SpunkySkunk347
Bluelighter
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Unconscious Archetypes in Cognitive Pscyhology - "How far does the rabbit hole go?"
Something which first gained professional credibility in the early 19th century with men like Freud and Jung, coming from concepts proposed by philosophers in the 19th century (and many of its roots going well back before that), the unconscious mind.
Although a lot of Jungian psychology may stretch into the bizarre, some of it even extending into what might be considered 'spiritual' or 'mysticism'; the existence of an 'unconscious mind' is something that remains widely agreed upon.
In modern cognitive neuro-psychology, many examples can be given demonstrating the existence of an unconscious mind: newborns are born with the ability to swim and hold their breath underwater; among the many 'optical illusions' out there which play with our sense of vision in strange ways, a certain test revealing a "blind spot" near the center of our field of vision due to the presence of the optic nerve demonstrates the sheer ability of the brain to organize sensory input unconsciously, as the reason we never see this 'blind spot' is because we fill it in subconsciously with what we assume is there (you can do this right now yourself http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Constudblindspot.gif).
Some of the most essential archetypes in our nature such as "mother" and "father", are described in Jungian psychology as archetypes of the unconscious written in us genetically.
Now, some of these materia in the mechanics of the mind are simply phenomenon resulting out of tendency; but there are some which hint to a level of complexity far more immense. Some individuals suffering from brain damage (in some cases this damage may have been inflicted intentionally from psychosurgery as a cure for epilepsy) causing them to lose conscious ability to move their arm demonstrate a strange phenomenon: the arm will begin conducting various activities subconsciously as though no conscious control had been lost, but these activities may be disruptive, chaotic, or what could be referred to as the arm "taking on a life of its own", such as smacking things out of the way, or picking up objects to examine them and then throwing them - all while the person themselves might be watching in disbelief. To explain this, one might propose that regions of the brain controlling the arm when attempting to receive instructions from the remnants of the damaged region may defer to other regions of the brain instead, which are connected to each other as the unconscious mind. Thus, the arm may be reacting to stimulus as though the person were dreaming, similar to occurrences of people sleepwalking.
I then ask, when applied to other aspects of the unconscious, how far does the rabbit hole go? How much unconscious complexity is there in the simplest of actions? How much does unconscious activity influence the inclination of our decision making in ways that might even be symbolic - ranging from endearing to mischievous?
Given that the brain has formed its structure throughout the course of evolution and is ultimately derived from the will to live, we end up having to consider a scary possibility: consciousness and conscious awareness are illusions supporting social constructs of morality - and acts of self-interest are kept dimmed from conscious awareness. In Jungian psychology, this archetype is known as the 'shadow'. For me at least, this makes me heavily question what 'we' even are - given that the will to live is at the root of all actions, and our formation changes based on temporary benefit.
Something which first gained professional credibility in the early 19th century with men like Freud and Jung, coming from concepts proposed by philosophers in the 19th century (and many of its roots going well back before that), the unconscious mind.
Although a lot of Jungian psychology may stretch into the bizarre, some of it even extending into what might be considered 'spiritual' or 'mysticism'; the existence of an 'unconscious mind' is something that remains widely agreed upon.
In modern cognitive neuro-psychology, many examples can be given demonstrating the existence of an unconscious mind: newborns are born with the ability to swim and hold their breath underwater; among the many 'optical illusions' out there which play with our sense of vision in strange ways, a certain test revealing a "blind spot" near the center of our field of vision due to the presence of the optic nerve demonstrates the sheer ability of the brain to organize sensory input unconsciously, as the reason we never see this 'blind spot' is because we fill it in subconsciously with what we assume is there (you can do this right now yourself http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Constudblindspot.gif).
Some of the most essential archetypes in our nature such as "mother" and "father", are described in Jungian psychology as archetypes of the unconscious written in us genetically.
Now, some of these materia in the mechanics of the mind are simply phenomenon resulting out of tendency; but there are some which hint to a level of complexity far more immense. Some individuals suffering from brain damage (in some cases this damage may have been inflicted intentionally from psychosurgery as a cure for epilepsy) causing them to lose conscious ability to move their arm demonstrate a strange phenomenon: the arm will begin conducting various activities subconsciously as though no conscious control had been lost, but these activities may be disruptive, chaotic, or what could be referred to as the arm "taking on a life of its own", such as smacking things out of the way, or picking up objects to examine them and then throwing them - all while the person themselves might be watching in disbelief. To explain this, one might propose that regions of the brain controlling the arm when attempting to receive instructions from the remnants of the damaged region may defer to other regions of the brain instead, which are connected to each other as the unconscious mind. Thus, the arm may be reacting to stimulus as though the person were dreaming, similar to occurrences of people sleepwalking.
I then ask, when applied to other aspects of the unconscious, how far does the rabbit hole go? How much unconscious complexity is there in the simplest of actions? How much does unconscious activity influence the inclination of our decision making in ways that might even be symbolic - ranging from endearing to mischievous?
Given that the brain has formed its structure throughout the course of evolution and is ultimately derived from the will to live, we end up having to consider a scary possibility: consciousness and conscious awareness are illusions supporting social constructs of morality - and acts of self-interest are kept dimmed from conscious awareness. In Jungian psychology, this archetype is known as the 'shadow'. For me at least, this makes me heavily question what 'we' even are - given that the will to live is at the root of all actions, and our formation changes based on temporary benefit.
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