Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

What it Might Be like to Be a Group Agent

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
Neuroethics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Many theorists have defended the claim that collective entities can attain genuine agential status. If collectives can be agents, this opens up a further question: can they be conscious? That is, is there something that it is like to be them? Eric Schwitzgebel (Philosophical Studies 172: 1697–1721, 2015) argues that yes, collective entities (including the United States, taken as a whole), may well be significantly conscious. Others, including Kammerer (Philosophia 43: 1047–1057, 2015), Tononi and Koch (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 370: 20140167–20140167, 2015) , and List (Noûs 52: 295–319, 2018) reject the claim. List does so on the basis of Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (Encyclopedia of Consciousness, 403–416, 2009). I argue here that List’s rejection is too quick, and that groups can, at least in principle, display the kind of informational integration we might think is necessary for consciousness. However, group consciousness will likely differ substantially from the individual experiences that give rise to it. This requires the defender of group consciousness to face up to a similar combination problem as the panpsychist.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Those who defend a robust cognitive phenomenology might take issue with my characterization, because they hold that there is a ‘something it is like’ to be aware of some fact. For clarification, I mean awareness to be something along the lines of ‘potentially accessible in working memory.’

  2. Though see [14] for a rejection of this distinction.

  3. For some other treatments, which I will largely set aside for the purposes of this paper, see [15,16,17].

  4. Throughout, I will use the terms ‘group,’ ‘corporate,’ ‘collective,’ and ‘plural’ interchangeably.

  5. Similarly, Rupert [10] argues that having phenomenal states is a requirement for intentionality, and therefore that groups lack mental states in virtue of lacking phenomenal states.

  6. Kammerer [2] attempts to articulate a sophisticated anti-nesting principle that does not run into the same problems, but Schwitzgebel [27] argues that it is basically unsuccessful, and I endorse his argument. Most germane for our purposes, Kammerer’s anti-nesting principle does not seem to rule out collective consciousness in principle; at best, he can only hope to show that collective entities that are similar in organization to the United States are not conscious. Other everyday collective entities, on the contrary, are left on the table.

  7. This also seems important for rejecting Baddorf’s argument. If groups can be conscious, but only insignificantly so, then they can be minded, but only insignificantly so, and therefore may not be apt candidates for moral responsibility in the form of accountability.

  8. As we’ll see in §5, this recalls recent work on the unity of consciousness. For an extended discussion, see [29].

  9. See [30] for some evidence to this effect. The researchers found that, when multiple people watched the same movie and then were asked to report details about it while in an fMRI scanner, patterns of neural activation in higher-order areas were more similar between people recalling the same event than between recall and perception. The authors take this to indicate that there was at least very similar spatial organization of the memories of those experiences, which means that the experience of those memories is very similar across the different participants, more similar than the firsthand experience and the experience of remembering for any subject.

  10. Sam Coleman [31] thinks that it is impossible for subjects to combine in the way I’m suggesting they do. I’ll return to this concern and the nature of the combination in §5.

  11. See [32] for a discussion of joint attention that seems especially pertinent to the points I make here.

  12. This isn’t to say that the tasks to which groups are put are straightforwardly intended by their members at the moment of their creation. Social groups are sometimes formed unknowingly, for ends that are not entirely transparent to all of their members. Those ends might also change over time as members’ needs change. But the point here is to say that individuals operate in groups (in the “we-mode”, as Tuomela [35] phrases it) only in the context of certain tasks, and that the experience of groups will be tied to their performance of those tasks.

  13. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this issue.

  14. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this issue.

  15. I am grateful to Caleb Dewey, Eve Isham, Terry Horgan and his Philosophy of Mind working group, Brandon Ashby, and two anonymous reviewers at Neuroethics for their comments on this paper at various stages in its production.

References

  1. Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2015. If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious. Philosophical Studies 172: 1697–1721. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0387-8.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Kammerer, François. 2015. How a materialist can deny that the United States is probably conscious – Response to Schwitzgebel. Philosophia 43: 1047–1057. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9653-z.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Tononi, Giulio, and Christof Koch. 2015. Consciousness: Here, there and everywhere? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 370: 20140167–20140167. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0167.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. List, Christian. 2018. What is it like to be a group agent? Noûs 52: 295–319. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12162.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Tononi, Giulio. 2009. An integrated information theory of consciousness. In Encyclopedia of Consciousness, 403–416. Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012373873-8.00014-1.

  6. Epstein, Brian. 2018. "Social Ontology", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =

  7. Durkheim, Emile. 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method. Ed. Steven Lukes. London: Macmillan Education UK. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16939-9.

  8. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fredrich. 2018. The phenomenology of Spirit. Eds. Terry Pinkard and Michael Baur. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139050494.

  9. Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. 2015. Reading capital: The complete edition. New York: Verso.

  10. Rupert, Robert D. 2014. Against group cognitive states. In From Individual to Collective Intentionality, eds. Sara Rachel Chant, Frank Hindriks, and Gerhard Preyer, 97–111. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199936502.003.0005.

  11. List, Christian, and Philip Pettit. 2011. Group agency. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199591565.001.0001.

  12. Björnsson, Gunnar, and Kendy Hess. 2017. Corporate crocodile tears? On the reactive attitudes of corporate agents. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94: 273–298. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12260.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Block, Ned. 1995. On a confusion about a function of consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18: 227–247. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00038188.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Kouider, Sid, Vincent de Gardelle, Jérôme Sackur, and Emmanuel Dupoux. 2010. How rich is consciousness? The partial awareness hypothesis. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14: 301–307. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.04.006.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Brooks, D.H.M. 1986. Group minds. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 64: 456–470. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048408612342641.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Huebner, Bryce. 2013. Macrocognition: A theory of distributed minds and collective intentionality. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199926275.001.0001.

  17. Pettit, Philip. 2018. Consciousness incorporated. Journal of Social Philosophy 49: 12–37. https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12219.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Chalmers, David J. 1996. The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Baddorf, Matthew. 2017. Phenomenal consciousness, collective mentality, and collective moral responsibility. Philosophical Studies 174: 2769–2786. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0809-x.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Putnam, Hilary. 1965. Psychological predicates. In Art, mind, and religion, eds. W.H. Capitan and D.D. Merrill. Liverpool: University of Pittsburgh Press.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Tononi, Giulio. 2012. The integrated information theory of consciousness: An updated account. Archives Italiennes de Biologie 150: 290–326.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Kim, Jaegwon. 1993. Supervenience and mind: Selected philosophical essays. In Cambridge studies in philosophy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  23. Kim, Jaegwon. 1998. Mind in a physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/4629.001.0001.

  24. Kim, Jaegwon. 1992. Multiple realization and the metaphysics of reduction. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52: 1. https://doi.org/10.2307/2107741.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Fodor, Jerry. 2008. Special sciences: Still autonomous after all these years. Noûs 31: 149–163. https://doi.org/10.1111/0029-4624.31.s11.7.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Block, Ned. 2007. Troubles with functionalism. In Consciousness, Function, and Representation. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2111.003.0006.

  27. Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2016. Is the United States phenomenally conscious? Reply to Kammerer. Philosophia 44: 877–883. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9725-8.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2012. Why Tononi should think that the United States is conscious. The Splintered Mind. https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2012/03/why-tononi-should-think-that-united.html. Accessed 10 Jul 2020.

  29. Bayne, Tim. 2010. The Unity of consciousness. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199215386.001.0001.

  30. Chen, Janice, Yuan Chang Leong, Christopher J. Honey, Chung H. Yong, Kenneth A. Norman, and Uri Hasson. 2017. Shared memories reveal shared structure in neural activity across individuals. Nature Neuroscience 20: 115–125. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4450.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Coleman, Sam. 2014. The real combination problem: Panpsychism, micro-subjects, and emergence. Erkenntnis 79: 19–44. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9431-x.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Siposova, Barbora, and Malinda Carpenter. 2019. A new look at joint attention and common knowledge. Cognition 189: 260–274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.03.019.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Wegner, Daniel M. 1987. Transactive memory: A contemporary analysis of the group mind. In Theories of group behavior, ed. Brian Mullen and George R. Goethals, 185–208. New York, NY: Springer New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4634-3_9.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  34. Wegner, Daniel M., Ralph Erber, and Paula Raymond. 1991. Transactive memory in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61: 923–929. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.61.6.923.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Tuomela, Raimo. 2007. The philosophy of sociality. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313390.001.0001.

  36. Mørch, Hedda Hassel. 2019. Is the integrated information theory of consciousness compatible with Russellian Panpsychism? Erkenntnis 84: 1065–1085. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-9995-6.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Roelofs, Luke. 2016. The unity of consciousness, within subjects and between subjects. Philosophical Studies 173: 3199–3221. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0658-7.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and Program in Cognitive Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Max F. Kramer

Authors
  1. Max F. Kramer
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Max F. Kramer.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Kramer, M.F. What it Might Be like to Be a Group Agent. Neuroethics 14, 437–447 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-021-09459-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-021-09459-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation