Metaphorically, the collective/cultural bubble is to the individual cognitive bubble as the ancient city wall is to the cell wall, each being an autopoietic construct which defines the community or system. Heraclitus pointed this out long ago:
The people must fight for their law as for their city wall.
Speaking with understanding they must hold fast to what is common to all, as a city holds to its law, and even more firmly. For all human laws are nourished by a divine one, which prevails as it will, suffices for all and surpasses them.
Common to all is Thought (ξυνόν ἐστι πᾶσι τὸ φρονέειν).— DK 44,113-14; Kahn LXV, XXX-XXXI; Wheelwright 80-81
I translate το φρονέειν here as ‘Thought’ (rather than ‘thinking’) in order to denote a universal (‘divine’) process in which all things are involved, rather than a psychological process that is supposed to happen inside of individual thinkers. This is consistent not only with other fragments of Heraclitus, but also with Peirce’s view ‘that our thinking only apprehends and does not create thought, and that that thought may and does as much govern outward things as it does our thinking’ (CP 1.27, 1909). In another context, he related this to scientific thinking as a communal activity:
There is no reason why ‘thought’ … should be taken in that narrow sense in which silence and darkness are favorable to thought. It should rather be understood as covering all rational life, so that an experiment shall be an operation of thought. Of course, that ultimate state of habit to which the action of self-control ultimately tends, where no room is left for further self-control, is, in the case of thought, the state of fixed belief, or perfect knowledge.
Two things here are all-important to assure oneself of and to remember. The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is ‘saying to himself,’ that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. The second thing to remember is that the man’s circle of society (however widely or narrowly this phrase may be understood), is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism.— Peirce, EP2:337-8
The ‘circle of society’ is ‘of higher rank’ in this respect, that ‘all the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the powers of unaided individuals’ (EP1:369). But in another respect, this ‘loosely compacted person’ depends on individual organisms for access to experience – its ‘only teacher’ – just as a biological population or species depends on the survival and reproduction of individuals to continue and evolve. Every means of inquiry is based on making contact, or connecting, with the reality which is independent of conventional belief. Yet the system which makes inquiry possible is made of the connections which constitute the community. The individual who devotes himself to inquiry can do so with integrity only by working both with and against the conventions of the society which he inhabits; and insofar as that society is healthy and evolving, it embodies a diversity of habits.