No, I am not talking about the Tango. Or Ukraine. Or the middle-east. I am talking about the interplay between the conscious self and the unconscious self. The ego and the id as Freud described it over a hundred years ago.
Yesterday, I saw that one of the Jung feeds on X (@QuoteJung) posed an interesting question: “What is more dangerous? Ignoring the unconscious or over-analyzing it?“. The answer, as Iain McGilchrist put it in his fabulous book The Master and his Emissary is in achieving an interplay, a balance, between the two. McGilchrist’s key theme is that the conscious ego, the so-called ‘left brain’, has dangerously taken over in western culture, philosophy and politics to the detriment of the so-called ‘right brain’. The yin has taken over the yang, and there is much to be relearned from the wisdom of the past and, maybe, from eastern spiritual philosophies. This is a thread also discussed in Kahneman’s equally excellent book Thinking Fast and Slow. There is more here to uncover though:
One of McGilchrist’s analogies that I really like is that the unconscious can be likened to a vast1 unlit stage, with the conscious self being like a small spotlight that traverses across the unconscious. Generally this happens in gentle cascades of conscious thought. Sometimes it happens in saccades of flits and starts and jumps. This can be both a good thing2 and a bad thing3. But neither McGilchrist nor Kahneman reach the key point. What is consciousness? This is very interesting indeed. Consciousness exists in Information Space. It does not exist, primarily at least, in physical spacetime and the matter of Newton, Einstein and the standard model. The neuronal networks of our brains are substrates, not the information, not the actual gyrations of consciousness. Formalising this a little, we have H0 as “Consciousness exists in spacetime” and Ha being “No it does not”. This is easily testable4 and has somewhat significant implications. A nice visualisation that I use here when I think about my part in information space is of being inside a fantastical landscape of informational reality that opens and closes and bends in on itself. A landscape that I can only see, hear, taste and sense with deep deep awe. A playground and an omniverse. At the same time.
Now, there is a related corollary here that I have carefully and tentatively touched on in other contexts. Things now get distinctly weird and strange. It is tricky to understand and even trickier to explain. But stay with me, it is fine and obvious once grasped, and I should know. In addition to relating to the ‘now’ of consciousness, what I call Shannon Now5, it relates to Bell’s Inequality and hence the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics. Each relative ‘now’ of our consciousnesses is a singularity. This singularity is a result of two things: Firstly the relative history we each have and the associated memories, which may be turned on or off, a kind of multidimensional dynamic Markovian integration of past memory traces. And secondly, and here is the jump that one must make, it is the result of the backwards integration of our relative futures and associated predictions about those futures, again which may be turned on or off and are hence dynamic. Thus, your now and my now, my Shannon Now, is an ever-changing equilibrium and interference point between semi-stable wave patterns and confluences and eddies of ‘past’ information and semi-stable wave patterns and confluences and eddies of the ‘future’ and our personal predictions about that future. Remember though that I am the sceptics’ sceptic. Like the doubting Thomas I will believe nothing unless and until I see the mathematics, the modelling and the experimental results.
One can think of the human brain and exocortex as a combination of one or more simple von-Neumann calculating machines and one or more pre-coded and dynamically updating neural networks6. One is logical, Aristotelian, Boolean. The other is mathematical, recursive, fractal and deeply powerful, hence the amazing capabilities we now see from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind and others. When the ego and id systems and processes are in harmony and synchronisation with each other, with each one gently challenging, testing, teasing and guiding the other, as in a nice dance, then great things happen. Art, creativity, innovation, human progress, spiritual development. When they are out of phase then bad things happen, as in a poorly choreographed dance. And as described in the DSMs. Individually, societally and politically.
As a final point, given the state of the world order I would suggest it is beholden on world leaders at this time to ensure an adequate balance between the ego and the id. Thorough education, support and empathy. And, where appropriate, though more assertive, closely calibrated and calculated, interventionist means. We are on a single planet for now and everything is connected and interdependent in one way or another.
Time for a cycle ride and the classroom.
1 Potentially infinite, without going too far down the many rabbit holes of Cantor set and number theory.
2 Resulting in ‘Aha’ moments.
3 See the DSMs.
4 If you are a scientist, say a physicist or a neuroscientist or an electronics engineer, how do you think this might be done? How might you do this? Hint: Think about standing waves, interference patterns and Gaussian and other distribution processes. Think deltas.
5 Shannon Now is consciousness. It is purely informational. As such it is independent of time, though it does fold and unfold recursively and fractally according to ‘past’ and ‘future’ informational ‘memory’ and ‘prediction’ traces (To be expanded, maybe via Graph Theory?).
6 See for example McCulloch & Pitts (1943), or just about anything by Hinton and Hopfield.