How to share a mind: Reconsidering the group mind thesis

Abstract

Standard accounts in social ontology and the group cognition debate have typically focused on how collective modes, types, and contents of intentions or representational states must be construed so as to constitute the jointness of the respective agents, cognizers, and their engagements. However, if we take intentions, beliefs, or mental representations all to instantiate some mental properties, then the more basic issue regarding such collective engagements is what it is for groups of individual minds to share a mind. Somewhat surprisingly, this very issue has not received much attention in the respective debates and when it has, typically the outlook has been skeptical or outright negative. In this paper, I argue that it is epistemologically possible for a group of individuals to literally share a single mental unit. In particular, I will put forward and defend what I shall call the zombie conception of group minds.

The Extended Mind: State of the Question

“…one’s beliefs might be embodied in one’s secretary, one’s accountant, or one’s collaborator.” In this respect there has been some excellent work on extended cognition across social dyads, teams, or small groups where coupling is often direct, active, and mutual (see, e.g., Fiore and Salis ; Gallagher and Tollefsen ; Salas, Fiore, and Letsky ; Sterelny ; Sutton et al ; Tollefsen ; Theiner ). Some authors, however, take this idea that cognition may be a matter of shared (nonverbal, oral, or written) communication much further, suggesting that just such practices allow for the establishment of what I have called mental or cognitive institutions (Gallagher ; Gallagher and Crisafi ; also see e.g., Krueger ; Menary ; Szanto ). That is, extended mind is not just about the use of hand‐held notebooks, iPhones, writing tablets, diagrams, maps, or specific kinds of exograms, etc.…”

Consciousness Incorporated

“…Thus, while she rightly denies that group agents are phenomenally conscious, she does not make anything of the fact that, by this remark, they have to enjoy access consciousness; she ignores a distinction of which I make much, between intentional states with and without coawareness. Thomas Szanto () also denies that group agents are phenomenally conscious, and conscious indeed in any significant manner, maintaining that they are zombie agents.…”

Group as a Distributed Subject of Knowledge: Between Radicalism and Triviality

“…Thomas Szanto uses the intentional stance strategy to explain what it means for individuals to share one group mind. Group intentional states, he argues, are properties of a single, rationally unified, mental unit (Szanto, 2014). This unit should not be understood as some substantial entity existing over and above individuals; instead it should be seen as supervening on a normatively and rationally integrated set of individual mental states.…”