Talk:Collective consciousness

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 January 2021 and 30 April 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Honeylemongreen.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 18:01, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Why the redirect?
Why is this article a redirect? &#8211;&#8211; Constafrequent (talk page) 13:15, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Terribly weak article (Opinion)
I hate to make my first comment negative, but this article amounts to little more that pseudoscience and should be removed. To mark it only for cleanup misses the point in my opinion.

The author states:

"Biologists, competent also in physics, maintain that these observations can be explained by existence of so called quantum entanglements.

"It seems probable that people acting synchronously and together during mass meetings, like religious invocations or ideologically rationalized manifestations and war battles become entangled by this kind of physical mechanisms."

There is nothing I am aware of in quantum physics theory to support such a supposition, certainly nothing that attributes a "probability" that quantum interference explains the behavior of organisms in any way. Recommend, for starters, citations for this comment, although truthfully this would be considered mere speculation by nearly all physicists. Biologists with "competence" of quantum theory are not credible sources as far as I'm aware. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Tlcastle (talk • contribs) 21:24, 5 December 2006 (UTC).


 * It starts fairly well but the rest is just nonsense. This is better as an article about the sociological term coined by Durkheim - the rest just isn't right, and none of the links actually point to relevant, reliable research. There also seems to be a confusion with Jungian "collective unconscious". I'm going to work on this - which will involve a major deletion of the non-sensical text. Madmedea 18:47, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually, just looking in my dictionary of sociology this article is confusing social facts with the "collective conscience" and "collective consciousness". So I'm going to fix that as well. Madmedea 19:25, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
 * can we please list new york city as a hive mind, this would not be psuedoscientific and makes commplete and total sense Idespisethefrench (talk) 15:39, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Oh, get over yourselves. You can't kill the idea of collective consciosness regardless of how much you want to. Soak in it, bitches.Jiminezwaldorf 02:08, 27 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Most recent research by the way suggests that because of mirror-neuron activity the collective consciousness is quite real, that mirror neurons are constantly in communication with each other and collectively constitute a network independent of our autonomous selves194.213.49.62 (talk) 09:23, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Do you have a source? Dental plan (Lisa needs braces) 09:23, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Consciousness and conscience?
It seems a common error to use the two interchangeably. The definitions of consciousness and conscience in English are different. The original French (quoted in the article) also translates to the former, plus, the sociological concept is not represented well using the term "collective conscience". Jamshyd 23:58, 4 May 2007 (UTC)Jamshyd


 * Right: Collective consciousness or collective conscience are [... terms that] were used by the French social theorist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). He used the terms in his books The Division of Labour (1893), The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897), and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). No he didn't. He used the term conscience collective in his book Les Règles de la méthode sociologique. Maybe he used it in other books too, and maybe he used other terms; offhand, I'm not sure. &para; The article talks of "conscious collective" in the original French. Really? Amazing, as to me that doesn't even sound like acceptable French. Where does this occur?


 * I can guess how to fix all of this, but WP purports to be an encyclopedia. Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned, but I don't think an encyclopedia should be run by guesswork. -- Hoary 08:36, 29 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I've gone ahead and fixed the French, and also removed "collective conscience" which is not a correct translation of the term. Mona-Lynn 23:06, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

http://www.awakeningearth.org/PDF/collective_consciousness.pdf —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.9.220.57 (talk) 22:21, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Conscience collective
I have redirected this article here. Those two terms seem to be treated as one and the same in at least some scholarly publications; ex., or [http://books.google.com/books?id=Om98TTifAo0C&pg=PA136& dq=%22Conscience+collective%22+%22Collective+consciousness%22&ei=3JsFSMGCB6HayASB99WZAw&sig=woX3lE_dAdcEg_nKh3L4IY3w_z4]. That said, there seem to be some rather nuanced difference, but I have yet to find a source that clearly and neatly explains it. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 06:28, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Philosophy of cooking ?
Collective consciousness as a post-modern philosophy of cooking ? Is this really relevant in this article ? For sure, it should be more developped if it is to be considered relevant in some sort. Samuel purgess (talk) 03:51, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

Explanation of small changes
Added in an extra point by Burns and Egdahl and then put previous point I had put in a couple of weeks ago about the holocaust also derived from them together as that was neater. Also added in a couple of points about suicide. Oxford73 (talk) 10:05, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Original Research
Two new entries seem to be not in keeping with Wiki guidelines eg Original Research. Needs to be changed or deleted.Oxford73 (talk) 15:28, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Ethical suggestion
I wish to suggest the elimination of this sentence: "One might recommend collective conscience as a superior translation of Durkheim's concept, in part due to the busy association of the word "consciousness" with both Marxist and Freudian thought, but also as "a conscience for Durkheim is pre-eminently the organ of sentiments and representations; it is not the rational organ that the term consciousness would imply."

The ethical reasons for which I make this suggestion are:

1. there are new ongoing advances related to our understanding of the concept of consciousness itself; in my current understanding conscience is definitely not "bigger" or on a "superior level" than consciousness, and it is the other way around: consciousness includes cognition (which in turn includes reception, processing, representation and expression), memory, sentiment (emotion), and conscience as well;

2. an interpretative "recommendation" (VALUE judgment) which is in direct relationship with different relatively vague and possibly always subjective philosophical or ideological points of view does not really have a ggod standing/place in an encyclopedia, which is first of all defined right here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia as a compedium of information on what is known, not evaluated or estimated; this, in my opinion especially applies to what are still considered by some "soft sciences", and most certainly by most "still developing sciences";

3. Dr. Sigmund Freud never presented or represented himself as a thought leader or philosopher or sociologist; he was indeed a revolutionary clinician, but it is not his "fault" that his ideas have been points of departure for many interpretations or even new fields of application; I actually think it would be offensive to the memory of Dr. Sigmund Freud, who was first of all interested in understanding more about the human psyche in order to help his patients, who wished to explain to himself what current day neurology and still fledgeling psychiatry of his time could not yet explain, to be included, (especially in an encyclopedic work), without his work being carefully consulted or analysed with utmost scrutiny, in some current day value calls; (Mr. Karl Marx, being both an economic historian and a philosopher would perhaps not be offended, since philosophers are called to often make valuative calls, although I must also say that historians these days tend to be a bit more careful about valuative calls and tend to rely on pretty objective sources);

4. I was particularly saddened and offended myself about this sentence "The Jewish populations of Bulgaria and Denmark survived whereas the majority of the Jewish populations in Slovakia and Hungry did not survive the Holocaust. It is suggested that these different national behaviours vary according to the different collective consciousness between nations". This statement certainly strikes me as being totally ignorant and oblivious about certain objective historical conditions existent on the ground, both within society, and about the Holocaust responsible documented war criminals; it furthermore smacks of blaming the victim, which taints the whole article and certainly sort of points that the whole article may be written with undue an duncalled for bias.

In conclusion, please reevaluate this article using an ethical balanced point of view, especially when attempting to explain complicated abstract concepts, some of which we are still trying to understand and may still be evolutive in their explanation along human knowledge which grows these days by leaps and bounds, so that no one can say about wikipedia that it is a biased and unbalanced initiative. I personally value very much the informative value of wikipedia, I use it myself as an informative tool quite often, I wish to support its continued integrity, and its ongoing capability of improving.

Dr. Eugen Craciun 84.210.21.34 (talk) 15:45, 2 August 2011 (UTC)


 * Anyone can edit Wikipedia. You are free to revise this article. The sentence you highlight is problematic for a variety of reasons. TimidGuy (talk) 10:44, 3 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I have replaced that sentence with what I believe is a more balanced treatment (with Reliable Sources). I've also changed the lead sentence to be more substantive -- more about the meaning of the term than its history.  Your comments and edits are of course welcome...  --Macrakis (talk) 22:58, 6 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Because you brought the ethical problem of number 4 to attention, I plan to remove this sentence for the reasons you mention, and also because I question the source's verifiability for how bold their claim is. I feel like collective consciousness can be explained without mentioning this piece of research. -Honeylemongreen (talk) 06:39, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Should be a disambiguation page
This page should be reworked to focus less on the single definition of collective consciousness in Durkheim's work. More than half the article focuses on definitions not coined by Durkheim, and the See Also section is mostly unrelated to Durkheim. Pages that link here are also not uniformly referring to Durkheim's work: Hive mind and Group mind (science fiction) refer to this page for one of the alternative meanings listed on this page. Indeed, a cursory look at Special:WhatLinksHere/Collective_consciousness suggests that most of the pages linking here are doing so for non-Durkheim reasons. -- Carleas (talk) 02:41, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

Gustave Le Bon
I was wondering whether there ought to be some reference to Gustave Le Bon, who apparently wrote about this subject in the 1880s and 1890s. Here are two references: -- HLachman (talk) 23:03, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Study Notes on Group Mind | Psychology
 * Who's Afraid of "Dr. Lebon"? on JSTOR

WikiEdu course project in editing
Hello! I am a student editor currently taking an editing course, and will be working on this article as part of my coursework. I hope I will be able to contribute well in this article and am looking forward to collaborating and learning from both past and present editors who have worked and are working on this article as well! I am still new to editing in Wikipedia, and any input or advice that anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated!

I noticed this article has transformed into an article about the more sociological definition of the word, but it looks like this transformation has occurred in parts and not all together. I aim to work on reorganising the article without letting go of the good information already here.

Maybe what should be done is figuring out how to organise the article by the relevant areas or theories of the concept. I’d like to work on this, but I would really love it if anyone else who has more experience and knowledge about it could give their input! --Honeylemongreen (talk) 05:22, 9 March 2021 (UTC)


 * I'm about to try editing the article for original research first, and then reorganising the article sections. -Honeylemongreen (talk) 06:34, 22 March 2021 (UTC)