Why is an organism a life form but not a society?

[untermensche]

A person is conscious because a brain evolved to create consciousness and that brain maintains a certain level of structural integrity.

Human society did not evolve to create a consciousness, at least we have no evidence of this.

Consciousness must flow from a mechanism specifically "designed" to create that consciousness. Evolution is simply a way to achieve design without a designer.

You would have to propose the specific mechanism by which a society could be conscious.

This is errant nonsense.

Nothing evolves to create anything. Evolution is purposeless. Humans evolved consciousness. But nothing ever evolved 'to create' anything - there is no possible mechanism for this, and it flies in the face of absolutely everything that is known about the mechanism of evolution.

The sentence is a little ambiguous but the rest of the post should have been sufficient for understanding.

You can read it as, a person is conscious because a brain evolved which allows consciousness to exist.

And while evolution is purposeless, evolved organs are not.

 

[PyramidHead]

Saying that x, y, or z is alive is only useful if it adds something to our understanding. If it shares some, but not all, characteristics of what we ordinarily call alive, why not leave it at that: society shares some, but not all, characteristics of what we ordinarily call alive. I think the danger of going further and saying societies are alive is the smuggling problem. Given an everyday word, people will naturally smuggle in related concepts to aid their interpretation of the word. If society is alive... well, I'm alive too, and I'm conscious, so I guess society must be conscious. Life is sacred, so society must be sacred too. Et cetera, et cetera.

No different from what the early modern philosophers tried to do with God; Anselm (and later Descartes) thought he'd proved the existence of a maximally great being, and from there went on to happily assume it must be Jesus, rather than any of the other maximally great beings from different religions. Lines of inference that rest on common words are remarkably prone to fraying into unrelated areas.