NOTE-381: Schwitzgebel — Is the United States Phenomenally Conscious? Reply to Kammerer

Contribution

The first published reply to Kammerer’s Sophisticated Anti-Nesting Principle (SAP; LIT-409, NOTE-362). It grants the SAP its two virtues, keeping the antheads and Block’s inhaled tiny organism conscious and capturing the intuition that a car-and-driver system is not a second mind, and then argues that its verdict on the US is unsecured, that its condition A has unintuitive consequences, and that its justification is either too strong or ad hoc. It also restates what Schwitzgebel’s own argument is for: that some actual or easily arranged groups are conscious if materialism is true, with the US chosen only as the most plausible case.

Key insight

The SAP makes a group’s consciousness depend on what its members think about the group, and why they keep doing their part. Both are facts about individuals that can change while the group’s processing stays exactly the same. So the SAP either makes group consciousness flicker with members’ moods, or, if “required” is made strict enough to stop that, becomes a condition nothing meets. Separately, the SAP needs members to represent the very entity whose consciousness is at issue, and it is not clear that anyone does.

Assumptions

• “The United States” as defined in the original paper: “a spatially distributed, concrete entity with people as some or all of its parts” (§2, citing Schwitzgebel 2015 pp. 1698, 1708). The author’s “best guess” adds residents’ artefacts, computers especially, and perhaps the air between people, but not terrain or unharvested crops.
• Kammerer’s statement of the SAP is quoted in full (§1, from p. 1051) and glossed: “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.”
• Every theory here will have sharply unintuitive consequences (§2, citing Schwitzgebel 2014). So the second concern is offered as a cost to be weighed, not a refutation.

Key results

• Concern 1 (§2): the principle may not exclude actual groups.
  • Kammerer allows group consciousness. If he allowed some actual conscious groups, the two would agree on the intended main idea and differ “only about a detail”. Schwitzgebel doubts Kammerer would allow this, but “nothing he says seems to preclude” it.
  • Condition A requires members to consciously represent W. When people use “the United States” they may refer to the government, the nation, the land mass. Whether they represent the concrete entity at issue depends on reference magnetism, “a rather risky ontological-cum-referential proposition”. If they do not, condition A is not met and the US is not excluded.
• Concern 2 (§2): unintuitive dependence on members’ motives.
  • The Leo case. Monday: Leo processes video feeds for Sector 27A of the Tonga Trench without knowing of the group. Tuesday: he learns of it and carries on; his representation is not required. Wednesday: he is depressed and keeps working only because he represents the group and feels obligated; condition A is arguably met, so the group loses visual consciousness of the sector. Thursday: he recovers and it returns. Group-level report, behaviour and processing never change.
  • The dilemma. Read loosely, “required” yields such “flickering-qualia cases” (cf. Chalmers 1996). Read strictly, Kammerer’s own view lets the US’s population be replaced by non-conscious “people” who are functionally identical (because constituted by lower-level people), so no conscious representation is ever required, and condition A becomes “nearly impossible to meet”.
  • General form: any theory that dissociates higher-level functional organisation from consciousness invites flickering or fading qualia cases.
• Concern 3 (§2): the justification.
  • Kammerer’s justification is quoted (from p. 1055): ascribe consciousness only when behaviour cannot be explained by the mental states of other subjects, because one should prefer the simpler explanation.
  • If general, it is the overdetermination or causal-exclusion problem (Kim 1993; Merricks 2001; Thomasson 2007). It would put normal human consciousness in doubt, since behaviour is in principle explicable at the cellular level, and baseballs breaking windows. Whatever answer saves those, emergent or not, saves group consciousness too.
  • If special to consciousness, it is unmotivated and “appealing to us only because it seems to rule out U.S. consciousness”.
  • And group-level explanation is often the simpler one: why the army disembarked here is explained by the route to the capital, not by the motives of each general and private.
• Conclusion (§3). “I have not encountered a better defense of an anti-nesting principle than Kammerer’s.” Anti-nesting principles should appeal to anyone wanting to avoid unintuitive verdicts on groups and on levels below the organism.

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	The SAP is compatible with actual group consciousness, so it does not defeat the paper’s main point	moderate	§2; textual: Kammerer’s own concession (NOTE-362, C3)
C2	It is unclear that citizens consciously represent the entity whose consciousness is at issue, so condition A may fail for the US	moderate	§2; argued from reference to vague and competing candidates; rests on the author’s definition of the US
C3	On a loose reading of “required”, the SAP makes group consciousness flicker with a member’s motives while group-level function is fixed	moderate	§2; one constructed case (Leo); depends on reading “required” motivationally, which the author says is one “flat-footed” reading
C4	On a strict reading, condition A can never be met, by Kammerer’s own allowance that complex roles can be filled non-consciously	weak–moderate	§2; a sketched replacement case; not shown for any specific role
C5	Any theory dissociating higher-level function from consciousness invites flickering or fading qualia cases	assertion	§2; cites Chalmers 1996 without argument
C6	A general simplicity rule leads into causal exclusion; a special one is ad hoc	moderate	§2; a dilemma, with the general horn tied to Kim, Merricks, Thomasson
C7	Group-level explanation is often simpler than individual-level explanation	weak	§2; one example (an army’s landing)

Concepts

• Anti-nesting principle — conscious beings cannot have conscious subparts, nor belong to larger conscious systems. Restricted principles forbid nesting only under stated conditions (§1).
• Sophisticated Anti-Nesting Principle — Kammerer’s restricted principle, quoted in full in §1 (see NOTE-362).
• “Required” — the word in condition A whose reading the second concern turns on: motivationally, emotionally or for the part’s functional contribution.
• Flickering-qualia case — a case in which conscious experience at one level switches on and off while that level’s functional organisation is held fixed (§2).

Connections

• Kammerer (LIT-409, NOTE-362). The target. NOTE-362’s Limitations says the US verdict rests on an asserted condition B and that “Schwitzgebel’s first concern in his reply (per its abstract) presses this”. Read in full, the first concern presses condition A, not B: the question is whether citizens represent the entity, not whether the US needs their representations. See Corrections.
• Schwitzgebel 2014/2015 (LIT-159, NOTE-131). The original argument. The reply narrows its intended conclusion to “some actual (or easily arranged) groups of people”, and cites it as Philosophical Studies 172: 1697–1721 (2015); the record’s LIT-159 is filed as Schwitzgebel (2014), from the manuscript NOTE-131 read.
• The Weirdness of the World (LIT-216, NOTE-188). The book’s appendix replies to Kammerer again, paired with Dretske, as “motivated post-hoc”, with the Planck-sized-person case. That compresses this paper’s third concern and adds a counter-case of the second concern’s type (a change inside an individual flips a larger system’s consciousness). Per NOTE-188, the book does not repeat the reference argument or the Leo case.
• Chalmers. “Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia” (LIT-392, NOTE-347) is the argument the flicker case borrows its shape from; Schwitzgebel cites only The Conscious Mind. The car-and-driver intuition is said to be compatible with Chalmers’s and Dretske’s objections in the original paper.
• Block (LIT-407, NOTE-366) is cited for the inhaled tiny organism, one of the two cases the SAP keeps conscious.
• List (LIT-401, NOTE-340) is not cited.

Bearing on the record

• THEORY-043. This is the reading THEORY-043 names as “the next reading on this seam”, and it bears on the account in three places.
  • The Kammerer paragraph (“Kammerer moves the line …”) says the US verdict rests on an asserted counterfactual (NOTE-362, C2). This reply adds a second, independent gap: condition A may not be met, because citizens may not represent the entity in question (C2 here).
  • promote_when asks for the Occam-style rule “worked out”. This reply argues that it cannot be worked out without either raising the causal-exclusion problem for all higher-level consciousness or being ad hoc (C6). That does not refute the account; it makes the anti-nesting half of promote_when harder to satisfy.
  • The organisational-invariance bullet says invariance “leaves Kammerer’s principle standing”, because the US is not an isomorph of anything. The Leo case (C3) is an invariance-style argument that does not need an isomorph: group-level function is held fixed by construction, and only a member’s motive varies. On a loose reading of “required”, that brings the fading-qualia style of argument to bear on the SAP after all.
  • The Connections line “Schwitzgebel’s reply to Kammerer … is not filed” is now out of date. THEORY-043 is not edited here.
• No ML instruction. Nothing belongs in the anthology.

Limitations

• The Leo case depends on one reading of “required”. The author says so (“on one possible flat-footed reading”) and offers the dilemma for the case where Kammerer reads it more strictly; where Kammerer would “drive the stake” is left open.
• The strict horn is sketched. The replacement of the population by functionally identical non-conscious “people” is asserted to follow from Kammerer’s allowances, not worked through.
• The reference argument rests on the author’s own ontology of “the United States”. He says he is “not at all committed” to it.
• Short. A seven-page reply with no positive principle of its own.

Open questions

• Is there a reading of “required” that blocks motive-driven flicker but can still be met by actual citizens? The answer decides whether the SAP survives concern 2.
• Can the simplicity principle be restricted non-arbitrarily, for example to cases where the lower-level subjects’ states are about the higher-level behaviour, which is Kammerer’s condition A again?
• Does the Leo case also apply to IIT’s exclusion postulate, where a member’s change of state can change which set of elements has maximal Φ? The book’s “Max goes to sleep” case (NOTE-188) suggests it does.

Corrections

• No dossier existed, so there is no seeded skim to correct.
• Citation as requested. Title, Philosophia 44(3), 877–883, 2016 and the DOI 10.1007/s11406-016-9725-8 are right (Crossref; online 20 June 2016).
• The brief called the copy “likely from the author’s site”. It is: the same file (62,239 bytes) is served at faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/KammererReply-160428.htm and linked from the author’s abstract page.
• NOTE-362’s Limitations misplaces the first concern. It says the reply’s first concern presses condition B (the asserted counterfactual). The first concern is about condition A (whether citizens represent the entity) and about Kammerer’s allowance of group consciousness. Condition B is not discussed. NOTE-362 wrote that “per its abstract”, which is ambiguous on the point. NOTE-362 is not edited here.
• The abstract and the text differ on concern 2. The abstract says the principle makes consciousness depend on “internal structural details of individuals”; the text’s case is about a member’s motivation.