Cognition as Participation: 2 Collective Cognition and Fields of Attention

If cognition is participation rather than representation, then a consequence follows immediately — and unavoidably:

Cognition cannot be individual in the way we have been taught to assume.

This is not an empirical claim about teamwork or social influence. It is an ontological one.

Once cognition is understood as constrained participation in a field of potential, the field is primary. What appears as “individual cognition” is always a local stabilisation within a collective cognitive field.

This post makes that claim explicit.

---

1. The category error of “individual cognition”

Most theories of cognition begin with individuals and then attempt to explain how they coordinate: through communication, shared representations, alignment mechanisms, or social cognition.

This gets the order wrong.

Coordination does not emerge between pre-existing cognisers.

Cognisers emerge within coordinated fields of activity.

What we call an “individual cognitive act” is always:

• already oriented,

• already constrained,

• already scaffolded
  by a wider field of attention, practice, and possibility.

There is no cognition that begins from zero.

---

2. Fields of attention, not aggregates of minds

A field of attention is not a collection of private mental states. It is a structured potential that determines:

• what can be noticed,

• what counts as relevant,

• what distinctions are available,

• what responses are intelligible.

Fields of attention are:

• historically sedimented,

• materially scaffolded,

• socially maintained,

• and perspectivally actualised.

They are not inside anyone’s head.

When multiple participants are oriented within the same field, cognition appears coordinated — not because minds align, but because they are already participating in the same constraints.

---

3. Why attention is collective by default

Attention is often treated as a private mental resource: something individuals allocate, withdraw, or focus.

But attention only makes sense relative to a field that structures salience.

You cannot attend to:

• what has no contrast,

• what has no affordance,

• what has no place in a system of relevance.

Fields of attention:

• pre-structure salience,

• stabilise patterns of noticing,

• and constrain what participation can actualise.

Individual “attention” is therefore a local tuning within a collective field, not a private spotlight cast from within.

---

4. Expertise as field attunement

Consider expertise.

Expert cognition is often described as superior internal representation, richer models, or more accurate mental maps. But phenomenologically, experts do not report “better pictures”.

They report:

• immediacy,

• fluency,

• sensitivity,

• an ability to notice what matters.

This is not representational gain.

It is attunement to a field.

Experts are better participants because:

• the field has been restructured through repeated engagement,

• distinctions have been stabilised,

• and trajectories of action have become reliable.

Expert cognition is therefore collective memory actualised perspectivally, not private intelligence stored internally.

---

5. Collective cognition without a super-mind

At this point, it is tempting to imagine a “group mind” hovering above individuals.

That would be a mistake.

Collective cognition does not require:

• a higher-level subject,

• shared representations,

• or a unified consciousness.

It requires only:

• a shared field of constraints,

• distributed participation,

• and stabilised pathways of coordination.

The cognition is in the system, not in a super-agent.

Participants are not components of a mind.

They are positions within a field of actualisation.

---

6. Breakdown makes the field visible

As with normativity, breakdown is where ontology shows itself.

When coordination fails:

• misunderstandings proliferate,

• actions misfire,

• relevance collapses,

• attention fragments.

What breaks is not “communication between minds”, but the field of attention itself.

This is why large-scale failures — institutional, political, or epistemic — cannot be repaired by correcting individual beliefs. The problem is not internal error. It is field destabilisation.

Repair, where possible, must therefore be collective and structural.

---

7. Implications we can no longer ignore

Once cognition is recognised as collective participation:

• The idea of purely private understanding becomes incoherent.

• Learning cannot be reduced to information transfer.

• Intelligence becomes a property of relational systems.

• Responsibility for epistemic failure shifts from individuals to structures.

• Design, education, and governance become cognitive interventions.

Most importantly:

Cognition is no longer something individuals have.

It is something systems do — through us.

---

8. What follows

This post closes one door permanently: cognition as an internal, individual process.

The next post opens another:

Post 3 — Symbolic Systems as Stabilised Participation

There we will show why symbols are not representations in the head or codes in the world, but collective stabilisations that make participation durable across time, scale, and absence.

At that point, the last refuge of representational cognition collapses — quietly, and without drama.