Flavors of Group Consciousness: Vanilla, Strawberry, and Chunky Monkey with Extra Nuts

Yesterday, I was rereading Philip Pettit's 2018 article "Consciousness Incorporated". Due to some vocabulary mismatch, I find his exact commitments on group phenomenal consciousness not entirely clear [note 1]. (By "consciousness" or "phenomenal consciousness" I just mean conscious experience, the stream of experience, or "something-it's-like-ness" in a relatively theoretically innocent sense.)

Pettit endorses group consciousness of some flavor. But what flavor? A mild flavor, he hopes: something "sufficient to engage philosophical interest" but not too "challenging and mysterious" (p. 33). In contrast, in my article "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious", I see myself as defending a radical position that clashes sharply with ordinary common sense. So the question is, can we distinguish among different degrees of ontological commitment in endorsing "group consciousness", with vanilla on one end (palatable to almost everyone) and, on the other end, well, let's call it "Chunky Monkey with Extra Nuts".

Group Consciousness: Vanilla

Sometimes a group of people all, or mostly, share a particular conscious state -- in a weak or innocuous sense of "sharing". Individually, everyone (or almost everyone, or at least enough of the group) is undergoing that type of conscious experience. So if I say that the theater audience was alarmed by the sudden collapse of the lead actor onstage, or if I say that World Cup viewers around the globe saw the amazing goal, and if we assume that the alarm and the seeing are conscious experiences, then in a certain innocuous sense the groups share conscious experiences.

(One complication: The alarm or the seeing might manifest differently in different members of the group, depending on, e.g., their mood and their viewing position. Set this aside for simplicity.)

Here's a depiction:

[as always, click to clarify and enlarge]

"The audience felt alarmed by the actor's sudden collapse": In this vanilla version of group consciousness, that statement only implies that (enough) of the audience experienced, as individuals, a feeling of alarm (conscious state A in the depiction above).

Pettit clearly wants something more flavorful than this.

Group Consciousness: Chunky Monkey with Extra Nuts

A radical view of group consciousness, in contrast, posits the existence of a stream of experience possessed by the group in addition to the streams of experience possessed by each individual. I have argued that the United States might have a distinctive stream of experience over and above the experiences had by individual citizens and residents of the United States. If streams of experience, or centers of subjectivity, are discrete, countable things (they might not be), and the group contains N members, then on the Chunky-Monkey-Extra-Nuts view, there are N+1 discrete streams of conscious experience -- 300,000,000-ish for the individual members of the United States plus another one for the group as a whole.

Furthermore, on a view of this sort, the conscious experiences of the group mind might be very different from the conscious experiences of any individual members of the group. If the United States is a conscious entity, for example, it might consciously enforce an embargo. But what it feels like, subjectively from the inside, to enforce an embargo might be completely opaque to any individual person. (Alternatively, consider a possible human-grade group mind that is composed out of smaller insect-grade individual minds, capable of appreciating Shakespeare in a manner far beyond what any insect could do: my Antarean Antheads case).

Here's a depiction:

It is highly counterintuitive (in current mainstream Anglophone culture) to think that the United States, or any existing groups of people, actually give rise to a discrete, higher-level stream of consciousness at the group level -- a distinct locus of subjectivity. On this view, group-level mental states arise from, and are not merely composed of, the mental states (and other interactions) of the members, so that there are four, not three, distinct occurrences of experience A (three among the individuals and a fourth for the group) as well as the possibility of experiences (B, D, E) that occur in none of the individuals. If you find this a weird and radical view, you are probably understanding it correctly.

Pettit presumably doesn't want to defend this flavor of group consciousness. [Note 2]

Group Consciousness: Strawberry

Can we and Pettit find an intermediate flavor -- more interesting than vanilla but not as wild as extra nuts?

Pettit compares the relation that a group mind (or "agent") has to its members to the relation of that a statue has to the molecules composing it:

As the statue relates to its molecules, so the group agent relates to its members. The group agent is not the same agent as the set of its members, because the set of members is not, as such, an agent at all. But still, the group agent is a set of members -- a suitably organized or networked set -- and qua set it is the same collection as the set of members who make it up. The group agent is distinct from the members under the one aspect but not distinct from them under the other (p. 23).

This physical analogy captures the intended non-radicalness of Pettit's view. It is a little too simple, however, since not everything in the members' minds belongs to the group mind, and since the group can have mental states that none of the members individually possess. This isn't analogous to how we normally think of the molecular composition of statues.

A favorite example of Pettit's is the following: The group has three members. Member A believes P, Q, and not-R. Member B believes P, not-Q, and R. Member C believes not-P, Q, and R. No one believes P-and-Q-and-R. The group decides collectively, however, that P-and-Q-and-R is a view they can stand behind as a group. They might endorse "We believe P&Q&R" -- though not all of them even need to endorse that, as long as there's a procedure by which it comes to constitute the group's view, for example, by being voiced by the leader after a proper consultative process.

We might depict the situation thus:

The conscious experience of the group is in the red box: The group consciously believes P&Q&R. It's not enough for the members to share a conscious state (e.g., A), and no individual believes P&Q&R, but due to structural features of their relationships, the group believes P&Q&R in virtue of the right members accepting that "we believe P&Q&R". (Let's ignore the trickier case in which the group believes P&Q&R without any individual member accepting that the group believes this.)

Now, is this an interestingly intermediate "strawberry" flavor of group consciousness? Maybe! But here's a question: In virtue of what is "P&Q&R" a conscious belief that the group possesses? If P&Q&R is a conscious belief because individual group members consciously endorse P and Q and R and/or P&Q&R in the right kind of coordinated way, then maybe this is a fairly vanilla view after all: Conscious experience is still the province of individual people. What Pettit adds is only a somewhat more complex way of picking out which individual conscious experiences count as the group's shared conscious experience. Group consciousness is just individual consciousness, plus a criterion for attributing some of those states to the group as a whole.

On the other hand, if the social relationships among the group members yield more than that, if the group's conscious experience arises from the interconnections among members so that conscious experiences at the group level aren't just individuals' conscious experiences plus a criterion -- well then maybe we're starting to get into Chunky Monkey territory after all.

Suppose there's something it's like to consciously think, "Ah, P&Q&R, that's right!" On the Chunky Monkey view, this experience could really transpire in the group entity, even if it occurs in no individual member's head. On the strawberry-that's-basically-vanilla view, that's impossible, and to say that the group consciously endorses P&Q&R is only to say something about structural relationships among what individual group members do consciously endorse.

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Note 1: Pettit prefers "coawareness", which he appears to equate with "access consciousness" in Ned Block's sense. He says that access consciousness implies there being "something it's like" and maybe vice versa (at least for the case of belief). Despite this, he says he is "setting aside" the issue of phenomenal consciousness -- perhaps thinking of "phenomenal consciousness" as a phrase that is more theoretically commissive than I hear it as being (see p. 12-14, 33).

Note 2: In footnote 6, for example, Pettit favorably cites his sometimes-coauthor Christian List's 2018 criticism of my article on USA consciousness.