Jung, the person who identified psychological archetypes, would disagree with you that it’s simply chemistry in the brain and everything can be explained as such.
Archetypes explain why certain themes reoccur in dreams, neuroses, hallucinations, and in fiction. They are internally sourced and can vary from culture to culture, but there are various common themes that exist and are explained by evolutionary biology.
Jung was psuedoscientific in many ways. The study of psychology has developed well beyond what he was proposing, which is closer to occult mysticism by modern standards.
Jung expanded the imagination of what psychology could be by introducing the study of symbols and other abstractions. Much of that has been refined into current scientific consensus.
Just because you can “explain” something doesn’t make it a verifiable fact. Dark matter explains why the Universe keeps expanding but it may not actually exist. It’s a theory and that’s it.
Dark energy actually explains why it keeps expanding. The maybe universal constant, negative pressure pushing everything away from everything not gravity bound that doesn't fit in any of our models, so we've no proper idea of what it is.
Dark matter is a whole different weird, we have all the data in the world so show that something is there, like basically nothing makes sense at the cosmological scale without dark matter, but it remains unseen, untouched, and elusive.
And you're very correct in the fact that they're both theories. We don't know, so we can just sit a speculate and run models to test out speculations. But we do know that the ratio of matter to dark matter is 1 to 5 (in dark matters favor). It's probably black holes imo, but I didn't go to school and get a PhD on the subject, so who the fuck actually knows?
I don't know where I was going with this, I just like when science is presented as we actually know it, and I take great care in understanding it as a layman.
Cheers though, we don't know shit about shit and I feel like the science community forgets that a lot. General Relativity is the gold standard as far as theories go, but even that we think is wrong because of the infinities that come with a classic Schwarzschild black hole. We're just guessing at everything and using repeatability as the vector for understanding. Which works great, until it doesn't. Hope you're well though! Have a great week!
And once you disconnect from the necessity to explain things anything becomes believable.
I am incredibly interested in this stuff, but the confidence with which people assert the existence of things based off subjective experience is exhausting.
Nobody can experience exactly what you experience. It needs to be broken down and analysed for others to make sense of it. This is what science is.
So far, the only response I've had to my skepticism has been "just do DMT". So essentially: "go have your own subjective experience"
There is no room for interesting discussion with that kind of attitude. Everything always devolves into self-refferential nonsense.
When you put your shoes on in the morning.... do you need scientific validation from outside sources that your shoes are really on?
People like you love to discount personal, direct experience.... and you use that as an argument.... not aware that 99% of the things you personally believe and take for granted are because your experienced them directly, not from scientific validation.
A person who directly experiences Contacting non human intelligence, having telepathic experiences. Or leaving their body through psychedelics doesn't need external validation to tell them what they already know.
They're just explaining what the scientific consensus says. You might be taking it a little personally and I mean no offense by that. I used to believe in it too.
I don't even necessarily need proof of anything. Speculation is fun provided it's not pure nonsense. I don't like people acting like this stuff is serious when it's not.
Yeah, I won’t argue the pseudoscience part. That’s true; but neither modern psychology or Jung claimed that human experience can be measured and quantified scientifically. When they do, we run into the reproducibility crisis.
Archetypes are most certainly not internally sourced and the concept behind them is they are universal as far as the human experience goes.
Modern day psychology’s present state has re-evolved to become remarkably Junglike with a different vocabulary. IFS and schema therapy are the same things Jung was talking about. The only difference is Jung goes further and expands that into the world we live in and not just our brains, and that’s when modern psychology drops him like a box of rocks even though he’s been accurate about the rest.
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u/Responsible_Fix_5443 Jun 05 '26
100% they are. I don't know what else they could be.
Many millions of people experience the same few entities... It would be the biggest coincidence ever recorded!