Study notes: Is the Monastery Minded?

Is the monastery minded? If so, does it have experiences? Does it have a phenomenal field of its own, beyond those of its monks? The first is the large step, and within it simulation asks the most of a group. The second is small. The third gets a negative answer, from the grain at which monks are coupled. By the criterion of belonging, an occurrence belongs to the subject whose regulation partly constitutes it. A minded monastery’s regulatory economy runs mostly in the monks. Where such a process helps regulate a monk’s experience, the experience belongs to both. A field of its own would need regulation that binds contents held in different monks into one co-present whole.

• The labyrinth only sloshes. Every state is caused by earlier states and the tilt, and nothing assesses anything. This is causal interaction.
• A valve opens when pressure in a chamber exceeds a threshold. This is regulation of a physical variable, and pressure is not about anything.
• Two sensors measure the pressure in a distant chamber and a mechanism compares them, dropping a sensor whose readings keep diverging from the other’s and from later evidence. Disagreement and reliability are here physical. This is the minimal case of content-sensitive regulation.

The third labyrinth’s vehicles are two numbers. They support no generalization, compose with nothing and run no model. A locally organized fragment is not an experience unless its regulation belongs to a minded economy, so the essay keeps mindedness first, against the order Michał and Thomas suggested.

Cognition comes cheaper than mindedness. Plants cognize without neurons, and an institution cognizes as a matter of course. The question is whether the monastery meets the five conditions as an institution. M1: where monks deliberate alone and an administrator tallies votes, nothing the institution decides returns to the deliberations. Where contributions change the context of the others and assessments revise earlier commitments, states constrain one another through the institution’s own processes. M2: a house where the abbot decides has a real unity, but it is the abbot’s. A chapter that decides through structured disagreement among offices has a unity no member owns. The test is whether institutional psychology predicts what the psychology of the members, taken one at a time, does not. The verdict is graded: a house with common deliberation, lasting memory and its own simulation is a serious candidate for thin mindedness.

A record is consulted. Nobody’s assessment returns to change it, and a rewrite lands on a new record. A role-state, such as the cellarer’s grasp of the stores, is maintained in conversation, challenged and revised, and persists through its corrections. In M3 one house keeps its understanding alive in conversation across overlapping generations, and the other re-derives it from records. A stateful program can be translated into a functional one that passes its state explicitly, and the two compute the same function. If the records carry what the conversation would, the houses deliberate, remember and learn alike, and psychology finds the same regularities. Psychology’s traction depends on how the computation is organized, not on where the state sits between steps. Persistence matters only for experience.

Weak unfolding passes the whole state explicitly from step to step, in its own format, as when a recurrent network is unrolled with the same weights. Later steps still assess and correct the content earlier steps produced, so the carrier survives and experience is preserved. Strong unfolding trains a network in which each layer represents in a space of its own. It matches input–output behavior and leaves no shared format for correction, so it may destroy the carrier. There the account predicts a difference, and rejects the assumption that report and behavior are the only evidence: lesions, perturbations and interpretability reach internal structure. Mindedness depends on neither. The records sit nearer strong unfolding, since what passes between generations is a report that each reader re-encodes. They can serve the monastery’s mind and cannot carry experience of its own.

The representations an institution owns outright, its Rule, records and decisions, are declarative. They do not run forward into a model of what happens next. The runnable models are in the monks’ heads.

• Delegation (M4, first house). A gifted brother imagines privately and announces a forecast. Only the output enters the institutional economy, so internality fails.
• By role (M4, second house). The cellarer lays out the coming year with the community’s categories and figures, and the chapter corrects the scenario while it runs.
• By artifact (M5). A house that reckons Easter by the computus runs a model. A house that copies a table made elsewhere consults one.

A role-process happens in one member’s head and belongs to two economies, his and the house’s. It uses institutional representations and is shaped by institutional corrections. Simulation by discourse is the role-process seen from outside, and meets the condition thinly.

Part of what notices the wandering, assesses it against the psalm and returns his attention is his internalized Rule. It tracks, assesses and intervenes, the three aspects of experiential regulation. It runs in him and serves his prayer, so it belongs to his economy. If the monastery is minded, it belongs to the monastery’s economy as well, since the community shapes, keeps and corrects it. Where it partly constitutes his experience, the experience belongs to both. The monastery has no other experiences by this route. The argument depends on the difference between supplying inputs and closing a regulatory loop on the monk’s own vehicles: a sermon heard is not the preacher’s experience. It fails on the local variant, where the Rule would only shape inputs. Experience, Selfhood leaned against that variant, and this essay disowns it. Assigning the togetherness of experienced contents to access changes the explanatory target.

P1: a total institution, in Goffman’s sense, shapes most of its members’ waking hours, so a minded monastery shares in many of its monks’ experiences. A thin membership, the lay oblate or the citizen, carries the institution’s regulation through a small slice of life, and shares few or none. P4: monks in choir adjust to one another’s sound, but each auditory experience is a process in one brain, influenced through sound. A choir singing along to a recording differs in whether the acoustic loop closes. In both, the number of auditory occurrences equals the number of monks. Sharing by overlap adds no experience: one suffering occurs and belongs to two subjects. A measure of experiences counts occurrences, not ownerships. A field of the monastery’s own could add an experience.

Time. A regulatory economy’s now is the span of the loops that constitute its occurrences, measured in corrections and not by the clock. A monk’s perceptual vehicles are formed, corrected and replaced many times within one episode. The monastery’s loops close through a reply, a chapter meeting, a season’s planning. A monk’s experiential vehicle undergoes no monastic correction while it lasts. The loops are slow enough to assess truth-bearers such as judgments, and too slow to keep anything tracking.

Content. Speech, gesture, writing and action compress what a monk holds into what he can express. Access is a bottleneck, and the vehicles of experience are kept at a resolution it never needs.

So the monastery binds truth-bearers at the grain of report. That is cognitive binding. Its records start a new carrier at each reading. To Thomas: nobody chooses the grain. It is the grain the regulation’s corrections preserve, and the monastery’s cross-monk corrections are sentences and acts delivered over hours and days.

Reach: does the channel land on vehicles still under regulation, or carry only finished outputs? Latency: does a loop through it close while those vehicles exist? Bandwidth: does it carry the distinctions their regulation respects? Speech scores low on all three, and the criterion is graded, since cortical areas also exchange outputs. P2: monks joined by channels like the Hogan twins’ thalamic bridge would be a candidate for an additional field. P5: buffer every signal of that channel for hours. Reach and bandwidth are unchanged and no loop closes in time. The author conjectures that there is then no field, so latency is the decisive property. P3: in Block’s China the people relay the whole’s fine-grained signals, and the whole’s vehicles are patterns over those signals, slow by our clocks and proportionate to themselves. Monks report their own contents. A collective of reporters binds only what reports carry.

At each level of organization, what matters for mindedness is the integration the level adds to what its parts already have. Sever the parts along whichever boundaries lose least, and what is lost is the residual integration. By the national level the tight loops have closed lower down, in persons, households, firms and towns. Between them run law, prices, elections and media, narrow channels carrying reports and scalar signals. National simulation runs inside agencies and reaches the nation by delegation. So the residual is thin, whatever the verdict on smaller groups. Tononi and Koch exclude the nation by IIT’s exclusion postulate. The essay keeps the minimum partition and drops exclusion: the nation is denied a mind for lacking integration of its own, not because its parts have minds. List argues that cross-member connections contribute moderately. The essay frees that argument from IIT and makes the hierarchy explicit.

The system that prices form is not the nation. Its boundary is drawn by arbitrage and runs across borders. The residual-integration argument does not reach it, because it is not a level in the hierarchy from persons to nations. Its vehicles are prices, and an order is a signal at the grain of the vehicle it moves. If it is a mind, it is an alien one, and whether psychology gains traction on it is left open. On Kammerer’s principle a whole is not conscious if its organization requires parts whose roles depend on conscious states representing the whole. That would deny the monastery any consciousness. The essay grants a minded monastery its share in its monks’ experiences and denies only a field. Schwitzgebel showed that Kammerer’s principle makes consciousness flicker when one member’s reason for playing his role changes. The grain of coupling belongs to the channels between members, which do not change with motives.

The account needs no anti-nesting principle: nesting is permitted and each level must earn it.

• Sirian supersquids: conscious. Light signals carry the whole’s fine-grained signals, so the limbs are relays.
• Antarean antheads: conscious if the ants relay, even if the ants are as intelligent as people.
• Elementary-particle people: you stay conscious when made of their “matter”. They relay at a grain far below your vehicles.
• A monastery: minded to the degree its common life meets the conditions. If minded, it shares in its monks’ experiences and has no field of its own.
• The United States: no mind of its own, by residual integration.

What matters is not ion channels but what such channels allow: coupling at the grain of the vehicles the regulation maintains, with loops that close while those vehicles last. Voice and gesture carry finished outputs.

The account divides phenomenality. A minded monastery whose role-processes run in conscious monks shares in some of their experiences, and a minded house that avoids this is hard to build. What is withheld is a field of its own. The pair: a house with common deliberation, lasting memory and a cellarer whose imagining the chapter corrects is modestly minded and has no field, because its monks are coupled at the grain of report. Couple the monks by channels like the Hogan twins’ and the house becomes a candidate for a field. The physical difference lies in the coupling between members: latency above all, then reach and bandwidth. Exposed: the line between a role-process that partly constitutes a monk’s experience and one that only supplies its inputs will not always be easy to apply. And the price system remains open. The essay also defers whether one subject can sustain several fields.