the organisation that would ground the state is supplied by its parts thinking about the whole. Parts that are conscious but represent nothing about the whole (insects in an anthead, tiny people playing neurons) do not block anything. Parts whose representations of the whole are indispensable (citizens who know what the US is and should do) do. On this view the US’s behaviour is fully explained by the conscious states of other subjects, so ascribing it a further stream of consciousness multiplies subjects needlessly.

Assumptions

• Supervenience on functional organisation (§2, p. 3). Phenomenally conscious states supervene on functional organisation. Kammerer notes this is implied by most materialisms and is also compatible with Chalmers’s naturalistic dualism. Type materialisms (McLaughlin, Polger) are not strictly committed to it, but must accept that some functional complexity is required (n. 1). He then works with functionalist materialism “for reasons of simplicity”.
• A theory of consciousness supplies, for each conscious state S, a functional property P sufficient for S (p. 4, nn. 5–6). Ideally an exhaustive disjunction Z of such properties, necessary and sufficient. The SAP is an exception clause added to any such theory: “if an entity has P, then it has S, except if it falls under the cases described by” the SAP.
• Parts are functional parts. A part of W’s functional organisation must make “a certain lasting (even if merely dispositional) contribution” to W’s causal properties. A one-off intervention is not a part, as brain surgery is not part of the organisation it changes (n. 8).
• Humans are conscious, and so (possibly) are the anthead insects (p. 3).
• No particular theory of consciousness is assumed (p. 3). Kammerer says the SAP “may in the end imply that certain kinds of functional organization cannot be the basis of a genuine stream of consciousness”.

Key results

All are informal. There are no formal results and no data.

• The SAP (§3, p. 4). Given W with P, where P is normally sufficient for S, W does not have S if W has at least one part playing a role in its functional organisation such that:
  • (A) performing the role requires the part to have conscious mental states (beliefs, emotions, hopes, experiences, desires) representing W: what it is, what it does, what it should do. That is, the part has a functional property Q sufficient for a conscious state R about W.
  • (B) if no part of W performed a role of that kind, W would no longer have P, nor any other property sufficient for S. “In other words: if no subpart of W had R, then W would no longer have S.”
• The cases (§4, pp. 5–7).
  • Antheads: conscious. The insects do not represent the whole creature (A fails), and neurons could do their job (B fails).
  • Block’s tiny people in place of neurons: conscious. The role can be played by a non-conscious neuron, so B fails “even if condition A is fulfilled”.
  • The US: not conscious. Citizens have conscious states representing the US. A country of neurons or simple computers, or one whose inhabitants “had no idea of their existence as a group”, would not show the US’s behavioural and cognitive complexity. So A and B hold.
  • Unwitting group consciousness: allowed. Humans could be part of a collective organisation that is conscious without their knowing. If some come to know of it and that knowledge becomes necessary for new organisation, the new aspects cannot ground new conscious states of the whole. Its “old” states may persist (p. 5).
  • Fine-grained verdicts. Since the SAP works on states, not on consciousness wholesale, the tiny people could make me talk about a theorem M by consciously steering my speech. I would then have no conscious thoughts about M, while keeping my ordinary states and the auditory experience of my own speech (pp. 5–6).
  • Reviewer’s variant (n. 8). If the organisms insert a thought about M once, so that I can go on unaided, I do consciously think about M: their act is not part of my organisation. If their continuing intervention is needed, the SAP says my “thoughts” about M are not conscious. Kammerer bites this bullet and says it is not “such a counter-intuitive claim after all”.
  • Spatial scatter and animals. The SAP is consistent with Schwitzgebel’s supersquids and with animal and alien consciousness, so it entails neither “contiguism” nor “neurochauvinism” (p. 7).
• Chalmers’s objection kept, Schwitzgebel’s reply escaped (pp. 6–7). Chalmers suggested that the US’s capacities arise largely from its members’ capacities rather than their relations. Schwitzgebel replied that global-workspace theories say the same of human minds. Kammerer answers that workspace modules are not conscious and do not represent the person, so the SAP excludes the US but not humans.
• Defence against arbitrariness (§5, pp. 7–8).
  • Intuitive. Putnam’s principle has an “intuitive pull”; his mistake was to read “subpart” spatially, not functionally.
  • Not ad hoc. It follows from “a specialized version of Occam’s Razor”: “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” (p. 8). This is also why we deny consciousness to books, computers and puppets. Kammerer grounds it in the explanatory role of consciousness ascriptions, adding that “a satisfying justification would require further reasoning”.
  • Residual arbitrariness is everyone’s. “Why is a whole conscious in this case but not that?” can be asked of any theory of consciousness (the hard problem, Levine’s explanatory gap), so it is no special objection to the SAP (p. 8).

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	The SAP keeps the antheads and Block’s tiny-people brain conscious	strong, given the SAP’s definition	direct check of A and B, p. 5
C2	The SAP denies the US conscious states	weak–moderate	rests on the counterfactual that without members’ representations of the US, it would lose its complexity, p. 5; asserted, with no analysis of which US-level capacities depend on such representations
C3	The SAP allows some genuine group consciousness, under conditions matching our intuitions	weak	one hypothetical (unwitting human collective), p. 5; “precisely match” (p. 7) is asserted
C4	The SAP keeps Chalmers’s objection and escapes Schwitzgebel’s global-workspace reply	moderate	p. 6–7; depends on workspace modules being non-conscious and non-representing of the person
C5	Putnam’s error was reading parts spatially, not functionally	assertion	p. 7, no textual analysis of Putnam
C6	The SAP is justified by an Occam-style rule against ascribing consciousness where other subjects explain the behaviour	weak	§5, p. 8; the author says a satisfying justification needs more
C7	The SAP’s residual arbitrariness is no worse than any theory’s	moderate as a tu quoque	p. 8; it does not show the SAP is less arbitrary than Putnam’s, only no worse than the field

Concepts

• Anti-nesting principle — any principle that a conscious entity cannot be constituted by other conscious entities (p. 2). Putnam’s is the standard example: no pain-capable organism decomposes into parts separately capable of pain.
• Sophisticated Anti-Nesting Principle (SAP) — the A-and-B exception clause above, added to any functional-supervenience theory.
• Representing W — having conscious states about “what it is, what it does, what it should do” (p. 4).
• Functional subpart — a part that makes a lasting, possibly dispositional, contribution to the whole’s causal properties (n. 8).
• Genuine nested consciousness — the case the SAP rules out: a whole whose would-be conscious state exists only through parts consciously representing the whole (p. 4).

Connections

• Schwitzgebel (LIT-159; NOTE-131). A direct reply to §2. It reproduces the antheads, Block’s neuron case and the supersquids from the manuscript and agrees with Schwitzgebel against contiguism and neurochauvinism. It does not take up the §6 objections other than Chalmers’s, or §7’s three exits. Schwitzgebel’s reply is “Is the United States Phenomenally Conscious? Reply to Kammerer”, Philosophia 44(3), 877–883 (2016), DOI-10.1007/s11406-016-9725-8, not filed here. His book (LIT-216; NOTE-188) treats the SAP as Objection 5, beside Dretske.
• Minsky (LIT-429, LIT-399, LIT-402; Singh, LIT-444). Not cited. The SAP is the clearest statement in the record of where a society of mindless agents and a nation of persons come apart. Minsky’s agents represent nothing about the mind they compose, so condition A cannot hold for them. That is the same reason Kammerer gives for global-workspace modules (p. 7). If some agent did model the whole (a self-model agent), the SAP would withhold only the states that depend on that model, not the rest.
• Hofstadter (LIT-437). Not cited. The “Ant Fugue” colony is an anthead in the SAP’s sense: the ants do not represent the colony.
• Dretske, as Schwitzgebel reports him. NOTE-131 records Dretske’s criterion that a conscious system’s representations must not depend on the conscious states of others. The SAP is a narrower relative: it restricts the dependence to states that represent the whole, and to roles the whole cannot do without.
• List (LIT-401). Independent and compatible. List changes the bridge principle to IIT and argues the US’s Φ is low whatever its members represent. Kammerer keeps any functionalist bridge principle and adds an exception.
• Functionalism and anti-nesting. Kammerer cites Putnam as “Psychological Predicates” (1967, in Capitan & Merrill, Art, Mind, and Religion) where Schwitzgebel dates the same principle 1965, and he cites Block’s “Troubles with Functionalism” (1978) for the neuron-replacement case. Both are being filed by another reader in this batch.
• Tononi. Only in n. 2, as another anti-nesting principle. The SAP says nothing about exclusion or Φ, so it neither supports nor answers Schwitzgebel’s one-ballot reductio.

Bearing on the record

• For the bridge THEORY. This is the source for the claim that the anti-nesting question can be split: nested consciousness as such (allowed), and consciousness grounded in parts’ representations of the whole (denied). Cite it for the SAP’s statement and its verdicts on the standard cases. Do not cite it as showing that the US fails condition B; that is asserted.
• Correction to NOTE-188’s gloss. NOTE-188 reports the principle as “a whole is not conscious if its conscious parts represent the whole”. The text has two further restrictions: indispensability (condition B), and a scope of single conscious states, not whole consciousness. Without B, the SAP would make Block’s tiny-people brain unconscious too, which is exactly the case it was built to keep. NOTE-188 is not edited here.
• No ML instruction. Nothing belongs in the anthology.

Limitations

• The US verdict rests on condition B, asserted. No US-level capacity is analysed to show that it needs members’ representations of the US, rather than of their offices, neighbours, markets or rules. Schwitzgebel’s reply (LIT-459) does not press this: its first concern is about condition A, whether citizens consciously represent the US at all, and condition B is not discussed (NOTE-381). The gap here is still open.
• Representation is left undefined. Which states count as “representing W” (does a tax clerk’s belief about a form?) is not settled.
• The justification is promissory. The Occam rule is stated, and the author says it needs “further reasoning”.
• It keeps old states, denies new ones. The state-by-state scope means a whole can be partly conscious under the SAP. The paper does not say how a phenomenal field is split this way.
• Short. A nine-page reply. It addresses §2 and Chalmers only.

Open questions

• Which of the US’s capacities would survive replacing its members with agents that represent only local matters (their job, their neighbours)? The answer decides condition B, and with it the SAP’s verdict.
• Does a self-model in a Minsky-style mind (an agent that represents the whole person) trigger the SAP for the states that depend on it? If so, the principle has consequences for human self-consciousness that the paper does not draw.
• How does the SAP fare against Schwitzgebel’s three concerns (LIT-459, read in NOTE-381) and the Planck-sized-person case (LIT-216)?

Corrections

• No dossier existed, so there is no seeded skim to correct.
• Citation as requested. Title, venue, volume 43, issue 4, pages 1047–1057 and the 2015 date are right (Crossref; online 28 September 2015). The DOI is 10.1007/s11406-015-9653-z.
• Schwitzgebel’s abstract page for his reply misdates it. It lists Kammerer’s paper as “Philosophia 42”; Crossref gives volume 43.
• NOTE-188’s gloss omitted condition B and the state-by-state scope (corrected in NOTE-188 v2) (see Bearing on the record).