Group Action Without Group Minds

Who Is Afraid of Group Agents and Group Minds?

The heyday of the ideas of group mind and group agent seems to be well over. Why dig up these corpses that seem to have been buried ages ago? I will try to give at least a partial answer to this question in this chapter. Yet the main task below is to clarify these notions when viewed from a naturalistic point of view and compatibly with current theorizing in the collective intentionality litera...

Individual Minds as Groups, Group Minds as Individuals

Group Minds and the Case of Wikipedia

Group-level cognitive states are widely observed in human social systems, but their discussion is often ruled out a priori in quantitative approaches. In this paper, we show how reference to the irreducible mental states and psychological dynamics of a group is necessary to make sense of large scale social phenomena. We introduce the problem of mental boundaries by reference to a classic proble...

Group Routing without Group Routing Tables

We present a group routing protocol for a network of processes. The task of the protocol is to route data messages to each member of a process group. To this end, a tree of processes is constructed in the network, ensuring each group member is included in the tree. To build this tree, the group routing protocol relies upon the unicast routing tables of each process. Thus, group routing is a com...

Coalescing Minds: Brain Uploading-Related Group Mind Scenarios

We present a hypothetical process of mind coalescence, where artificial connections are created between two or more brains. This might simply allow for an improved form of communication. At the other extreme, it might merge the minds into one in a process that can be thought of as a reverse split-brain operation. We propose that one way mind coalescence might happen is via an exocortex, a prost...