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What, then, of theories of mental representation that rest on informational relations that do not rely on perceptual states as such, but instead rely on counterfactually stable causal relations between a cognitive system and its environment? Rupert contends that it’s hard to see why the relevant sorts of causal relations would obtain in virtue of states of the collectivity qua states of the collectivity rather than in virtue of states of the member of the collectivities qua members of the collectivities. At least initially it seems as though responding by way of an informational theory like Fodor’s should be easy. After all, according to Fodor there would only need to be some state of a group that could stand in the right sort of actual and counterfactual causal relations to some state of the world. As Fodor understands mental representation, in order for some mental representation “X” to be a representation of a property X it must meet three conditions:

1) It has to be a law that X causes “X”; 2) Some “X”s have to be caused by X; and

3) If anything other than X causes “X”, it’s causing “X” must be asymmetrically dependent on Xs causing “X”

representation is that there would have to be some state of a collectivity that stood in these sorts of causal relations to some property of the world. Fortunately, there are cases of collective representation that meet all of these conditions in the actual world. Consider the case of Naval vessel navigation discussed by Edwin Hutchins (1995).

Hutchins takes as his primary example of a collective representation the navigational fix cycle. The fix cycle is used to establish the location of a ship in relation to various sorts of landmarks in order to facilitate a computation of the trajectory of the ship (Hutchins 1995, 117). The interesting thing about the fix cycle is that it is the implementation of a computation that contains a number of processes, some of which are internal to persons and some of which are external to persons. As Hutchins (1995, 117 emphasis in the original) puts the point, “the fix cycle is accomplished by the propagation of representational state across a series of representational media”. Briefly, the representation of the ship’s location is produced through the interaction and association of a number of different lower level processes—each of which is already in the business of producing representations. Although the media that are produced by each of the relevant subroutines vary wildly, they are nonetheless capable of being brought into coordination with one another in order to give rise to a representation that can direct the behavior of the ship.

The navigation system of a ship consists of a number of systems that are designed to be sensitive to a variety of one-dimensional constraints in the world (Hutchins 1995, 118). The output of each of these systems is propagated across a number of media until the fix cycle produces a representation of the location of the ship on a chart. None of these various sub-systems (e.g., neither the alidade user, the hoey, the chart, nor the fathometer) is capable of producing an authoritative representation of the location of the ship. Instead, it is only by

bringing these various representations into coordination—often by way of taking repeated measurements—that a representation of a ships location is produced by the navigation system. That is, it is only by way of the coordinated activity of a variety of systems that the location of the ship can be determined and a representation of this location can be produced in such a way that it is usable for setting a course for the ship. Moreover, because of the way in which training occurs in the US Navy, the representations produced by the various individuals in the crew are typically only capable of being understood by those who are trained to take measurements using a particular device. The persons working on a particular task take as inputs the information (here we have the production of an analog representation) produced by some technology or the information they receive in a visual representation of the ships location from the bow. They then engage in some sort of computation in order to produce a representation that can be read by someone else. They then output a digital representation that can be read by another system and that will eventually be capable of being coordinated with other sorts of information. Notice, none of the individuals in the navigation crew represents the position of the ship. It’s only the navigation crew as a whole that represents the location of the ship.

Here is how this sort of system can be used to demonstrate the possibility of an informational theory of collective representation. The fix cycle is capable of varying lawfully with the location of the ship in the same way that person-level representations are supposed to vary with features of the world.92 If this were not the case, then there would be a whole lot

92 _{Human operators in association with their machines produce the constitutive representations, and it is no law}

of nature that people don’t make mistakes; so, it’s quite hard to see how nomic relations between representation and representatum could be established. However, it’s not at all clear that you get anything like strong nomic relations between neural states and features of the world. That said, my inclination is to take the relevant relations to hold ceteris paribus, and I would probably fill in the ceteris paribus clause with some functional claim concerning the proper operating of the system. This might be to abandon such theories of content. However, if that’s the case, it’s going to be true both for individuals and collectivities. And I say: So be it!

more chaos on the sea, more ships would be lost, and there would be a lot more ships running aground. This allows the fix cycle to meet the first of Fodor’s criteria. Moreover, the fix cycle of a given ship must at least some times be a representation that’s caused by the actual location of the ship—for exactly the same reasons. This allows the fix cycle to meet the second of Fodor’s criteria. Finally, it is very likely that, on at least one occasions, a fix cycle might produce a representation that fails to accurately map the location of a ship. However, its doing so will have to depend asymmetrically on accurate representations of location. Were it not the case that the deliverance of the fix cycle was the sort of system that delivered accurate representations except where there was some failure of the informational channels in the system, it would not be a representational structure that was capable of representing the location of the ship rather than just recording it in a way that accidentally happened to covary with some state of the world. The fix cycle thus meets the third of Fodor’s criteria. It looks, then, as though the fix cycle can represent the location of the ship. Why, then, would anyone be worried about the capacity of a collectivity to stand in the right sorts of causal relationships to things in the world?

Perhaps the fact that collective systems are widely distributed systems should itself be seen as a problem. Although collectivities are interconnected in important ways, they are also spatially distributed. Since there’s no unified consciousness that controls individual bodies through telepathic mind-control (as the Overmind does in Arthur C. Clarke’s (1953/2001)

Childhood’s end), the distributed computations which would have to take place in collective cognition will require information to be passed between distributed component systems. However, if the information from such systems will be useable to form unified intentions in a way that will allow for genuinely intentional action that’s responsive to the ever-changing

world in which we find ourselves, it seems that it will have to be the case that there is some person who, in the end, produces the final representation on the basis of her beliefs about the location of the ship. If this is true, it looks like she is doing the representation of the location of the ship rather than the navigation crew as a whole. Or so the objection goes.

There are, however, a number of things to be said in response to this objection. First, there are numerous cases in which a thing whose constituent parts are spatially (and even temporally) distributed seems to count as a single entity with stable behavioral dispositions (e.g., flocks of seagulls, the New Zealand All Blacks, Bank of America, the Black Panthers, and the British Navy (cf., Bloom and Kelemen 1995)). As Dennett (1989) puts the point, what is particularly striking about termite colonies, is that they are examples of complex systems that are capable of functioning in a "purposeful and integrated" way simply in virtue of having lots of subsystems doing their own thing without any central supervision. And, as Mitchel Resnick (1997) suggests, many systems that appear to have central controllers (and are usefully described as having them) do not. Moreover, as we’ve already seen, a person’s visual system is spatially distributed throughout her brain and across a number of different systems (e.g., the eye, the optic nerve, the lateral geniculate nucleus, primary visual cortex, the prefrontal cortex, the fusiform gyrus, etc.) yet we are not concerned about calling the visual system a single system. On the whole, individual cognitive systems aren’t all that different in this regard from collectivities. While the individual neurons of any particular cognitive system will be interconnected in important ways, they will also be spatially distributed. Moreover, if homuncular functionalism is the right view of the mind, individual mentality will be distributed across different systems because the computations that are required in order to give rise to intentional action are far too complex for any of the

individual systems to execute on their own.

Does this mean that there is no objection to be made on the basis of distribution? Of course not. However, if you are willing to throw out spatially distributed systems merely on the basis of their spatial distribution, many other things are going to have to go as well. I am inclined to think, however, that at the point where an individuals visual system becomes problematic as a case of a cognitive system, something has gone radically wrong. If all of human mentality falls away because of spatial distribution, we’ll have far bigger worries about the possibility of doing cognitive science than worrying about whether collectivities can have mental states. Unfortunately, however, there is a further objection lurking in the wings.

This more promising objection is grounded on worries about the limitations on the flow of information through a distributed system. The most promising version of this argument is based on an objection to centralized decision making in large-scale economic systems offered by Friedrich Hayek in “The use of knowledge in society”. Hayek (1945) recognized that one of the key problems facing any economic order is a worry about how to utilize the highly dispersed, incomplete, and often contradictory ‘data’ possessed by various individuals in a society in order to produce rational economic activity. In considering answers to this worry, Hayek (1945) argues that decision-making is possible only in cases where there is some single individual that actually makes a decision.

Here is one way in which this objection might be developed. In any society where people are engaging in collaborative activities, planning will rest, at least to a large extent, on information that has not been gathered by the person who will in the end make the decision to execute the plan. Instead information will be collected by a number of individuals, each of

whom will have a unique perspective on the information that she’s collecting. The problem is that when information is passed to the planner, it will take a variety of different forms depending on the context in which the information was gathered as well as facts about the psychology of the person who is gathering the information. In some cases, this even leads to contradictory information being gathered by the planner. Furthermore, the more distributed the system is, the more likely it will be that there will be huge differences in the information that is collected since much of the information that will necessary for collective action will be highly dependent on the immediate circumstances at hand and the more distributed the system is the more differences there will be in immediate circumstances. The problem is that the planner will now either have to make a decision about which of this information she will pay attention to, or she will have to make a decision of her own about what to do—in which case the decision will be based exclusively on her preferences and not on the preferences of the people who have collected the information. This seems to suggest that the decision- making that underwrites a collective action is really just individual decision making of a planner embedded in complex social circumstances.

In the case of the economic decisions, the continuous flow of goods and services that is required to maintain a functioning economy requires continuous deliberative adjustment. However, in cases where quick action is required because of changing circumstances, as in the case of response to economic problems of various sorts, the filtering of information by a central planner will be far too slow to effectively respond to changes in circumstance.93 Note, however, that the problem is not merely a problem with the distribution of the informational

93 _{This sort of argument is far and away the most compelling argument against the centralized socialism of the}

former Soviet Socialist Republics as well as the Eastern European countries that adopted, or were forced to adopt, Soviet economic policies. The argument also, however, cuts against any form of centralized economy including state capitalism. If Hayek is right, the only option is a radically decentralized political apparatus.

content across a large system, but a worry that the sort of informational content that will be relevant to making a particular decision will change as the circumstances with which the system is faced change. So, if there is a centralized decision making system, it will have to be able not only to monitor the diversity of information coming into the central system, but it will also have to send out requests for the right sort of information at the right time—but this won’t be possible without interpreting the information coming in from the various sources, which will always be out of date and incomplete. As Hayek puts the key point:

The problem which we meet here is by no means peculiar to economics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and with most of our cultural inheritance, and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science.

For any highly distributed system to which we might want to attribute collective mentality, there will be a difficulty with the diversity of information that will be prohibitive of rapid action in response to changes in circumstances for the system in question. So, if there has to be a central control system for collective decision-making, this will lead in the end either to an individual decision made by one member of the collectivity (in which case, it would not be a collective mental act), or it will lead no deliberative activity at all on the part of the collectivity (since the circumstances in which the system finds itself will change much too quickly for the system to respond). Neither alternative looks to be a good result for the mentality of collectivities.

This objection is quite compelling. However, rather than pushing us away from collective mentality, this argument actually suggests a key point for the defense of collective mentality. To begin to answer the objection, we must note that it presupposes that cognition takes place in some sort of centralized processing system. However, we have very good reasons to think that even human cognition isn’t centralized in this way. In order to make

sense of the sort of architecture that we should expect for a collectivity, then, we need to stop and think briefly about the way in which human cognitive architecture happens to be organized. However, Daniel Dennett and Marcel Kinsbourne (1991) have offered compelling arguments for the claim that the human capacity for consciousness requires nothing like a central observer. While it is true that the brain has to be able to bind things together in some way, there is no need to suppose that this must happen in one place. In place of a centralized Cartesian subject that experiences things from inside a Cartesian theater, Dennett and Kinsbourne (1991) propose the multiple drafts model according to which conscious thought is accomplished by using multiple processes of interpretation and elaboration. On this view, each of the subsystems in the brain make localized and specialized observations that fix informational content. Each of these observations, then, reflects the state of the brain at the time of the observation. The question, however, is whether or not there must be a single process that unifies these informational states into a single narrative.

Dennett and Kinsbourne argue that localized discriminations should not be understood as states that are meant to be fed-forward for consideration by a central discriminator. Instead, they argue for an account of consciousness as content sensitive settling (Dennett and Kinsbourne 1991). Using the analogy of synching sound tracks to films, Dennett and Kinsbourne argue that temporal inferences, for example, are drawn by comparing the content of several data arrays. Moreover, they argue that once such a temporal ordering is drawn, it need not be drawn again by a higher-level discrimination. Supposing that something like this view of human consciousness is plausible, we see an immediate parallel to the sort of discriminations that give rise to a fix cycle in the navigation of a naval vessel. In a fix cycle, the location of a ship is determined by the synchronizing of a number