Because consciousness is an attribute of individual humans, human action originates in individuals and not in "society" or in any kind of social grouping. It will be necessary to demonstrate this point in some detail here, since the opposite notion—that "society" (in a literal sense) acts or has a will of its own—is quite widespread, leading to many erroneous ideas and pernicious policies.

First, as we saw in Section 1 (pp. 1.3:5-9), conceptual consciousness rests upon a base of percepts and sensations, ultimately deriving from a person's direct experience of reality through his or her senses. Society and human groups as such do not possess sense organs and therefore cannot literally perceive physical objects. If every person in a crowd sees an object, we may state, as a kind of linguistic shorthand, that "the crowd sees" the object; however, this expression is clearly just a simplified way of conveying that each member of the crowd spots the same object. Here we should not allow linguistic convention to obscure our understanding of reality. Several human beings may perceive a single object, but each perceives it only through his or her own sense organs. A blind person, for instance, may not be able to perceive a certain object directly, but may know of it indirectly, through the (aurally perceived) verbal descriptions of others. There is no valid scientific evidence that perceptions can be telepathically transmitted from individual to individual.