Consciousness Incorporated

Abstract

Thomas Nagel (1979, chapter 12) introduced the topic of consciousness to contemporary philosophical debate, arguing that a mental state is conscious when, in an intuitive sense, there is something it is like for the subject to instantiate it. The question I address here is whether the incorporation of a group as an agent introduces a new collective sort of consciousness. There are good grounds for holding that incorporation as an agent brings a new intentional subject into being: a subject with a relatively autonomous structure of intentional attitudes like belief and desire and intention (List and Pettit 2011; see too Tollefsen 2015). And those grounds naturally generate the question as to whether incorporation as an agent has an impact on consciousness that parallels its impact on intentionality. I consider that question here from the point of view of my commitment to corporate agency, and to the joint intentionality it generally presupposes. Unfortunately, I have to do so in the compass of a single article without due consideration of all alternatives. Show more