Is the Collective Unconscious Possible? - 2
Evidence For: Quantum Dualism
Evidence in favor of an intangible and abstract 'ego' within your self comes from the placebo effect. The placebo effect is the phenomenon where if someone thinks a treatment will be effective, there is a strong and statistically-significant chance that it will be. The power of belief in aiding recovery is a proven, ably-documented phenomenon. And what's more, two placebos often work more effectively than just one! This is evidence that some kind of abstract belief-system is affecting your chemistry in ways that can actually change biological function.
Other evidence for an intangible mind come from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). If an individual suffers from a psychological condition like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the way they take in sensations from the outside world and transform them into perceptions - then, ultimately, a response - is often based on irrational and poorly-formulated 'wiring' within the brain. If an individual with OCD leaves the house and starts worrying that they've left the stove on, then goes back to check - this reinforces the biological connections between instinctive thoughts that may transpire every time one leaves the house. Giving in to them strengthens the connections between these thoughts because neural circuits allocate resources to those cells and networks being used more. Ergo, the more you perform various actions or thoughts, the more they're reinforced in the future and become instinctive.
With CBT, an individual can force themselves into situations that would normally evoke maladaptive instincts and attempt to counter them with persisted efforts to install a new response. Over time, an individual can learn to associate behaviors with new instincts. So what happens to the old brain-circuits from the irrational behaviors? They receive less resources, in the form of glucose and oxygenated-blood, and the brain literally rearranges itself to accomodate newly-learned instinctive patterns. This is more evidence that 'consciousness' exists at the personal level in a real, but currently inaccessible-to-study kind of way.
So that's scientific evidence of a personal consciousness. What of a 'collective' consciousness, then?
Some researchers with a background mix of neuroscience and theoretical physics are proposing a link between mind-body interactions and emerging concepts from quantum physics. Concepts like complementarity, coherence and superpositions are rife with potential psychological implications - based on how loosely one wishes to interpret them.
Complementarity refers to the ability of a photon to exhibit properties of both a wave and a particle. New studies, some of which featured within the Reviews section right here on Humanswers, like Lommel's Consciousness Beyond Life and Henry Stapp's Mindful Observer offer a compelling (though sometimes pseudoscientific) account of how consciousness may exhibit quantum physical properties as structures within the brain may have complementary aspects of both a physical and nonphysical/psychological function. In fact, experiments famous within quantum mechanics like the double slit experiment provide evidence that an observer's choice for how to detect changes will determine the changes observed, at the quantum scale.
Coherence refers to the concept of particles' shared oscillation rates and vibrations having a link with information-sharing across time and space. If you'd read our review of Kaku's Physics of the Impossible, you might recognize this concept as offering the only known potential for faster-than-light travel of information. But I digress - authors like Stapp, Lommel, Davies and Kelly are still in the pop-neuroscience lit section with various theories about quantum coherence and consciousness. More aptly: on the potential coherence of neural networks firing in unison to create conscious awareness and to provide the conscious 'glue' that unifies our senses. Generally, it's proposed by proponents of the quantum consciousness theories that this could provide a sense of constancy from one moment to the next for you to enjoy a sense of self.
This research, taken in stride, offers an interesting angle for the collective unconscious to exist within the realm of the quantum as a nonlocal conscious 'force' to which our personal consciousness - also nonlocal and not necessarily tied to biology - may bind. Stapp, for example, offers a theory of how the Quantum Zeno Effect may be a possible explanation for how volition may bind micro-physical action to biology and shape attention-span via quantum coherence. Or, to the layman - that an exertion of mental will may bind the nonphysical aspect of consciousness to the physical aspect - the circuitry within the brain. This binding may be possible for the nonlocal aspects of personal consciousness and the nonlocal aspects of collective consciousness - or so they theorize.
Research results involving shared-information by spatially separated cells offer more intrigue for possibility that other information - namely conscious ideas and abstract knowledge - may also be potentially shared across distances. Research in this area is already underway, and with titles like, "Replicable Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Evidence of Correlated Brain Signals Between Physically and Sensory Isolated Subjects," the proposed link between quantum coherence and aspects of consciousness will either be strengthened or diminished in years to come - but the preliminary results carry potential for the pro.
To get a sense of the tone of new research into quantum consciousness, consider this excerpt from van Lommel's last book:
Like the particle and wave aspects of light, this perspective on the relationship between nonlocal and waking consciousness constitutes a complementary theory rather than a dualistic one. Conscious subjective experiences and their corresponding objective and visible brain activities, the physical effects of waking consciousness, which can be established with the help of an fMRI or EEG, are two different manifestations of one and the same underlying reality; they cannot be reduced to one another.
...
According to psychologist C. G. Jung, who himself experienced an NDE during a cardiac arrest in 1944, the shared human consciousness is similar to the collective unconscious.17 Alongside the ego, as waking consciousness, Jung recognizes the self: a higher or broader aspect around the ego, which encompasses both the conscious and unconscious components of personality. Individuality, therefore, is distinct from the embodied ego. The unconscious individual component of consciousness is in contact with other aspects of the collective human unconscious, of which the individual unconscious essentially forms a part. Each part is linked nonlocally with the whole.
Admittedly, formulating a link between studies of consciousness and quantum physics is poorly understood at present. However, the accumulated evidence within observer-dependent theories of how quantum mechanics works, the fact that personal conscious has at least some evidence (via the placebo effect and CBT, as just two examples), the potential for the existence of a collective unconscious is not absurd.