Well, that's precisely the point of the article. According to the author, the United States indeed "walks like a duck and talks like a duck," to the extent that it is homeostatic (feeds itself, defends itself, undertakes coordinated actions such as trade embargoes) and large scale information transfer does occur between its constituent subsystems (humans, say).
Of course there is something intuitively bothersome about that: somehow, we don't believe that there is something it is like to be the United States, but we do believe there is something it is like to be xenophon. That's why the core question isn't absurd at all -- the author is trying to understand what truly differentiates a conscious system.
It doesn't seem like that much of a bullet to bite.
If you accept that many-celled organisms can be conscious, and that eusocial colonies (ants, bees) behave more like intelligent organisms than any one member, it's not much if a stretch to say "hm, a country belongs on that scale".
It's moderately surprising that a consistent system would put the US at eg 25% of a human by consciousness, but it's not the kind of thing that makes you say "oops I made a wrong choice somewhere".
The lense of homeostasis (or autopoiesis more generally) is useful: it does allow you to put things on a meaningful, insight-yielding scale: there are humans, and rocks, and then fire and hurricanes somewhere in between. So what does it take to make something past human in the scale?
It's a huge bullet to byte if you think about the ethical implications downstream. Individualism assumes that the relationship between a nation state and the individuals that make it up is exactly not like this.
FWIW, any theory that tries to say that larger scale relationships exactly match smaller scale ones is surely wrong, but so is any theory that tries to deny holistic aspects at larger scales.
Just like organs do not work like large cells and people aren't large-scale organs, societies aren't large scale people. But there are social elements that bind us into a society. Dogmatic individualism is wrong, and treating society as an individual is also wrong.
Can I just say "Thank you" for pointing out the key difference between looking at things that look similar at different space scales but remembering that no, actually they are completely different. That dust storm from space may look like the beach at my feet, but they are two very different systems that move differently, and arise for different reasons. It's cool that they look the same, and no doubt that's meaningful for some reason, but it doesn't mean they are the same.
In any event the US acts like a person because it is basically the President plus Congress plus the leaders of the top 100 public and private American institutions. Any group that small is going to act coherently.
I'm not ready to accept the simplification of a few leaders and powerful people having quite that level of significance. I think the U.S. is still a much more massive complex system.
Your assertion is sorta like saying that the human body is like an organ because it is basically the heart, brain, and eyes.
We obviously do not live in anarchy, but I don't think our world can be so simplified accurately either.
The article isn't saying that the larger scale relationships exactly match the smaller scale ones. It's just making the claim that the larger scale relationships include all the ingredients that materialists usually identify as sufficient for consciousness.
Individualism (like reductionism more generally) only requires that the higher level explanations be expressible in terms of lower level explanations, not that they're necessarily better (in terms of the insight per unit complexity) for any particular context[1]. It certainly doesn't require any analogy between the people in a nation and the neurons in a brain.
[1] like how an atom-by-atom model of an airplane might be better, even if it would be accurate enough to break it into a smaller number of tension- and shear-bearing elements
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, as nobody has replied to explain their reasons for doing so, but the idea seems reasonable to me in this context.
I could see taking it a step further: instead of a Gaia theory, by which I assume you mean that the Earth is a sentient system, why not have all things that are causally connected be part of a universal consciousnesses? At what distance apart in space or time or both do we reject that individual components of a complex system could possibly combine to be conscious? Also, do all components need to be of the same type (individual human beings, in the United States example)? Can not other mammals and birds and fish and insects and forests and fields contribute?
The example in the article is a nation state, but is there any reason for rejecting a larger system? If the United States is conscious, does an American who goes to live abroad cease to be a bit of United-States-consciousness and become, for example, a bit of France-consciousness? What of astronauts, or those who will inevitably live on Mars someday?
Is the number of bits of nation-state-consciousness significant? Would China be "more conscious" by virtue of having four times the population? Is Canada only dimly conscious, having only a ninth of the population?
Finally, it seems strange to me that we'd use geographical borders to delineate separate nation-state-consciousnesses in an age when individuals so routinely communicate and travel outside of them. Nation states don't exist in vacuums, but interact and cooperate in many ways that affect each other mutually, for both good and bad. Perhaps all the people who speak a given language could be a conscious entity, regardless of where they live.
This is all fun to think about, but I lean towards the so-called neurochauvanism mentioned in the article and have a difficult time wrapping my head around the concept that something outside of brains could be conscious.
As I said below, if you really are a materialist, then this shouldn't bother you. As a materialist, you can't judge something from the inside, you can only apply the duck rule.[0] And the US, a book club, a couple, all of these deliberate, form consensus, act for self-survival...they act like living things just like us bags of meat do, so they should be "concious", just like a person or a rabbit or a duck is.
Or, if this still does bother you, may be you should question your faith in materialism.
Of course there is something intuitively bothersome about that: somehow, we don't believe that there is something it is like to be the United States, but we do believe there is something it is like to be xenophon. That's why the core question isn't absurd at all -- the author is trying to understand what truly differentiates a conscious system.