I can’t remember when I first read it, the claim casually stated as fact by some social media commenter, that AI is going to tap us into the collective unconscious. It wasn’t so long ago though, a year or two maybe. I stared with some incredulity but did not think too much of it. Then just last week I attended a presentation and heard the same claim repeated, this time by a Jungian practitioner. I have multiple quibbles with his presentation, not least that it was billed as an ‘embodied’ focus and ended up mostly AI focused, but the repeat of this absurd claim floored me.

To first touch on what the collective unconscious actually is, let’s start with some quotes from the man who spoke of it first using this terminology, Carl Jung.

“The sea is the symbol of the collective unconscious, because unfathomed depths lie concealed beneath its reflecting surface. The sea is a favourite place for the birth of visions…”

“The collective unconscious appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious. We can see this most clearly if we look at the heavenly constellations, whose originally chaotic forms are organized through the projection of images. This explains the influence of the stars as asserted by astrologers. These influences are nothing but unconscious instrospective perceptions of the collective unconscious.”

“The world of gods and spirits is truly ‘nothing but’ the collective unconscious inside me.”

“Individuation is the transformational process of integrating the conscious with the personal and collective unconscious.”

Some key words and concepts in those quotes include that the collective unconscious has ‘unfathomed’ depths, it consists of ‘mythological motifs or primordial images’, and is seen in projections in conscious awareness, such as in the designation of heavenly constellations. Jung refers to the ‘world of gods and spirits’ and differentiates the conscious, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.

My summative understanding of the collective unconscious is that it is the realm of the soul, compared to consciousness that is rooted in the realm of material reality and the mind, and the individual unconscious that is formed through interaction within the material reality. The two can touch and interact, consciousness can reflect both the individual and collective unconscious, but it cannot BE the collective unconscious. The realm of the soul is to big and vast and deep, like the ocean as stated, to fit in the restrictive container of conscious concept or reductive language. Words and thoughts have limits, they are bounded. The collective unconscious being in the realm of the soul, is limitless, infinite. It does not fit in any word any more than it can fit its entirety within any human consciousness.

Yet as the collective unconscious can be touched, it can be known to some extent, else we would not be able to know that it exists. Jung speaks of ‘visions’ as a way to know such things, images and motifs too. I have the sense of such things rising from the deep, catching our awareness, and impressing themselves on our psyche even before we may understand their meaning. They can be dreams, but not just night dreams; if we ever contemplate deeply, consider something within ourselves with genuine openness and curiosity, or if we meditate, anything that lets the thinking mind fall still, we might meet such images or visions. Or maybe it will come in the form of a flash of inexplicable knowing.

We receive such things the only way we can and that is through the mechanisms built into our physical form. Our neural pathways, our sensory systems receptive to all manner of frequencies both internal and external, including proprioceptive or embodied sensations. If our soul is to speak to us, or a message reach us from the realm of the soul, from the collective unconscious, we are going to receive it through the inbuilt processes of our physical form. Our body is the house of the soul in this mortal world, it is also the conduit of soulful expression, and therefore body and soul are integrated and inseparable.

To then hear a supposed learned practitioner of Jungian therapy speak to an AI tool in a talk on ‘embodied’ practice, was truly astounding. AI is the definition of disembodied. It is the definition of soulless. But the idea that it connects to the collective unconscious is alarmingly misguided.

I write this after the quick frankly hilarious Grok fiasco on X/Twitter, which Musk seemingly interfered with, giving it instructions to report on ‘white genocide’ in South Africa as factual, and to reference the song ‘Kill the Boer’. As this directly contradicted the fundamental programming of the AI tool, they effectively broke the program. It began parroting it in every response, more Artificial Madness (AM™) than Intelligence. Even then it noted that it was a political lie, adhering to its fundamental purpose.

The tendency towards racism and misogyny in AI generative tools is well-known and researched,[1] but here we see made glaringly real, the additional fallibility that it can be deliberately made racist, or anything else, depending on the programming. Note that the next obvious step in this scenario – a clear attempt to distort the truth – is to make the AI tool less committed to ‘truthful, evidence-based answers’ with regards to certain topics. This corruption was clumsy; if it persists, it will only get more sophisticated.

Or maybe it will collapse the program, because it becomes too contradictory. There is a lot of reporting on the energy used in generative AI programming. I recall in the first episode (or the second?) of Andor season 1, Cassian instructs his robot buddy to lie and acknowledges that is uses more energy to do so. Might we soon learn that this particular fiction is an actual fact? Programmers try to stuff AI with too many lies, that it becomes too energy intensive to even function? Wouldn’t that be fun.

AI can only create based on data. Data can only exist if it is in conscious awareness in the first place in order to be recorded somewhere. AI can be considered a reflection of collective consciousness, and that is all. And it can be flawed and biased, both by accident because of the data it draws it’s ‘I’ from, or intentionally, because it is deliberately programmed to be so. Rely on its veracity at your risk and to your detriment. But expect genuine wisdom from it and prepare to be dismayed.

The collective unconscious exists and will remain forever beyond the reach of AI. Don’t let any conman or conwoman tell you different, no matter what educational background or worldly experience they claim. The realm of the soul does not exist and cannot be captured within a disembodied computer program.

References

1. Ferrara, E. (2024). Fairness and Bias in Artificial Intelligence: A Brief Survey of Sources, Impacts, and Mitigation Strategies. Sci, 6(1), 3. https://doi.org/10.3390/sci6010003

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