The first worry that might be suggested concerns the possibility of limitations on the sorts of states that collectivities might be able to exhibit. While people possess myriad mental capacities, it’s difficult to imagine a collectivity that could possess all of these. However, the thought goes, if a collection of humans is to count as minded, it must be capable of having at
least the same sorts of mental states that we find in the human beings that compose the collectivity; otherwise there would be no reason to suppose additional mental states beyond those possessed by the individuals that compose the collectivity. So, if there are mental states that collectivities can’t possess but that their constituents can, the collectivities must not have minds. But there are clearly states that can be possessed by the individuals that compose a collectivity but not by the collectivity itself. For example, every member of a human collectivity could have the capacity to enjoy a sunset; however, it’s difficult to imagine what it could mean to say that a collectivity has the capacity to enjoy that same sunset without appealing to the phenomenal states of the individuals who enjoy it. A proponent of this objection would claim that any system to which we ought to be willing to concede mentality will have to be able to experience such qualitative states as enjoying the sunset. However, if every qualitative experience of enjoyment is localized in an individual, and if ascriptions of enjoyment to collectivities should always be read distributively, then collectivities aren’t the sort of thing to which we ought to be willing to concede mentality.
This objection is misguided on a number of levels. First, there are very few sorts of organisms that take enjoyment in watching the sunset. It may just be humans that watch sunsets for the purposes of enjoyment; and if it’s not just humans, it’s probably just people and some tribes of bonobos. So, if particular qualitative experiences are a necessary condition on mentality, then humans, and perhaps some bonobos, are the only cognitive
systems that we know of—and this is such a bizarre claim that it’s not worth adopting. This point is, of course, rhetorical. However, the rhetoric generalizes in an incredibly robust way. We know that there are a number of mental states that can occur in human systems that cannot occur in some simple systems. Humans have the capacity for normative reflection;
scorpions and badgers probably don’t. When I get a phone call from a friend inviting me over for dinner, I can decide whether I want to go or not; but when a scorpion detects vibrations in the air with its trichobothria and in the sand with its pedipalps it has no choice, it just moves toward the prey (and sometimes to its death). The scorpion is immediately pulled toward the food by the vibration sensations; it doesn’t decide to act. In fact, it’s probably true that all scorpion activity is driven by pushmi-pullyu representations—they get around in the world without reflection, decision or higher-order cognitive, states. However, it seems quite reasonable to me to say that such states are mental states.
Moreover, there are a number of capacities that are not possessed by all members of
Homo sapiens sapiens. We know of lots of mental disorders that make it impossible for a person to be in certain sorts of mental states. Some people are achromats, seeing the world only in black and white. Others are autistic and don’t have the capacity to attribute complex mental states to others that are different from their own. The cases go on and on. Now, it would seem crazy to rule out all of these organisms as cognitive systems. So, to put the response briefly, we ought to recognize that mentality is not an all or nothing affair.
Perhaps collectivities will lack qualia. However, even this is an open question that will turn on what our best theory of what qualia are in humans. While it’s probably true that collectivities will only be able to possess the sorts of mental states that are exhaustively explained in terms of their computational structure, whatever those happen to be, I’m inclined to think that a representational theory of qualia is probably the right sort of view, I don’t want to come down on that issue at this time. Instead, I’ll just say that we need to be careful to specify precisely what claim we’re making when we say that collective mentality is possible. We need to be precise about what sorts of mental states we mean to be talking about
and we need to be careful to specify the computational structure that underwrites this attribution of a mental state (or mental states). Thus, I begin with the reasonably untendentious assumption that there are no collectivities around these parts that exhibit conscious states. However, without further argument, this does not, by itself, offer a good reason to deny mentality to collectivities.
This first argument can, thus, be set aside, and I suggest that we follow Rob Wilson (2004) in noting that in order for collective mentality to be possible, it will only have to be possible that there could be a collectivity that had at least one sort of psychological state. Since there is a spectrum of mentality running from systems that possess a wide range of mental states and systems that possess relatively few, we shouldn’t begin by asking whether there are any group minds, but we should, instead focus on the question: can any collectivity have beliefs (or desires, or memories, or perceptions, or emotions)? There are, however, other objections lurking in the area.