Collaborative Consciousness

Is it possible to have conscious awareness caused by the collaboration and combination of multiple individuals?

By consciousness, I am referring to my hypothesized ability for the function of conscious awareness, as I further explained in a summary post; Conscious Comprehension, as well as  more detail in a couple dozen other posts. The basics of my understanding of consciousness are; it is memory access of factors and the interaction of those factors. 

Consciousness seems to be something most humans naturally possess most days, but having an overall system, gain the effect of consciousness through combination of multiple individuals, is another question. For a system to be conscious of any given concept, it would have to be able to access memory of a minimum of 2 factors, and the interaction of those factors. By any regular situations today, it seems there is no system that directly accesses memory of multiple people's minds. So the short answer seems to be; there is currently no collaborative consciousness. But that doesnt mean its not possible, or that it doesn't occur indirectly.

A potential method of a system which accesses memory of factors and their interactions, between multiple people, indirectly, could be communication. Communication is transferring information from 1 person to another, and information is basically an altered version of measurements. So if information about something which is involved in the process to be conscious of it, is transferred via communication, from 1 person to another, then it required the collaboration and combination of multiple people. Information was transferred from the memory of 1 person to another, for the 2nd person to be able to access that information, in the combination required for conscious awareness of that bit of information. 

A lot of information that most people know, is learned through communication from others, so by this understanding, a significant amount of what someone is conscious of, is through a form of indirect collaborative conscious awareness. This is basically the method of human progression. Through cumulative learning and transference of information of what was learned throughout history, people now are able to receive more information than ever before. Information which took 1000s of others, to contribute their portion of communication of their memories of conscious awareness of certain factors. 

This method is different than a potential direct collaboratively conscious system, because with this method, the memories of information of each individual must be transferred to 1 person before the information can be accessed. For a process to be directly conscious of information, it needs to be a system with direct memory access to multiple individuals. This seems unlikely to occur, but technology can allow a lot of possibilities.

A possible alternate method of indirect collaborative conscious awareness, could be an exterior memory access system. Computers would be the obvious potential memory access system which is exterior to our minds, but it seems they currently don't have the functionality to access memories in the correct combination of factors and their relative interaction. If AI does acquire this capability (which seems quite plausible), then it could potentially receive any information which humans have transferred to the internet, and perform a method of indirect collaborative consciousness of all our information. 

Besides receiving information which we have recorded, AI could have the potential for accessing memories of information long range. This could allow for the possibility of a direct conscious awareness, which is collaborative in the sense of using multiple technological or computer units. It could potentially have sensory perception (cameras, microphones etc) recording information, or computers, at various locations, then access memory of that information and the relative interaction of the information, from an alternate location.  

In a similar function, humans could have the possibility for direct (or at least more direct) collaborative conscious awareness, using technology. If we are able to integrate technology with our brains to transfer information, this should allow the potential for multiple people combining information of memories to cause collaborative conscious awareness. Whether it is direct collaborative consciousness, would depend on the requirements for method of direct memory access.

Technology will likely allow new potentials for collaborative conscious awareness, but it seems even today, through sharing of information, even if only indirectly, we do regularly cause collaborative conscious awareness.