Can't believe you referenced CTT here ---and that you get it. I suspect based on your much more in depth analysis that people who can make those rich associations that you speak of - find even greater leaps of faith necessary for recovery.
Cormac McCarthy's only nonfiction essay is also one of my favorites. If associations are just inference and the origins of inference are generating models that best help us maintain our homeostatic bounds, then this essay very nicely ties symbolic thought to active inference and Friston's FEP. Also note that according to Solms, feelings evolved to do the precision weighting necessary for Bayesian updating, another tasty connection.
The Wayback Machine can pierce any paywall! That's how I read that essay. However I have an objection to characterizing mythology as coming from the unconscious. Mythology is the result of a human mind attempting to transmit metaphysical truth, that is, truth from above the physical. The unconscious, as McCarthy says, is very tightly connected to the organism. The unconscious you could say is is about the infrahuman, mythology is about the supra-human.
I sympathise with that point of view myself, though I think it's more complicated than just a matter of the one being for the supernatural and the other for the natural - I think a lot of mythology draws on our biological history, and some of the whisperings of the unconscious are divinely inspired. For this essay I wanted to take a 'methodologically atheist' approach, to respond to "Kekule" on its own terms. But if you're interested, I wrote about rationality vs. beyond-rationality in a more mystical style a few years ago - still one of my favourites of my own posts: https://smalldarklight.substack.com/p/further-up-and-further-in
Can't believe you referenced CTT here ---and that you get it. I suspect based on your much more in depth analysis that people who can make those rich associations that you speak of - find even greater leaps of faith necessary for recovery.
Cormac McCarthy's only nonfiction essay is also one of my favorites. If associations are just inference and the origins of inference are generating models that best help us maintain our homeostatic bounds, then this essay very nicely ties symbolic thought to active inference and Friston's FEP. Also note that according to Solms, feelings evolved to do the precision weighting necessary for Bayesian updating, another tasty connection.
Had to look up the FEP, learning a lot here! Thanks for a very stimulating response :-D
The Wayback Machine can pierce any paywall! That's how I read that essay. However I have an objection to characterizing mythology as coming from the unconscious. Mythology is the result of a human mind attempting to transmit metaphysical truth, that is, truth from above the physical. The unconscious, as McCarthy says, is very tightly connected to the organism. The unconscious you could say is is about the infrahuman, mythology is about the supra-human.
I sympathise with that point of view myself, though I think it's more complicated than just a matter of the one being for the supernatural and the other for the natural - I think a lot of mythology draws on our biological history, and some of the whisperings of the unconscious are divinely inspired. For this essay I wanted to take a 'methodologically atheist' approach, to respond to "Kekule" on its own terms. But if you're interested, I wrote about rationality vs. beyond-rationality in a more mystical style a few years ago - still one of my favourites of my own posts: https://smalldarklight.substack.com/p/further-up-and-further-in