Inside the Tragic, Obsessive World of Video Game Addicts - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/read/video-game-addiction-is-destroying-american-lives-456 <comment><USER2> Tragic. I played a lot of World of Warcraft when it came out, had the classic relationship challenges (wife didn't play but the kids did) and finally stopped playing seriously when I realized I had wasted a weekend working on materials for imaginary armor rather than building an actual robot or learning something new. Fortunately, Blizzard completely ruined the game with the Mists of Pandera expansion and I've never played since.

But looking back at _why_ I played so much, is touched on in the article. It simulates being very productive (which in a meta sense you are), and for me that represents "goodness" in my self image. It was only after I called out the lie I was telling myself about "getting stuff done" did I really lose the compulsion to go play for hours.

I still enjoyed the social aspects, and the strategies for gaming the economy or finding a new way to solo a boss fight, but I no longer equated it with being productive. So for the same reason I don't sit in a movie theater for 8 hours straight, I stopped playing for those long stretches. And when I did have something I could get done, I chose not to play WoW.

<comment><USER3> _I played a lot of World of Warcraft when it came out, had the classic relationship challenges (wife didn 't play but the kids did) and finally stopped playing seriously when I realized I had wasted a weekend working on materials for imaginary armor rather than building an actual robot or learning something new._

One whole weekend! :) You don't want to know how many weekends of mine that netflix or videogames have claimed. I think I turned out alright though. For me, it's mainly about whether I feel motivated. If I do, it's easy to avoid that other stuff. If not, then there's an endless stretch of time with nothing to do and no money to pursue hobbies. That stuff is a natural filler for the void of endless boredom.

About the kids: I wanted to ask you, how did the kids handle it when you left? I guess you didn't get too into it, so maybe they didn't feel very strongly one way or the other about whether you played. But I think I'm going to try to cultivate a relationship with my kids over videogames, whether it's playing Minecraft with them or whatever MMO they want to play. It seems like hiking through the woods together, but virtual woods. But I'd imagine it's going to go like: They might get too into it at the expense of schoolwork, so I'll have to put my foot down and say no more, which will make them quite upset. And sure, that's the job of a parent. I'm their parent, not just their friend. But I can't help remember how misplaced my father's rules were, so I don't want to become like that. Yet I remember how much of a pushover my friend's dad was, which my friend took full advantage of; again, don't want to be like that. So I wonder how to strike a proper balance. It'd be great to hear from you and anyone else with children what your rules are regarding videogames.

Is there an instruction manual that comes with each child? No? Hmmm....

<comment><USER4> "It seems like hiking through the woods together, but virtual woods."

I've played minecraft with my kids a lot, and it can be fun, but virtual play time is not all adult nostalgic fuzzy bunnies, I was highly annoyed to discover that minecraft playtime with the kids is just like meatspace play time with the kids which means it includes all the annoyances, so there's tons of typical "what are you doing put that down right now", "be nice to animals or we stop playing", "if you walk along the edge you're going to fall and get hurt", "lava will burn you I told you to leave that alone", "I don't care how much of a temper tantrum you have you can't take that diamond I just mined and do nothing with it because its too valuable", "stop teasing your sister in game or we all quit", "no we aren't there yet", "dads redstone thing is complicated stop dumping water buckets on it", etc.

I've spent my whole life from kid up to adult being lectured incessantly from liberal arts grads that normal humans never treat online humans like they would meatspace because ... some fuzzy psych major BS whatever, which is just apologist rhetoric for its OK to flame people online because its "natural", and/or stereotypical "nerds suck we spend our time watching football so we're cool" BS. However, despite decades of pontificating, I assure you my kids act online just like they act offline, both the mostly good and occasionally not so good parts.

Its tiring. Just like taking kids to a (real) park involves burning mental energy keeping them alive (I'm talking real parks with real wilderness, not swing set neighborhood parks), taking kids to your base in minecraft involves me not focusing on the game and spending maybe 25% of mental energy, maybe more, trying to keep them out of trouble. And just like in the real world, one or two adults can easily keep one kid out of trouble but you get two or more kids and only one adult and next thing you know one is shooting arrows at her brother or the other is dumping lava buckets on his sister because she won't give him back his sword and she's threatening to tattle to mom and oh its all Fed up sometimes. Well, kids will be kids.

It was/is fun, just go in with the awareness that if they spend X% of real world time being naughty, in virtual world its going to be the same X% of time being naughty. Its not gonna be all idyllic.

As far as rules and stuff its not rocket science you make a to do list and work it top to bottom and unless you're an idiot, minecraft is the last thing on the list not the first, the first is usually homework.

<comment><USER5> I think you are possibly being too harsh in game. A video game should be fun; a place where all rule implications can be explored. Turning it into an authoritarian environment with a running lecture seems like a good way to discourage play and exploration.

That kind of lecturing may make sense in the real world, but one of the differences/advantages of virtual worlds is that the normal constraints don't apply -- you can do whatever the machine/software allows, without risk (certainly not fatal risk, as in the real world).

Games present an opportunity to examine systems in depth without the traditional fears/consequences of the real world.

<comment><USER4> Yeah but there's the socialization aspect. In that my kids are pretty good at getting into meaningless sibling arguments with each other in real life, and also in minecraft. True that there is superficially no downside to beating each other up in minecraft, but may as well try to civilize them a bit as if we're in real life. Or learning when dad says if you do that the wrong way its going to hurt, is an easier lesson to learn the hard way in minecraft than on a bicycle or whatever, so why not teach it in minecraft where they won't get physically hurt by falling into minecraft lava or off a minecraft building.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Obligatory link to an essay I wrote five years ago covering the larger picture, what drives this problem and some way forward: [http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology- is...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is-h.php)

It's freaking sad, and it's just getting worse.

1992 or so. I'm a computer guy, gamer (arcade and old Atari) and we've got this cool new thing called a Nintendo for my two boys, 6 and 4.

Being a good dad, I sit down next to them and "help" them get started playing a game. We went through Super Mario, then started on Zelda. Wow! This was a lot better than those arcade games where you only got 3 or 4 minutes and had to pay. Here you could play, well, you could play _forever_.

And then it hit me. You could play forever. That was the whole gimmick. I stood up and left the room. Never played another console game again, unless it was something very brief and involved having people over. During that time, I watched every other member of my family get involved in games that took literally hundreds of hours of their time. I'm still watching my second- youngest son struggle with online games and college work. It's depressing as hell.

Today as I type this, I realize that I've spent 3 or 4 hours fucking around online that I should have been doing something useful. That's just Facebook, Twitter, G+, and so forth.

This is not a coincidence. Every piece of tech I pick up is trying as hard as it can to be "sticky" Same shit, different platform. I'm still the big hunk of dumb meat I used to be. Computerized gaming just keeps getting better. The trajectory is not good.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have friends that keep insisting I get back into gaming and frequently question my (apparent) lack of interest in current games. This sums up my reason for not going back to video games:

      But just as Patricia rematerialized, her AA recovery partner
      and husband of 43 years contracted a fatal illness. Patricia
      took care of him until the end.

      "I regret so much," she said. "I wasted all our time
      together. We could have been doing all kinds of things, but I
      was just gaming."

I wasted almost a decade of my life, and who knows how many years off the end by the terrible condition I let my body fall into. I failed at graduate school, and nearly failed as an employee. I had no social life outside 3 or 4 friends at any time during that decade. I'm no longer in the head space where games are dangerous to me, but I can safely say that I'm enjoying playing sports, going outside, dating, hanging out with friends and the rest of the things I gave up for those years much more than playing the latest FPS or strategy game of the month.

<comment><USER8> I'm not much into gaming, let alone an addict, but I never got this moral superiority argument people use when bashing games. Why are "sports, going outside, dating, hanging out with friends" inherently better than games? Admittedly all these other things are less likely to lead to addition but that's exactly because they are less stimulating, or to put it bluntly, boring.

<comment><USER9> Mainly because they are creative / productive, whereas gaming is passive / consuming.

<comment><USER10> Clearly you've never played any game competitively (e.g. broodwar, cs); there are even 'creative' games in the traditional sense for that matter, where you design things (e.g. minecraft, DF, wc3,...). Most of those don't usually have the shortcircuited feedback loop that brings someone into addiction however. I disagree there's anything fundamental about gaming that's better than other activities other than the lack of exercise. Mastering a game in skill/strategy or crafting maps/mods can bring as much joy as anything else. I'd equate some games with playing music for the closest traditional perspective.

I'd expect them surpass any meatspace activity actually. It's hard to compete with the limitless degrees of freedom from a game (specially when we get more inputs/sensitive feedback). And I'm not at all uncomfortable with that. Having fun is quite productive, one just has to safeguard the more longlasting joys of life, like having a successful career, family relations, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One key distinction between video game addiction and many other forms of classic addiction is that it's incredibly cheap by comparison.

A game purchased for $5 may net you hundreds of hours of gameplay. By contrast, that same $5 doesn't go nearly as far when spent on say, alcohol.

It's also worth noting that video game addiction doesn't necessarily result in any sort of addictive exclusivity. I've seen plenty of video game addicts who are also alcoholics.

<comment><USER12> Incredibly cheap in terms of financial cost, but not in terms of opportunity cost of the time you lose.

Admittedly I haven't read the article because Vice is blocked at work, but I imagine video game addiction is a lot different from other addictions since it has to do with something you do rather than a state you're in (not to say it's necessarily worse - just different). Serious addicts can play video games for several days straight, whereas I don't think doing drugs for several days straight (at least without doing anything else) is common among even the most serious addicts (though admittedly I'm not an expert in this). I think it would be very difficult to be a "high functioning" video game addict.

<comment><USER11> > _I think it would be very difficult to be a "high functioning" video game > addict._

There's plenty of them, just like there are high-functioning alcoholics.

Suppose you could define the degree of addiction as the amount of interference the addictive habit inflicts upon a person's life. By that logic, a busy, high-functioning person who plays 20 hours a week may in fact have a more damaging addiction than the person with tons of free time on their hands playing 80 hours a week. Of course, if the latter person has all that free time on their hands because addiction interfered with their life at a much earlier stage, then that's worth considering.

I guarantee you there's a ton of high-functioning video game addicts though, probably even right here on HN. Founder depression in particular can play right into such things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> After having read all the "positive" stuff about gaming in "Reality Is Broken" by Jane McGonigal I remember thinking:

To some children/adolescents games are the perfect (psychological) parents: providing all the endless, almost limitless attention and appreciation, perfectly dosed challenge and rewards, a sense of accomplishment and unconditional ... fun.

I think this could be unique gateways for games to tip some effected ppl. into addiction, gateways not used by other potentially addictive stuff.

</comment><comment><USER14> For the masses who spend the majority of their time watching sports, movies, tv, thinking about celebrities... How is gaming wasting their lives? What value do these other things have that gaming does not?

I submit that hedonism is a purpose unto itself, that all recreational activities hold equal value to our species (~none), differing value to the individual, and that people should simply do whatever they enjoy, right now.

Working towards a potentially better future that may never happen is not necessarily the right thing.

<comment><USER15> It's not black and white. Many hobbies, which might appear useless for society in general, at least provide personal enrichment. Someone that spends their time programming video games is not helping feed people, but it is helping them become a better programmer. Also, it's well established that humans need rest and recreation to be productive workers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> During one of the darkest periods of the last few years, I was working on a failing startup. All the front-end work was done and "good enough", and I was waiting on my cofounder to finish up a few last infrastructure tweaks so we could launch. I had less than a couple hundred in my bank accounts, was barely making rent, and was basically in a holding pattern.

So, I started playing Fallout: New Vegas. I clocked like 120-140 hours in two weeks. I beat the game, I beat the expansions. I had a blast.

I think the problem with the video games is that they often offer a certain kind of refuge. You're a hero, and more importantly, you make tangible progress.

Playing CS or Quake or UT or Payday, you are playing a round, and everything lives and dies in that 12-20 minutes of your life. Everything is simple: strafe left, fire, reload, pickup, die, respawn. It's a beautiful three- dimensional puzzle in planning space, and at least for me is nearly a meditative state. I'm a big guy, and when I played Mirror's Edge, I quite literally cried because I was getting a chance to experience a freedom of movement only my skinny, small friends who practiced parkour could accomplish. I was free.

Playing RPGs is similarly relieving: I'm the Courier, I'm some guy left for dead in a pit in the ground, and I've got to piece together how I got there and how to bring justice to the person that put me there. I've got a neat little checklist of things to accomplish, fairly straightforward ways to check off those things, and a continual sense of "oh, okay, if I do this, then this happens, and then this." At a time in my life where things were most uncertain and the way most unclear, I could fire up New Vegas and see a logical progression of actions and accomplishments.

What do we get in the real world?

Well, it's not the people--it seems like pretty much everyone exists mainly in a state of consumption, alternating between work and home and social media or texting.

It's not heroics--the only wars being fought are unjust and unending police actions against the third world or our own citizens, and even as experienced developers we, searching for ever-more professionalism, realize that a team is not made of a hero and ensemble cast but instead a group of cooperative individuals with humility.

It's not even a clear causal universe: I write several KLOCS of code and deliver features, my sales don't increase. My friend doesn't take out ads, his sales increase. My cat plays outside, it gets hit by a car and dies behind a radiator waiting for me to come home. My other friend hangs outside in a parking lot, and a wild kitten appears. There's no sense to it, only random chance.

And so, does it really surprise anyone that we'd prefer our virtual worlds to this situation?

<comment><USER17> My theory as to why games are so fun is that its all about having a sense of purpose.

In real life, you can find purpose in things but if you are not careful then the daily eight-hour grind of a job, followed by dinner and a few hours of social activities then sleep starts to feel like a meaningless repeating routine. You can wake up knowing everything that's going to happen in a day and just go through the motions, brain on simmer.

In contrast, you hop into a game and you have something you need to do. You know how to do it. You can do and achieve something in a reasonable amount of time, seeing progress as you go. There is never a moment (generally speaking) where you feel like you are wasting time or not achieving anything - at least in a game you are engaged in - and that is incredibly satisfying in a way that's hard or infrequently achieved in real life.

<comment><USER18> It's true, because man does not find meaning in leisure, only in work. Ora et Labora as the monks used to say. Video games give you a false sense of progress and labor. Its why gambling are so addictive, because it is not pure recreation but it more closely resembles work, especially insofar as that you can make rent money.

<comment><USER16> So, take it one step further:

What's "not false" about our progress and labor in the middle and upper-middle class?

The bank can decide to repossess your house or car if you miss payments, medical bills can wipe out everything you have and destroy your credit, the police can decide at random to screw you and ruin all of the progress you've made. If you don't make rent, or you just get gentrified, what "progress" have you made?

There's a deeper illness here.

<comment><USER19> >" _There 's a deeper illness here._"

I look forward to the day someone can discover it, and describe it.

<comment><USER20> But why do that, when we can just write a really dramatic comment on HN to try and sound insightful?

<comment><USER16> Do you want to explain how there is, in fact, no fair comparison between the temporary progress in games and the often temporary progress in life? Do you want to explain how the arbitrariness of games is somehow not mirrored by the real world?

Or do you just want to sound like some snarky nit on a message board?

<comment><USER20> My comment was directed at the reply to your post. The fact that life is often transitory, arbitrary, and often downright empty is a defining theme of art & literature, and one of the most consistently studied topics throughout history, so I find nothing insightful about the comment in question. The poster makes it sound like he/she has been the first person to ever notice this.

"Or do you just want to sound like some snarky nit on a message board?" That was the idea, yes.

<comment><USER16> Ah, alright. Carry on, then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Tangential thought-

Why does this seem to be tied so closely to _online_ games?

At least superficially it seems like it was never a problem anywhere close to this magnitude in the old days of single-player, and the addiction stories are always WoW, Starcraft, Warcraft, CounterStrike, Call of Duty, etc.

<comment><USER22> I attribute it to the social aspects. For all the introverted stereotypes assigned to gamers, many find comfort and enjoyment in the communities of online games. This, combined with the direct and quantifiable competition, allows for near endless gameplay. As long as others are playing, there is a reason to continue.

<comment><USER23> More importantly is the sense of community and importance.

I don't think people understand the responsibilities of a Guild Leader in your typical MMORPG. When you're a guild leader, dozens, hundreds... even thousands of people look up to you for guidance.

Not virtual people, I mean real people. And the demands of a guild often demand dozens of hours of game-time. Either laying alliances with other guild leaders, setting up training schedules for the newbies, connecting newbies to veteran players who can show them the ropes. Etc. etc.

For competitive games, like Starcraft, League of Legends, or CounterStrike... the "guild" is not part of the game but instead part of the online community. They are called "Clans" in these games. But the concept is simple, you're in charge of a team, usually dozens of people.

You are expected to make practice, 8pm on Saturdays. You are expected to train certain maps, and make progress with skill.

For WoW, you are expected to be ready an hour before the Raid. You are expected to play your role (tanking, healing, DPS, whatever) for the next 2 hours in the Raid, and you have at least 5 players at any time that are dependent on your success.

People get "addicted" to the social connections, expectations, and in-game status. When you're a guild-leader in charge of a 10,000 person guild (_real_ people), it is a bit depressing to return back to the real world where you're a low-level junkie.

Even at a low level, you're always happy for being able to contribute to your Guild or Clan, especially when your peers appreciate your efforts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a game maker, this stuff terrifies me. I think that there are a lot of devs out there who string together compulsive elements in their games without realizing just how potent they can be.

<comment><USER25> There are just as many who intentionally make the game as addictive as possible. It was bad enough before F2P, now it's getting out of hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Minecraft is the only game that led me to a major life change. When I look around the real world, I realized _it 's the same thing, only more advanced_. Once I made that realization, mining and crafting virtual resources became a lot less interesting, and mining and crafting something real became very intriguing and motivating. Then for a nice mind-f left turn, one day I wondered, what if _we_ are living in a computer simulation?

</comment><comment><USER27> When I find myself getting addicted to a game now, I look for a way to cheat and rapidly progress to the end. The illusion dispelled, I only have to waste one hour of my life. Bonus: reverse engineering skills.

Edit: But also, I never bother with MMOs because they're tedious to begin with. It's multiplayer FPS games that are the real trouble spot.

</comment><comment><USER28> I basically left off playing video games when I realized I could get the same high, for nearly the same level of social interaction, by _writing code instead_. And that would help me in many more ways than killing the top level boss in WoW.

My "immersive alternate reality" approach is to use novels, which have a well- defined end.

<comment> FLUX-YOU I thought that would be a good replacement for WoW/EVE, but it turns out nothing kills that flame faster than an 8to5 job.

Now I know how I'd feel as a goldfarmer.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, some people find jobs to drain their coding desire. Pretty individual, I'm sure. For me, I have to hack at home to keep my enthusiasm for software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> On the other hand, people who are that crazily obsessive about playing a popular sport are usually lauded by society, rather than being kidnapped and sent to rehab.

</comment><comment><USER30> Spending all day on social media and writing for clickbait sites about how evil games and gamers are is a particularly tragic addiction.

</comment><comment><USER31> These are failures to parent. At the end of the article, Dad laments his kid being the same after Wilderness Camp (which should have fixed everything!!!). What his kid really needs is some involvement.

<comment><USER14> _Brett 's father had retrofit a metal lock on his Celeron computer to prevent his son from gaming. (age 12)

_he was in the tenth grade .. he stopped bathing or brushing his teeth regularly.

Basically these parents have 100k to shell out on rehab but they can't trust their 12 year old to be obedient, and they completely neglect his basic hygiene. This is parenting bordering on abuse.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your entertaining tech stories nobody knows about? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN! There's a lot of famous tech stories - 'magic / more magic', 'reflections on trusting trust', etc. but what are you own lesser-known memorable tech stories? <comment><AUTHOR> I have a couple:

\- 2008, the 'bad times ahead' memo from a VC to their portfolio companies just on the edge of the big crash - was all over YC at the time and you could feel the fear in the comments.

\- digg and the HD-DVD decryption key. The DRM key for HD DVD was banned in comments, and users kept posting it and mods kept taking it down until Kevin Rose himself commented it.

\- Caldera Linux releasing the first graphic Linux installer, called 'Lizard', short for Linux Wizard. Red Hat releasing their graphical installer called 'Anaconda' because 'Anacondas eat lizards'.

\- The bittorrent load test. Bram Cohen needed some stats for how effective BitTorrent would be, but he needed some good licensed content. So he cut a deal with Light Speed and posted on Slashdot tellign everyone they'd get free, high resolution (at the time) lesbian porn if they'd download this new software, Bittorrent</comment>


Using Cloudflare Gateway to Stay Productive (Turn Off Distractions) While WFH - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/using-cloudflare-gateway-to-stay-productive-and-turn-off-distractions-while-working-remotely/ <comment><USER2> I've had a really great experience with using [http://nextdns.io/](http://nextdns.io/) for this purpose. It comes with a lot of pre-defined things to block (Social Media, Advertising, Genre of Distractions ...) that can be helpful especially when working from home.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a terrible hack... and I'd rather not give Cloudflare any more of my traffic than I already do.</comment>


PHP MVC: Maintenance Very Costly - <AUTHOR> http://typicalprogrammer.com/php-mvc-maintenance-very-costly/

<comment><USER2> I'm optimistic that it's possible to write PHP applications / website backends without a framework. With that said, I've never been fortunate enough to see that first hand.

Then again, as soon as the "cruft" and annoyances that generally come with a php script-per-endpoint approach are gone, maybe it's not an existing 3rd party framework that was plugged into the site, but it's probably a "framework" by some interpretation of the word nonetheless.

If you haven't tried it, I would highly recommend giving Silex a try.

[http://silex.sensiolabs.org/](http://silex.sensiolabs.org/)

<comment><USER2> I should clarify my comment here. Not that I've never seen it. I've never seen it done well.

<comment><AUTHOR> To paraphrase Churchill, what I called classic PHP style is the worst form of PHP programming, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.

The creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, recently said that "all PHP frameworks suck," and his gave reasons for that opinion: [http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/226-4-Reasons-Why-All- PH...](http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/226-4-Reasons-Why-All-PHP- Frameworks-Suck.html). Elsewhere Rasmus has described his preferred style of PHP programming, which is pretty much what I described in my article.

It wasn't my intention to damn all PHP frameworks, or the MVC model, though in my own work I agree with Rasmus. I do maintenance programming and the more I run into MVC-style framework-based PHP apps, the more convinced I am that those apps are actually more fragile and harder to understand and maintain than some of the worst PHP spaghetti code I've worked on. I don't think that's because the frameworks themselves suck. I think that's because the framework and MVC model force the programmer to scatter related bits of code and data in too many places, obscuring the relationships and the flow of control. Some people delight in this complexity (perhaps believing it is more ideologically OOP pure). From a maintenance point of view it's a pain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I do php and have done php. The code I've worked on hasn't used a framework. I tend to like using the templating engines (twig/smarty) to separate my html from my logic.

I also find by separating the logic into classes it becomes much easier to test.

Zend and Symfony make resuable components that you can use without using their whole framework. The fact that frameworks exist with the same name as the components makes looking up documentation on these hard

</comment><comment><USER4> How about using another language to write php code? Without hesitation, the language would also be using one of the PHP frameworks/styles/approaches, which sucks. Could you advise me on this Haxe-to-PHP expedition - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9111742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9111742) ?</comment>


If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140130a.htm <comment><USER4> A materialist rejects "consciousness" as a fruitful term, observing that it often leads to confusion and non-sequiturs, as contradictions often do. The paper itself shows how certain definitions of consciousness would have these outcomes. Materialists would say that you need a functional definition of consciousness: If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it's a duck. It's a bit like talking about a "soul". Humanity, for the longest time, thought there was a soul, separate from our mere bodies. They just had a "feeling" that it was real, despite not being able to provide a functional definition of what it is. Consciousness is no different. Coherence of the self is an illusion.

<comment><USER5> The vast majority of humans still believe there is a soul so I think it's fair to say Humanity still thinks so.

<comment><USER6> You don't speak for me.

<comment><USER5> You don't speak for humanity. Believe in souls or not most people do and we need to understand that when we use abstract words like 'humanity believes in x'.

<comment><USER6> Composition fallacy.

<comment><USER5> Simply naming a logical fallacy isn't an argument. And in fact I claimed it would be fair to suggest humanity believes in souls, I didn't make the claim. Rather, I suggested it is far more reasonable (though not a fact -- "humanity" is an abstract subjective concept with no fixed meaning) to assert humanity believes in souls than that humanity doesn't, a silly assertion the article makes without argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Arrgh! This is what annoys me about reading much philosophy. The article is about consciousness which is a term used by many different people in many ways and with many different implied definitions. But does the guy give a clear definition of what he's talking about? No he leaves it vague but waffles on for hundreds of words in a way that you can't say if it's right or wrong because you're not sure what he means.

If you are using consciousness to mean being aware of stuff in a way that you can act on it then the questions are fairly simple - humans are conscious when in a normal state, not so when knocked unconscious. Likewise rabbits. The United States can show collective consciousness in that it's citizens in aggregate can be aware of things and react. If you look at a different meaning of consciousness in terms of subjective experience then probably other people have similar experience and rabbits a simpler version but it's hard to tell.

I don't get why philosophical writing tends to be so vague and waffly. Maybe because they don't achieve much in the real world unlike say neuroscientists studying consciousness and so need to hand wave and be vague to cover up the lack of real content?

<comment><USER8> His argument doesn't need a definition of conscience. He argues that if A arises from certain traits of B, then you must accept that A also arises from C, since it contains the same traits.

Secondly he clearly refers to a definition of conscience called phenemonology. And one must assume that "materialist" is a term in philosophy that people familiar with the field knows what entails and people not familiar with it doesn't. this paper is not an introduction to either of those terms.

Your complaint is that you don't know the what these words are and that is what is apparently wrong with philosophy.

<comment><USER9> Thank you. I'd also like to add that philosophy has a long history of pretty dramatic accomplishments in the real world. You can thank philosophy for science and the various modes of scientific inquiry, and the concept of natural rights and liberal democratic government. On the flip side, the Nazi regime was heavily influenced by late 19th Century philosophy (not all accomplishments are good?). Every discipline has an accompanying branch of philosophy that defines it's modes of inquiry and research methods, and philosophical lines of thought infiltrate every corner of the public discourse. It's just idiotic to say philosophers accomplish nothing in the real world.

<comment><USER10> >I'd also like to add that philosophy has a long history of pretty dramatic accomplishments in the real world. You can thank philosophy for science and the various modes of scientific inquiry, and the concept of natural rights and liberal democratic government. On the flip side, the Nazi regime was heavily influenced by late 19th Century philosophy (not all accomplishments are good?).

If your method of answering questions yields contradictory answers to the same question (eg: "Do individual humans have moral worth? Nazism says no, liberalism says yes -- philosophy!"), then it's not very good.

<comment><USER11> Philosophy isn't a method of answering questions, it's a discipline. (I mean, do you really think that everyone from Thales to Quine was using a single method?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In his paper "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" [1], HN-favorite Scott Aaronson resolves to my satisfaction the question of whether a waterfall can be said to be computing the solution to some problem as it cascades over the rocks, because there exists a mapping in which the initial water state is the initial state of the problem, the gyrations of the water "compute", and the final state of the water can be mapped to a solution. He points out that we can with some actual mathematical rigor observe that the mapping itself can be said to be doing all the work.

Similarly, I feel trying to parse conscious intentionality by any known meaning of the term "conscious" out of something like "all the individuals of the United States" is a situation where the mapping is doing all the work.

Clearly, there is something to the "United States" as well as other groupings of human beings. But I daresay in a lot of ways these things are less mysterious than they seem... we deal with these groupings _all the time_ , and if we thereby fail to ascribe consciousness to them, I'd say our experience should probably be listened to. Sure, groups of humans routinely do great things no individual could do, but at the same time, and with no contradiction, groups of humans fail miserably and stupidly too. We've all seen committees that fail to successfully accomplish a goal than any individual on the committee could have, or where the committee remains fuzzy on its purpose (pardon English's anthropomorphization, there) even as the individual members are all quite clear (but divergent). Rather than trying to throw this in the "consciousness" bucket I think it's better understood as, well, the way we all _already_ collective conceive of these things, as human organizations, with their own foibles, characteristics, and properties.

It's not consciousness. It's something else. "Greater" in some ways, and yet, profoundly lesser in others. Trying to view it through the lens of "consciousness" is just anthropormorphism striking again, and I'd say actively harmful in terms of trying to understand the phenomena.

[1]: [http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf](http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf)

<comment><USER13> >HN-favorite Scott Aaronson resolves to my satisfaction the question of whether a waterfall can be said to be computing the solution to some problem as it cascades over the rocks, because there exists a mapping in which the initial water state is the initial state of the problem, the gyrations of the water "compute", and the final state of the water can be mapped to a solution. He points out that we can with some actual mathematical rigor observe that the mapping itself can be said to be doing all the work.

This is why panpsychism appeals to me. On some level it makes more sense for me to believe that sentients is an intrinsic property of physical reality then to believe that sentients can emerge from someone moving sticks and stones around according to some algorithm.

<comment><USER14> The possibility of sticks and stones, their motions, and algorithms are already an intrinsic property of reality, so the things you want already exist in the model you reject.

<comment><USER13> The thing I "want" is sentience. It's the Qualia problem.

<comment><USER14> That exists regardless of what you think about it.

<comment><USER13> You're not making much sense to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is an excellent and thought-provoking article. I'm not entirely sold on the argument -- in particular, there's no reason to automatically assume that _any_ sufficiently complex system is conscious simply _because_ of its complexity. If you looked hard enough, you could probably find lots of complexity in e.g. the interactions between billions of individual cells in a slime mold, but most people wouldn't use that as a basis for calling it conscious. Human brains aren't just an undifferentiated mass of connections that somehow bootstrap themselves to consciousness; they have definite functional units that are genetically determined. Countries have at most a few thousand years of development behind them, rather than billions of years of animal evolution, and it seems a bit implausible that they would have developed the complex processes of consciousness so much more quickly.

We ascribe consciousness to humans by observing their behavior, not the structure of their brains. And it's true that countries do respond to stimuli and act with purpose, but (echoing Chalmers) I think a lot of that can be ascribed to individual people controlling a hierarchy, and not to the collective. If there's anything about a country that arises from the distributed connections between humans, it would be more likely to manifest as broad social trends, not specific actions like going to war. But those general trends seem to ebb and flow for their own inscrutable reasons; they certainly don't show obvious evidence of intelligent purpose.

Nevertheless, the concept is fascinating. And I think the author makes an excellent point that even if it's wrong, the argument is worth considering if only to help us come up with better criteria for what it means to say an entity is conscious.

<comment><USER16> >But those general trends seem to ebb and flow

I'm quite sure that from the perspective of a cell in my liver, my whole life seem to be ebb and flow. Assuming that the cell would be able to observe and comprehend processes much broader and longer than itself.

It's the same in case of possible consciousness of a large group - as parts of it we will face many difficulties just to notice and understand such phenomenon.

Especially taking into account that it won't be exactly the same type of consciousness as human one.

<comment><USER15> That's kind of an argument from ignorance, though.

It's _conceivable_ that any kind of system whatsoever is conscious in ways that we can't understand or comprehend. But if the author's position is that the US should be provisionally considered conscious because it takes purposeful, intentional actions, then a lack of apparent purposefulness seems like a reasonable criticism of the argument.

<comment><USER17> 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 - <USER2> 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.)

<comment><USER18> > 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.

<comment><USER17> 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.

<comment><USER19> _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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I remember thinking about this after reading Godel esher bach. The reason I don't believe it's clearly probable is that it's hard to imagine that a system that hasn't been forged under as much natural selection to have much intentionality. And it's hard to imagine consciousness without that.

It's also with considering that the US could be sliced along arbitrary boundaries and it probably wouldn't change too much. That alone seems like such a structural/functional difference that arguing for the consciousness of a system like the US on simialriry-to-brains grounds seems difficult.

Still, the strangest thing I've considered is: suppose that the US, or some other group we are a part of, like the galaxy, is conscious.and we get good evidence that it's true. Then disturbing it's function, or destroying it could kill that consciousness. It would be like killing God.

<comment><USER21> >Still, the strangest thing I've considered is: suppose that the US, or some other group we are a part of, like the galaxy, is conscious.and we get good evidence that it's true. Then disturbing it's function, or destroying it could kill that consciousness. It would be like killing God.

Obviously the most fun thing to think about. It's worth noting that "consciousness" is on a sliding scale from dim awareness to focused lucidity. Is my dog conscious? Probably not, but there's _something_ there. How about a gorilla? The lines start to blur. Is it outlandish to ascribe to a large, distributed group, a fish-level of awareness?

<comment><USER22> "Is my dog conscious?"

I would say absolutely. But maybe we have a different definition of consciousness.

<comment><USER23> "Clearly not, he's asleep right now."

<comment><USER24> Consciousness in the metaphysical sense isn't really turned off when you sleep; otherwise you couldn't have dreams.

<comment><USER25> Assuming you're really awake and having dreams as opposed to your thoughts being reorganized in a way that you simply remember as vivid, real experiences. Even if you're conscious, that's only a tiny part of sleep (often REM). Being awakened otherwise is like just having missing time where there's a gap in conscious experience. As if it was off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Since the author established that the United States is a linguistic entity, then why doesn't they simply ask it. "Are you conscious?", "Do you have subjective experiences?". Surely whomever you direct the question at will laugh at you and no one would take you seriously.

A more plausible way for the US to take this type of question seriously is if it was indeed asked by a planet-sized alien. Then I expect the authorities in the US to come up with some traditional explanation of countries and how the US is one. And would reject the fact that it's conscious. If an entity doesn't believe that it's conscious, then can it be conscious?

I find it strange that the author didn't entertain such line of thinking since, to me, it makes the most sense. The first thing you would do when you want to know something about a language-capable entity is probably ask it. He mentions the Turing Test with regards to testing the consciousness of the supersquids, but why not the United States?

<comment><USER27> > If an entity doesn't believe that it's conscious, then can it be conscious?

On the flip side, if an entity asks itself that question, it probably _is_ conscious.

<comment><USER26> Sure. But when did the US ask itself that question? (assuming that -- in accordance with the paper -- when the US "speaks" it's the officials that speak for it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A collection of entities or the pattern the entities partake in are NOT self aware. It's only the entity itself observing the pattern or collection as such, that is.

It seems people are postulating properties of collections and patterns of groups, then checking things off, one by one, being satisfied of the similarities. It is the person checking these things off that is realizing similarities then taking the leap of anthropomorphizing awareness into that idea.

<comment><USER29> So we are not self aware, but our brain cells are? But aren't the brain cells themselves also just a collection of entities (molecules?)

<comment><USER30> The salient difference for me here is that the brain has a holistic factor:

Individual brain cells are not self-aware, or intelligent in any capacity. A whole brain is both.

Individual humans in The United States are aware of both themselves and of the United States. The United States is arguably not aware of itself in a greater- than-the-sum-of-its-parts capacity, as a human brain is.

(So far I've only read the abstract of the linked article)

<comment><USER31> how do you know that the United States is not aware of itself? do you think that brain cells are (would be) aware of the fact that we are conscious?

<comment><USER30> It's a fun thought experiment, but the illusion of self probably didn't just spontaneously arise in humans; it's much more likely to be an adaptation from hundreds of thousands of generations of natural selection for a more intelligent species. Nature selected countless times, through genetic succession, for the more aware species.

> do you think that brain cells are (would be) aware of the fact that we are > conscious?

No, a neuron is too simple a system to be capable of awareness by itself. I get what you're getting at, but if we're talking about a higher-level phenomenon, let's not also call it consciousness. In fact, we essentially use "consciousness" as a post-facto description of our own illusion of self, so it essentially makes no sense to ascribe it to a system that didn't arise more or less the same way as we did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> A related question I like to consider from time to time: "Are corporations conscious?" They are composed of many individuals who we consider conscious and they gather a whole bunch of information on their internals. They even have entire departments of conscious beings devoted to communicating information to other conscious beings that often speak as if they were the corporation itself (sure, corps may have a strange habit of referring to themselves in the third person, but so do some people). How would we even measure this?

<comment><USER33> It's weird you're the first comment (from a brief scan) to mention "measurement". All of the obvious tests are fraught with ethical issues, but testing for behavioral responses seems pretty easy, I think. For instance, consider this thought experiment: set up a rogue, landed, state; have that state attack the U.S. Can we predict a response? Surely! So, we know the U.S. responds to very simple "acute pain" stimuli. We know it responds to chronic pain stimuli: if a certain economic activity is no longer justified in a subregion (Detroit:cars), then that region atrophies.

Really, I think the major issue is to determine how to talk to the U.S. What's the sovereign state equivalent of "how's it going?" It seems that the only obvious attributes of the state we to acquire resources---usually by cooperating in s semi-symbiotic fashion with similar states, and responding to basic pain-like stimuli. The U.S. seems to act more like a very simple worm, and less like a higher animal. Perhaps it has primitive organization? (I'm thinking of the larger jelly fish which, while massive, are cognitively simple.)

<comment><USER32> States are another fun one, thought rather terrifying to think that congress in some strange way might be equivalent to prefrontal cortex. One of the problems we face here are identifying the information channels that are actually important for driving behavior. In some cases hours and weeks of talks between high ranking officials in various foreign services do nothing compared to a 30 second conversation on a street corner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Or phrased another way: we still have no real solid leads on consciousness. There's all sorts of neat things thought up about it, we have some questions we'll want to answer or dissolve, but there's not even a consensus on what consciousness is.

This is really disappointing, because consciousness is neat.

I also find it questionable to posit fake scenarios then try to draw conclusions from them. I can say "what about a fire that boils water, but it's actually frozen?", but it doesn't really mean such a thing is possible. See also p-zombies, an exercise in imagining nonsensical things in order to draw questionable conclusions.

<comment><USER35> I don't think that philosophical zombies are a nonsensical line of thought at all. As Ray Kurzweil states in one of his books (paraphrasing), "I take it on faith that the universe exists". Accepting the inability to receive proof of others' consciousness is a major battle in the quest for developing a rational view of the subject.

<comment><USER34> The pzombie line is "posit the same world as ours, but no one's conscious". At _best_ , it's useless because we don't know what consciousness is. At most likely, it's just dumb and non-sequitur. Like saying "OK imagine this glass of water. It's identical to water in every way. But it's fire. Ah-ha! What does _that_ mean? <spooky voice>".

So either consciousness is based in physics, in which case pzombies are non- starter, or we don't know what consciousness is and it's a pointless conversation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't accept consciousness as anything of real value as far as intelligence goes. There's no reason anything should want for consciousness. It's an abstraction layer our higher order has to the lower order, and emulating it is senseless. It's merely the childish desire to make something that resembles us. True, pure intelligence would be something so mechanically terrifyingly above anything the human mind wouldn't even register it as intelligent. Consciousness isn't worth emulating, it's just the crappy UI evolution gave us.

In the same vein, I see emotion associated with AI so often, and that is so frustrating. Emotion is the opposite of intelligence, it's a series of global variables the left over parts of our brain use to influence the parts in control, it's a bad system and need not be copied.

If there is a god, this is how I imagine it. Free from the flawed systems we live and deal with, free from emotion, free from compassion, a horrifying being of pure logic who you could never begin to comprehend

<comment><USER37> I see our various emotions not as the opposite of intelligence, but rather as high speed, roughly-tuned, very imprecise guesstimation engines. Handy where our basic intelligence is incomplete (infancy mostly), when our information is incomplete (to aid guessing) and when we need extremely fast reaction times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> To all those who aren't yet sold on this idea, consider it like this: what if consciousness is not a consequence of organised systems, but rather a property of all matter. Who's to say that the slime mould _doesn 't_ have consciousness? To get all new-age and spiritual about it, maybe this could extend to any level of organisation, and the very act of conversing and connecting with other people is an expression of collective consciousness. The way I see it, this idea is to the traditional view, as the traditional view is to solipsism.

<comment><USER39> An atom is not "red" or "warm". There are properties that are only properties of an organization, not of the individual.

I think a lot of philosophical hurdles will be gone when respecting boundaries more. In this case not so much physiological or neurological boundaries, but "(machine) learning" boundaries. A system is separated from its environment by a Markovian boundary. If not, it would not be able to built up a representation of "that out there". It would "be it", but not "represent it". I think much of the questions around "self" and "consciousness" can be solved by postulating mechanisms that use such Markovian boundaries within the (artificial) brain.

Information requires a transmitter and a receiver. These can be the same entity separated through time. For example by writing something down that you read the next day the two of you (your old and new version) communicate with each other. But, separation, physically or temporary, makes a system more than some kind of chemical soup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Anesthesia practically eliminates consciousness yet the brain states are probably more similar than brains and the United States. I'm not sure I agree that apparent similarity is good enough to conclude that the US is probably conscious under a materialist framework.

Definitely possible, however. And fun to consider whole galaxies exhibiting consciousness.

<comment><USER41> > fun to consider whole galaxies exhibiting consciousness.

Yeah, but a slow consciousness that would be, unless information can travel at speeds faster than light. If not, then there is a limit to how large a computer can be on account of the speed of light and a few other physical limitations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I realize Mr. Schwitzgebel may have presented a conscious U.S. as a deliberately ridiculous idea to illustrate his point, much as Schrodinger did not intend his cat to be taken seriously. But as a card-carrying Science Fiction nut, I have to say, I find the idea plausible or even intuitive. Of course there could be a slow, broad form of consciousness that inspires extremely large and complex systems. It would live in the interactions and emergent coincidences of public and private life and it may even spill over into our more complex inanimate systems. It would certainly use them as tools or limbs.

I propose a ridiculously expensive study with a huge grant wherein I give the United States an aptitude and personality test. Based on the results, we could attempt to find this 239 year-old citizen some rehabilitative help to reduce some of its more antisocial and criminal tendencies.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Decided to switch out the actual title of this one ("If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious") for fear that it could seem clickbait-y. In fact I think the actual text is very lucid and thoughtful; for whatever reason, philosophers just seem temperamentally inclined toward "cute" titles like that.

<comment><USER43> I appreciate the note, but at the risk of being offensive you took something that was quite reflective of the style and content of the article and made it sound dry and academic -- almost research-y. It may have outright reduced the clicks to the article; at the very least, it probably changed the sort of person who read it.

<comment><USER44> Since several users have made a good case for the existing title, we've reverted it. If it were obviously in violation of the rules (misleading or clickbait), we wouldn't do that, but this is one at most arguable.

I think samclemens was genuinely trying to follow the guidelines, though, which is good.

Perhaps ironically, the post is at #2 anyway, which is way high for this sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've never been a fan of anthropomorphism nor of overloading terms (with additional definitions). Everything descends into a primordial soup when this starts happening. And it is very hard to predicatively and rationally operate in a bowl of primordial soup where one thing is not distinct from another. Clear and crisp definitions and detailed distinctions are what makes higher order modeling possible. So no... societies are no in any way "conscious", even though they may at times act in ways similar to conscious entities.

</comment><comment><USER45> I have a similar view, that a society (not necessarily a political concept like country, but more culturally defined group of people) is the ultimate intelligent being. And the main rationale behind that notion is that society DEFINES human intelligence. We think human are intelligent beings but as a matter of fact, every capabilities that we deem signs of intelligence, such as language, logic, math are given to the human by the society. Suppose we have a unfortunate person who somehow is raised by a dog without any direct or indirect contact from the human society, he would demonstrate very little intelligent superiority over other advanced mammals - no language, no culture, not even logic.

As pointed out by the article, society as a distributed group entities demonstrate signs of consciousness, but that's not even the key, the key is society defines every single consciousness of the members in it: how we think, what we want, etc. A single person's intelligence is simply a tiny subcomponent of the ultimate intelligent being - the society. How intelligent we are are mostly determined by the society (doesn't mean that everyone thinks a like), and the exciting thing is that some of us get to contribute some improvements to that ultimate intelligent being.

<comment><USER46> Society may be great at transmitting knowledge but it doesn't create knowledge -- people do. Even the thoughts you've just written down, are your own, not societies. I can even disagree with your thought and we can throw it into the gutter.

Society may know how to create fire, but it's one man who created for the first time, and it's the choice of just that one man to pass it onto another (and yet another). A man on a island may certainly discover fire.

<comment><USER47> Yes, but a lot of the knowledge you rely on to construct complex concepts were taught to you at some point, they didn't just manifest in your mind independent of society. Every person may add a little bit, and that little bit each person adds may be only a very small bit outside of the collective knowledge that would exist had they not existed.

I guess my point is that how we have learned how to attribute and locate the source knowledge doesn't necessarily describe how it is actually created, moves, and is altered.

<comment><USER46> > to contribute some improvements to that ultimate intelligent being.

That's fair, I'm just turned off by the language of "ultimate intelligent being." Perhaps that's just my human bias, but I have trouble seeing society as anything greater than its parts, primarily people and knowledge.

<comment><USER47> I didn't read it that way, but I wouldn't have worded it that way either.

Humans are the ones that decide what intelligence is to them. We've seen many times in history that this is in fact, very unintelligent to do. But sometimes it seems to work splendidly. The individual can define him or herself as the most intelligent while everyone agrees. That really doesn't necessarily mean anything beyond everyone agreeing that they are intelligent. And some people may as a result, choose to entertain their consciousness in other ways, in order to direct it on a different course. And this may wind up being more intelligent. And then we pretend that nothing weird happened and we knew all along what real intelligence was.

:)

I tend to view things as absurd before I view them as intelligent, but my life is fairly boring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Oh, come on! It has nothing to do with materialism but everything with complex systems and what we call "ecosystems" \- with the stochastic-within- fundamental-laws nature of what we call universe or reality.

Ecosystems could exhibit what appears (to an external [hypothetical] observer) to be a conscious, "intelligent" behavior due to obeying to underlying "forces" or "laws" \- physical, environmental (herd behavior, etc.) economical (energy expenditure, diminishing returns), evolutionary (which affects populations).

Forest or town formations (which appears to be "optimal", "designed", while they just grew up causally out of individual "processes") are obvious examples.

Financial markets could be [falsely] viewed as "intelligent", while it is just a stochastic individual actions and "herd behavior".

Ants or bees colony, a big city at night, viewed from an aircraft - they all appear to have consciousness of its own, but no, it is mere an appearance. Nevertheless we cannot assert that these formations are purely chaotic - <USER3> are shaped by a chance, but in accordance with the underlying forces and laws which govern (or limit) behavior of individual "agents" within the system.

Just like all these atoms - they have their positions due to multiple causes (stochastic processes), but in accordance with fundamental laws of what we call "gravity", "magnetism and electricity", "conservation of energy", etc. There is no "intelligence" or "consciousness" apart from that, or That, as a Hindu would call it.

</comment><comment><USER49> I am a dualist and I ought to accept that rabbits are conscious. They must have a soul of some sort to be able to have the Easy Problem of Consciousness between their ears. They see, they hear, they do lots of things. But I don't and I can't accept "consciousness in spatially distributed group entities."

The author, judging from the abstract (it's 7AM here), has it up-side-down. One has to first prove that spatially distributed complex entities (like an atom, molecule, the brain or a pen) has phenomenal experience, that is "there is something that it's like to be a pen". Then she can prove materialism is true. But to start with materialism being to true and then... well, who am I to judge.

Some say that materialism is refuting itself, in the sense that proving it true dissolves any kind of truth into non-sense.

<comment><USER50> > consciousness in spatially distributed group entities.

I understand you're a dualist, but from the materialist standpoint, "spatially distributed group entities" describes neurons.

<comment><USER49> From a dualist pov, neurons are spatially distributed group entities too. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I made a serious argument once that god(s) have a mind, with some of the same rationale. Many individual people contribute parts of their brain to a whole that has will, makes plans, seeks goals, has moods, etc, where each of those cognitive states do not belong to a single individual. Some individuals have more influence, but there are few religious leaders who couldn't be excised for rapidly turning against the supermind. This isn't supernatural, and it isn't mystical. It would apply equally to the Market as to the Government as to God.

But like many flights of scientific fantasy (and like the article) it also isn't very predictive, it isn't verifiable, and it isn't ultimately very useful as a model.

I abandoned the idea when I recognised it as otological onanism.

<comment><USER52> Just because you can't test it doesn't make it worthless. If you haven't read Julian Jaynes, then I think you'll like him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Has the author really never heard of group consciousness? This is not a terribly interesting argument, and certainly not one that counters the materialist perspective. It reminds me of a young earth creationist I once heard arguing that since the moon is slowly drifting away from us, then at one time is would have had to be far closer if the Earth were really billions of years old. In his mind that was an unpalatable conclusion, and thus sufficient to close the case. Anyone else would have just nodded his head and said, "yeah, and...?"

</comment><comment><USER54> I was thinking about something similar to this idea recently, but replace "United States" with a large corporation.

In a sense the United States is conscious, but the "experience" of being the United States, or Exxon mobile, or Google, is so far removed from the experience of being a person or even a rabbit that it doesn't matter. i.e. It's a metaphor more than anything else.

We take in information through eyes, ears, etc made up of cells. We think in a brain, experience emotions, inhabit a body.

The United States takes in information through organizations, people, computers, etc. It thinks and makes decisions via all sorts of different systems and processes. It doesn't have a physical body, it has different parts and material all over the place made of many different elements.

Perhaps it's true we only value forms of consciousness similar to our own.

I don't know, I don't philosophy well. This paper was thought provoking.

</comment><comment><USER55> For some wider context of his views, check out his other articles, particularly [http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/CrazyMind.ht...](http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/CrazyMind.htm).

I don't get the impression that Schwitzgebel takes analytic philosophy very seriously, which is something I find very refreshing about him (compared to other philosophers of consciousness such as Chalmers). His early interest was on ancient Chinese philosophy, and in [http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/ZZ.htm](http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/ZZ.htm), he promotes what he regards as an ancient Chinese outlook about not taking language too seriously, which contrasts with traditional Anglo-American philosophy.

</comment><comment><USER25> The article and comments miss what I think are tremendously important issues in this discussion: collective memory and group think. People in groups often take on a particular culture with group-specific reactions, activities, _and memories_. We've seen people get internally divided between their individual thought/reaction and the group thought/reaction on a given experience. Further, although author rejects U.S. feeling pain, Americans as a whole reacted with much of the same pain and shock when they watched planes hit the Twin Towers. Their emotional response mostly went in the same direction with the conflicts coming in on their assessments of what happened and what do do. Much like internal to the brain, conflict resolution and consensus kicked in to converge majority on an overall reaction that all Americans were conscious of.

So, groups and even America often act like an individual might even in terms of feelings. The groups memory is spread out among parts of its members. New members, like the author's aliens, even get some of that memory through information exchange, stories, sharing feelings, and indoctrination. Their mind can transition to a cross between individual mind and the group's mind.

So, brain stores its knowledge in neural connections and states updated by certain processes. Consciousness emerges. Details of it have varying levels of internal strength, conflict, and so on. Human groups store their knowledge in individual brains and connections between them via senses. Group's consciousness similarly has varying levels of commitment to specific ideas or actions with conflict. The question is, "What's the real difference here and how far can it go?"

If it can go far enough, then the U.S. might be conscious, have a collective memory, have the ability to feel pain collectively, and have an intent formed of members' consensus. That's stronger than the author's own claim. Yet, I think I've cited examples to back some of it up. The U.S. itself doesn't need a brain: its identity can be made of pieces of other brains, both storing knowledge & having feelings, plus their interactions with each other.

Note: I'll end with a possibly controversial view that I don't think all of U.S.'s members make up its consciousness. I think it filters out a lot of them. It has it's own self-organization and learning principles that are quite a bit different than the brain's aside from basic concepts of sensory processing, reflection, conflict and consensus.

</comment><comment><USER56> I've had a similar suspicion for a while. Superorganisms of micro-organisms are a place we find consciousness; superorganisms larger organisms (like us) seem at least as likely to be conscious, if not more so, given that consciousness is already present in the components at some level.

</comment><comment><USER57> One should really look into works of Russian publicist Sergey Pereslegin. He (plus other people) produced a lot of fascinating speculation on such concepts (superorganisms composed of humans and organizations)

</comment><comment><USER48> Consciousness is an appearance, same as when an external observer sees an "intelligence" in behavior of a whole colony if bees or ants or, which requires special tools, bacteria.

One of CMU's AI Guru (I forgot his name), back in 60s, described brilliantly a principle that "incredible complex" observable behavior of an ant is not due to its "intelligence", but due to obstacles in environment. This is the clue.

There are "meditation" techniques to observe "discrete" (non-continuous) nature of what we call consciousness.

<comment><USER58> > appearance

Just a comment that this is called an "emergent phenomenon" in some circles, and an "illusion" in Buddhist thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> May be I'm missing something. This doesn't strike me odd at all. I mean, one could say the United States chose to legalize gay marriage, or chose to forge a deal with another concious entity Iran. This is similar to a person making a change in their own body or making peace with an adversary, respectively. One could liken the democratic process and the political system as concious thinking, perhaps.

How is this any different? If you relax the definition of "concious", then why isn't the United States concious?

<comment><USER34> Can you provide a definition for consciousness? Perhaps you have a different notion than most people keep in mind (even if they are unable to explain).

<comment><USER59> I'm using a very simplistic definition of the term. Essentially, anything that responds to input is "alive." I'm actually basing it on the notion the author gives since he considers rabbits as being "concious." I'm not sure rabbits are self-aware though in the sense that humans are, ie., becoming a "strange loop" as Douglas hofstadter would put it. Self-awareness is one thing, conciousness, as the author presents it, is another thing.

The thing is, externally, one can talk about a nation in the same ways we talk about a person in the same ways we talk about a group or even a couple. You can consider it responding to input and even being "self-aware" as an entity, even being deliberating. A materialist doesn't believe in the immaterial, s/he can only judge an entity by observing its reaction to stimula, so as far as s/he can judge, the materialist can observe the US from the outside, and apply the duck rule[1] to conclude it's concious.

However, I'm not talking about qualia[1]. Qualia, a materialist would say, is an illusion. But, again, going by the author's definition, I'm not sure we can say whether rabbits or flies experience qualia, and qualia is sort of a hard to thing to reason about from the outside of the head. For me, the question of qualia is a much more interesting argument against materialism.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure I'm a materialist, but I'm a scientist by trade, so I have to work in that mindset. Still, I never felt comfortable with it.

[0] [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rule+of+Duck](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rule+of+Duck) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia)

<comment><USER10> >However, I'm not talking about qualia[1]. Qualia, a materialist would say, is an illusion. But, again, going by the author's definition, I'm not sure we can say whether rabbits or flies experience qualia, and qualia is sort of a hard to thing to reason about from the outside of the head. For me, the question of qualia is a much more interesting argument against materialism.

Nobody says qualia are an illusion, in the sense of not really existing. People just say, "Qualia are not metaphysically spooky and immaterial; they're things your brain makes."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe consciousness fades out as the size of the group gets larger and larger and there's some limit where it can't get conscious anymore (probably related to the speed of sound).

But consider this: you are aware of yourself, but how do you know that you are the only thing occupying your brain? I mean, what if your brain spawns 5 different conscious processes, each of them completely separate and independent from the others? And what you feel as yourself is just one of these 5 processes.

How could you ever know if that's true or not?

<comment><USER60> > _How could you ever know if that 's true or not?_

Well, if I never see myself saying or doing something that MY process hasn't decided itself, it's as if those extra processes don't exist for all practical purposes.

<comment><USER24> Actually I've heard that scientists have proved that your awareness of your brain's decision sort of comes after the decision has already been made by your brain.

Not to mention there's a lot of "subconscious" stuff that happens inside one's mind.

<comment><USER60> > _Actually I 've heard that scientists have proved that your awareness of > your brain's decision sort of comes after the decision has already been made > by your brain._

I've read that too. But philosophically I think people draw the wrong conclusions from this -- like we're puppets and the brain is some autonomous third agent.

My brain and my consiousnless are part of the same thing, so making the decision (in the background) and having it come to awareness a little later, is still the same entity "thinking".

I don't have to think "out aloud" in my brain (consciously) for myself to make a decision: my brain can make it drawing directly and subconsciously from the same memories, sensory inputs, biases etc that I have available when I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> 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!

</comment><comment><USER62> I advanced a similar hypothesis five years ago:

[http://blog.rongarret.info/2010/10/great-conspiracy- without-...](http://blog.rongarret.info/2010/10/great-conspiracy-without- nuts.html)

[http://blog.rongarret.info/2010/10/mega-memes-and-great- cons...](http://blog.rongarret.info/2010/10/mega-memes-and-great- conspiracy.html)

</comment><comment><USER63> The thing is we have no clear idea what we mean when speaking about consciousness.

Luckily, there are some people who honestly try to find out. Dan Dennett to name one.

Also this talk about consciousness by Susan Blackmoore is both funny and enlightening: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdMA8RVu1sk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdMA8RVu1sk)

</comment><comment><USER64> I think that to a materialist, the question might not be a hard one at all. The theory may well be that consciousness depends on the _strength_ of the connections between the components of the collective "mind", and that some range of connection power (i.e. the ability of one component to influence others) is required. You then measure the connection strength among people in the US, and it may turn out be well below the threshold require for the thing that will be defined as consciousness. After all, solids and fluids behave differently enough for the difference to be considered qualitative, even though there is just a quantitative difference in the strength of the connections between their components. So there may be nothing special about our brains _except_ for the strength of the connection between neurons which lies within certain "magic" bounds. Collectives with connection strength either below or above those bounds may display some behaviors similar to intelligence or "consciousness" but not quite.

Other possible, but similar measures can be the number of components (much larger in the brain than in the US or an ant colony), or the average number of connections each element has. In any case the result may be the same: a quantitative difference may lead to a qualitatively different result.

</comment><comment><USER65> On a related note, I'm of the opinion that the AI's have already taken over humanity, IE: Corporations.

As we develop AI, I see it naturally augmenting the Corporation's ability to make decisions, eventually supplanting humans in the high-order strategic planning.

Once that happens (and it will!).... hope for the best?

</comment><comment><USER66> If the argument of this paper is correct, I think it would be evidence against materialism. If you find a position has an implausible consequence, that is evidence against that position, especially if its competitors (e.g. dualism, idealism) lack that consequence.

<comment><USER67> Panpsychism is common in dualism as well.

<comment><USER66> I don't think panpsychism is common in dualism - the vast majority of dualists are not panpsychists. The argument of the paper is that "the United States is conscious" is a probable consequence of materialism. For your point to succeed, we'd need an argument that panpsychism is a probable consequence of dualism (or idealism, or so on), as opposed to merely a possibility compatible with it. Since materialists need to ground mental concepts in physical ones, they run the risk that their attempts to do so may have a broader scope than they intend (as this paper argues). Dualists don't need to ground the mental in the physical, so they don't run that risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> This is an old idea, which doesn't make it less interesting. I prefer to think about the Internet possibly being conscious... more interesting because maybe the Internet consciousness is where the singularity will come from.

</comment><comment><USER69> >If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious

The author is lowballing here in the extreme. It would be the universe that is conscious.

</comment><comment><USER70> To the honest Materialists: what's your explanation of Qualia? Why it exists? Why aren't we Philosophical Zombies? Thanks

</comment><comment><USER71> Kind of cute to care about this, impressive references and all.

Thinking about thinking, troubling as it may be, presumes a supremacy of human consciousness the sensibility thereof is its own determinant.

A waterfall is a pretty analogy for the State. My point being...interesting that it holds together, but that being established, play your part or propose some alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER72> If it's conscious, it has the wit of a paramecium at best.

</comment><comment><USER73> You must be at least this tall to write about "consciousness".

At least there's only one mention of "quantum".

</comment><comment><USER74> This is an old idea. Google keyword: "global brain".</comment>


SEO: the new trend in home-based jobs?  - <AUTHOR>

After spending 12 years of my life working for top corporations, recently I decided to pursue a career in the home-based industry so I can attend to my family's needs without having to miss work.  It took me a while before I was able to find long term and stable project, for most of the projects that I see would require a skill in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which is something new to me.  I was starting to feel hopeless, until a friend referred me to a project that does not require SEO skills.
I have spent 4 years of my career in the corporate world as an IT Junior Process Analyst, building test cases and developing web based projects using ASP and Visual Basic, but that was 8 years ago.  True enough that technology is fast changing, it has affected how certain products or companies are being marketed in the internet, and SEO plays a great role in this.
According to Wikipedia, Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines.  The objective is to make a web page rank high on the results list, or be on the first page of search engines like Yahoo, Google, Bing and the like.  Knowing how SEO can generate jobs for people, and how it can greatly affect the marketability of a product, an individual or a company, I am currently looking for tutorials or schools that will help me learn more about this new process in the world of Information Technology. <comment><USER2> The easy thing to do is say "visit seomoz.org", particularly the blog. I'm thinking of one entry in particular, but I can't find it offhand, sorry. I'll come back and comment if I can find it.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo>

<comment><USER2> Oh... This was it. Nice!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Simple and comprehensive tutorials in Deep Learning using TensorFlow - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/easy-tensorflow/easy-tensorflow <comment><USER2> What is used to make graph animations like this one? [https://github.com/easy- tensorflow/easy-tensorflow/blob/mast...](https://github.com/easy- tensorflow/easy-tensorflow/blob/master/1_Basics/files/1_1.gif)

</comment><comment><USER3> > It's developed and maintained by Google. As such, a continued support and > development is ensured

Yes. Google - definitely not known for suddenly abandoning things.

<comment><USER4> they have a huge business interest in maintaining tensorflow since they're selling tpu time

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I appreciate the effort put by you, but I still find tutorials lacking in some aspects:

1\. Data loading mechanism. tf.Data can be used here.

2\. Saving models as SavedModel so that it can be used later.

<comment><USER6> The dirty secret of machine learning is it's 20% model building, 80% plumbing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great work.

I've seen a lot of Keras tutorials out there, but well-written and commented pure TensorFlow tutorials are so rare to find.

Thanks for doing all of this!</comment>


Bizarre Antimatter Looks Surprisingly Like Regular Matter - <AUTHOR> http://www.seeker.com/bizarre-antimatter-looks-surprisingly-like-regular-matter-2158988923.html <comment><USER2> How could you tell if a galaxy is made up entirely of antimatter?</comment>


Ask HN: What's in your .bash_aliases? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> alias sudo='sudo '

allows you to use sudo with your aliases, where you normally wouldn't</comment>


The "Light Triad": The Saintlier Side of Human Personality - <AUTHOR> https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/03/22/psychopaths-and-narcissists-have-hogged-the-limelight-now-its-time-to-explore-the-saintlier-side-of-human-personality-say-researchers-as-they-announce-a-test-of-the-light-triad-traits/ <comment><USER2> Everyone loves a quiz[0].

[0] [https://scottbarrykaufman.com/lighttriadscale/](https://scottbarrykaufman.com/lighttriadscale/)</comment>


Reflecting back on one year of Kaggle contests - <AUTHOR> http://mlwave.com/reflecting-back-on-one-year-of-kaggle-contests/ <comment><USER2> How much time on average did you spend on each competition? Did that time increase or decrease (or was not affected?) as you progressed in skill?

Also what was your background before starting to compete?

<comment><USER3> The tricky part is setting up your pipeline: from .csv files to submission. This can take a day, or 30 minutes, depending on the contest. If feature engineering is required then this adds a lot of time to this process.

Time to create the first submission dropped drastically after a few competitions. I now have a small library of munging and ensembling scripts that I can quickly adapt to suit the needs. On the other hand, time spend on optimizing and staying inside top 10, increased too. For the KDD-cup I'ddo weekend long sprints for a few measly improvements. All in all I'd say I spend at least 8 hours per competition.

My background was front-end developer growing into analytics and dataviz more and more. I think it was on HN that I saw a link to learnpythonthehardway.org and I started from there. After reading "programming collective intelligence" I got more serious.

<comment><USER4> And your post is certainly an inspiration to me :) Thanks for documenting your journey. I'll make sure, one year down the line, I document something like this and hopefully will get some success on kaggle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have you made the transition from playing with ML in your spare time to actually sustaining a living from Kaggle income?

<comment><USER3> No, not yet. I'd love for Kaggle to be a place where analysts can earn a steady income, but I think that is something for the future. Right now even the top performers do not consistently win prize money, so they'll need a job on the side. If they are top competitors then this is usually a wellpaying job and so they are competing for fame and bragging rights, not prize money.

At my startup I do predictive analytics on whatever data I can get my hands on. There is an industry demand for fast and scalable solutions, which I fancy working on. Also Kaggle indirectly gives a lot of commercial opportunities and exposure. Perhaps in a year I'll reflect back on a modest start with ML as a career.</comment></comment>


Lupex, a new exchange that enables betting on the price of crypto - <AUTHOR> https://lupextrade.com <comment><USER2> First of all, this isn't new. (I am sure you know this)

Secondly, why would anyone want something that is basically futures.. but with less control and information?</comment>


Slur: anonymous marketplace to trade secret information in exchange for Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://slur.io/#what

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794256](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794256) (124 points, 13 days ago, 54 comments)

</comment><comment><USER3> If this were to become as widely-used as the creators intend, it would mean the end of making money from information.

For example, any drug, hardware, or software with any value would appear on the site. Why spend millions/billions creating those things if they just get leaked right away?

I think it would actually mean the end of most human progress, because the ability to live off of your creativity would be destroyed. Maybe you'd pursue creative things regardless, but you wouldn't be able to make a living off of them, and it would drastically hamper your ability to create.

I'm not actually sure human society would survive a total elimination of private information.

So, in short, this is one of the most evil things I've ever seen, even if there's also potential for good.</comment>


How to Play Long Video Games When You Have No Time - <AUTHOR> https://kotaku.com/how-to-play-long-video-games-when-you-have-no-time-1830099478 <comment><USER2> The killer for me has always been reduction to save points vs arbitrary save times. If you have other responsibilities you often need to just immediately stop what you're doing, and for a save point style game that means losing progress.

I recognize that arbitrary saves are increasingly difficult, but if an open world game like Skyrim can manage it, so can an FPS.

<comment><USER3> > arbitrary saves are increasingly difficult

They aren't. Using save points is a game design decision. If you allow a player to save at any point it becomes very easy to "cheat" by saving progress in the right places.</comment></comment>