Brief Thoughts on Mind(you have to start somewhere)

I am a reluctant Jungian.

The truth is I like Freud better: as a human being, as a scientist -- and certainly as a writer of not just scientific but literary merit. Freud it seems to me was the more intellectually honest of the two men. Reading their personal letters only cemented my opinions.

But it seems that Jung better stands the test of time.

Jung's theory of archetypes seems more compatible with the emerging neurological and evolutionary evidence -- his ideas on religion and the personification of basic psychic forces continue to hold water. Freud almost certainly would have continued to revise his theories had he lived, and several times made comments that foresaw the current state of drug therapy, the ultimately physical basis of psychological processes, a view which Jung probably did not share-- but we are left with only Freud's system at the time of his death, and in most of it's details it seems destined to obsolescence. Freud's great gift to us is his method of psychological thought. Jung's legacy is his uncanny intimacy with the operations of his own psyche.

The problem I face with Jung is that his thought quickly places us on metaphysical quicksand, which for him was no problem. He raises problems about reality that cannot be sidestepped and cannot be easily laid to rest. For instance: synchronicity. Despite being picked up by occultists and new-agers as an explanation for just about any logically indefensible belief (much the way a hashed up version of quantum mechanics is used for the same purpose) it is damned hard to avoid the basic phenomenon if you have done any kind of intense work on yourself: as you change internally, your experience of the world changes. Bizarre coincidences and opportunities seem to arise. It is not something the rational mind wants to acknowledge.

But I believe in the rational mind.

It helps that Jung defines Synchronicity as an acausal meaningful pattern. "Acausual" frees us from the difficult idea that thought somehow influences the "outside" world -- the entire unsolvable tangle of the post-Descartes mind-body debate. In a modern scientific model we don't want to deal with those knots. "Mind" is the functioning of the brain and the body. Thought is a physical phenomenon which can be measured and mapped. As Buddha told us long ago, mind as an entity does not exist.

If we look at Synchronicity as a function of perception, it makes more sense. Perception is more than just my sensory intake, it is the way I order that data, the assumptions my brain makes in order to reconstruct a model of the world from that data. Obviously, changing the assumptions changes way the meaning of the information.

This is not the place to tackle the many problems of meaning. But on a very basic level, meaning is the function of attention. An organism's perceptual system is built around pattern recognition, the ability to pick out from the environment those events, objects or combinations that are significant to the goals of the organism. The most fundamental of these -- such as the deep assumptions that make visual perception possible at all: assumptions about distance, color, shade, how three dimensional objects behave, movement, etc. -- are hardwired into the brain. They can be demonstrated even in very small children, and without them, no complex organism could function in a real-world environment.

On a much higher level, acquired assumptions about the world -- how people behave, what we can expect in our social interactions, what the consequences of certain types of behavior will be -- can become so familiar over time that we cease to be conscious of them, but they can be changed by conscious effort, and changing these assumptions definitely changes our experience of the world, in ways that sometimes do seem almost magical. This is the basis of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, whose power I can attest to from personal experience. These underlying assumptions and associations are, to a large extent, the meaning of our experience.

If meaning is wholly a function of consciousness -- there is no inherent meaning in any event or object in the outside world -- then the mystery of Synchronicity at least partially dissolves.

When Jung talks about the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious we could begin by thinking about these two types of "assumptions" and how they might be instituted into he brain.

Consciousness is a feedback loop. Very similar to pointing a video camera at the monitor to which it is attached. Perceptual systems are organized around pattern recognition, and what happens in the higher animals is that the pattern recognition is increasingly focused not just at the outside world, but back on the behavior and thought of the organism itself. This allows for self-correction, but it also involves us in all the problems of self-perception: that it must always be incomplete, limited by significant blind-spots, and that it tends to distort. (Perhaps this is why this type of consciousness seems to be most effective in social animals, where other points of view are readily available for correction.) Our subjective experience of consciousness is the echo effect characteristic of feedback loops.

(more development and notes for these thoughts are coming)