COMMENTS

Thank you Ken for, as I hear it, this call to creatively engage the individuation process.

Though that might not have been your exact intent, I’m imagining not responding to the Weltanschauung’s distorted power (thoughts about truth) with challenging it as wrong thinking (as to your note that at a conscious level we can become immersed in right and wrong) but with the question, were we Orwell now, connected to a flow of psychic energy, what might we be intuiting, or sensing, or feeling or thinking. This is not meant to say that we shouldn’t bring good thinking to todays problems, but to bring the thinking forward with deep connection to psyche thus participating in the upheaval of the terrible Ministry.

In my view dreams, those that are personal, those that bear some reference to the collective; as well as what various creative processes might be bringing forth at this time, are of the utmost.

Some themes I am noticing in dreams and creative expressions are attentiveness to that which is local and immediate, grounded (horizontal and “earthy” rather than reified and vertically “spiritual”), consciously suffering the challenges of developing a relationship with “the unknown”, images of natural cycles, and finally, what seems to be of great importance, relating to the archetypal and personal and mythological feminine.

It’s compelling to me to tend to the seeds of a new myth, which seem to be already emerging in this most difficult immediate myth.

Thank you Ken, for your work for and care for this community.

I’m very interested in hearing what others may have to say.

Gwen Sensenig

Thank you Ken, for your thoughtful post. I’m sitting with the points you’ve raised. Yes, I sense that Orwell’s collective myth is upon us. The story of Frankenstein has come to mind as well. And thank you Gwen, for your comment. I’m also drawn to tend to the seeds of a new myth. What a beautiful metaphor.

To be honest, I feel overwhelmed when I spend more than 5 minutes each day watching the horror movie that is news. I find some agency in contacting representatives and engaging in local civic actions, but what inspires me is doing my inner work and envisioning millions of people in our country making a similar choice to prioritize reflection, by whatever means available to them. I envision a mass movement toward interiority altering the extreme collective darkness and destruction that surrounds us. While I believe it’s possible and perhaps probable that Orwell’s vision will manifest in completeness before the pendulum swings, I hold the vision that large numbers of people turning to inner work will create a complimentary forcefield that will nudge us away from the abyss and toward greater wisdom, balance, and harmony with nature.

I feel uplifted when I consider this vision; therefore it seems worthwhile, even if ultimately it doesn’t unfold to the degree I hope it will. Time will tell!

Heidi McCormick

OCTOBER 12, 2024

The editors of the latest issue of Psychological Perspectives, volume 67, issues 1-2, 2024, dedicated the issue to artificial intelligence. The various contributors to the volume address psyche and artificial intelligence in various ways with titles such as About the Art: Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence and the Psyche: The Trickster and Our Moral Compass, and The World of Gaming and Jungian Analysis.

Of late, the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) has become much more commonplace and concerning for many people. For our first blog, I felt it appropriate to begin with a current topic, which was primarily chosen due to its timely appearance in Psychological Perspectives (the Jungian journal offered by the L.A. Jung Institute).

In the introduction, the executive director of the L.A. Institute for Jungian Studies, Christophe Le Mouel, provides personal dreams and recaps of books related to AI. In particular, he reviews Max Bennett’s new book, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made our Brain. LeMouel quotes Bennet: “A silicon-based AI can infinitely scale up its processing capacity as it sees fit. Indeed, individuality will lose its well-defined boundaries as AIs can freely copy and reconfigure themselves; parenthood will take on new meaning as biological mechanisms of mating give way to new silicon-based mechanisms of training and creating new intelligent entities.”

Here, Bennett describes what he sees as the next evolutionary upheaval, silicon-based mechanisms or machines. We are left pondering the author’s description, wondering if this technological shift is a development or a threat to humanity. It certainly sounds like a threat to humanity. The movement away from biological life forms can easily happen if we don’t regulate AI technology. Even if we do, as recent events in our country have revealed, the threat will remain real.

The quote introduces a science fiction perspective, but one that apparently AI researchers are striving to accomplish. Silicon instead of carbon-based

life would introduce a new chemically-based machine. Could this introduce a new biology, if that word even applies? If this did occur, we would need to ask: But what of psyche?

Jung informs us that “Natural history tells us of a haphazard and casual transformation of species over hundreds of millions of years of devouring and being devoured …. The importance of consciousness is so great that one cannot help suspecting the element of meaning to be concealed somewhere within all the monstrous, apparently senseless biological turmoil, and that the road to its manifestation was ultimately found on the level of warm-blooded vertebrates possessed of a differentiated brain—found as if by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet somehow sensed, felt and groped for out of some dark urge.”

He further states: “We do not know how far the process of coming to consciousness can extend, or where it will lead. It is a new element in the story of creation, and there are no parallels we can look to. We therefore cannot know what potentialities are inherent in it. Neither can we know the prospects for the species Homo sapiens. Will it imitate the fate of other species, which once flourished on the earth and now are extinct? Biology can advance no reasons why this should not be so.”

Jung treats us to critical points about natural evolution and the development of humans and consciousness, and most importantly meaning. These aspects of psyche express the dynamics of which there are many and appear to be associated with biological life on our planet. It appears that AI ignores the psyche, due to the willfulness of researchers striving for technological advancement.

In the introduction of Psychological Perspectives, Le Mouel also informs us that “AI will need to confront the apparent absurdities we find in dreams, fairy tales, and myths before it can pretend to have general intelligence… Still, I doubt it can produce the elixir of life.”

Well stated, and to the point, Christophe Le Mouel!

AI has a long history of a promising future. Today, it seems the future has begun. Yet, the predictions of Bennett and past researchers are always balanced on a fine line between fantasy and reality. Of course, it’s the reality side of this balance that can lead to catastrophic conditions should the researchers and AI advancement go unchecked without regulations. It seems absurd to say that the next extinction and “evolutionary” change would result in the elimination of the human race and that a new generation of silicon machines would prevail. This absurdity leans much more to the side of fantasy, yet this paraphrases Bennett’s words.

For this fantasy to even remotely enter the realm of reality, computer technology must change dramatically. Not only are enormous amounts of data required for AI to function and process, or mimic, some degree of intelligence, but the speed and the electronic circuits of the computers must enter a completely new realm. The realm of quantum, biological networks!

 Quantum computers are slowly coming into our world. As researchers and developers struggle to understand what and how to begin to build and program such devices, it is important to remember that these devices are computers, albeit with extremely high speeds, and are based on algorithmic programs as well. The algorithms, though quite different from today’s computers, would still be algorithms!

Biological circuits, at this point, are not a serious concern, but silicon circuits are. If silicon and quantum computers were to be combined, then we’re not facing just silicon computers but a hybrid of sorts. Again, the result would still be algorithmic computers. If, however, the quantum world and biology were to unite, then the algorithmic form of the machine, as we know it, will drastically change and algorithms might no longer exist.

Some critical questions related to the psyche with respect to a silicon “evolutionary” change, to hybrids, or quantum biological circuits are: Would there be a deep Self? Is it possible for consciousness to occur? Would complexes form? What about the natural evolutionary process?

Finally, consider AI and the first two letters of active imagination (AI). These contrasting processes – technology and the human psyche – are likely to never integrate.

Ken Silvestro

NOVEMBER 3, 2024

There are many ways to assess, and try to understand, the chaos that has enveloped this country for several years. As we approach the latest election, the chaos has intensified. This probably doesn’t surprise anyone. Basically, our political system, our politicians, and our judicial system have succumbed to the collective chaos. Jung informs us that the collective is comprised of:

all psychic contents that belong not to one individual but to many, i.e., to a society, a people or to mankind [sic] in general…as well as concepts of justice, the state, religion, science, etc., current among civilized man [sic]…It is not only concepts of and ways of looking at things, however, that must be termed collective, but also feelings.

Clearly, Jung’s description can be applied to so many areas of our current lives and to the chaos we all experience at this time.

When we hear politicians calling each other names, acting and speaking childishly or superiorly, when family members are angry with each other and not speaking to one another, when violence is being displayed and people are being assaulted, there is chaos “a foot,” as Sherlock Holmes might say. It doesn’t, however, take the astute eye of Sherlock to see and feel the chaos. Civilization as we’ve known it for years has been torn apart.

In simple Jungian terms, we can describe the chaos as expressions of the collective and personal shadows. Most of us are familiar with the general idea of the Jungian shadow, but let’s be more specific and describe the collective shadow, which is often referred to as evil due to its enormous propensity for broad and dispersed atrocities, pain, and disasters. Jung speaks of the collective shadow as evil as well.

[People] do not deny that terrible things have happened and still go on happening, but it is always ‘the others’ who do them. And when such deeds belong to the recent or remote past, they quickly and conveniently sink into the sea of forgetfulness, and that state of chronic woolly-mindedness returns which we describe as ‘normality’…The evil, the guilt, the profound unease of conscience, the dark foreboding, are there before our eyes, if only we would see…None of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow…[Harmlessness and naivete] lead to projection of the unrecognized evil into the ‘other’. This strengthens the opponent’s position in the most effective way, because the projection carries the fear which we involuntarily and secretly feel for our own evil over to the other side and considerably increases the formidableness of his [sic] threat.

Jung is speaking about the collective shadow and its influence on us, as we find ourselves in a collective and simply as individuals.

On the other hand, the individual shadow belongs to one’s own psychic nature, which is often referred to as the personal shadow. Does it vary very much from the collective shadow? In certain ways it’s very different. Most prominent is its formation. Beginning as each of us enter life, it then develops and grows within our psyches throughout the years. Its content becomes everything we suppressed and that was oppressed in our lives, due to being informed how to behave, think, feel, and so forth, by authority figures and culture.

The collective shadow provides us with an essential way to understand the chaos we are currently seeing and experiencing. As Jung stated above, it is the shadow of a group of people, a social subset, or an entire society. This implies that there can be more than one collective shadow. There are as many collective shadows as there are collectives. If our political social structure is divided into different social groups, then each group has a collective shadow. The content of these shadows can be extremely different, and projections can vary considerably, but nevertheless, they are their own psychic realities.

Collective shadows tend to be associated with general morals, values, reactions, ideas, and trends, while personal shadows are associated with individual experiences. Collectives, however, are comprised of individuals and each individual shadow contributes to the development of a collective shadow. Once formed, the collective shadow has a dynamic of its own and in turn, powerfully influences the individual members who formed it. It functions like a storm cloud over the individual members beneath it who belong to the collective. Each person is affected by the chaos as it maintains its own existence at that point.

Once again, we turn to Jung.

But if one can no longer avoid the realization that evil, without man’s [sic] ever having chosen it, is lodged in human nature itself, then it bestrides the psychological stage as the equal and opposite partner of good…It’s not that present-day man [sic] is capable of greater evil than the man [sic] if antiquity…He [sic] merely has incomparably more effective means with which to realize his propensity to evil. As his [sic] consciousness has broadened and differentiated, so his [sic] moral nature has lagged behind. That is the great problem before us today. Reason alone no longer suffices…he [sic] harbours within himself [sic] a dangerous shadow and adversary who is involved as an invisible helper in the dark machinations of the political monster. It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group.

The chaos we currently experience is an expression of the collective shadow. It is not likely to vanish after the election. In fact, it could easily persist and become more intense. This is something of which we must all be conscious in an attempt to render it less and less powerful.

Ken Silvestro