Macrocognition: A Theory of Distributed Minds and Collective by Bryce Huebner

By Bryce Huebner

We are living in an age of clinical collaboration, well known uprisings, failing political events, and extending company strength. lots of all these collective motion derive from the choices of clever and strong leaders, etc grow to be as a result of the aggregation of person pursuits. yet certainly collective mentality continues to be a seductive risk.

This e-book develops a singular method of allotted cognition and collective intentionality. It argues that actual cognition calls for the ability to interact in versatile goal-directed habit, and that this calls for really good representational platforms which are built-in in a fashion that yields fluid and skillful dealing with environmental contingencies. in response to this argument, the booklet claims that collective mentality could be posited the place and purely the place really good subroutines are built-in to yields goal-directed habit that's delicate to the troubles which are correct to a bunch as such. not like conventional claims approximately collective intentionality, this process finds that there are various sorts of collective minds: a few teams have cognitive capacities which are extra like those who we discover in honeybees or cats than they're like those who we discover in humans. certainly, teams are not likely to be "believers" within the fullest experience of the time period, and realizing why this is often the case sheds new gentle on questions about collective intentionality and collective accountability.

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Extra info for Macrocognition: A Theory of Distributed Minds and Collective Intentionality

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These arguments suggest that intentional systems theory can provide a useful tool for interpreting the collective behavior of some corporations, political parties, religious groups, colleges, and academic departments. After all, for the proponent of intentional systems theory, any entity that behaves in a way that is “fully and voluminously” predicted by adopting the intentional stance should be counted as a believer in the fullest sense of the term. However, even if positing mental states facilitates reliable predictions of collective behavior, this fact on its own should not persuade anyone who is not already a dyed-in-the-wool instrumentalist that there are collective mental states or processes.

I gather that this is the reason why Dennett himself has long been ambivalent about the possibility of group minds (1976; 1989a). indd 37 10/9/2013 4:59:47 PM 38 MACROCOGNITION adoption of the intentional stance), such patterns are the explananda of the cognitive sciences, not the explanans (Cummins 2000). 5 A Failed Attempt at Opening the Black Box Perhaps there is something more to learn about functionally specified black boxes by returning to the bubble-up architectures that I addressed above.

We must find some sort of analogy to fund our claims about the mentality of nonhuman entities, but precisely what sort of analogy is relevant is not transparently obvious. In thinking about the kinds of capacities that are shared across cognitive systems, it is helpful to consider a simple argument advanced by William James (1890) in the opening pages of the Principles of Psychology. James suggests that one of the core challenges facing psychology involves offering a clear strategy for discriminating intelligent action from mere mechanical behavior.

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