Combining Minds

Abstract

This book explores a neglected philosophical question: How do groups of interacting minds relate to singular minds? Could several of us, by organizing ourselves the right way, constitute a single conscious mind that contains our minds as parts? And could each of us have been, all along, a group of mental parts in close cooperation? Scientific progress seems to be slowly revealing that all the different physical objects around us are, at root, just a matter of the right parts put together in the right ways: How far could the same be true of minds? This book argues that we are too used to seeing the mind as an indivisible unity and that understanding our place in nature requires being willing to see minds as composite systems, simultaneously one conscious whole and many conscious parts. In thinking through the implications of such a shift of perspective, the book relates the question of mental combination to a range of different theories of the mind (in particular panpsychism, functionalism, and Neo-Lockeanism about personal identity) and identifies, clarifies, and addresses a wide array of philosophical objections (concerning personal identity, the unity of consciousness, the privacy of experience, and other issues) that have been raised against the idea of composite minds. The result is an account of the metaphysics of composition and consciousness that can illuminate many different debates in philosophy of mind, concerning split brains, collective intentionality, and the combination problem, among others.

Rational Agency without Self-Knowledge: Could ‘We’ Replace ‘I’?

“…Of course, my conceptual arguments cannot in themselves establish that we actually are group agents, and the full defence of this possibility requires discussing several other issues – about the unity of consciousness, the privacy of experience and the structure of the brain – which I address in other work (Roelofs , , Forthcoming‐a, Forthcoming‐b). But showing the correlative possibilities of moderately selfless agents and seamless collective agency is one step towards a compositional view of our own agency.…”

“…I claim that when a group agent says or thinks something, these token utterances or thoughts are simultaneously uttered or thought by one or more individual agents. Of course it is a significant assumption that thoughts, like utterances, can coherently belong to more than one agent; in other work I have argued at greater length for the more general thesis that mental states, including not just thoughts but conscious experiences, are shareable within certain limits (Roelofs Forthcoming‐b). Not wanting to inflate this paper with that discussion, let us suppose that thoughts can have two thinkers, and ask how that would resolve the worry about ‘we’ having come to mean ‘I’.…”

“…Then we would say, for instance, that because there are two human beings, and both are capable of rational thought and action, we have two rational agents (plus any group agents). But if we wanted a more conciliatory response to this line of objection, we might try accepting the Rovanian view, but then arguing that individual agents can still co‐exist with group agents, by having rational points‐of‐view which are component parts of its point‐of‐view (for fuller development of this idea, see Roelofs Forthcoming‐b).…”

Beyond Combination: How Cosmic Consciousness Grounds Ordinary Experience

“…A major trigger for the rise of interest in cosmopsychism is the hope that a holistic, top-down, substantiation of macro-level experience will prove a more viable option than an atomistic, bottom-up constitution. Micropsychism experiences serious difficulties in facing the combination problem , and advocates of cosmopsychism belong with those who suspect that a sound solution requires a radical shift in perspective (but see Dainton [2011], Miller [2018], and Roelofs [2015] for recent attempts to address the combination problem from a micropsychist perspective).…”

Idealism and the Mind-Body Problem 1

“…By embracing fundamental 13 I don't know of any philosopher who is committed to micro-idealism. Perhaps the nearest isRoelofs (2014), who favors micro-idealism but does not rule out cosmic idealism Strawson (2006). looks like a micro-idealist but has more sympathy with cosmic idealism.…”