Two lovers look into each other’s eyes. They each feel an intense passion for their respective lover and an extraordinary appreciation for the other. The quality of their individual experiences of consciousness at this moment are seemingly identical cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally.
A group of coworkers occupy the fifth floor of a downtown office building with windows that face east. When they individually direct their gazes through those windows they each see the sun rising in the morning. They all agree on which buildings and streets are visible. Visual consensus is expected and common.
There is near universal agreement among people around the world that there are fundamental rights and wrongs. Dehumanization in all of its various hideous forms is spurned. Love of others is seemingly natural, life sustaining, and encouraged. Exceptions exist, but overall, there is a widespread elementalism to being human.
Consciousness is that remarkable, mysterious, and commonplace phenomenon that we all experience. Indeed, consciousness is essential to, if not equivalent to, life itself. Like many who have a deep interest in philosophy in the modern era, I too am fascinated by the nature of consciousness. The topic is hot, we could say, among the thinking set. Despite its ubiquity, both as a topic of interest and as a nearly constantly lived experience for each of us, there is still so much to learn about its origins, its significance, and its limits.
As suggested by my excerpts above, my current interest is to explore the notion of collective consciousness. My intuition and daily observations tell me that it is a legitimate and perhaps underlying feature of human and social reality. Of course, subjective and solipsistic individuality is an unmistakable attribute of consciousness, but does that describe the only boundaries for our personal mentation? Is consciousness confined solely to the self? I think not. I hypothesize that consciousness reaches beyond the confines of our unique life experiences and that we share an over-arching sentient reality. What follows is my investigation of this impression.
To begin examining collective consciousness we need to look first at the form and features of consciousness from the individual or non-collective perspective—where it lives for each of us singly. It can be useful to think of mindful experience as consisting of at least two domains—one with more operational characteristics and another which is more phenomenally qualitative. A distinction can be made between the aspect of consciousness that involves cognition, reasoning, and information processing on the one hand and the realm of consciousness pertaining to self-awareness, subjectivity, and internal disposition on the other hand.
A good place to begin teasing out these differences is with science. It has to be noted that when science looks at the phenomenon of consciousness it is by and large latched onto physicalism as an explanation for its existence. This should not be surprising since science is by and large a physicalist enterprise. Nevertheless, there is interpretative value in applying physicalist descriptions of consciousness as a baseline for understanding this reality. Given that today the physicalist view of consciousness is currently predominant, and has been for much of the modern era, it is worth understanding the scientific approach as having at least a rational underpinning and for many a convincing theoretical basis worth understanding.
Physicalism postulates that consciousness within individuals is caused by physical forces. What constitutes physical forces is not as clear cut as it may sound at first. Our first thought is that something material or made of matter must characterize the causal factor. However, one thing we have learned from quantum mechanics is that at the particle level at least not all things have mass or are made of material. So, the term physical needs to include non-material properties like energy or fundamental fields. Perhaps, then it is reasonably safe to say that physical forces are those covered by the science of physics, as incomplete as that may be.
Physicality, whatever its true scientific nature, is centered in the brain. Over time, neuroscience has identified many ways in which mental states are correlated with and caused by features within the physical constitution of the brain. Neuroscience is well on its way to solving the so-called “easy” problem of consciousness. By that is meant that neuroscience research has revealed how brains process stimuli, integrate information, support attention, and manage communicable awareness. Much is known about how the mind is affected by brain injuries, tumors, surgeries, syndromes, diseases, drugs, and electromagnetic stimulation. In short, physicality can be linked to mental functionality by understanding the mechanics of the brain’s structure.
What is referred to as the easy problem of consciousness relates to the making of measurements and predictions of objective mentation which is discernable through the methods of neuroscience and cognitive science. How we perceive, remember, process language, and attend to and utilize information has been revealed by science. The immense amount of knowledge gained has contributed significantly to our understanding of what it means to be a reasoning, analyzing, and reflective human being.
The hard problem of consciousness, however, has not been solved by science, at least according to considerable portion of the philosophical and scientific communities. Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers coined the term “the hard problem of consciousness” in the 1990s. What Chalmers and others question is why does consciousness manifest as a subjective and phenomenological experience? Why do we have a feeling of what-it-is-like-to-be? Why is there a first-person point of view?
Interestingly, those who accept the legitimacy of a hard problem of consciousness come from different philosophical and scientific camps. For example, those philosophers who are attracted to phenomenology or the sensations of lived experience acknowledge an irreducibility and fundamentalism of consciousness. They speak of qualia, units of consciousness such as the greenness of green or the softness of soft, as intrinsic attributes of reality. They already value that non-physical entities such as mathematic postulates or abstract concepts are real. Therefore, it is not a far leap to think of qualia as also possessing authentic legitimacy.
There is a community of scientists, including physicists, who admit to reasoned explanations in and of themselves as having limitations. They understand objective descriptions yielded by scientific investigation does not fully explain subjective certainty. Quantum mechanics can reinforce this view. The role of observer is crucial in determining realism within modern physics, so perhaps consciousness is not unlike the observer shaping actuality from moment to moment. These scientists can be skeptical of reductionism in that macro phenomena is not always adequately described or comprehended through an identification of base-level physical constituents. A consensus view of subjectivity, they would say, may never be attained by study which rests on a materialist assumption.
What I have just attempted to depict regarding the science community turns out to be an alternative view from the mainstream scientific consensus. Many scientists are not easily persuaded from their physicalist viewpoints. The belief and trust in science eventually uncovering all existential secrets is strong. The hard problem to them represents a goal and a challenge for those who have been working on the easy problem. The way in which the mechanics of the brain produces consciousness will someday be known as will many other unexplained enigmas. The general scientific view is that the brain is a utilitarian and computational instrument. Subjectivity as described above is either outside of science’s scope or a fanciful imaginary state more closely aligned with emotions than with cognition. Science is a starting point for understanding the state of consciousness studies for individuals, but as of now it is etiologically inadequate.
A potential, if not fully, credible claim physicalism can make in the context of consciousness comes when the conversation turns to collective consciousness. To explain it is worth noting at the start that a physicalist philosophical perspective implies a metaphysically realist view of existence. Realism is the outlook that there is a world out there outside of our individual minds, an external material universe that exists independently of any living observer or participant. This belief is consistent with science and is so ubiquitously conventional that to suggest otherwise seems contrary to common sense.
Realism stands in contrast to idealism—the prospect that reality resides in the mind. Experience, ideas, and perception are products of mentation or the workings of the mind. Since we cannot remove ourselves from our minds when assessing the contents of reality, it is difficult, maybe meaningless, to conclusively state definitive truths about an extraneous existence. Mind over matter is the hallmark of idealism. All we can know is what the mind reveals to us. Therefore, whereas the idealist camp hitches itself to subjectivity, the realists accept objectivity’s dominance. These differing considerations of the nature of reality could not be sharper.
The appearance and essence of consciousness is clearly an unresolved enigma at the level of individualism. Comprehending consciousness in the context of collectivism does not get any easier. So why bother contemplating collective consciousness? Because it seems so apparent, of course. As a collection of individuals, we share so many common aspects of ‘the real world’. We jointly sense the same things in corresponding ways. We reason and emote similarly. We are aware of and attend to identical priorities. And we exhibit common behaviors. A reasonable question to ask is, if consciousness was unique only to each individual’s experience of what-it-is-like-to-be-me, then why do we all appear to partake in an equivalent subjectivity? Consciousness must not be confined to the individual. Rather, it—whatever it is—must also have a parallel breadth and depth that continually encompasses us all.
Let us unpack what collective consciousness is. To do so we need to acknowledge that there are two principal outlooks that get into how we define collective consciousness. Simply put, there is a more analytic viewpoint based in the social sciences of sociology and cognitive psychology and a more metaphysical interpretation that reaches less into science and more into philosophy, poetry, and speculation. I am tempted to dispense with the former first, not because it is not valuable with regards to shared values and culture formation, which it is, but because it is not ontologically rooted, which is where my primary interest lies.
Throughout history people have lived in groups from families to clans to tribes to subjects, serfs, slaves, and now to citizens. Cohesion of groups has meant that individual members have developed shared realities based in beliefs, feelings, behaviors, and identities. From this interaction and communion emerges patterns of thought and action which over time become values and standards accepted by most, if not each person. Collective decision making expresses these conventions infusing the culture with customs and traditions that become associated with the group. It is as if a group mind becomes established—a unified psychosocial state within a commonly lived experience.
Societies exhibit a group mindset brought about by communal coordination and synchrony. Community members can think, feel, and behave similarly building a powerful and shared culture. Enlightenment-era philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel gave much thought to this power of cultural maturation. Similar to the growth over time of an individual consciousness toward enhanced self-awareness and personal liberation, Hegel sees a culture as constructing a spirit which becomes inherent among the people and which finds voice in the art, religion, and philosophy of the collective. Over time culture and all of the people within it establish greater self-comprehension and a spirit of self-actualization at both the personal and the social levels. Hegel captures quite well the sociological perspective of a collective consciousness based in cultivated civilization.
The view of collective consciousness just described appears notably empirical and justifiable as real. I will not deny that. However, this style of consciousness is rooted in the physical conjunction of individual people. It is an emergent consciousness dependent upon the survival and thriving of a group of human beings. Whereas collective consciousness must by definition be relational in nature the mere development of group norms, as profound as it is, still seems to overlook something more elemental about distributed perceptions of reality.
The central question for me then is, what about the validity of making a claim that there exists a foundational sentience that we share as humans, as animals, as biotic, and even as abiotic entities in the realm of perceptual reality? Is there not a conscious throughline of primitive awareness binding all living and non-living substances of existence with each other and with the primary source of all-there-is? My inquisitive but scientifically untrained gut tells me that there is a common, distributed, underlying, and intersubjective consciousness that is both individual and collective in nature. Before I choose to assign faith and belief to the actuality of a super mind that hovers above or infuses within all of reality I want to note what evidence there is for such an existential assertion.
My initial premise is that the question of which view of collective consciousness is the correct one will never be definitively answered. Just as materialists and idealists will always differ about the true nature of reality, so will those who view consciousness in a solely atomistic and personalized manner vs. those whose interpretation is of consciousness as an exhibited general field. The separation between these two camps will likely always be consciousness as apportioned among many subjects or consciousness as one unified domain in which all engage. To expect that there lies somewhere a Rosette-like stone upon which the Truth about the constitution of consciousness is etched is a fruitless hope.
When reviewing the range of concepts which address a primeval field of consciousness or uber-mind there remains an atomism, a reductive nod to the accumulation of individual minds. Amassing of individual subjectivities must be included in any idea of a participatory field in the same way discreet objects are influenced by the field of gravity or the field of electromagnetism. An expansive conscious terrain will be transcendental, but simultaneously granular—a unified interconnected web with an inherent phenomenalism finding both common and idiosyncratic expressions at the point of each distinct person or object.
As may be obvious, I am looking for a justification to believe in panpsychism. I have been drawn to this theory since I first read about it and I am stubbornly clinging to this visceral feeling I have that it is plausible. In short, panpsychism speculates that proto-subjectivity or proto-experientialism exists in all matter and energy, whether considered as particles, waves, or fields. It proposes that there is a primitive condition of what-it-is-like-to-be in every aspect of the universe, including in our world. Panpsychism counters physicalist theories of consciousness by claiming that the inert non-stimulative nature of materialism is not the source of consciousness as physicalists assert, but rather that consciousness has always resided within all matter and energy and has continuously emerged into more lavish forms, such as human consciousness.
Might not fledgling consciousness, as it ascends from its quantum beginnings, pass through a collective stage exhibiting a broadly shared reality as it concurrently finds manifestation within the consciousness of each individual? It seems like a conceivable working hypothesis to me. That from the absolute source of all-there-is—whether we call it the Source, the One, the Logos, or God—consciousness, the capacity for all of creation to reflect upon itself in whatever manner it can and does, is part of the fabric of reality. Can science conclusively prove that a panpsychist-style consciousness pervades everything in an all-inclusive collectivism? Most likely not. Can I have a spiritualistic faith that we are all like droplets dripping from a super mind of pure perception? I am not ready to bow down to that either. But how exciting it is to speculate that collective consciousness may exist and have its roots in one over-arching holistic metaphysics.
Fields of consciousness are mused to be associated with a variety of disciplines such as biology and psychology in science; variations of spirituality and theology; and just plain old fundamental ontological reality. Two metaphors which I find constructive come from Aldous Huxley and Carl Jung despite their difficulty in being scientifically testable or verifiable.
In 1954 Aldous Huxley, the English author and philosopher, composed a short book entitled The Doors of Perception. In this book he narrates his experience and interpretation of taking a supervised trip on mescaline during the year of my birth,1953. Huxley wanted to explore the potential insights to be gained regarding the nature of reality and perception via altered states of consciousness. In particular, he wanted to test a theory he had developed prior to his experience with mescaline that the human brain acted as a “reducing valve” limiting the totality of consciousness. Implied in this hypothesis is that consciousness is of a vastness and strength that a mere human individual could be overwhelmed by its complexity and its intensity. Following the altered state encounter Huxley concluded his theory was justified in that the brain and nervous system worked to eradicate unnecessary stimulation and information from the “Mind at Large”.
Among the many psychological contributions which came from the mind of the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Jung was the notion of the “collective unconscious”. Although not specifically theorized as being an ontological construct—indeed it seems more mystical than metaphysical—Jung’s description of the collective unconscious is as the direct source of the unconscious psyche of each individual. Jung was compelled to understand why there were certain commonalities among humans around the world. He noted similar civilizing motifs, or archetypes as he called them, occurred cross-culturally and which he believed impacted the consciousness of all individuals. He described an intimately dispensed communal psychic stratum that reaches across all peoples and back in time to our earliest ancestors. Such a projection, if it indeed exists, carries a profound universalism for all of humankind.
As much as I may want to feel otherwise I know collective consciousness is more poetry than science. It speaks in the metaphorical words of field, web, ocean; it suggests a shared soul; and implied is that collective consciousness is a reverberation emanating from the source of all-there-is. These are not exactly testable claims. They do not hold up well in a laboratory. Nevertheless, the appeal is in the impression of unity, solidarity, bonding, and the pure delight of rejoicing in spiritual and down-to-earth fellowship; of knowing that my awareness and perception of reality is in concert with the living and non-living actualities that I apprehend. Viscerally, I feel profoundly that my consciousness is not an isolated physical phenomenon, but a point of light on a much larger canvas—a cosmic painting on which my existence is joined in fraternity with everything and everyone.