Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) challenge us to expand our conception of introspection, and mentality in general, beyond neurotypical human cases. This article describes a technologically possible "ancillary mind" modeled on a system envisioned in Ann Leckie's (2013) science fiction novel Ancillary Justice. The ancillary mind constitutes a borderline case between an intimately communicating group of individuals and a single, unified, spatially distributed mind. It occupies a gray zone with respect to personal identity and subject individuation, neither determinately one person or conscious subject nor determinately many persons or conscious subjects. Advocates of a Phase Transition View of personhood or Discrete Phenomenal Realism might reject the possibility of indeterminacy concerning personal identity and subject individuation. However, the Phase Transition View is empirically unwarranted, and Discrete Phenomenal Realism is metaphysically implausible. If ancillary minds defy discrete countability, the same might be true for actual group minds on Earth and human cases of multiple personality or Dissociative Identity.
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Full draft here. As usual, comments, questions, objections welcome, either as comments on this post or directly by email to my academic address.
6 comments:
It always gets my attention when someone mentions consciousness. Will look forward to your thoughts.
https://rdcu.be/dd9Pz es
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-021-00537-6#auth-Daniel-Shabasson
If you going to compare illusioness to consciousness...
...tradesman accillarest that I am, may I suggest...
That illusion is best understood when an illusion appears or is present...
That conscious is best understood when consciousness appears or is present...
Then life can become very very interesting, forever maybe...
...my disposition to indiscretions aboud...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/introspection/
This link is foundational to practises and exercises in groups for introspection today...
...serving to help remind oneself of oneself...
A couple of things I noticed:
The discussion of how an Ancillary mind would respond to inconsistent perceptions among its ancillaries could bring in comparisons to how our minds handle inconsistent data. For example, sometimes I look at a trompe l'oeil optical illusion, and it looks 3D; I can touch it with my fingers and confirm haptically that it's just a 2D image, but still see the 3D image with my eyes. The effect is disconcerting, but not really threatening to my identity or personhood. It seems likely that an Ancillary mind could have a similar way of dealing with inconsistent perceptions.
In the 2015 paper on the USA, you rejected treating "high-bandwidth neural synchrony" as a condition for consciousness. In this paper you seem to use how "swift, thick, and direct" the cognitive connectivity is as a key factor in determining how much the Ancillary mind is a single individual. Those two positions aren't contradictory, but there is a bit of tension between them. I agree more with this newer version.
At the end, you wonder if "people with dissociative identity might in some cases defy our usual countability assumptions concerning personhood." There is one obvious way in which they do: they are sometimes treated differently in law. For example, a court may find diminished or even no responsibility on the part of a person whose physical body committed a criminal act, if that act was committed by an alternate personality.
Which ties into the bigger point I would like to suggest: intention. Alternate personalities have a different identity, which I understand as an intention to be a certain person or thing. Composite individuals may be composite beings precisely to the extent that all of their composite parts have the intention to be a part of that individual. If the ancillary robots have no capacity to assert an indepedent identity, then there is no identity issue, simply one single Ancillary mind. If they have the capacity to identify as something other than the Ancillary mind, but in fact all continue to identify as part of the same individual, then they remain part of a single individual. If one or more of them changes their intention or identity or makes the choice to leave, then the Ancillary mind would lose that single part.
I don't know how introducing intention as a factor would affect your argument that there are indeterminate cases. I'm not sure if one can have indeterminate intentions... It seems likely that you can.
This sounds like it's going to be an interesting issue of the JCS. (Hope I'll be able to access it.)
My usual response to these types of questions is that there's no fact of the matter. That whether there's only one mind here or multiple depends on how we choose to define "mind". But I'm obviously dismissing the phase transition and phenomenal arguments.
Reading it, I do wonder if a case couldn't be made around what interests the various bodies are oriented toward. If their own individual interests, then they're separate entities. If all toward the whole's interests, then one unified one.
But one caution would be that people can sacrifice their own interests for those of the group's, such as a soldier giving up their life for their country. My (somewhat jaded) view is that this far more rare than our stories imply, but it might still be a complication in using interests as a guide.
Another caution might be that's it's not clear how unified our own psychology is along these lines. Again, I think most times we're oriented toward our own interests. But I could see cases where it isn't strictly true.
And it's worth noting (SPOILER ALERT) that it turns out to not be true for one of the group entities in Leckie's excellent novel, which ends up in a civil war against itself.
Interesting paper Eric!
Mike
He wrote that article
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