Collective and Artificial Subjectivity as Artifacts of Subtracting Consciousness at the Source

Not a ToE · Sep 18, 2026 · 28m

Discussions of whether AI models, ant colonies, or human societies are conscious often begin from a third-person inventory of structural organization, information flow, and behavioral performance. In his famous reductio, Eric Schwitzgebel made the implication uncomfortably explicit: if materialism is true and consciousness is nothing over and above functional integration, then a spatially distributed network like the United States should probably count as a conscious subject in its own right.

In this episode, we unpack the hidden epistemological sleight of hand behind this intuition: the…