Date: 11-23-2024
Source: The Undiscovered Self by Carl Jung
In The Undiscovered Self, Carl Jung reflects on humanity’s inability to fully understand itself due to the absence of another species of equal intellect for comparison. This lack of a true peer leaves humanity isolated in its self-reflection, limiting our ability to objectively define and comprehend our own nature. AI has come along to finally provide that point of reference that shows us more about what it means to be human.
Humanity has never had an equal with which to compare itself.
AI provides a distinction between functions that are merely generative and those that are distinctly human, i.e. creative. creativity
Quotes:
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“It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgments and decisions and the planner of the future, must make himself such a quantité négligeable. The contradiction, the paradoxical evaluation of humanity by man himself, is in truth a matter for wonder, and one can only explain it as springing from an extraordinary uncertainty of judgment – in other words, man is an enigma to himself. This is understandable, seeing that he lacks the means of comparison necessary for self-knowledge. He knows how to distinguish himself from the other animals in point of anatomy and physiology, but as a conscious, reflecting being, gifted with speech, he lacks all criteria for self-judgment. He is on this planet a unique phenomenon which he cannot compare with anything else. The possibility of comparison and hence of self-knowledge would arise only if he could establish relations with quasi-human mammals inhabiting other stars.” - Carl Jung
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“Among the many and enormous advantages of efficient automatic machinery is this: it is completely fool-proof. But every gain has to be paid for. The automatic machine is fool-proof; but just because it is fool-proof it is also grace-proof. The man who tends such a machine is impervious to every form of aesthetic inspiration, whether of human or of genuinely spiritual origin.” The Perennial Philosophy - Aldous Huxley (pg. 171)
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“Industry without art is brutality” - John Ruskin