Overmind, Hive Minds, Collective Unconcious and/or Zen

[LARA]

Wasn't sure where to throw this one out, doesn't fit into science though it's sort of psychology, or really philosophy and it's not completely laid back....

But anyway, curious to get some opinions from non-believers on the concepts of what I would term a Hive or Overmind (kind of a sci fi topic) or Jung's Collective Unconcious and/or the Eastern philosophical concept of Zen.

Also Superorganism might be a good one to throw out, too.  Goes good with the whole Hive Mind deal.

Are these concepts crap?  Is there any scientific validity to any of them?  Do they correlate/relate in anyway?

I guess I think about these occaisionally, and how they fit into religion and psychology and people's conceptions and misconceptions of the divine (ahem, sorry to use the term)  and conciousness itself being some kind of emergence principle that naturally arises when certain factors are met in complex and chaotic natural systems.

[Tank]

Well I'm not totally dismissive of some apparently 'supernatural' behaviour because of the following experiences. When I was first married I was walking up the path to the flat where I and my wife lived. She was behind me and I could not see her, she said " Have we had any post today?" I replied 'No we haven't had any post today." She said "Pardon?" I turned around and repeated myself. She looked a little surprised and told me she hadn't said a word out loud but had thought the question and I had replied as if she had spoken. On numerous occasions I would start whistling a tune only for my wife to tell me she had been thinking it in her head. We tried to replicate the effect but never could when we actively attempted to do it. For this reason I am sceptical of James Randi's offer to demonstrate a a supernatural ability as we could not do it when we tried.

So there you go a card carrying 100% atheist who has experienced the unexplainable  

[Gawen]

Wasn't sure where to throw this one out, doesn't fit into science though it's sort of psychology, or really philosophy and it's not completely laid back....

But anyway, curious to get some opinions from non-believers on the concepts of what I would term a Hive or Overmind (kind of a sci fi topic) or Jung's Collective Unconcious and/or the Eastern philosophical concept of Zen.

Also Superorganism might be a good one to throw out, too.  Goes good with the whole Hive Mind deal.

Are these concepts crap?  Is there any scientific validity to any of them?  Do they correlate/relate in anyway?

I guess I think about these occaisionally, and how they fit into religion and psychology and people's conceptions and misconceptions of the divine (ahem, sorry to use the term)  and conciousness itself being some kind of emergence principle that naturally arises when certain factors are met in complex and chaotic natural systems.

Wow, that's a big chunk to chew on. But to answer your question, no, there is no scientific validity to these concepts...simply because like what Tank said, the experiences can't be duplicated or studied in a scientific manner.

[TheJackel]

Hello Lara,

I would like to see if I can help you with your problem/curiosity here.

I guess I think about these occaisionally, and how they fit into religion and psychology and people's conceptions and misconceptions of the divine (ahem, sorry to use the term) and conciousness itself being some kind of emergence principle that naturally arises when certain factors are met in complex and chaotic natural systems.

Technically consciousness is a very chaotic system, and memory or stored information make up pretty much everything you know, and understand about the world and yourself. This information took many years to develop, and your own processing and interpretation of this information is abstract perception and interpretation. this is to where the emergence of belief, opinion, or self consciousness can arise from. And believe it or not, language development and observational experiences makes up a lot of your consciousness as it is developed from the time you are born. It makes a lot of sense that consciousness is an emerging property, a continuous developing one at that.

However there is a key question to understanding why consciousness is a material physical emerging property. This is even harder question to answer than the supposed hard problem about what things are like.

* Is consciousness made of nothing?

When you think about that, you can't exist or be anything if you are nothing due to nothing not being anything at all. So it's through obvious deduction that we can conclude that consciousness is a material physical chaotic process, and an emerging property that is too complex and unpredictable for us to fully understand as a system. And this is because chaotic systems can not be predicted with any kind of accuracy.

[DropLogic]

Well I'm not totally dismissive of some apparently 'supernatural' behaviour because of the following experiences. When I was first married I was walking up the path to the flat where I and my wife lived. She was behind me and I could not see her, she said " Have we had any post today?" I replied 'No we haven't had any post today." She said "Pardon?" I turned around and repeated myself. She looked a little surprised and told me she hadn't said a word out loud but had thought the question and I had replied as if she had spoken. On numerous occasions I would start whistling a tune only for my wife to tell me she had been thinking it in her head. We tried to replicate the effect but never could when we actively attempted to do it. For this reason I am sceptical of James Randi's offer to demonstrate a a supernatural ability as we could not do it when we tried.

So there you go a card carrying 100% atheist who has experienced the unexplainable  

I have also experienced this phenomena.  I think it honestly comes with the passage of time, and your familiarity with your mate.  I can usually guess what my wife wants to eat for dinner because there is a known variable of what she usually likes.  I can usually guess when she wants ice cream because it has been a certain amount of time since we last went for ice cream.  I can tell when she wants me to give her a back rub without her saying it, or when she wants to hear her favorite song. She always says, how did you know??  I just say that I'm not sure, that my body just gets a feeling.

[LARA]

Yeah Gawen, it is a big chunk to chew on. Probably way too big to get any easy answers, other than the one you gave. And your answer is probably the most sensible one given the scope and complexity of the problem.

Thanks, TheJackel

I would have to agree that there obviously has to be some sort of physical source to any sort of consciousness.  No magic or fluffiness here.  Jung's Universal Unconscious couldn't just be some big entity floating about by it's own accord.  All information has to have a physical carrier to exist.  Zen is a very nebulous concept, definitely in the category of the metaphysical, not even well defined, so I'm now wondering why I even threw it in there. Kind of a red herring, sorry.

But then when I look at the point at which unicellular organisms began to evolve into multicellular organisms I get more and more curious. It took a long and probably nasty time for organisms to evolve from the intellectual level of a flat worm to the mental functioning of your average mammal.  But the cells aren't fundamentally all that different.  The organization and levels of specialized cell functions is, of course.  So perhaps it isn't a logical conclusion, but rather an analogy, to make the jump that properly organized multicellular creatures could have an overmind or hivemind sort of phenomenon going on.  I think that this could be studied scientifically and there would be physical evidence of it's existence.  This doesn't mean that I think such a thing currently exists.  But if it did, you would see physical evidence of communication between members, such as in the nervous system of higher multicellular animals, specialized members suited to certain tasks and structures that helped to organize the members into a functioning whole.  Superorganisms are studied in science, it's a scientific term relating to things like ant colonies and the like, however they are composed of relatively simple creatures that don't exhibit physical evidence in the way of creating some sort of conciousness greater than themselves.

Fundamentally we are organized out of living cells that have evolved over time to communicate and somehow out of this humans (and possibly many other creatures) have a sense of self, memory and thoughts that are somehow generated from the activities of these cells. It's a bizarre thought to realize you aren't a single organism but a colony of highly specialized ones that are no longer capable of independent living.  At least without some human interference in the way of eukaryotic cell culture.

But anyway..I think maybe I'm coming back to a point that I was in this forum a long while back and don't particularly want to repeat myself...or make atheists believe I'm trying to convert them in some way or another with intelligent design or other such bunk.

[TheJackel]

[fazFwQo83]

These are all different things, however similar they may appear:

1. Hive / Overmind: I wouldn't say this is one mind with a direct controlling influence over other minds, but in a sense, when you consider the common streams of thought running through various segments of society, the originators or proliferators of these common streams of thought might be said to form the Overmind (telling the masses what to think through media, religion, law, the monetary system, etc). Think of the impact one book [The Bible] has had on humanity - this would be an example of a common stream of thought patterns running through many individuals which causes them to behave in certain ways and those who propagate such streams of thought could be called the "Overmind".

2. Jung's Collective Unconscious: refers to streams of thought, how these streams of thought propagate, develop and organise through a species and how these thought patterns become manifest in the actions and psyche of the individual subscribing to any given thought pattern. This principle applies to thought patterns of all [thinking] species, not only homo sapiens.

3. Zen is a form of Buddhist practice. The word [Zen] literally means meditation. This has to do with a calming/training of the mind and I suppose in itself is merely another thought pattern that results in specific learned behaviour - however beneficial that behaviour may be to the organism.

As for consciousness, the way I see it, the brain is the seat of the mind. Through complex connections between neurons and the electrical impulses that run through them, we have an engine for thought patterns that allows for learned behaviour, abstract thought, perception, emotions, etc. As the brain withers, so is consciousness snuffed out.