I think there's a fundamental confusion in the article between goal-seeking behaviour, and between communicable self-awareness.
Clearly, large collectives of people can seek goals. Large collections of transistors can also seek goals, up to a point.
But it's impossible to communicate directly with the United States as a self-aware entity, or to have a direct conversation with a collective.
You can communicate with a representative of the US, but there's no way anyone can talk to, or email, or Skype, or send a paper letter to, or have a telepathic conversation with, any entity that would consciously describe itself as "The United States of America."
This matters because you could ask ten representatives of the US for their opinion on something and get ten conflicting answers - without essentially damaging the concept of "US-ness."
This clearly doesn't match the definition of a unified consciousness. It's not the same as a single consciousness changing its mind, because there is no recognisable single mind that changes.
What about insect colonies, animal herds, bird flocks, and corporations? They simply amplify the goals and personalities of their leaders. I'm not aware of any instances where - for example - a separate corporate mind made its wishes known to override board decisions.
(You could possibly argue this is what happened with Reddit. I'd say no - that was a conflict between factions with different goals, not evidence that there's a metaphysical Reddit-mind independently placing conference calls and tweeting to steer Reddit's future.)
> But it's impossible to communicate directly with the United States as a self-aware entity, or to have a direct conversation with a collective.
Would you expect one of your cells to be capable of carrying a conversation with you? ("No.") Then why would you expect a "cell" (citizen) of the United States to be able to communicate with it?
> This matters because you could ask ten representatives of the US for their opinion on something and get ten conflicting answers - without essentially damaging the concept of "US-ness."... It's not the same as a single consciousness changing its mind, because there is no recognisable single mind that changes.
You could also stimulate ten neurons separately and receive 10 differing responses. And when a person changes their mind, there is also no recognizable single neuron that has changed.
The first point is begging the question. Clearly, humans and many animals communicate.
Do countries communicate with each other in similar ways? They can appear to. But in fact there's no communication independent of the individuals who represent the countries. The entities called "Russia" and "United States" are wholly defined by the contents of the embodied minds of their representatives.
There is no way "United States" can change its mind during an international negotiation independently of any of its representatives. If it did they would suddenly stop pushing one line and start pushing a different line for no obvious reason.
I'm not aware of this ever happening.
Compare that with human and animal communication. So far as I know, my self awareness isn't defined by a shared description and belief in "Me" across all my neurons. If you pull an individual neuron out of my brain it won't have any concept of anything, never mind of "Me."
So the two processes are completely different. One is the flocking behaviour of (semi)intelligent agents.
The other is an emergent property of units that have almost exactly zero intelligence and awareness individually, but somehow combine to produce something that has much more.
There is no way "United States" can change its mind during an international negotiation independently of any of its representatives.
This is provably false unless you are adding hidden assumptions. It is easily shown in the case of some bureaucracies that a person will have a hard time getting something out of them, even though no single person will claim to be the one stalling the request. From the outside, the bureaucracy behaves as if it has a different goal than the (stated) goal of each individual.
Communications are regularly attributed to the United States in law and diplomacy, and the humans who carry out those communications will often have personal views that are inconsistent with the state's position. The concept of a 'board decision' itself implies the attribution of intention, which is one aspect of consciousness, to a corporation. Any board resolution that is carried by majority reflects the will of a 'separate corporate mind' overriding the conscious decisions of the dissenting directors.
I disagree. You're still confusing goal seeking with consciousness. You can easily automate goal-seeking, so goal-seeking and intention are not nearly a sufficient condition for consciousness.
On your basis you could impute consciousness to any cybernetic system that takes a majority decision - such as the navigation systems on the old Shuttle.
And just because communications are attributed to a nation, doesn't mean you're dealing with anything more than a diplomatic convention. In practice you're still dealing with leaders and representatives, and the leaders will set policy.
Without the leaders there is no entity - and in fact it's also known in diplomacy that you can decapitate a country simply by killing its leadership, or define a new country by changing its leadership.
A change of leadership creates a change of identity and intention, even though the rest of the things it does remain broadly unchanged.
Compare that with human brain, where there are no "leadership neurons". There are broad areas of the brain that integrate experience and are involved in making decisions, but you can't point to one neuron and say "That's the president", or to one group and say "That's the ruling party."
More, there's no self-awareness. These arguments are kind of pointless without a final definition of consciousness, but it seems likely to me that entities that act in conscious ways have some internal representation of a persistent self which is perceived - somehow, in a magical way we don't understand - as a unified self-identity.
So you need two things for that. One is a persistent representation of self. And the other is the ability to experience that representation as a singular self-definition.
Humans are embodied, so we know what experience is. Corporations, countries, and bird flocks aren't.
If you invade a large land area, remove a source of profit, or trap half a flock of starlings in a net, no singular embodied experience corresponds to that loss. You can predict goal-seeking behaviours, and you can find individual responses to individual circumstances. But all of those fail the requirement for a single unified self-aware change in state.
Otherwise you'd have to argue that countries somehow feel pain when they're invaded. Citizens may feel pain, especially if they're killed, injured, or made homeless. But countries?
Clearly, large collectives of people can seek goals. Large collections of transistors can also seek goals, up to a point.
But it's impossible to communicate directly with the United States as a self-aware entity, or to have a direct conversation with a collective.
You can communicate with a representative of the US, but there's no way anyone can talk to, or email, or Skype, or send a paper letter to, or have a telepathic conversation with, any entity that would consciously describe itself as "The United States of America."
This matters because you could ask ten representatives of the US for their opinion on something and get ten conflicting answers - without essentially damaging the concept of "US-ness."
This clearly doesn't match the definition of a unified consciousness. It's not the same as a single consciousness changing its mind, because there is no recognisable single mind that changes.
What about insect colonies, animal herds, bird flocks, and corporations? They simply amplify the goals and personalities of their leaders. I'm not aware of any instances where - for example - a separate corporate mind made its wishes known to override board decisions.
(You could possibly argue this is what happened with Reddit. I'd say no - that was a conflict between factions with different goals, not evidence that there's a metaphysical Reddit-mind independently placing conference calls and tweeting to steer Reddit's future.)