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What are your thoughts on the idea of "collective consciousness" as something we absorb not necessarily through religion or formal education but through the shared real world experiences of humanity? By that I mean as told through stories, ideas, news, arts, things that tug at our emotions edging us toward better defining what we sense is right and wrong, using empathy and compassion.

Are there people who are maybe caught up in what they sense is right or wrong in the real world, through this "collective consciousness" but they might be hung up by what they are being told religiously or politically that doesn't jive with what they sense is more intellectually true?

Is there maybe something that is passed on from generation to generation, evolving naturally just in the course of nurturing and teaching as the world evolves, regardless of religious teachings or political leanings which might be causing a disconnect with what is being taught in religious or political speeches? This is what I wonder.

Is there maybe a better term for "collective consciousness" for what I'm trying to say? Any thoughts?

Julie808 8 May 30
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1

Makes sense. How else would humanity eventually come up with the question for the answer 42?

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Too vague to be meaningful.

It’s difficult enough to pin down what consciousness means in the individual sense. Collectivizing it invites mysticism and woo. I think Durkheim was getting at something with his “collective representations” or “social facts” long ago which anticipated the externalized version of “memes” without the Darwinized baggage Dawkins added to cultural units. IMO Searle’s treatment of social facts and social construction are far better than Durkheim or Dawkins could muster. With Dawkins we have the ontological conflict of internal memory traces (engrams in the literature) and social facts before we even start down the gene disanalogy path.

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Some believe Remote Viewing taps into "collective consciousness". I'm skeptical.

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Possibly inherited memory or reactions

bobwjr Level 10 May 30, 2022

Not necessary. We all tap into a similar cultural well. It used to be more word of mouth until the advent of writing and storage in external media. Gutenberg advanced such means greatly and then Tim Berners-Lee came along. As vague as “collective consciousness” is it seems grounded in language, images and folkways and not on being passed through the germline.

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Collective consciousness is an archaic sociological concept which was touted by Emile Durkheim and he couched this in terms of what he called social facts. Collective representations and other notions influenced Carl Jung, though he cited Lucien Levy Bruhl instead. Durkheim tried to keep social construction independent ( sui generis ) of our biology, for which he’s characterized as a “blank slater” by the evolutionary psychology crowd (Pinker).

Jung thought cultural themes reflected a phylogenetic (or evolutionary) grounding in archetypes, but diffusion and convergence are difficult to rule out, and his reliance on esoteric and mystic ideas keep him from being taken seriously. Synchronicity? Really? He was stuck in the mindset often attributed to Lamarck, that striving and repetition imprint on our inheritance.

John Searle has taken a quite serious modern philosophical stab at “collective consciousness” based on social facts and how aspects of our reality (eg- the monetary system) are socially constructed yet there are bedrock brute facts that aren’t socially constructed.

Social construction tends to get a bad rap. It is similar to reflexivity where mere human thought and activity projected outward can take on a life of its own. George Soros has a monomanic version of this notion applied to financial markets and how far from equilibrium speculative bubbles form. We could be in one of those phases with the unsustainably heated up housing market once again.

So collective consciousness may be useful, as long as you steer clear of potential excesses, such as the noosphere and omega point pushed by mystics such as Teilhard, archetypes of Jung, and extreme social constructionism that ignores bedrock brute facts.

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You describe what I usually think of as “culture” — a resilient (for good or ill) vehicle for worldviews, attitudes, unwritten social conventions plus all you mention, and more. Although I was born, brought up and educated in the United States, my family went there in the 1940s after having barely survived Naziism, and the differences to the Eastern European/Central Asian ancestral culture of home remain to this day, giving me alternative perspectives and emotions that are sometimes disconcerting, but often useful.

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Meme organism as coined and defined by illogical atheist and BRILLIANT biologist Richard Dawkins.

Word Level 8 May 30, 2022
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It goes without saying that we absorb cultural aspects of existence that are unrelated to education or religion. the absorption varies from nation to nation. people have to manage the dichotomy between what they live and what they are told by parents, teachers or priests. an unstressful life depends on knowinf the difference and adjusting to it.

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