If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious

Re:If materialism is true, the United States is probably con... by cobber2005 on Friday September 18, 2026 @11:28AM (#49755799)

Schwitzgebel says “You might think, for example, that spatial contiguity is a necessary condition of objecthood, so that it makes no more sense to speak of a spatially discontinuous entity than it makes sense – unless you adopt some liberal views about ontology – to speak of an entity composed of your left shoe, the Eiffel tower, and the rings of Saturn”

The cybernetician Ranulph Glanville speaks of Gordon Pask’s conception of spatially discontinuous entities composed of bodies and minds in this way:

“A p-individual is a psychological individual and an m-individual is a mechanical individual. So an m-individual is a body and a p-individual is a mind. But it’s saying that one person, one body, one brain even, does not have just one person in it, one p-individual – one persona, to use that dramatic term. What it says is that we can take on different roles, which clearly we can. So as someone who draws and as someone who listens I am not the same persona, I’m a different p-individual in Pask’s terms but in one m-individual, but I can also have – incidentally for instance in a group action I can have a lot of m-individuals that become one p-individual. So this is one of Gordon’s clever inventions: The distinction between the m-individual and the p-individual. What that allows is that if I have a room with seven people in it, all busy working at something together, you know, and just lost in that thing where we’re working together, you have seven m-individuals forming one p-individual – one psychological individual that is getting on with the work. And that’s the experience that we have. ... So, m-individuals and p-individuals, they’re bodies and minds. M is body, P is mind. They stand for ‘mechanical individual’ and ‘psychological individual’.”

https://ranulphglanville.org.za/pasks-p-and-m-individuals/

EDIT: added link

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Re:If materialism is true, the United States is probably con... by someguynamedq on Friday September 18, 2026 @01:50PM (#49757817)

Also we are not discontinuous. Internet lines, satellites, pressure waves, etc.

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Re:If materialism is true, the United States is probably con... by cobber2005 on Friday September 18, 2026 @05:18PM (#49760386)

I guess I’d say we are, in many ways, not physically discontinuous. But that initially we are largely mentally discontinuous, until we learn and acculturate some shared meanings by making use of that physical connection (over which we can send and receive signals, and build some degree of similar understandings or affects about some things, which would be like a p-individual encompassing many m-individuals).

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