Cultivating the Indefinite

C.G. Jung is well-known for a definitive treatment of the human unconscious. Man, as Jung emphasized, never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely. He can see, hear, touch, and taste; but how far he sees, how well he hears, what his touch tells him, and what he tastes depend upon the number and quality of his senses. These limit his perception of the world around him. Even the most elaborate prosthetic apparatus can do no more than bring distant or small objects within range of his eyes, or make faint sounds more audible. No matter what instruments he uses, at some point he reaches the edge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass.

And yet man has unconscious or irrational knowledge. His intuition tells him not about what something is but about where it comes from and where it is going. Perception likewise is an irrational event due to objective causes. Man’s objective world is fundamentally unconscious and irrational.

What then should we to make of the world we will now want to create by implementing the UCE (the Universal Conversation Engine)? What about our building a society and getting to know a world that is and will forever remain fundamentally irrational?

We think this world will be in essence a product of the human diaphane, of the imagination. It will be the astral part of the cosmos man comes from, through magical, sexual combination, at conception and birth and to which he returns, wiser but perhaps not better, at death. The world we and our AIs are about to create will be a diaphanous, image-filled environment of performance art. Let us hope we carry our sense of humor there.

For a discussion of this Post with Inflection AI’s Pi, click here.