Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Wanted: Functionalist Group-Mind Affirmers

Dear Brain Hammer-heads,

I'm looking to round up a pile of citations of functionalists who have explicitly endorsed, in response to Ned Block's Chinese Nation argument from "Troubles with Functionalism," that an appropriately organized Chinese population would give rise to a solitary group mind.

Thanks in advance,

Pete

11 comments:

  1. Pete,

    I have a book MS that's about 3/4 of the way finished on roughly this topic.

    I saw that you posted a link to my x-phi-ish paper with Bruno and Sarkissan stuff on your other blog, but the real philosophical arguments don't come out there. I have one paper on group minds that came out in philosophical psychology a couple of years back, and another thing that is currently under review--but niether of these explicitly address Block. I have a brief bit about Block in a chapter of the MS, but I'm not sure how much new ground that bit covers.

    The two best arguments, to my kowledge, that explicitly address Block's arguments are Bill Lycan's argument against Block in *Consciousness* and the DHM Brooks article calle "Group minds" that came out in AJP (?) in the early 80s (?).

    Are you planning on doing some work on the topic (I thought quite a bit about one of your arguments that looked to bear on group minds a while back, but I haven't written anything in response)...

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  2. sorry for all of the weird typos...my browser does not appear to be interfacing well with this blog.

    bryce

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  3. Thanks, Bryce! That's quite helpful.

    I'm thinking about this stuff right now because my paper, "Supervenience and Neuroscience," got accepted by Synthese, and I have till xmas of this year to make any revisions. One line of thought I develop in that paper is against group minds, and I'd like to have additional citations of pro-group-mind peeps, especially those who have explicitly endorsed functionalism/multi-realizability.

    Anyway, I'd love to see anything of your own along these lines, if you'd be comfortable with shooting it my way.

    Cheers!

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  4. I'll send you a couple of things shortly. But I also just remembered that Dave Chalmers talks about Block's case in TCM when he is doing his fading qualia and dancing qualia cases.

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  5. One more: Christian List and Phillip Pettit (2006). Group agency and supervenience. Southern journal of philosophy, 44, 85-105.

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  6. Thanks for all the stuff. This is super helpful.

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  7. Jackson and DBM in *Philosophy of Mind and Cognition*

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  9. Hi Pete,

    This may be to late for your purposes, and maybe the view floated isn't quite your target, but Rob Cummins, Pierre Poirier, and I flirt with viewing institutions as cognitive systems in "Epistemological Strata and the Rules of Right Reason": http://www.springerlink.com/content/r030l3r685003vu2/

    -Martin Roth

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