CBI Seminar: Toward an extended theory of collective mind: Turing machines, colonies, dancers, multiple selves and hybrid minds

Speaker: Kenneth Mavor (School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews)

It is 100 years since the social psychologist William McDougall (1920) wrote “The Group Mind”.  Innovative, but perhaps too meta-physical for the audience at the time, Psychology largely responded by asserting that all (human) collective phenomena were simple aggregates of individual psychology.  However, we now recognise many collective forms of extended cognition that go beyond individual abstract brains and recognise embodiment and also entrainment, synchrony and emergent behaviour of hive minds. In this talk I start with the simple yet powerful idea of a Turing machine, and then explore a continuum of forms of extended cognition, and the related idea of a continuum of “mind”; from ant colonies to human cultures.  I try to consider what an expanded understanding of “collective mind” might mean for hybrid forms of cognitive entanglement and AI.