I'm not 100% sure what you mean by “archetypal influences”. There seems to be a real tension in the phrase, it borders on being an oxymoron: “archetypal” suggests something interpretive (and so unmeasurable); conversely “influence” suggest something causative (and so measurable).
Yes, I don't exactly know what I mean by that either, not because I'm pulling terms out of, uh, nowhere, but because what I'm trying to get a glimpse at is such an esoteric layer reality. The archetype itself may not have an actual existence - there may be no such thing as "Italian food" as an existential object, but as an essential subject it's just fine. The tension in the phrase maybe accurately reflects the tension of the referent. It literally is partially real and partially unreal - the thin air at the top of the noosphere or the far infra extreme of the semiotic continuum.
are your 'archetypal influences' measurable? If the answer is yes then they are the proper subject of scientific analysis and methodology. If the answer is no then they do not tell us about the way things are. As I said above, you cannot have it both ways.
They are measurable qualitatively but not noumenally. There is an archetypal influence, but no archetype. Seemingly preposterous, but I think of it as just symmetry. Objects are governed by causality, subjects are the opposite - they both cause causality, and cause nothing both exist everywhere and nowhere at all. Not much different than the laws of physics really, just that the laws of the psyche are as plastic and obscure as the laws of physics are observable and rigid. I can't have it both ways but I think that clearly the universe DOES have it both ways.
The problem with astrology is that it is not testable. It was this fundamental realisation that lead to the divergence of astronomy and astrology. Back in the day Johannes Kepler was both the court astronomer and astrologer; they were considered the same thing.
Yes, and I'm totally on board with this. I have no agenda to try to make astrology a scientific discipline, I'm just trying to say that science should devote some time and resources to addressing the 'who' and 'why' questions of our existence without reducing them to 'what' and 'how'. I think that astrology is looking was the right area...'when', but that it's value may not have anything to do with the planets themselves, and certainly has nothing to do with stars, it's just about time.
[As a side note: it is interesting that this is the same period where people began to accept the sun-centred universe. It has always struck me that astrology implies the old homocentric view of the universe; the prehistoric belief that the stars are all about us...]
Yes, in fact there is sort of an astro-historical book which I recently read which really bases an entire thesis on that which I've really latched onto. Forget the name at the moment but the author makes a great case for that period (correlated to the astrological significance of course) being the most recent Grand paradigm shift, which he suggests, and I would welcome, is currently being reconciled. Not that we're going to start believing in a homocentric exterior universe (haha), but that the classical, alchemical type of modeling is revealing of our interior architecture. The psyche is homocentric.
This also means that I think you are entirely in error when you propose there is not a sharp division between science and mysticism. There absolutely is, but it is one of methodology not subject matter.
Yes, there is a sharp division of methodology, but I think subject matter also, and that is the part I would like to see reconciled. Some part of science should make it their business to actively address the who and why side of the cosmos and factor it in to a new cosmology. I honestly have no interest in trying to make anything unreal more real. Not looking even at the possibility of anything supernatural at all, just trying to deeply and fully embrace all that we collectively agree is ordinary and natural. We think, we feel, our lives has meaning. I just don't want that left of the big map is all. Without it, it can't even begin to claim to be the whole story and to imply that it is can be as damaging in it's way as mystical apophenia (more on that later).
However we are beginning to see convergence again
Yes, and I would like to believe this conversation is, in it's own irrelevant way, part of that.
Your example of phenome expression is a good one, what was a mystery has recently had much light thrown upon it by a combination genetics and fractal mathematics. Slowly it is coming into the realm of data and method.
Cool, I'd be interested in finding out more about that.
You seem to me making a similar move. Because I use the archetype of “Paris in the Spring” so there is such a thing as “Paris in the Spring”.
I try to avoid the Platonic gutterball, because I think that it goes too far to say that archetypes exist in the same way as ordinary things exist. They exist in the sense that their influence shows up. We recognize a square as being square - we can't not see it as a square. There seems to be potential for squareness built into spatial order but it's like trying to pick out frequencies of color from white light. You need a prism. Astrology tries to use time as a crude blurry prism for human identity and zeitgeist.
Why can they not be understood as a deep archetype that exists as a conflagration of subjective associations, images and concepts: birth, growth, sexuality, Napoleonic architecture, the view from the opera house, gauloises and coffee....
They could be but the conflagrating process seems no less obscure. Meaning presents as if a gestalt - holographically referencing associations but possessed of novelty. Expressions are 'coined'. They go viral. It's like 'isn't the internet just a conflagration of a computer and a telephone'. True enough on one level, but you completely lose any sense of the meaning of the thing you are trying to describe, so it actually disinforms. This is what I feel like is happening with the conventional scientific worldview, it's calling consciousness a conflagration of neural phenomena while promoting randomness, chaos, and nothingness as the verifiable source of everything meaningful to us.
I agree that we have a particular way of understanding things- what you call intuition. I even accept the general thesis of Chomsky that there is a deep grammar of humanity. The question is what does this tell us?
I think it tells us that we are not as alone as we think in the universe. Consciousness is a conversation between different parts of the brain. Some of these parts may not say much for most people most of the time, like any organ or tissue in our body, it's going along doing it's thing and not bothering us most of the time - it's small still voice drowned out by the highway traffic of postmodern economaniac fugue, until it, for whatever reason or no reason, it lays some intuitive or instinctive awareness on us.
I like some of the implications of Jaynes 'Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral mind' in that it seems not impossible that our brain has other sentient or quasi-sentient structures in it we are no longer ordinarily aware of. Perhaps a chunk from a dead-end hominid here, or a freakishly wise amphibian there... Anyways, such a chunk may have entirely different ways of organizing the data of our perception. It may be completely oblivious to our momentary concerns but has a wide angle lens on certain incoming events. What looks like precognition to the conscious mind is simply a neural smoke signal from our far-sighted scout. Maybe it doesn't know we exist or who it's scouting for, but it speaks in hunch and it has a job to do.
To say I am conscious is to say the universe is conscious.
Yes. That's my main theme that I feel science hasn't stopped denying. That denial is it's version of homocentric bias.
Archetypes exist because they exist in us. However where I think you are wrong is that while archetypes exist in themselves it does not follow that their content is true.
Yes, great point and absolutely true. Woe to the person who releases the steering wheel of skepticism to the chaos of apophenia. This is indeed the source of the darkest effects of religion and mental illness. Truth, no. Truths, lies, mistakes, partial truths, misinterpretations, delusions, illusions, epiphanies, revelations, definitely. Caveat emptor.
Jeez, condensing these 12 hour conversations into written words is exhausting. I'm getting tired of hearing my own overheated wind, lol.
