I've been doing some background reading on the concepts of collective experience, collective consciousness, and collective mind. Mostly, I don't think there are any such things, at least, not in the way they're talked about in this paper and also in Garriy Shteynberg's Psychology of Collective Consciousness. It's based on what's called 'autonoetic cognition', the idea that inherent in any experience is the idea that "I am" having that experience; in the same way, collective autonoetic cognition generates an experience that "we are" having that experience. This paper takes the idea of representing 'our' experience further, on the one hand, arguing for the "necessity of collective mind representations," and on the other, offering empirical arguments "identifying a social context, the synchronous arrival of information." Like I say, I disagree - if there are collective minds, they're more likely to be described as in Dynamics of collective minds in online communities, originating in network interactions in communities, and not based in some form of common experience or consciousness. But there's much more to read and to say about all this.
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