William G. Lycan (1981), The Journal of Philosophy 78(1), January 1981, pp. 24–50 — DOI-10.2307/2025395.
The brief’s citation is correct in every detail checked: title, journal, volume 78, issue 1, pp. 24–50, 1981. Crossref gives the first page only, and the PDC record gives 24–50 and the month, January.
Key takeaways
Not read. Nothing below is a claim about what the paper argues.
- How the record’s readings place it:
- NOTE-131 (Schwitzgebel, fn 21) lists Lycan 1981 with Brooks 1986, Wilson 2004 and Huebner as “notable exceptions” to the neglect of group consciousness. It says Huebner, Brooks and Lycan “endorse hypothetical group consciousness under certain counterfactual conditions … while refraining from stating that their arguments … extend to any group entities that actually exist”.
- In §7, after Block’s China brain, Schwitzgebel adds “(though see Lycan 1981)”. In fn 20 he says the US case “is importantly different from more artificial cases discussed in Lycan 1981 and Brooks 1986”.
- Block thanks “Bill Lycan” for comments on earlier drafts of “Troubles with Functionalism” (LIT-407, n. 25), and answers Lycan’s 1974 paper on Putnam’s functionalist hypothesis there (p. 282).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 for the bridge between Minsky’s society of mind (LIT-429) and Schwitzgebel’s conscious United States (LIT-159). On the record’s evidence it sits on the composition side, as a defence of crediting a homunculus-built system with mind against Block’s absent-qualia intuition. Schwitzgebel reads it as supporting C3 hypothetically, for artificial cases, and as stopping short of actual groups. That is Schwitzgebel’s description, not a reading. Whether it argues anything about nesting, or about Putnam’s condition (LIT-396), is unknown here. So its bearing on C4 and C5 is unstated, and nothing should be drawn from it until it is read.
Unavailable because no lawful full text could be reached. A reading should
state:
- what “homuncular” functionalism claims about levels of decomposition, and whether its homunculi are mindless at the bottom, as Minsky’s agents (LIT-399) and Selfridge’s demons (LIT-427) are;
- what it says about Block’s China system, and on what grounds;
- whether it says anything about nesting, that is, about minded homunculi composing a minded whole.
It carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.