Earlier quoted context omitted.
> to communicate their intention to collaborate on the plan What the law says is "conspire to violate". If person X and person Y together work out a way for person Y to commit murder and then person Y commits murder, is person X considered as conspiring? > People don't think in groups Sure they do. It's called "conversation" or "correspondence". If we had telepathy, we could skip the transcoding to sound or text, but…
> Sure they do. It's called "conversation" or "correspondence" Conversation is action, not thought. > If we had telepathy There's a couple different things (in fiction, naturally) that go by that name; the active analog to oral communication is also action, the sort of passive integration associated (not exclusively, just as an example) many hive-mind collective organisms in sci-fi is thought rather than action, but…
I think the distinction here is a pretty dubious one. Consider, as a hypothetical, a situation in which one can actually tell "what someone else is thinking" based on a more advanced form of EEG. Would it still be "thought" as opposed to "conversation" if two people are doing it to each other simultaneously? Why is transcoding in terms of pixels on a monitor different from transcoding as sounds? Is the key difference for you whether the transcoding is active or passive on the part of the thinker of the thought?
Put another way, if we define "thought" as being limited to those things which have no perceptible effect on the world at all, then we run into the separate question about whether this "thought" thing exists in the first place.