Group Mind

from Richard Ostrofsky of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed) www.secthoughts.com quill@travel-net.com March, 2011 A fantasy: Somewhere in your body, a single cell (let's call her Suzie), just one among about fifty trillion others, achieves a breakthrough of consciousness, coming to perceive and understand that the system she is part of has a collective mind of its own. Sadly, as often in such cases, her neighbors were sure she had gone insane. "How could you be right?" Suzie's fellow cells demanded. "We are autonomous beings, each one of us, acting on the conditions we find around us. It's true that sometimes we seem to be cooperating toward some larger purpose, but that is just a manner of speaking an outcome of what we are doing separately. How could all of us together (different as we are) want or know or intend anything no one of us can imagine?" But the little cell was sure she was right, and set out to prove her point, devising all sorts of statistical indices and running numerous opinion polls to study her world and its properties as a whole. What she quickly realized, however, was that her first problem was really a philosophical one: just to explain what it would mean for a group of individuals (with separate minds of their own) to comprise a collective mind together. She had to define what she wanted to study, and get others to accept her definition. Well, what does it mean? We humans feel that we have minds, and mostly agree that Suzie was right; but her question is still a difficult one: What does it mean for a group of entities (or any system) to be a mind? When we look closely at this matter, it turns out that there can be no simple answer because mind is not an all-or-nothing proposition not the sort of thing that you either have or lack. We have various capabilities in mind when we speak of minds. Here are just a few of the things we mean when we speak about our own: To begin with, we think of a mind as framing and acting upon some representation of its world. That representation might be almost as local and limited as that of a single cell in our bodies, or it might be as broad and rich as Einstein's conception of the whole universe. No matter. Mind at every scale must collect and work with information about itself and its world. To be part of a group-mind, as Suzie thinks she is, would involve having access to and being guided by some version and subset of the

information available to the whole. Second, minds act from purposes, intentions, driven by suggestions and reasons rather than by mechanical causes. Mere things move because something pushes or pulls them. Minds move because they have some reason to do so, one that prevails over competing reasons to do nothing, or do something else. Individual members (like our friend Suzie) of any group mind would be guided and constrained in some way, perhaps without their even knowing it, to contribute to that mind's collective purpose. At the very least, a group mind would provide the over-all context in which its components find their places and do their individual jobs. This contextual binding, as we might call it, might be very strict or fairly loose and lenient up to a point. The simplest minds take in whatever comes at them that they are equipped to receive and respond to. More sophisticated ones are capable of collective attention that is to say, of allocating even of voluntarily directing their resources of parsing and interpretation toward some matter of interest. But why are some things more interesting than others, and why is anything of interest in the particular way that it is? Humans have a special sub-system (the affect system as it is called) to recognize what is of collective interest to all those trillions of cells for example, whether something is to be ignored or fought, fled from, eaten, or investigated further. Human groups make similar decisions collectively, with or without specialized sub-systems e.g. the politicians, the media to help them do it. They have collective emotions, feelings and moods, rustling through their networks at any point in time.Any mind will need to defend itself from potential overload of information, if only by clinging to blissful ignorance of stuff it doesn't need to know. Our groups do that, just like individuals. Yet another attribute of some minds, and characteristically of human ones, is the faculty of 'time-binding' (as Korzybski called it): our capability to represent a remembered past, an envisioned future or a fantasy of either in 'the mind's eye' of consciousness. Once upon a time, it was thought that only behavior could be studied scientifically that mind as such could not be studied at all. Today, mind is being studied with rigor and brilliant success, but the field's central question is not and never will be a purely scientific one. Some people still regard the notion of 'unconscious mind' as a contradiction in terms. Some people still argue that only humans have true minds that animals are just organic machines.Against such views, the whole drift of modern psychology and computer science has been to broaden and muddle our concept of mind: to recognize many distinct capabilities or 'faculties' of minding, but no such 'thing' as a mind only bodies with brains, going about their business, which involves an extraordinary and characteristic sensitivity to the world around them. To the extent that we can and do

speak loosely of minds as entitities, it is awkward now to deny that human groups and organizations must themselves be minds of a sort: systems capable of collective decisions and actions also of collective attention, memories and envisionments, and subject to collective feelings and moods. Groups, organizations, and society as a whole, guide and bind us contextually rather more loosely than a little cell like Suzie is bound within your body, and by rather different means, but no less sufficiently for the whole system's requirements. The body that Suzie is part of might be sick, or its collective mind might be insane. Suzie might guess this to be the case, but would have no way of knowing for sure. You and I are in much the same boat.