[FRIAM] OK. That's funny.

[Steve Smith]

> FWIW, I'm not trying to *assert* collective intention (or higher-order intention). The idea that a collection of intentions exhibits a relatively closed "floor" or "logical layer of abstraction" below ... so that the structure of a collective of intentional agents may well be self-organized in the same way a group of non-intentional objects like molecules or grains of sand might self-organize.
>
> But my intuition argues that that "floor" is not tightly closed ... that there is a LOT of leakage from the intentions of the agents into the "intention" of the collective. For that sort of reasoning, this paper is interesting:
>
>   Collective (Telic) Virtue Epistemology
>   https://philpapers.org/rec/CARCTV

Glen -

I've been niggling about in my own noggin about the possibility that
"awareness precedes intention", particularly while considering the
collective versions of same, but your link here yields a delicious
confounding of that in the line:

    "through a (collective) intentional attempt to get it right aptly" 
which suggests that awareness/knowledge might not arise in the absence
of intention?

thanks for leading me (back) to Sosa...  his work is such a rich vein
that I keep dropping away from it in perplexity I think.

Intuitively I agree that there is a LOT of leakage from agent's
intentionality into a collective, or at least in the one's we speak of
here.   But what of cells forming organs forming organisms?   If a cell
has an intention (at least to remain coherent?) then the collective
(organ) supports that intention (as a reward for it's symbiotic
participation in the organ's functions?) of the cell, but the cell does
not provide the higher intentions of the organ, but rather merely
supports them as a byproduct?  Or maybe I'm wrong... since you often
speak of kidney/nephron function...  is the intention of the cell
somehow reflected in the intention of the nephron which then becomes or
informs the intention of the kidney which -> other organs -> organism -
> social groupings of organisms -> ...    or perhaps I'm buggering the
term "intention" badly here.

BTW... this is not an attempt to be argumentative, but rather reflects
my own wonderment at the implications that seem to arise from what you
offered here...

- Steve


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