ai and the collective unconscious

12 minute read

Robert Anton Wilson came up with a fascinating concept he called the Jumping Jesus Phenomenon. The concept was designed to measure the incremental increase of knowledge over time. He took the birth of Jesus as a significant marker in Western history and proposed that all human knowledge up to that point be considered one unit. This unit he called a Jesus. The time it took us to achieve the second Jesus was around the time of the Renaissance. The third was the mid-1700s. The fourth was the early 1800s, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The rate has been increasing exponentially since then.

This exponential increase leads to a point in time when we are doubling knowledge at a rate greater than every second.

This always presented a bit of a conundrum for me. When considering the limits that people are bound to in space and time, I couldn't fathom her knowledge could increase beyond a certain point. Either the population would have to grow to the point that it devoured the entire planet, or something else would need to take over. I think that something is AI. We have created a technology that has already surpassed our capacity to catalogue and process data as individuals, and within a decade, will have an apparent IQ that will be beyond our ability to comprehend.

All bets off on precisely what happens next.

inside and beyond

I read a comment recently that spoke about AI. The question was simple, 'If it is a tool, what problem is that attempting to solve?'

It's a good question, however, the few paragraphs that were quoted were a very rational attempt to explain a phenomenon I believe is driven by forces that are far more irrational. This is not to condemn the attempt to explain AI rationally, but rather to consider that there are deeper issues at play. 

The notion that these technologies may have been created, not to solve a problem for us, but to solve a problem for those who might seek to control us, in implied. It's a valid proposition. The Internet of Things, smart cities, facial recognition, central bank digital currencies, all exist with the potential to limit and restrain individual choice and activity. The degree to which these technologies are aligned with any one or more conspiracies, be they for political, economic, or spiritual domination, is open to debate and investigation. I will leave that to each of you to consider. 

the new gods

These are very rational attempts to explain the effects of rational causes. This does not make them wrong, but there is a deeper question at play that all too often goes unasked. The deeper question is, to what degree, and in what ways are these technologies, and the conspiracies that may be steering, expressions of our collective unconscious? As such, to what degree might we be attempting to answer an irrational effect with a rational cause? 

What I mean is, and this is not to blame the victim, but to what degree are we each individually responsible for the manifestation of this phenomenon? 

We can't change the world, but to what degree might changing ourselves, shift the balance of power and any forces that might attempt to exert control over our lives? If we do not reclaim it for ourselves is it not evident throughout history that others will claim it from us? 

You really don't have to do much research or digging these days to see that there is a push for political and economic centralisation at a global level, be that through the corporate actions of Blackrock, Vanguard, or State Street, or the implementation of NGO policies at regional and national levels of government (or governance as it is now called.)

separation vs connection

The issues we face, be they at an individual or a collective level, are rarely resolved at a rational level alone. It would be foolish to dismiss the ability to plan and strategise aspects of our lives, but the bigger challenge is that of realising the nature of the psyche - be that on an individual or on a collective level. If the degree to which an individual can individuate is the degree to which they can ameliorate the apparent fated effects of unconscious drives, then is the same not true of the collective?

Societal neurosis, splitting, and separation into individual identities without a sense of collective connection is ultimately what founds, and perpetuates, external conflict.

Well, this may seem fairly self-evident, it is not a perspective that is easy to educate, and like so many attempts to impose ideologies, it could have monstrous consequences.

From my perspective, the shift in conscious awareness has to be individually realised.

The best that we can hope for is to create environments that foster such realisations in individuals. After that, we just hope for the best. In this regard, in the final resolution, we do what we can and give the rest to faith and hope for the best. 

ai and the collective unconscious

With regard to technology, what elements of the collective unconscious might be at work here? What unconscious projections are these organisations be constellating? After all, corporations, governments, economic bodies are not just inert names or concepts; they are compositions of people. What conscious or unconscious processes are being played out by them and within them? Anyone who has worked for a large organisation knows that organisational policy is only one aspect of what that organisation is. To a greater or lesser extent it is the individuals who is drawn into that environment, who are attracted to it, either out of desire or necessity, but play a part within it. While their conscious actions might be in line with policy, they bring into that container their own individual unconscious drives and shadow. To what degree these marry up with the unconscious drives and shadow of the organisation would be the subject of a different essay.

What is evident is that the less conscious people are of their unconscious processes, the more they are drawn to the archetypal forces in the external world that represent them. One example is the attraction to leaders to solve problems. As a valid case for competence-based hierarchies, but how often do people buy into personality and narrative? It's a common trope that more and more people consider that politicians are liars. 

Be they leaders or organisations, what psychological forces do such personalities and systems co-opt from individuals?  

let's go crazy

I realise this is a bit of a reach, but go with me on this for a moment, because it's intended to illustrate a point - not to be a prediction. When it comes to AI and the use of AI in corporations one of the potentially most frightening scenarios would be the increasing automatisation of their systems. If we have driverless cars, what is to say we couldn't have CEO-less companies? Corporations run by AI. Why not? What marketer could compete with an AI that can predict your deepest fears and your deepest desires, and will play you for every breath, every gain of attention, and every penny it can extract from you?

As I say, it's a reach, but it is an attempt to illustrate what might be at the core of our unconscious creation of AI. That in an attempt to express our collective consciousness - our collective knowledge - we are also manifesting a technological expression of our collective unconscious.

Nietzsche's assertion that "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." Qualifies the extent to which rational materialism dominated Europe since the Enlightenment, and while his own belief was that God was a little more than affection to explain and compensate for our suffering, Jung took this further, in his attempt to repair this division. 

Jung's life's work can be seen in the context of attempting to repair the division that resulted from rational materialism. The Self, which was a secular attempt to define the principles that God represented, was something to be realised in the process of individuation - something to be realised by each individual in themselves and not represented by some external organisation such as a church.

The notion that we are rational beings, rationally creating the world, was for him an inconvenient fiction. We are, especially as a species, largely an unconscious mass of instincts and drives. 

To what degree is AI an expression of those unconscious drives? To what degree might it be an expression of our inability to attend at an individual level to our relationship with a collective unconscious - to the Self? So much so that our collective unconscious is attempting to manifest something so powerful in the material world that it could genuinely act like a vengeful or benevolent God?

In this regard, it could be seen as a backlash from material rationalism. The nation that all of the mysteries of the universe could be solved if we had enough information. From Nietzsche's perspective, this is what killed God. From Jung's perspective, this is what caused the separation to the collective unconscious, to the mystery within, and that relationship that contextualises the true nature of human experience, not least, it's suffering.