What Does the Nation of China Think About Phenomenal States?

• DOI: 10.1007/s13164-009-0009-0
• Publication Date: 2009-11-30T14:15:41Z
• Authors: Bryce Huebner; Michael Bruno; Hagop Sarkissian
• Keywords: 05 social sciences; 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences

Critics of functionalism about the mind often rely on the intuition that collectivities cannot be conscious in motivating their positions. In this paper, we consider the merits of appealing to the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity. We demonstrate that collective mentality is not an affront to commonsense, and we report evidence that demonstrates that the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity is, to some extent, culturally specific rather than universally held. This being the case, we argue that mere appeal to the intuitive implausibility of collective consciousness does not offer any genuine insight into the nature of mentality in general, nor the nature of consciousness in particular.