Eric Schwitzgebel on Consciousness, Group Minds, and Cosmic Weirdness

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel argues that when we think carefully about consciousness, group minds, and the cosmos, our ordinary picture of reality collapses. The world, he suggests, is not just slightly counterintuitive. It is profoundly weird.

This article introduces some of the most provocative ideas inspired by Schwitzgebel’s work: the possibility that large systems like nation-states might be conscious, why our intuitions about who or what has a mind are unreliable, how the Copernican principle applies to consciousness, and why attempts to make reality tidy almost always fail.

1. Why Consciousness Forces Us Beyond Common Sense

Consciousness is often defined, in philosophy and cognitive science, as subjective experience — what it is like to see red, feel pain, or taste coffee. On the face of it, this seems simple and familiar: we are conscious, our pets probably are, rocks probably are not. But once we press on the details, every theory leads somewhere bizarre.

• Materialist views say that consciousness is entirely produced by physical processes in the brain.
• Dualist views hold that consciousness is at least partly non-physical, involving a soul or non-material mind.
• Panpsychist views claim that consciousness, in some very elementary form, is a basic feature of all matter.

Schwitzgebel’s central claim is not that one of these is obviously right, but that none of them is normal. Each, if taken seriously, undermines common sense about what sorts of things can have minds, where our own minds begin and end, and how reality is structured.

2. Can Consciousness Be Built Out of Conscious Parts?

Many people assume that if an object is made of parts that are already conscious, the whole cannot also be conscious in a distinct way. On this view, there could not be:

• A conscious army made out of conscious soldiers.
• A conscious ant colony made out of conscious ants.
• A conscious nation made out of conscious citizens.

But this assumption is far from obvious. Consider the brain: billions of neurons each perform simple signaling functions, and there is debate over whether any individual neuron is conscious on its own. Yet the system as a whole gives rise to rich, unified human experience.

We already accept that new properties emerge when parts are arranged in special ways — for example, individual water molecules are not wet, but large collections are. Schwitzgebel suggests we should at least take seriously the idea that consciousness might similarly “scale up” in complex systems.

2.1 What Would a Group Mind Look Like?

For a large system (like a corporation or nation) to be a plausible candidate for consciousness, it should at minimum exhibit:

• Information integration: It must gather and process information about itself and its environment.
• Coordinated decision-making: It must respond to that information in reasonably unified ways.
• Goal-directed behavior: It should pursue objectives that are more than just the sum of individual member goals.

Many modern organizations already do all three through data systems, legal frameworks, and hierarchical control structures. This does not prove they are conscious, but it makes the idea less obviously absurd.

3. The United States as a Candidate Mind

Schwitzgebel’s most famous example is the question: Is the United States conscious? Taken literally, this sounds like a joke. Yet, carefully unpacked, it becomes a sharp test of what we really believe about minds.

3.1 Functional Parallels Between Brains and Nations

From a high-level, functional perspective, both are information-processing systems that integrate signals and act on the world. Some theories in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind explicitly tie consciousness to such integrated information and complex causal structure.

If we accept that any system with a certain pattern of organization and functional complexity could, in principle, be conscious, then a large, tightly integrated political entity starts to look like a serious, if speculative, candidate.

3.2 Objections and Replies

Common objections include:

• “It does not feel like anything to be the US.” But we also lack direct access to what it feels like to be an octopus or a bat. Our inability to imagine an experience is not decisive evidence that there is none.
• “There is no single point of view.” Yet, research on split-brain patients suggests that even human consciousness can fragment into partially independent streams under certain conditions, challenging the idea of an indivisible “point of view.”
• “People already do the thinking; the US does nothing over and above them.” However, collective entities often have properties and decision patterns that cannot be reduced to any one individual — think of market crashes or large-scale social movements.

Schwitzgebel does not insist that the US is conscious. His point is that once we specify clear criteria for consciousness that include non-biological systems, it becomes surprisingly hard to rule out such cases without also ruling out many other minds we are inclined to accept.

4. The Copernican Principle of Consciousness

In cosmology, the Copernican principle says that humans do not occupy a specially privileged position in the universe. We are not at the center in space, in time, or in metaphysical importance. Contemporary cosmology strongly supports this: we are one species on one planet orbiting an ordinary star in a typical galaxy.

Schwitzgebel extends this humility to the study of minds. If consciousness is tied to complex information-processing, then:

• It would be extremely surprising if only a particular biological architecture (e.g., human neurons) could host consciousness.
• It becomes natural to think that alien civilizations with advanced cognition are probably conscious, even if they are made from radically different materials (like silicon or exotic chemistry).
• It is also plausible that artificial systems with sufficient integration and complexity could be conscious, though we currently lack agreed metrics to judge when that threshold is crossed.

To say that only humans, or only Earth-like brains, can be conscious would be a new kind of geocentrism: instead of placing Earth at the center of space, it places biological humans at the center of mind-space.

5. Borderline Cases: When There Is No Fact of the Matter

We often talk as though a creature either is conscious or is not. Yet biology and neuroscience increasingly suggest that many capacities associated with consciousness come in degrees and vary across species and developmental stages.

Schwitzgebel explores the idea of borderline consciousness — systems for which it is neither clearly true nor clearly false that experience is present. Examples might include:

• Certain anesthetic states.
• Minimal consciousness in severely brain-injured patients.
• Very simple animals or artificial agents that exhibit complex reflexes but little flexible planning.

Neuroscientific work on disorders of consciousness shows that some patients once thought to be entirely unresponsive nonetheless exhibit brain activity patterns consistent with retained awareness, blurring once-sharp clinical categories. This supports the view that consciousness may be vague or graded in a way our everyday language fails to capture.

6. Panpsychism and the Temptation of “Cosmic Weirdness”

One radical reaction to these puzzles is panpsychism — the idea that some primitive form of consciousness is a basic feature of all physical entities, from electrons to galaxies. On this view, human experience is a highly organized and enriched form of something that exists everywhere in simpler guise.

Panpsychism aims to solve the mind–body problem by refusing to treat consciousness as something that suddenly appears late in evolution. Instead, it is fundamental, like mass or charge. However, this brings its own headaches:

• How do tiny “micro-experiences” combine to form the unified, rich experience of a human mind? (The “combination problem”).
• Do arbitrary collections of things — such as a shoe plus the rings of Jupiter — have their own combined consciousness, simply because together they form a physical system?
• How can such a ubiquitous property remain scientifically tractable and testable?

Schwitzgebel argues that while panpsychism is undeniably strange, so are its competitors. Dismissing it as too weird risks ignoring the fact that reality, as best current physics and cosmology reveal it, is already shot through with non-intuitive features — from quantum entanglement to the curvature of spacetime.

7. The Disunity of the Self

We normally think of ourselves as single, unified subjects of experience. Yet detailed reflection and psychological research suggest that human consciousness is often fragmented and disunified even in ordinary life.

Consider:

• Multitasking: You might half-listen to a podcast while driving, daydreaming, and monitoring the GPS map.
• Conflicting attitudes: Part of you is proud of a success, another part feels like an impostor.
• Automatic behaviors: You drive a familiar route “on autopilot” while your conscious attention drifts elsewhere.

Clinical and experimental cases sharpen the point. Studies of split-brain patients — individuals whose cerebral hemispheres are surgically separated to treat severe epilepsy — suggest that under specific conditions, their two hemispheres can respond differently to stimuli, as if there were two centers of awareness in one skull.

These phenomena weaken the intuitive objection that a group mind is impossible because a mind must be absolutely unified. If even ordinary human consciousness is partially disunified, it becomes easier to imagine minds distributed across multiple agents, systems, or devices.

8. Why Our Intuitions Mislead Us About Minds

Human beings are remarkably good at reading social cues in other humans and animals. We quickly infer who is angry, bored, or friendly. But this ability is tightly calibrated to the environments in which it evolved.

Several features of our “mind-detection” system bias our judgments about consciousness:

• Face and eye tracking: Even newborn infants preferentially attend to face-like patterns and especially to eyes.
• Anthropomorphism: We are prone to attribute human-like feelings to anything that moves in a biologically familiar way, from cartoon characters to robots.
• Neglect of unfamiliar systems: Conversely, we find it difficult to ascribe minds to entities that lack faces or animal-like behavior, such as plants, large institutions, or distributed AI systems.

These tendencies were adaptive for survival — deciding whom to trust, what to fear, and how to cooperate. But they are not designed to yield accurate judgments about abstract metaphysical questions. Schwitzgebel concludes that our gut feelings about what can or cannot be conscious are very weak evidence in such debates.

9. Living with a Deeply Weird World

Schwitzgebel’s broader project, developed in his recent work, is to argue that we should stop trying to force reality into common-sense boundaries. Instead of looking for a comfortable theory of consciousness, free will, or cosmology, he suggests we embrace the likelihood that the true story will look alien to our intuitive expectations.

In the case of consciousness, this might mean accepting one or more of the following:

• Some large-scale systems, perhaps including nations or corporations, really are conscious in their own way.
• There are vast regions of borderline consciousness where existence of experience has no precise yes/no answer.
• Consciousness might be far more widespread in the universe than our initial, human-centered perspective suggests.
• Our own minds are not unified individuals but shifting, partially overlapping patterns in a larger web of processes.

These ideas do not provide easy practical guidance, but they encourage intellectual humility. We should be cautious about declaring any particular theory of mind obviously right — or obviously absurd.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q1: Does Eric Schwitzgebel really think the United States is conscious?

He treats the question as a serious philosophical test case rather than a settled fact. His main aim is to show that once we commit to reasonable, naturalistic criteria for consciousness, it becomes surprisingly difficult to exclude large-scale systems like nations without also undermining our confidence in many other ascriptions of consciousness.

Q2: How does this relate to artificial intelligence?

If consciousness depends on the organization and dynamics of information-processing rather than on specific biological materials, then sufficiently complex AI systems might one day qualify as candidates for consciousness. However, we currently lack widely accepted scientific markers that definitively distinguish conscious from non-conscious artificial agents.

Q3: What is the practical impact of these debates?

They influence how we think about moral status, legal responsibility, and future technology. If some collective entities or advanced AIs are conscious, we may owe them forms of moral consideration. Conversely, if consciousness is much rarer than we think, we may be radically overextending ethical concern. For now, the uncertainty itself is a reason for caution and reflection.

Q4: Is panpsychism a scientific theory?

Panpsychism is primarily a metaphysical theory that aims to make sense of how consciousness fits into the natural world. While it is informed by science, it does not yet generate precise, testable predictions distinct from rival views. Its defenders argue that it offers a conceptually coherent way to avoid gaps in physicalist accounts of mind.

Q5: How should non-specialists approach these ideas?

The key is to hold two attitudes at once: intellectual boldness about exploring strange possibilities, and methodological modesty about our limited evidence. Recognizing that reality is likely far stranger than common sense allows can help prevent premature dogmatism while still motivating careful empirical research on brains, behavior, and complex systems.

Written by

Sneha Tete

• Integrated M.A. in Applied Linguistics, University of Hyderabad
• 5+ years in editorial, instructional, SEO, and research-based writing

Sneha is a relationships and lifestyle writer with a strong foundation in applied linguistics and certified training in relationship coaching. She brings over five years of writing experience to theskillvault,  crafting thoughtful, research-driven content that empowers readers to build healthier relationships, boost emotional well-being, and embrace holistic living. Her writing and insights reflect the belief that beauty, happiness, and wellness…