Group Minds

The various demographic generations have been described at large in the media, we all know the babyboomers; the millennials (1980-2000 born) are now the focus of attention, generation Z is next. Correlations within generations are observed, sometimes mistakenly seen as causalities, and sometimes very obvious causalities are overlooked. In this essay I point at the change in childbirth practices and notably Ceasarean (C-section) birthing as a potential factor in the behavior of the millennial generation. Especially the rich in the West have increasingly used, for various reasons, C-section and epidural and spinal anesthesia , and I posit that  in the millennial generation the effects on character, health and attitude may become more visible. What is now described as typical millennial traits like lack of initiative and fighting power might be typical for C-section born. Painless birthing might have consequences we didn’t anticipate.

Emerging trends in socio-political discourses in recent times have dwelt largely on the comparative study of parallel frameworks and political theories in the works of Western and African scholars with the aim of identifying seemingly familiar grounds that can be adopted in forging a common ground. The central idea is to attempt a canonization of theories that are considerably compatible in resolving common political problems across the divide. This paper therefore, attempts a comparative study of Anyiam Osigwe’s idea of the ‘group mind’ and J.J Rousseau’s notion of the ‘general will’ as identical frameworks with different orientations. The paper concludes that there are familiar grounds in the operation of both theories and consequently submits that they are practical tools that can be employed universally in the search for socio-political development.

Recent years have seen a resurgence in work on Edith Stein’s theory of empathy (Jardine 2015; Moran 2004; Szanto 2015; Taipale 2015; Vendrell Ferran 2015; Zahavi 2010) and of community and collective intentionality (Burns 2015; Caminada 2015; Calcagno 2014). Notably absent, however, is an account of the relationship between empathy and community. This chapter begins the work of making this relationship explicit. This can be of at least two-fold service to future research. First, it will show the conceptual richness and complexity of Stein’s theory of empathy, demonstrating that it cannot be confined to the theory-of-mind debate between simulation theorists, theory-theorists, and advocates of a direct perception model. Second, it may also serve to orient future research into collective intentionality by elucidating her original theory of communal experience. After establishing Steinian accounts of empathy and communal experience, I argue that empathy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for community.

Standard accounts in social ontology and the group cognition debate have typically focused on how collective modes, types and contents of intentions or representational states must be con-strued so as to constitute the jointness of the respective agents, cognizers and their engagements. However, if we take intentions, beliefs or mental representations all to instantiate some mental properties, then the more basic issue regarding such collective engagements is what it is for groups of individual minds to share a mind. Somewhat surprisingly, this very issue has not re-ceived much attention in the respective debates and when it has, typically the outlook has been skeptical or outright negative. In this paper I argue that it is epistemologically possible for a group of individuals to literally share a single mental unit. In particular, I will put forward and defend what I shall call the zombie conception of group minds.

To many people, it seems natural to conceive of the mind as a kind of ‘sandwich’ (Hurley) with cognition as the inner filling, wedged between action and perception. According to this model, mental states and activities are intimately tied to what’s going on inside the head, but only indirectly related to our bodies, our interactions with other people, and the world around us. In this course, we consider a loosely knit family of alternative approaches which study human agency and cognition as embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted (‘4E’) phenomena. In particular, we take as our focal point the ‘extended mind’ thesis, which asserts that our minds are ‘hybrid’ entities that emerge from the dynamic interplay between brains, bodies, and environmental resources such as symbols, tools, artifacts, cultural practices, norms, group structures, and social institutions.

In the first part of the course, we take our cue from Clark’s (2008) flagship presentation of the ‘extended mind’ thesis. By comparing Clark’s thesis with related developments, we explore its implications for understanding human cognition, affect, knowledge, rationality, and education. In the second part of the course, we examine Malafouris’s (2013) cross-disciplinary framework (‘material engagement theory’) for studying the human predisposition to reconfigure our bodies and minds by means of artifacts, tools, and material culture. Importantly, technologies are not simply ‘neutral instruments’ that facilitate our existence, but actively give shape to what we do, how we experience the world, and how we live our lives. To analyze the moral significance of technology, we take as our starting point Verbeek’s (2011) ‘post-phenomenological’ approach to moral agency as a property of human-technology associations rather than, as traditionally conceived, an exclusively human affair. In the third and last part of the course, we reflect on emergent scientific, technological, socio-economic, and political developments that (further) blur the boundaries between the traditional category of the human and its various ‘others,’ such as animals and machines, and that seem to be on a path to take us beyond human beings as we currently know them. Coming to terms with the potential displacement of ‘humanity’ as the shared reference point of our identity presents a formidable challenge. In our course, we contrast two strikingly different projections of what it means to be ‘human’ into the future: the ‘post-humanist’ framework outlined by Braidotti (2013), versus the ‘trans-humanist’ project advocated by Fuller (2010).

Could groups ever be an understanding subject (an epistemic agent ascribed with understanding) or should we keep our focus exclusively on the individuals that make up the group? The way this paper will shape an answer to this question is by starting from a case we are most willing to accept as group understanding, then mark out the crucial differences with an unconvincing case, and, ultimately, explain why these differences matter. In order to concoct the cases, however, we need to elucidate what it means to be attributed with understanding and what makes up an epistemic agent. I shall argue that it is abilities, above all, that guide our attributions of understanding. While it is true that understanding must go beyond single acts, this is not going beyond as in going behind them (to private occurrences which are impossible to discern and don't themselves contribute anything of value), but beyond as in considering what people could and would do: their discernable and valuable abilities. To conceptualize whom the abilities belong to, I will specify what it means to be an epistemic agent. I shall argue that it is being a successful target of the epistemic stance. The epistemic stance (heavily inspired by Dennett's intentional stance) forms an instrumental abstraction by attributing epistemic properties (i.e., beliefs, epistemic aims, problem-solving tactics) to an entity to explain or predict its behavior. Macro-systematicity (a higher-level pattern which a theory can exploit) is what makes the epistemic stance's abstraction an explanatory powerful one (regardless of how that macro-systematicity is realized) and emergence (the lack of a straightforward mapping relation between the micro and the macro) is what makes its power unique to a particular level of explanation. To end, I suggest two kinds of mapping-relations and walk through the shift from reducibility to emergence.

This paper shows that recent arguments from group problem solving and task performance to emergent group level cognition that rest on the social parity and related principles are invalid or question begging. The paper shows that standard attributions of problem solving or task performance to groups require only multiple agents of the outcome, not a group agent over and above its members, whether or not any individual member of the group could have accomplished the task independently.

The view that an agent’s cognitive processes sometimes include proper parts found outside the skin and skull of the agent is gaining increasing acceptance in philosophy of mind. One main empirical touchstone for this so-called active externalism is Edwin Hutchins’ theory of distributed cognition (DCog). However, the connection between DCog and active externalism is far from clear. While active externalism is one component of DCog, the theory also incorporates other related claims, which active externalists may not want to take on board. DCog implies a shift away from an organism-centred cognitive science to a focus on larger socio-technical-cum-cognitive systems. In arguing for this shift, proponents of DCog seem to accept that socio-cultural systems have some form of agency apart from the agencies of the individuals inside them. I will tentatively suggest a way in which such a notion of agency can be cashed out.

The concepts of superindividual mind and superindividual person represent a double ontological challenge: in formal ontology, as higher order objects; in regional ontology, as minds and persons. I will discuss Stein’s (1922) phenomenological description of common intentionality and her accounts of individual and superindividual personality and personhood in Social Ontology. Her argumentation is first to be proved within other phenomenological accounts, particulary in comparison with Husserl’s concept of higher order person (Personalität höherer Ordnung), Scheler’s total person (Gesamtperson) and Gallagher and Zahavi’s philosophy of mind (2008). Finally I will try to compare it with Petitt’s concept of group mind, stressing Stein’s distinction between stream of consciosness and stream of experience and the way the latter is founded on the former.

www.phenomenologyandmind.eu

In this paper, I introduce the emerging theory of judgment aggregation as a framework for studying group knowledge and group rationality in social epistemology. When a group or collective organization is given an epistemic task, its performance may depend on its ‘aggregation procedure’, i.e., its mechanism for aggregating the group members’ individual beliefs or judgments into corresponding collective beliefs or judgments endorsed by the group as a whole. I argue that a group’s aggregation procedure plays an important role in determining whether the group can meet two challenges: the ‘rationality challenge’ and the ‘knowledge challenge’. The rationality challenge arises when a group is required to endorse consistent beliefs or judgments. The knowledge challenge arises when the group’s beliefs or judgments are required to track certain truths. My discussion seeks to identify those properties of an aggregation procedure that affect a group’s success at meeting each of the two challenges.

Records of emails to FBI agent McElwee
Went through records and found a bunch of emails to FBI agent McElwee if anyone is interested. For the most part I am generally not all that deep into politics-except for Trump. Trump is a pathological liar, Trump is a sick virulent racist. Trump is vindictive as hell-and stupid as s**t. I am an American I have a right to my opinions and views. Here are emails sent to FBI agent McElwee with projections, forecasts, or "head's up" I sent to agent McElwee about future events. This is all I could remember at the moment. I might have overlooked a couple. In that most of my projections seem to be primarily intuition or political situational sense (there is absolutely nothing wrong with that), a, perhaps as much as 8%% or so, then a good analogy would be to compare it to the jet engine of a fighter jet in which the afterburner is the "psychic" aspect-which kicks on relatively randomly in my experience. I'm not the one that made an issue of spiritual-psychic anyway. I don't have to be amazing or miraculous-just consistent. All I am out to "prove" is that my beliefs are reasonable.

1, email to Agent McElwee 4-10-2020
"To me much of humanity looks like an uncontrolled pack of lemmings on a suicide run.
I tell you this Materialism Doctrine is utterly insane".

The Christian No Mask Madness without question produced a very large number of disproportionately high number of Americans who died of Corona Virus than most other European countries – by all accounts. A recent article stated that one hundred thousand Americans died of the corona virus that shouldn’t have compared to the Canadian death toll from corona virus. 

America's excess mortality rate from COVID-19 is significantly worse than Europe's
Janine Aron, John Muellbauer September 29, 2020

The United States has 4% of the world's population, but 21% of global infections and deaths attributed to COVID-19. This column shows that when comparing excess mortality rates, a more robust way to report deaths from a pandemic, the cumulative excess mortality rate in Europe from March to July is 28% lower than the US rate, contradicting the Trump administration's claim that the European rate is 33% higher. The northeastern United States - the region most comparable to individual European countries - has experienced much worse excess mortality than the worst-affected European countries. If the United States had kept its excess mortality rate at European level, approximately 57,800 American lives would have been saved.
https://voxeu.org/article/us-excess-mortality-rate-covid-19-substantially-worse-europe-s

The comparative analyzes are relatively consistent. Common sense would indicate that unmasked Christian madness is just that - madness. As of April 0f 2020, the extent of maskless madness hadn't really shown in the news so to speak.

The existence of group agents is relatively widely accepted. Examples are corporations, courts, NGOs, and even entire states. But should we also accept that there is such a thing as group consciousness? I give an overview of some of the key issues in this debate and sketch a tentative argument for the view that group agents lack phenomenal consciousness (pace Schwitzgebel 2015). In developing my argument, I draw on integrated information theory, a much-discussed theory of consciousness. I conclude by pointing out an implication of my argument for the normative status of group agents.

I argue that “group beliefs” are often best understood as commitments to the truth of a proposition, rather than as psychological states.  At the heart of the matter is the fact that groups can know the same propositions that individuals can, but that, under the most plausible account of the mental content of groups, they could not possibly believe the same propositions as individuals.  This is not to undermine the possibility of group knowledge.  Arguably, what is epistemically important about the belief condition on knowledge is not that beliefs are psychological states, but that believing a proposition is one way of endorsing it, and so becoming answerable for its truth.  Groups may not be capable of believing the same propositions as individuals, but they are capable of endorsing them.