Collective Consciousness

Collective Intelligence (CI), Collective Wisdom (CW), and Collective Consciousness (CC) are all very different phenomena. All of them have many definitions and descriptions, through the lens of various disciplines. To use them effectively, in ways that enable coherent discourse and action, we need to develop an understanding which reflects those differences. Here's my small contribution to that.

The concept of CI is most elaborated in the work of Pierre Lévy and referred to here:

CW is primarily a group dynamics, group pscyhology meme that has a good book exploring it, referenced here. I contributed to that research, but that's not the main merit of the book :-) There are additional comments about CW here.

CC too has lots of web sites and I am in particular resonance with this one. However, my perspective on CC is more sociological. From that perspective, CC exists in the context of a community or social movement and it reflects the evolutionary stage of that community or social movement. Here the Hegelian pair of terms of "thing-in-itself" and "thing-for-itself" apply. The "thing-in-itself" refers to the objective existence of a movement that doesn't have an awareness of itself as such; thus, its members don't realize that they are members in it. The "thing-for-itself" refers to the shared awareness of a movement or a culture with members realizing that they are part of it.