There is No Collective Mind, Only Accumulated Intellect by Marc LeVine

The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. - Ayn Rand

WARNING! This one is a little deep...but, hopefully worth it!

Some believe that one of the downsides of being human is that there is no DNA-shared, collective brain (base of intellect and experience) we can call upon to help us get over the rough spots in life.?Each one of us who sees the sun and the moon for the very first time has a similar reaction to that of our homo erectus ancestors.?Gazing up at the moon as infants, not one of us ever experienced a reliable ancestral “déjà vu” tied to a primal relative. First-time emotions are new to us, every single time.

Isn’t it amazing that after 7 million years on earth, each brand-new generation of humans must start over experiencing major emotions for the very first time??Unfortunately, there is nothing pre-programmed in our minds to prepare us for initial emotions. No matter how many billions of people have walked in the same footprints as their ancestors, we continue to react to each new encounter as something novel and responded to in our own way.?

The joy of childbirth. The sadness of death. ?Since creation they have remained fresh and unfamiliar to each of us, at any age... and from any age. The birth of a child still holds the same amounts of love and wonder as ever. ?Also, people have been dying since the dawn of mankind, yet we still shed the same amount of tears and deeply mourn the loss we have done since mankind replaced the dinosaurs. The repeating rituals of grief haven't dulled our emotions after 7 million years of experiencing and performing them.

Most Instincts are Largely Primitive. Most Biases are Totally Human.

There ARE indeed some primitive instincts genetically hardwired into our bodies that can be triggered by a cue. ?One such example is the reflex knee-jerk. There is also the sucking reflex of hungry human infants, whose bodies feel the need for survival.? There isn't many more like these.

Our pets rely much more on their primitive instincts than we do, because they have much less cognitive ability than their owners, who are more complex and deeper thinking beings.

Karl Jung was one of very few who believed there was such a thing as collective consciousness (not mind) and his example of it included nationalism, gender norms, religious values, class consciousness, and groupthink. I disagree with his theory. Ii is more likely that things are parts of human created belief systems derived from previously failed social interactions, competitive positioning and destructive outcomes leading to people and groups pitted against one another. They are likely not at all genetic in nature and are popular reactions to threatening situations and events challenging the very foundation of civilization. ?

People took different sides and formed differing beliefs seeking to protect themselves and defend what they came to believe. That got us the church versus the Mosque versus the Synagogue, which got us the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition and Holocaust… which got us anti-Muslimism, anti-Semitism and 9/11. This is not indicative of collective consciousness. ?It might be just the opposite.

So, what is this notion of a collective mind within humans?? We're Really Just On our Own

Might the idea of the collective mind be intended as a hoped for biological equivalent of learning the lesson about “doing something the same way over and over again and expecting different results?” ?

The caveman invented fire. ?He immediately learned of its dangers.?Yet, every child ever born since then has run his or her hands through a flame and felt the excruciating pain.?Our early ancestors couldn’t find a way to let us know that it is best not to get burned by repeating their own experiences from eons ago. ?That kind of experience didn’t travel well through DNA,

We are forced to confront life situations on our own, because they are needed to learn from. ?They help us develop into who we eventually become. ?Humans must continue to evolve. ?Most of what our earliest ancestors might have wished to send to us through their DNA would likely be just as outdated as reading a medical textbook from 1859 in 2023.? Evolution has taught us one thing. ?We can do much better by doing much better. ?We learn, grow, and solve problems on our own, as we should. ?And, creatively our solutions may vary from one person to another.

It might be nice to have some amount of collective intelligence and wisdom passed down to us through our ancestors DNA. They learned some very basic things the hard way and might save us the trouble. ?But they left no detailed texts during the early days of mankind.?Most of what they knew about their daily living has been lost.?But why not all of it??

What they passed down to us was in the form of generational storytelling and whatever has been inferred from archaeological “digs” and anthropological inferences.” Thus, the closest we might ever come to a collective mind remains as handed-me-down stories perhaps embedded among the fragile, yellow pages of some family accounts or recorded on various media.? Answers for living won’t come to any of us via DNA, we must search for them, which we can often find through individual research and daily living.?Make no mistake, these are our days and this is our time.

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In his book “The Time Machine,” H.G. Wells shows us a future in which the young don’t live long enough to grow old, because they have given up on trying to become something better than their current selves. They had only chosen to live through their youths to become food for their monstrous keepers. They allowed everything in their libraries to turn to dust and knew little of the past. They had no interest in learning.

We should never allow ourselves to believe anyone other than ourselves can live our lives for us; solve our problems on our behalf; and experience the feelings we each need to in order to be unique. We don’t need a biological collective mind, just a collective humanity with everyone studying current and past behaviors and AGREEING to learn from them how to improve our world.

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The Author

Listen to Marc's latest interview on “Failing for You” with Jordan Yates

Marc LeVine is a graduate of Syracuse (NY) University with a degree in Industrial Psychology, Marc is currently Talent Acquisitions and Learning and Development Lead at Thermo Systems. He is the recipient of the Excellence in Talent Acquisitions Award from HR Awards in 2021.

Marc's prior employment includes senior Human Resources and Staffing Industry management roles with Edgewood Properties in Piscataway, NJ, Brickforce Staffing in Edison, NJ, InfoPro Inc. in Woodbridge NJ and Plainsboro, NJ and Harvard Industries in Farmingdale, NJ, a former Fortune 500 company. He also served as Director of Human Resources for New Jersey Press, the parent company of the Asbury Park Press, Home News and Tribune and WKXW-NJ101.5. Earlier in his career, Marc served as Director of Career Services and Placement at Union Technical Institute in Eatontown and Neptune, NJ. In addition, Marc owned and operated Integrity Consulting Associates, a New Jersey based Human Resources and Social Media Marketing firm for 11 years. Marc also served as Council President in his hometown of Freehold Borough, NJ