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Aug 4, 2021Liked by The Living Philosophy

Interesting post, on a perennially fascinating topic. The angle of comparing it with takes on Reddit added flavor, although the results are not surprising - the ability of those folks to think in nuanced ways about anything that touches on their complexes is extremely limited.

And one minor note - Freud did talk about what Jung ended up calling the collective unconscious, though he didn't explore it at all. He called images that couldn't be labeled repressed "phylogenetic traces" - but considered them worthless fantasies and escapes from reality.

Finally though, the real rub about the idea is: what reason beyond it's relatively reasonably-soundedness does one have for considering it? I mean there's tons of ideas that sound reasonable that ended up being complete bullshit. So for every example you could give of an initially out-there sounding theory that ended up being proved true, there are about a million that have been discredited (the aquatic ape theory is my personal favorite - someday that's going to proven true, gosh-darn-it).

And the evidentiary reasons why Jung said he believed revolves around episodes that are quite contested. So is it interesting? Yes. Is it true? I have never seen a particularly compelling or solid examination of this.

P.S. There is actually a trickle of interesting work being done on hive mind or "collective consciousness" in humans. This older one - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=12066871446597425934&hl - has received the most attention and is perhaps one of the more interesting reviews.

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It gives us a good excuse to do the things we do. It may even be true! You say “so what”; genetics is proven some response’s are plastic, and can change over time. Like our brains!

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How do you think the collective unconscious relates to the 8 types?

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