Seite - 179 - in Cyborg Mind - What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

Cyberneuroethics • 179 Network Consciousness The idea of a collective consciousness was first proposed by the French soci- ologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917)364 in his 1893 book Division of Labour in Society. He defined this collective consciousness as the set of shared beliefs, ideas and moral attitudes that operate as a unifying force within society, which includes the concept of the collective memory of the social group. For Durkheim, society is not a group of individuals living in the same geographi- cal place; instead, it is primarily a set of ideas, beliefs and feelings of all kinds, which come into being through the individuals.365 It expresses a reality that is produced when individuals act on each other, resulting in the fusion of individual consciousnesses. In a social group, each individual’s mind is in a relationship with another person’s mind, forming a whole interconnected network of all the minds in the social and cultural assembly. Consequently, each person becomes part of his or her own social group, which expresses a sort of cooperative consciousness. In this way, individuals produce a collec- tive consciousness, or a kind of hive mind, through their interactions and this consciousness results in, and holds together, a society. At the same time, social groups are formed as a kind of multi- individual social organisms in which communication generally takes place through visual or oral means. The cohesive force holding the group together results from a combination of the collective consciousness and the collective memory. A kind of organic solidarity results where individuals become ever more integrated and interdependent, while specialisation and cooperation are extensive. This reality is also irreducible to its component parts and impossible to explain, except through its own means. In other words, the social group is more than the sum of its parts. It transcends in every sense the existence of any individual and is of a completely different order from the parts of which it is composed. This implies that society and social phenomena can only be explained in sociological terms. One of the first to suggest a further integration and development of this concept of network consciousness was the French Catholic Jesuit priest and palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), who was a col- league of the British scientist Julian Huxley. Teilhard de Chardin maintained that human persons were evolving from a state of being individuals to becoming a global consciousness or meta-mind super-intelligence. The ‘Noosphere’ (from the Greek nous, ‘mind’ or ‘reason’, and sphaira, ‘sphere’) would then come into existence.366 In other words, he suggested that when human individuals become ever more connected to this global Noosphere, to which evolution is developing, they would then merge into ever greater and united collectives in which individuality would This open access edition has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.