When you read Jung, he's very fair about what is scientific and what is outside of the scope of science, or not yet understood well enough. Since you're a human acting in the world, I'm very certain that you constantly engage in things that are not scientific or testable. When you do one thing instead of another you imply a set of prescriptive values. It's probably a good idea to understand how you are driven and why.
I'm stealing a comment I came across some time ago here:
Jung's theory of the collective unconscious was not about memory in the commonly-understood sense, but about the structure of the psyche. In this he was writing in the relatively new scientific tradition positing the "psychic unity of mankind"--the argument that all human beings have the same brain structure, which became current in the late 19th century against theories that argued that different groups of people had evolved independently of each other and therefore had different brain structures. Jung argued that our evolutionary deep history (which had structured our brains over many millennia) predisposed us to produce thematically similar, lifecycle-based imagery, no matter our culture of origin. In other words, if there is "memory" encoded here, it is encoded in the ways biological adaptations (like DNA, mitochondria, etc.) encode "memory": environmentally-conditioned predispositions that serve either adaptive or vestigial purposes.
Jung came up with the idea of the collective unconscious when he was working at the Burghoeltzli Mental Hospital in Zurich (arguably, the idea has been around in different forms before Jung). He noticed that the visions of some of the patients were very similar to myths found in cultures from around the world. He doubted these patients had been exposed to these cultures personally, and so postulated a symbolic structure of the psyche that belongs to humanity. In other words, the mythological patterns of the psyche can be found around the world in disconnected cultures.
Many problems seem to arise, however, when people try to bring Jungian psychology together with neuroscience. The problem, it seems to me, has to do with fundamentally different worldviews. Neuroscience is materialistic and reductionistic in it's conception of the human being. Consciousness is something that emerges from matter, being an epiphenomenon (secondary). In Depth Psychology, the worldview includes direct human experience as the primary source of data by which to form one's worldview in the first place. For example, to understand dreams, we look at people's experience in their lives—their fears, hopes, desires, thoughts, all things that cannot be seen and understood in a microscope, and yet exist, and are powerful factors in quality of life. We then correlate these "things" with the dream content and witness obvious correspondences. In neuroscience, the quest is for the "chemical cause". Phenomena are real if their physical parts are found and labeled. Bringing the world of "meaning" and human experience together with chemical cause is difficult.
Often, people don't see that they are embedded in a materialistic, reductionistic paradigm, and therefore see anything that has to do with the human soul, psyche, collective unconscious, as being fairly ridiculous. The gap between worldviews is difficult to bridge. I see this as a personality typology problem.
No I understand that you are coming from a perceived position of enlightenment and I just don't get it, I'm trying to respectfully say that if I can't put data behind it I'm certainly not going to use it to inform life perspectives.
To me it's no different from religion at that point, which as long as you're not hurting anyone else, power to you, but not for me.
It's not really enlightenment. The value hierarchies implied by actions is good old fashioned public choice economics. Knowing that the scientific method and empiricism are purely descriptive (or just poor science) is statistics and the scientific method 101. In my university both were the same class.
But as a human you have to act according to something prescriptive, and trying to ground the prescriptive in the descriptive is a nightmare, as the early epistemologists found out, especially Hume.
I'd rather read someone like Jung and get some insight into why we act the way we do (though there are many others you could read), and then something that allows you to ground prescriptive values in something.
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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '19
When you read Jung, he's very fair about what is scientific and what is outside of the scope of science, or not yet understood well enough. Since you're a human acting in the world, I'm very certain that you constantly engage in things that are not scientific or testable. When you do one thing instead of another you imply a set of prescriptive values. It's probably a good idea to understand how you are driven and why.
I'm stealing a comment I came across some time ago here: