New Paper in Draft: Introspection in Group Minds, Disunities of Consciousness, and Indiscrete Persons
I have a new paper in draft, for a special issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies. Although the paper makes reference to a target article by Francois Kammerer and Keith Frankish, it should be entirely comprehensible without knowledge of the target article, and hopefully it's of independent interest.
Abstract:
Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) challenge us to expand our conception of introspection, and mentality in general, beyond neurotypical human cases. This article describes a technologically possible "ancillary mind" modeled on a system envisioned in Ann Leckie's (2013) science fiction novel Ancillary Justice. The ancillary mind constitutes a borderline case between an intimately communicating group of individuals and a single, unified, spatially distributed mind. It occupies a gray zone with respect to personal identity and subject individuation, neither determinately one person or conscious subject nor determinately many persons or conscious subjects. Advocates of a Phase Transition View of personhood or Discrete Phenomenal Realism might reject the possibility of indeterminacy concerning personal identity and subject individuation. However, the Phase Transition View is empirically unwarranted, and Discrete Phenomenal Realism is metaphysically implausible. If ancillary minds defy discrete countability, the same might be true for actual group minds on Earth and human cases of multiple personality or Dissociative Identity.
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Full draft here. As usual, comments, questions, objections welcome, either as comments on this post or directly by email to my academic address.