tl;dr the United States may be conscious because consciousness is a purely physical manifestation.
You could skip most of this paper and ponder the deeper question posed by Sam Harris: how do we know anything is conscious? What if stars are conscious. Could we ever tell? Fundamentally we don't know the mechanisms that give rise to consciousness, so in theory anything could be conscious with a complex enough physical system. A country could be consciousness and we'd likely never know. Fun to think about!
You could skip most of this paper and ponder the deeper question posed by Sam Harris: how do we know anything is conscious? What if stars are conscious. Could we ever tell? Fundamentally we don't know the mechanisms that give rise to consciousness, so in theory anything could be conscious with a complex enough physical system. A country could be consciousness and we'd likely never know. Fun to think about!