Naturalist theories of mind and corporate personhood

All theories of mind need to do justice to the multiple realizability intuition:

1. Conscious beings in general, and persons in specific, could have a physical constitution very different from ours (e.g., silicon, plasma cloud, etc.), with the computational algorithms being significantly different as well.

On a naturalist theory of mind, all there is to a person or a conscious being is the physical constitution together with external connections. Therefore, on naturalism, what (1) says is that there could be persons radically different from us in their overall constitution. This means that the naturalist theory of mind must have a very flexible account of what it is to be a person or a conscious being. Presumably, this account is going to be something like this: Conscious beings are ones that represent the external world in certain ways—the best stories about this are causal in nature—and respond in other ways (or at least are of a kind to do this). The specification of the ways in which representation and response are done is not going to be too specific—it must be at a high enough level of generality to do justice to (1). And then persons are going to be the subset of conscious beings tha have (or at least are of a kind to have) a particularly sophisticated form of representation and response—perhaps the right kind of representation of the internal patterns of response together with a self-directed response to those patterns.

Here, now, is my hypothesis. Any naturalist story that does justice to (1) will be apt to count many human social groups as both conscious and as persons. Social groups do represent the environment and themselves, and respond to such representations in various sophisticated ways, including self-reflection analogous to that which persons engage in. Social groups have corporate representations that are not the same as individual representations and corporate desires that are not the same as individual desires. To a very rough first approximation, a social group believes p provided that a majority of the members believes p in a way that is appropriately explanatorily connected with their group membership (e.g., their belief is in the right way explained by or explains their group membership), and desires p provided that it has the right kind of tendency to pursue p. Anything that can design an airplane is likely conscious and a person. But an airplane can be designed by both an individual human, and a social group such as two brothers.

2. If naturalism holds, then many human social groups are conscious and a number of these are persons.

Notice that the computational sophistication in human social groups can be very high. For human social groups contain a number of human brains. Think of a computating cluster: a cluster while having some ponderousness can compute anything its parts can.

But:

3. Human social groups, other than perhaps the Church, are not persons.

(The naturalist is unlikely to worry about the exception.) If this won't do as a direct intuition, then we can argue for it on ethical grounds in the case of many social groups. For instance, an academic Department will often be such as to force the naturalist who does justice to (1) to count it as a person. But a respect is due to a person which is not due to an academic Department. A University administration should not dissolve a Department willy-nilly, but the gravity of dissolving a Department is not nearly comparable to the gravity of killing a person.

The dualist does justice to (1) without falling into an assertion that social groups are persons in a very simple way: a necessary condition for being conscious is having a soul or something like that, and a plasma cloud could have that, and social groups, at least other than the Church, in fact don't have that. (I am not saying that social groups couldn't have that, though I think they couldn't. I am inclined not to consider the Church literally a person, either.)

Objection 1: The naturalist can make it a condition of personhood that one not have persons as proper parts.

Response: If naturalism is true, the nerves in my shoulder could so grow that they would engage in the kind of computation characteristic of persons, and then a person would be a proper part of a person.

Objection 2: Social groups don't exist.

Response: It would be tough for a naturalist to hold that social groups don't exist and human beings do—both are appropriately posited by developed special sciences.