We often speak of subjectivity as if it cancels out any ‘true’ representation of reality, and we are left with a vacuous Pandora’s box where we don’t know anything within the vessel of the mind [pandoras box was originally a vessel sometimes large enough to contain a human, so I am using both the original and the modern meaning here]. However if we reach into that confused state, I do believe it is possible to extrapolate ’true’ information from it.
Do we need perfect instrumentation to gain knowledge? I remember watching Richard Dawkins [on tv] show how the eye is imperfect, and expect the brain has its imperfections too. Yet I am wondering if you need a perfect or just an adequate transport of information in order to gain ‘truths’ from a given source? if for example we see an image of a blonde girl on the TV, we see an imperfect representation of what she looks like, and indeed if she stood before us we still do, and yet the knowledge in our minds are perfect items of knowledge, a cube is a cube and girl is a girl etc, and we only need to marry a rather more vague representation of that to know what it is. If we see a box we know it is a cube even though we can never see a perfect cube in the real world ~ but we can see one in the minds eye.
So lets do a bit of ‘shotgun philosophy’ on this; we don’t get all the information we need from a given source, but we do get some information [probably all we need]. We see the girl and most of her attributes, we know what these things are so we can attest to the idea that we have seen the girl because the image fits into our bank of knowledge. We only get small amounts of correct information, but with everything we observe we get some more grains [or pellets of the shotgun] of info, eventually from simple forms and ideas we build up a vast collection of verified information ~ even though every part of it is only ever partially true in transit.
… and where are you going with this info as you transit? Will you use it to take you to reality? Is reality at the end of your travel? Reality changes.
It doesn’t matter if reality is transient, we build up a database of archetypes and with the limited amount of possible shapes and forms from one transition to another, we can build a highly representative vision of reality.
On another level, I do believe that we must begin with a set of archetypal forms, or we would never be able to work anything out. The soul and body it would seam comes with such a set, one to which we build through each incarnation. The alternative is the chaos of the unknown in Pandora’s box, and we really would have nothing to think of and no way of correlating reality to knowledge.
Good point… we are always lacking when it comes to perception. Truth is always based upon what has already been accepted to being true. Because our ideas are imperfect, and more importantly our means through which we arrive at them, we will always have imperfect knowledge. But what’s outside the box anyway? It can’t be known. So it’s not that we “are left with a vacuous Pandora’s box where we don’t know anything within the vessel of the mind”, but rather the opposite: we only know what’s within the vessel of the mind. That’s all we can ever know. In essence, we aren’t missing anything else in regards to knowledge. Whatever we think to be outside the mind, is most definitely a part of it (the key word is “think” there). As far as perception, it’s subjective just as our thoughts concerning our subjective perceptions are. Therefore, our perceptions are mental as well. The mechanisms through which we integrate the “outside” world are geared towards knowledge and knowing (mental stuff). Essentially, anything the brain or body comes into contact with is already grasped by the mind when experienced, whether that experience be conscious or unconscious (as we may or may not be fully aware of the impression as an individual ego) doesn’t matter. It’s all experience, and therefore, all subject to being devoid of any objective truth. There can only be a comparative or relative truth. So the box isn’t so bad because its all we have. The problem is how much faith we put in the box.
Well what I was trying to say is that there is imperfect representation of reality and reality itself holds no absolutes, therefore we only need to approximate reality! The box otherwise would bear no correlation to anything, and we would not know anything at all. What is in the vessel of the mind does represent reality and it doesn’t have to do it perfectly to achieve that. What the mind ‘touches’ it knows by the very imprint of a thing upon it, that imprint only needs to approximate the outer thing in the world. It is like if you sent someone a message, you could misinterpret it, this is our freedom, but most of the time we don’t. we read a message or a book and given that the meaning is potrayed adequately then we understand it. You understand this message even though it is just a bunch of text characters, your mind therefore has successfully received the info and knows it, even though the info is only telling you what it means via imperfect representation.
What makes the most sense to me is that the brain forms an archetype of objects after it acquires a small collection of experiences of them. It builds sort of an ‘average’ and then uses and refines this average with more and more experiences of the same object. To know that we see a woman is for the brain to identify the sight of one with the archetype of ‘women’ it has formed from past experiences of them. We feel fairly certain when the archetype has been fortified by means of numerous experiences and when the next instance of one in experience bears similar enough features. This certainty usually proves reliable and so we continue to trust in the archetype. In other words, we feel like we ‘know’ that what we see is a women because of how strongly our experience matches up with the archetype of ‘woman’.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say “we would not know anything at all”. Our approximations certainly don’t have any bearing on reality itself. I’d say the box only bears correlation to itself, and of course we don’t know reality itself, but only the approximation. In this way, the box will forever remain boxed off and separated from reality in itself, while equally being embedded in reality. It’s like different perspectives. The one perspective is in the box and can’t touch reality from that perspective, the other perspective is reality, and it is both the box (and whatever’s inside of it) and that which transcends the box.
The box is still within reality, so it’s an aspect of reality itself. It’s just the box functions through not being the full reality but only an abstracted piece of it; limited, imperfect, and just approximate.
I think this is more how knowledge or information about what we experience works. The incredible thing about archetypes is that they link us together in a way that hints to knowledge prior to our individual experiences. When you can travel across the world, into completely dispersed and different areas and talk to people who have stories and myths that match up and contain undoubted similarities to your own, then it becomes evident that the knowledge we create and think of has some primal relationship to our evolutionary history and experience. It goes beyond our individual bodies and is shared by us all.
That is my view, yes. How else could we maintain similarities in thought and other mental formulations? Essentially, an archetype is just another way of saying an instinct, it just goes further in its definition as it relates to mentality.
This would hold only for the most basic of archetypes (concepts) - ones like ‘object’, ‘space’, ‘time’, ‘self’, ‘other’ - but if you find that across all different cultures, there is the common archetype ‘tree’ - well, that shouldn’t come as a surprise, nor that it would have to indicate an innate idea.
Your mentations are very much a product of society. Society has created you to maintain your so called instincts and conditioning in alignment with the existing state of affairs.
So have I, and I know the distinction between his and the usage at work in this thread. I only hopped on board using that term because it seemed Quetzal was using it.
Well, the archetypes most definitely influence how we see reality. So its not so much the concept of “tree”, but how we respond to our concept of tree. What does it mean? How does it affect us? The tending to respond in such a way has to be innate and before individual experience, otherwise we would all respond differently and there would be no similarities because everyones experience of the tree differs based upon their current “placing”.
But wouldn’t you also think that the mind has sets of archetypes to begin with ~ from birth? [or even within the mind itself, and the primary nature of reality] Let us not forget what an incredible organic computer it is, within the imagination itself it can easily form complex geometric shapes to a way higher degree than what we the consciousness can! A computer can be programmed with a myriad of archetypes of form and informational basis, the human brain can do this to an incredible degree. When we look out the window and see a scenery the brain can form all the trees landscapes and buildings, and yet we the consciousness only vaguely notice this.
I was thinking of archetypes in a similar way to how a computer graphic would make 3D polygons or would work by code [information sets], I am not sure how jung thought of archetypes so I took it as like fundamental structures of ideas of a given thing?
Memory is playing a trick with itself because it tells you that it is not the words that you are left with but something other than the words. But the fact that you remember something of what has gone on before and that is being discussed implies that the impact of the words is translated by memory, which then tells you that the memory is something other than the words.
Thoughts about what you are looking at are outside the field of the body. I don’t think that the brain has anything to do with creativity at all. The brain is just a reactor and a container.
What is memory after all? Nobody knows what it is. You can give a definition as a student of psychology. “Memory is the mental response of recalling a specific thing at a specific time.” That was the definition that I had learned in psychology textbooks. But that is too silly a definition because nobody knows what memory is or where it is located. You can examine the brain after you are dead, after I am dead. But you won’t see any difference between the brain of a genius and the brain of a low grade moron. So we really don’t know.
The whole motivation, if I may use that word, behind the electromagnetic field is that they want to do something, change something. All the research projects are geared to the idea of learning something about the way memory operates and the way the human body is functioning, so that what’s discovered can be applied, which is very limited in the first place. The subject matter of life, the human body, and memory is such a vast thing that what you know is only a teeny-weeny bit of what there is. The only interest is to bring about a change. But there is nothing to be changed.
