#| Back back back. For now I'm focusing on achieving 100daystooffload at all with 82mhz and matto and prahou and all (of you). Back when I was syncronising with days of Synthember, I stopped after 8 and 12. So I will fill in days 9, 10, 11, 13, 14.. I'm going to freely phost documented lisp for my daystooffload phosts. That's a lot of what I think and write however today let's talk about Jung. I ended up somewhere with only a library book of Jung's transcribed 1920s seminars. While I kind of knew Jung was the somewhat mystical dream psychologist, this was my first time actually reading Jung. Jung's finding that he was sharing was that people who seek help are desperately out of their depth and hoping to abdicate responsibility to a doctor. Jung also viewed doctors as being in general absolute quacks, their help and ideas basically just being penny-for-the-thought opinions (expensive pennies). The only unbiased psychic facts available are recounts of dreams. Other conjectures are basically the doctor projecting ideas onto the patient, and the patient role-playing along with the doctor since what else are they going to do. But eventually both the doctor and patient find playing doctor's-ideas contemptible. Now Jung's comprehension of dreams is sensible: Dreams that make sense are somewhat uninteresting in that they're basically just coherent memories. Dreams that diverge from memories are the interesting ones (Jung also follows historical and especially tribal cultures he is aware of distinguishing great dreams and mundane dreams, but that's not my focus here). Jung shares a case of a patient's dream about visiting their sister, with a two year old child and trying to help the child say their wife's name but being unable to pronounce their wife's name themselves. The patient's sister had had their first child pass away from illness some years before, so to an extent the dream was plausible and hewn from memory. However the baby was a girl in the dream, instead of a boy in the actual memory. Further the scenario was not a memory: Trying to get this two year old dream child to say their wife's name, but failing to pronounce their wife's name themselves. The idea Jung was developing was that the dreams that closely tracked memories were basically those actual memories, or fragments of memories, but the innovations were the unconscious basically trying to place and express its thoughts and concerns while not actually having the existing source material to do so. So the original material of the dream are something like free variables: And the psychotherapist and patient try and constrain down and learn about what the patient's unconscious was trying to present with basically the closest proxy imagining it had access to. Given Hopfield nets are a plausible model for some parts of human memory, it's tempting to think that the unconscious is trying to converge a feature vector to a memory that doesn't actually exist, and then just inserting whatever got converged to. Then the quest of dream psychology is to spot these best-known-fit proxies in dreams, and trying to figure out what the patient's unconscious was concerned with in the patient's waking experience. My intuition is that in a hopfield net, converging to an existing memory is integration: Then in some sense getting from the integrated match down to an unintegrated specific item is differentiation of the best-feature-fit. Put another way, we find ourselves in an unknown scenario (a dream that is not an exact memory). We examine the novel objects in the dream, then find non-dream objects (in the object oriented sense) that fit. Out-of-dream discoveries create new memories. Pre-colonial cultures, Jung says, would meet to hear and interpret dreams together. However cultures with this sort of tradition reported these great dreams ending at colonisation with colonial burocracy being seen to replace dreams. Another warning of Jung's is against holier-than-thou people, saying these ostentatiously perfect people are basically a psychic burden on others on top of always harboring proportional darkness. This was alarming to me, because I try to think about and then do what I think is good, and really just that. I voiced this concern to a relatively new significant other mine and received their reassurance. Firstly, they were deeply incredulous that I was inappropriately perfect. After further prompting, they said my vices are that I am singularly obstinant, though I don't see this as a vice- I believe the beliefs I believe until I believe I was wrong, at which point I believe something else (which is true-er, hopefully). Aside from that, they said I am quite arrogant. I felt quite defensive about this, which seemed promising. Once, they were juxtaposing me in conversation to a wealthy middle-class manager, someone whose smartness was unimpeachable on account of their class success. No! I said. You misunderstand, I'm actually... Quite defensive. I'm fundamentally happy about not being as smart as the Professional Managerial Class. I would hope that their measures would find me wanting. So the fact that I got defensive about this is a promising dark side. I am aware by my natural obligation to see rather a lot of specialists that I am considered psychologically very stable and well adjusted, though somewhat burdened by perfectly real rational contextual concerns which I decline pharmacological interventions for. Perhaps I don't view myself as trapped in a dead-end, where Jung found psychological patients to hail from. I wonder if artistic inspiration is the differentiation of the antiderivative convergence to an existing memory. Once again I would like to identify this not just with #unix_surrealism and live music, but also Sussman's Hack Attack nature of true algorithmic authorship. Even though the art is later a tangible thing, the ambiguous dream of the art pre-exists it. Jung recalls that people never dream of the person they will turn out to marry, only beginning to dream about them long afterwards. |#