How We Share, Meta-Cognitively.

Résumé

I argue that the emerging field of collective cognition lacks consensus as to how a psychological state can be shared. Whereas much is known about the basic sensorimotor and cognitive mechanisms of social alignment, representations of "sharedness" at the meta-cognitive level remain unclear. One reason for this lack of clarity is the genuine difficulties involved in attending to the attention of multiple individual minds. As an alternative, I argue that individuals can use collective meta-attention, or attention to the attention of collective minds, as a cognitively frugal and epistemically robust way to track the presence of a shared experience. I also discuss the implications of the proposal for other shared mental states such as shared emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and goals.

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