This is a placeholder post for my maunderings about Collective Emergent Consciousness. This is not a trivial thought and reflects decades or more of conception and reflection about many topics which I feel are best summarized by "Collective, Emergent Consciousness".
We can start with the question of "what means Consciousness?". Like Art and Pornography, the easiest description is "I know it when I see it!" yet in fact, I believe it is important to note that we *don't* know it when we see it. Pan-Consciousness people attribute consciousness to all living matter and energy, which I suppose is where I also want to start (or end up?) Human-chauvinists would claim perhaps that consciousness is entirely the province of human beings, and for some, only human beings with certain attributes. Others may grant that other creatures might be "sentient", most often other large-bodied warm blooded creatures that we recognize as "similar" like great apes, bears, canines, etc. Sentience is usually defined as the ability to have feelings and awareness and is generally considered to be a lower bar than consciousness.
Nobility throughout history might suggest that "the unwashed masses" are somehow sub-conscious if not sub-human, our own slave-holding history would suggest that some of us have (do?) believe that some humans do not deserve the respect of maintaining their own agency. The highly educated or sophisticated among us may believe that others with significantly less of whatever they have are sub-conscious. The literate may often feel that way about the illiterate. This of course, just begs the question of "what is consciousness?".
The Buddhists speak of four layers of consciousness as described in this writing by Vietnamese Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh. Mind, Sense, Store, and Manas, they are called and the term "layer" may be misleading in that none has precedence over the others, are all interdependent and are all in some sense a unity. On the surface, they would seem to be describing exactly and only human consciousness. It will be interesting to see if their conception is a bit deeper or broader in application.
Mind is just what we think it is colloquially... the everyday consciousness of our thoughts... which gets interrupted when we fall asleep or into a coma. Mind consciousness is what we normally simply call consciousness or conscious thought.
Sense consciousness is the awareness we have of and through our senses, the gateway through which our perception of the external world enters our mind-consciousness.
Store consciousness is the background consciousness which operates all of the time, receiving and cataloging input from our senses and our thoughts (sense and mind consciousness) as well as re-sorting it to keep it coherent. It is more like the colloquial term sub-consciousness than the others.
Manas consciousness is something like self-consciousness. It is the aspect of consciousness that maintains the illusion of self and self-awareness. It reflects the localizing influence of sense-consciousness as if coming from inside the body or even head. It informs the store consciousness by organizing thoughts and sensations as the identity of the "self".
Jiddu Krishnamurti has an interesting metaphor which is that the soul is like the paper and the experiences we have are like foldings of the paper with the resulting creases being the self. These roughly correspond to sense, store and manas consciousness. The mind, of course, is what then observes the paper and even perhaps manipulates it yet more to add it's own foldings or creases. We are not just the sum of our experiences but also the resulting contortions we exert upon our "selves" as a result of these experiences.
I don't want to defer entirely to this Buddhist view of consciousness but I think it is rich and apt enough to have as a reference for what I am most interested in, which is what would it mean if there is a parallel and even connected interaction of the individual consciousness we normally attribute to human beings (and again, other sapient creatures) that is the superposition of these myriad localized consciousnesses into a more distributed network or field of consciousness.
The likes of Joseph Campbell and other mythologists and anthropologists speak of collective memory, collective myth as if it were a real, almost physical thing. Cultural belief systems and motifs are collective by definition, and in fact culture itself seems to be a collective entity, not just a summary shorthand for describing the statistical properties of the myriad beliefs or expressions of a people.
To begin to talk about the collective aspect of collective consciousness, it might be useful to introduce another term from complexity science, stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. Culture is stigmergic. Individuals in a group inscribe upon their physical context marks of their actions and in turn are influenced by the cumulative marks they and others have left behind. Even animals create pathways by simply following the paths of least resistance created by themselves and others who went before them, thereby reinforcing the navigability of the pathway. Tools, art, language, architecture are yet more examples where the this self-reinforcing feedback loop canalizes the behaviour of individuals into a collective behaviour, whilst carving or eroding a landscape of reinforcement. In complexity science, these artifacts of reinforced feedback loops are called attractors.
We have already implicitly introduced emergence through stigmergy and canalization (channelization). Another relevant term of art is entrainment. The phenomenon of strings of bicycle racers lining up in a tight row or migrating birds forming large V's are examples of entrainment. It is a little softer than stigmergy or canalization in that the landscape (pressure waves in air) are very transient... the individuals align themselves in the slipstream or resonant waves of those in front of them in real-time and a bird or a bicyclist coming along even seconds later would not be bothered (even aware enought) to follow the path followed before them. Flocking, schooling, and herding are more complex 2 or 3 dimensional forms of this and a whole field of study in their own right. Mob behaviour is a human example of this type of collective action. It involves global coordination through local coupling. The flock or school or herd might seem to be following a leader, yet most individuals are simply "going with the flow" in an entirely local entrainment. Herds and Packs are more likely to also have a leader but nevertheless most of the members of the group are simply following their neighbors in the same way that most of us simply "flow" down a multilane highway during busy times, paying more attention to those one or two carlengths away from us than anything.
So let's try to string Collective, Emergent, and Consciousness together. First we might want to consider collective organisms which are neither single-cell nor multi-cell life forms... once we knew to look for them, there were many examples of collective organisms which do not quite rise to the level of multicellular life. Slime molds and hive creatures are good examples. The individual elements (cells, individuals) are minimally viable on their own but in fact have developed to work collectively to enhance the survivability of all of those in the collective. It is postulated that multicellular creatures emerged *from* such colony creatures through specialization of individual elements into disparate "cell types", even organizing into organs, etc. In "proper" multicellular life, it is rare that a single "cell" can survive long without being part of an organism.
Before going further, it is probably worth trying distinguish consciousness from life itself. Life is an amazing phenomena in and of itself. It's most notable property it would seem to be it's local violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Rather than having a continuous decrease in organization over time, a giving over to entropy, living things seem to establish and maintain order within their boundaries and in fact often increase in complexity over time! They do this, not by defying the second law and entropy but by managing and exporting it. Life surfs on energy gradients, doing work to export disorder and increase internal order and complexity.
We know of proto-life or sub-life entities which seem to have some long-time-scale coherence that is almost life-like. Coherence over time is one characteristic of living things. Coherent structures that can be found are things like water waves, sand dunes, etc. These are resonant phenomena. Some are more interesting than others. A striking example is a propagating smoke ring or a soliton wave moving up a waterway... a pulse that seems to not dissipate. These are more complex forms of resonant feedbacks but are not quite up to the description of "life". For one thing, they *do* dissipate over time and have no mechanism for self-repair. They also have no mechanism for self-reproduction, both of which are important characteristics of life as well. Coherence over time with self-repair would be roughly what we call "survival".
For an individual unit to maintain coherence and repair damage to it's form and function as it exists (or propogates through) an environment it would seem that it needs to have perception and (re)action. It needs to observe it's environment and respond to it in a manner that sets up the resonances for itself that smoke rings and soliton waves get for free from their context (on some time-scale). Coupling these sensors to actuators is what we would consider to be a proto-mind or consciousness. The internal state of a neural network or similar becomes the "intelligence" that helps a primitive organism to avoid or seek energy gradients it can use or avoid ones that are disruptive to it's coherent survival. As life gets more and more complicated or sophisticated, those mediating structures naturally get more and more complicated.
As humans we mostly think in terms of brains or at least central nervous systems which even insects and worms have rudimentary forms of. On the other hand amoebae, all plant life, jelly fish and complex molluscs like octopi and squid do this kind of processing in a more (if not entirely) distributed fashion. The chemical and morphological state of plant stem and root tissue works together to determine how to grow toward the sun or shade, to reach for or withdraw from water and other nutrients in the soil. This is a very rudimentary form of "mind". To the extent that these configurations represent a (convoluted) model of their environment, they have a rudimentary model of the world they live in. it seems entirely evident in higher order animals that they have a self-awareness built into their model of the world. Not only to they have some kind of model of the milieu in which the exist, they also have a model of how that milieu will respond to them as they take actions. A jellyfish might seem to be just following gradients, but an octopus would seem to be doing something of a much higher order when it hides from predators or prey and disguises itself not just with it's chromatophores, but also by donning bits of material from the sea bottom.
This qualitatively different state of self-awareness would seem to be what we normally associate with consciousness. Human Chauvinists may want to consider this very rudimentary consciousness, but even there many would grant something more akin to human intelligence to great apes, cetaceans, and maybe elephants.
So now, after telling a few "just so" stories about how life is a collective, emergent phenomena and that as life becomes more complex, something like self-awareness grows up more explicitly out of other-awareness. It is hard to find a hard line to draw among these "levels of awareness" and therefore easy if we are in a liberal mindset to begin to slide down the slippery slope toward pan-consciousness. It is hard, even with these liberal interpretations of consciousness to guess what the consciousness of an electron or proton, for example, might be. Or even a star or a whole galaxy. But I'm definitely not excluding it entirely.
What I am, instead, focused on is collective human consciousness. By several measures, humans are an excruciatingly dominant form of life on this planet, and we are about to squirt ourselves out to the moon, other planets and the various belts of primordial debris orbiting the sun (mostly) beyond Mars. It has been claimed that humans and our domestic animals (pets, beasts of burden, and food animals) comprise more bulk than all other animal species combined. On the other hand, I believe that the bulk of earthworms may actually rival human bulk or even human and domestic animal bulk. In any case, we are not a trivial element in the biosphere of the earth.
Geologically we may not quite be leaving an idelible mark (yet) but climatologically we have definitely kicked it out of one mode and it is on it's way to another which is likely to be much less hospitable to humans, large mammals, and in fact most all life as it has adapted to our current climate. To the extent that these global effects are the collective consequence of our actions, it is not unreasonable to believe that we can collectively apprehend what we are doing to our environment, how it is going to effect us, and change our behaviour in response to avoid the cataclysm we may be on our way toward. If we were NOT at this apocalyptic juncture, I believe our collective consciousness would be on it's way to becoming self-aware in the same way, but this existential threat would seem like an opportunity to focus our emerging consciousness in the same way a freight train bearing down on an individual sharpens their sense of self through a direct and imminent threat to their survival.
It may also be hubris that has me wanting to have lived in "interesting times" and thereby declaring the current era and the things afoot during it to be somehow auspicious. But for the purposes of this writing I will act as if there really is an objectively qualitatively unique thing happening and that after it has settled out in a decade or century or three, history will mark this time as being "on the cusp" of something meaningful and qualitatively different.
Where to go from here
Schrödinger explains that living matter evades the decay to thermodynamical equilibrium by homeostatically maintaining negative entropy in an open system.
This property (identifying characteristic) of life might seem to be tangential to the question of consciousness, yet I believe it is on the same path. Seemingly contrary to the extremes of panconsciousness, this suggests that consciousness is a property of life which by this definition maintains negative entropy in an open system. By my hypothesis then, consciousness is merely an advanced property of life-itself on it's quest to maintain coherence and establish growth (of complexity if not also scale).
A key to collective emergent phenomena is local organization which yields global phenomena... this locality may be geometric(geographic) or topological. I intuit that what I am calling collective consciousness in the modern era is driven by the hyperconnectedness we experience with modern communication as well as transportation. While near instantaneous communication began with the era of transoceanic telegraph cables and wireless communication around the end of the 19th century, it was not until the last few decades that ubiquitously connected digital communication networks became available to the general public (Internet ca 1992 and smart phones ca 2008). Whether we invoke consciousness or not, it seems that we can unequivocally describe collective cultural phenomena whose time constant is on the order of days or hours where it might have been weeks or even years previous to global digital connection. Before the golden age of communication and transportation, these time constants may have been years unto centuries. While these are quantitative values, there are qualitative changes which come with exceeding quantitative thresholds. For example, human attention and lifespans couple with these changes in significant ways. If a change, for example, takes multiple generations to move through a population, the attrition of generational death provide a lower resistance to the change while guaranteeing a lower bound on the transmission. On the other extreme, when a communication exchange can happen one-on-one or many-to-many in real time, while the individuals involved can maintain a single episode of focus and interest, qualitatively more significant changes can occur in a matter of minutes or hours.
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