…. what (if anything) is the CC adding to the process?
It adds nothing. It is a house so to speak and it is the minds inside who do the adding.
It is like us and the web. We can get info from others in it but the web itself does nothing on it's own.
Okay - I think I'm getting there now. The "Collective Consciousness" has no independant existence. Has no sentience in and of itself. It could perhaps be thought of as a library, with each book representing an individual mind. Someone browsing the shelves could gain an understanding of what each mind thought, and could (by processing of "counting titles") come away with a sense of what the prevailing attitudes were on a particular subject. But the library does not have its "own" book, in any sense.
Okay, I'm with you now. I think the problem was when you claimed the CC was "sentient", with the implication (at least for me) that there was somehow something independent there. I believe we are on the same page now.
Possibly though you may need to modify then the language you use to describe it? For example, in this quote that I find interesting:
"As a coalition it has thoughts of its own" - what does that actually mean?
It means that it can form a consensus and have that consensus become a part of the collectives belief system.
The "it can form a consensus" part implies that it is actively and independently doing something, that the CC somehow is thinking and directing. A more accurate phrasing might be: "the sum total of thoughts in the collective lead to a consensus that becomes a part of the collectives belief" - eliminate the personal pronoun, and there is less potential confusion as to whether the collective itself has an independent thought.
So far as ""the sum total of thoughts in the collective lead to a consensus that becomes a part of the collectives belief" goes, I could dig that. I only have to go to a public meeting with a few persuasive speakers to see how a thought or a meme can spread through a population.
What you
seem to be implying with your sentence there is that when a thought becomes the majority in the CC, it will begin to influence all the minds thinking something different? If that's the case, then I have to ask - how does a minority thought get to become the majority, if the process of collective grouping "seeds" majority thought into the others?
Of course, if all you were saying is that "looking at the CC we can see what the current majority thought is, and take that as 'the' thinking of the world", then fine, I can go with that. Like saying "most books in the library are about cars, so cars are the most popular thing" - makes sense. That there is a structure that can be accessed that can provide something like the results of an ultimate opinion poll…..well, maybe. I'd have a whole raft of questions about how such a thing came to be, though, and what actual purpose it served/serves.
