The Collective Conscious


Consider the sentences:
1. Dmitri is experiencing great joy at his new job.
2. Sony is experiencing great joy at its increased sales.
If you're like me, your immediate intuition is that the first of these sentences makes a lot of sense while the second is completely ridiculous. A corporation like Sony can't be experiencing great joy! Group agents like corporations just aren't the sort of entity that are capable of phenomenal consciousness.
In an exciting new paper, the philosophers Bryce Huebner, Michael Bruno and Hagop Sarkissian show that this sort of intuition is not nearly as universal as one might have supposed. In fact, they show a dramatic cultural difference between the intuitions of Americans and the intuitions of Hong Kong residents. Americans think the first sentence sounds a lot more natural than the second while Hong Kong residents think that the two sentences are fairly similar in the degree of naturalness. (Even Hong Kong residents think that the first sentence is better than the second, but this effect is not nearly as strong in the Hong Kong sample as it is in the American sample.)
Drawing on these new results, Huebner and colleagues argue that there are important cultural differences in the way people think about individuals versus groups. Americans see a yawning gulf between individuals and groups -- individuals can be conscious and groups cannot -- while Hong Kong residents think that group agents are actually fairly similar to individual people

This is really an interesting post for me. I'd never viewed the concept in quite that fashion before and find it a great perspective... but then to hear that the Hong Kongites feel that a group can feel is very strange. Just goes to show that we humans are not rational if the meaning of rational is to be clean, clear and unambiguous as is mathematics. Or maybe they're right and I'm wrong and we CAN have a group consciousness. Shit.

Well, interesting to say the very least.

And then the next question which occurs to me is: is it a cultural difference, or a genetic one? And, regardless of which is the answer, what does that indicate to us?

- NonE

P.S. Conrad, having now gone to the link you provided, I see that the above post is not your creation at all, but rather a quote from someone else. I suggest that it is helpful as well as polite to distinguish between one's own writing and what one has copied from someone else. I was surprised at the attention to gramatical detail in "your" post. This explains it.

Regardless of the source, it's quite interesting and I thank you for the post.

Having a lot of direct experience with the Japanese (in case you don't know, I was born there, so was my brother and we both spent a lot of time there, and I have spent a lot of time with Japanese exchange students in America as a student counselor, a couple of whom remain my friends to this day) I can say that their conception of the role of groups, group identity and "consciousness" is difficult sometimes for a western individualist to navigate. They seem ashamed to act for purely selfish reasons at anything more than the most basic, trivial level. In social situations, unanimous consent is sought for doing things, and while this might seem difficult to obtain, it's not, because what happens is, no one wants to be left out, so when a majority becomes clear, everyone ascents.

The equivalent of the second sentence is really common, actually, and my friend Tsukasa is always saying things like "all Japanese business men do/have/feel x," or "my company is very happy about 3rd quarter sales," or "all Japanese want Obama, no more Bush," as if he were privileged to speak on behalf of these groups by virtue of his belonging to them and without any caveat or hedge. These are generalities, to be sure, but they are reflective of my experience.

Hong Kong has a significantly higher score than the US in terms of economic freedom. It seems at least ironic - possibly even contradictory - that they have a more collectivist cultural norm. Interesting.

If I cut a branch off a tree and it grows into a tree I see no problem saying there are now 2 trees. If I later graft a branch from a different tree onto the original tree I call it part of the original tree. Thats pretty dualistic.
So why can't a person see themselves as a part of a larger organism while "grafted" to it and an individual when not?

By the way I immediately got that Conrad was quoting from the link and the authors would be pointed out there. I found that informal yet satisfactory for an informal thread.

Sorry if you took it as a personal affront. If so, that was not my intent. My intent was simply to bring up the issue as I believe the issue is valid. And I don't know why I was triggered on this particular issue at this particular time. Shit happens, as they say. Perhaps it was because I DID perceive it as your post until I had delved further into it. But, once again, I'm not directing this at you, but rather at the issue in general.

- NonE (10,002)