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information available to the whole.

Second, minds act from purposes, intentions, driven by suggestions

and reasons rather than by mechanical causes. Mere things move becausesomething pushes or pulls them. Minds move because they have some

reason to do so, one that prevails over competing reasons to do nothing, or

do something else. Individual members (like our friend Suzie) of anygroup mind would be guided and constrained in some way, perhaps

without their even knowing it, to contribute to that mind's collective

purpose. At the very least, a group mind would provide the over-allcontext in which its components find their places and do their individual

jobs. This contextual binding, as we might call it, might be very strict or

fairly loose and lenient up to a point.

The simplest minds take in whatever comes at them that they areequipped to receive and respond to. More sophisticated ones are capable

of collective attention that is to say, of allocating even ofvoluntarilydirecting their resources of parsing and interpretation toward some

matter of interest. But why are some things more interesting than others,and why is anything of interest in the particular way that it is? Humans

have a special sub-system (the affectsystem as it is called) to recognizewhat is of collective interest to all those trillions of cells for example,

whether something is to be ignored or fought, fled from, eaten, or

investigated further. Human groups make similar decisions collectively,

with or without specialized sub-systems e.g. the politicians, the media to help them do it. They have collective emotions, feelings and moods,

rustling through their networks at any point in time.Any mind will need to

defend itself from potential overload of information, if only by clinging toblissful ignorance of stuff it doesn't need to know. Our groups do that, just

like individuals.

Yet another attribute ofsome minds, and characteristically of humanones, is the faculty of 'time-binding' (as Korzybski called it): our

capability to represent a remembered past, an envisioned future or a

fantasy of either in 'the mind's eye' of consciousness.Once upon a time, it was thought that only behavior could be studied

scientifically that mind as such could not be studied at all. Today, mind

is being studied with rigor and brilliant success, but the field's central

question is not and never will be a purely scientific one. Some people stillregard the notion of 'unconscious mind' as a contradiction in terms. Some

people still argue that only humans have true minds that animals are just

organic machines.Against such views, the whole drift of modernpsychology and computer science has been to broaden and muddle our

concept of mind: to recognize many distinct capabilities or 'faculties' ofminding, but no such 'thing' as a mind only bodies with brains, goingabout their business, which involves an extraordinary and characteristic

sensitivity to the world around them. To the extent that we can and do

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speak loosely of minds as entitities, it is awkward now to deny that human

groups and organizations must themselves be minds of a sort: systems

capable of collective decisions and actions also of collective attention,memories and envisionments, and subject to collective feelings and

moods. Groups, organizations, and society as a whole, guide and bind us

contextually rather more loosely than a little cell like Suzie is boundwithin your body, and by rather different means, but no less sufficiently

for the whole system's requirements.

The body that Suzie is part of might be sick, or its collective mindmight be insane. Suzie might guess this to be the case, but would have no

way of knowing for sure. You and I are in much the same boat.