75th Anniversary: Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (General Assembly resolution 217 A) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected and it has been translated into over 500 languages. The UDHR is widely recognized as having inspired, and paved the way for, the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties, applied today on a permanent basis at global and regional levels (all containing references to it in their preambles). 

Preamble

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now, therefore,

The General Assembly,

Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction. 

Article 1

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 8

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 9

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10

Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11

  1. Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
  2. No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 13

  1. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
  2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 14

  1. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
  2. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 15

  1. Everyone has the right to a nationality.
  2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

Article 16

  1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
  2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
  3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Article 17

  1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
  2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Article 18

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20

  1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
  2. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Article 21

  1. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
  2. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
  3. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Article 22

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Article 23

  1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
  2. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
  3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
  4. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25

  1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
  2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26

  1. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
  2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
  3. Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Article 27

  1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
  2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 28

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Article 29

  1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
  2. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
  3. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 30

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

(UN.org)

A short introduction to how the Kuhn Cycle works

All new fields begin in Pre-science, where they have begun to focus on a problem area but are not yet capable of solving it or making major advances.

Kuhn Cycle

Click a node to read about it.

Efforts to provide a model of understanding that works eventually bear fruit. The field can at last make major progress on its central problems. This puts the field in the Normal Science step where it tends to stay longer than any other step.

Over time the field digs so deep into its area of interest it discovers new questions its current model of understanding cannot answer. As more of these anomalies (“violations of expectations”) appear the model grows weaker. This is the Model Drift step.

If enough unsolved anomalies appear and the model cannot be patched up to explain them, the Model Crisis step is reached. Here the model is obviously no longer capable of solving the field’s current problems of interest. It’s a crisis because decisions can no longer be made rationally. Guesswork and intuition must be used instead. These tend to fail.

Finally out of the struggle to form a new model of understanding one or more viable candidates emerge. This begins the Model Revolution step. It’s a revolution because the new model is a new paradigm. It’s radically different from the old paradigm, so different the two are incommensurate. Each uses its own rules to judge the other. Thus believers in each paradigm cannot communicate well. This causes paradigm change resistance.

Once a single new paradigm is settled on by a few influential supporters, the Paradigm Change step begins. Here the field transitions from the old to the new paradigm while improving the new paradigm to maturity. Eventually the old paradigm is sufficiently replaced and becomes the field’s new Normal Science. The cycle then begins all over again, because our knowledge about the world is never complete.

(thwink.org)

Cornel West on God within

“The kingdom of God is within all of us so no matter where we go, we should leave a little bit of heaven behind.”

–Cornel West

Cornel Ronald West (Born June 2, 1953) is an American philosopher, theologist, political activist, social critic, actor, and public intellectual. The grandson of a Baptist minister, West’s primary philosophy focuses on the roles of race, gender, and class struggle in American society. Wikipedia

Do you know these unusual words?

RobWords • Dec 9, 2023 • Enjoy these weird and wonderful words from me and Susie Dent! And remember that the first 500 people to use my link will receive a one month free trial of Skillshare: https://skl.sh/robwords12231 For this video exploring the most wonderful rare words in English I am joined by my hero, Susie Dent! She’s the star of Dictionary Corner on British TV show Countdown and the UK’s undisputed Queen of Words. In this video she gives us her top 5 wonderful words… and I give mine!

The Overwhelming Lack of Intellectual Humility

We humans all think we know more than we really do. That’s why we argue about everything.

Robert Roy Britt

Robert Roy Britt

Published in Wise & Well

Nov 16, 2023 (Medium.com)

Image: Pixabay/G.C.

When I have an argument with someone, I’m almost always right. You probably are, too. I know these things because when researchers asked people to reflect on disagreements they’ve had, 82% of them were confident they were usually right.

I’m no math whiz, but something doesn’t add up there.

“Most of us overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and opinions, often badly, with little consideration of the possibility that we might be wrong,” says Mark Leary, PhD, emeritus professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and the guy who led that research.

Leary is totally right about this. He and other researchers have done experiments, over and over, that reveal the incredible overabundance of unwarranted human confidence.

Sure, we can be a rational, thoughtful, creative species. But evolution has equipped us with an overwhelming propensity to think too highly of our own thoughts, which causes us to get into deep mental grooves and stay there. Right, wrong or otherwise, it’s in our nature to become comfortable in what we think we know, commiserating with like-minded individuals, fearful of who and what we don’t understand, subconsciously unwilling to get out of our mental comfort zone, unable to boldly go beyond the convenient ways of seeing and comprehending the world.

This leads to skewed, misinformed viewpoints and tribal thinking that ultimately pits us against one another. Lean to the left, lean to the right, we just want to fight fight fight. Because we are right and they are wrong.

Extreme confidence in our thought processes may have served us well in some ancient, isolated tribal setting. It’s anything but productive in today’s information-soaked society on this increasingly crowded little planet. Would that our brains could evolve to keep up with the realities of modern existence.

I explained this rigidity of thought in a recent article about the human propensity for lying and gullibility, delving into the science of cognitive bias, by which we readily soak up misleading and even outrageous claims that support our worldview while unwittingly ignoring input that runs counter. This naturally creates myopic, vitriolic disputes rooted in what we falsely believe to be objective truths.

Medium reader Ray Wirth offered an insightful comment on the article: “It’s much easier for us to absorb information that fits our beliefs rather than to shift our beliefs based on new information,” Wirth wrote. “Literature, art, travel, biography, and cross-cultural experiences can shift our thinking and make us more open to seeing the world as it is.”

To see the world as it is, not as we want it to be. That’s wisdom, philosophers tell us. But it’s not easy to be wise.

Wisdom demands we slip the surly bonds of belief and seek objective knowledge and true understanding.

It all starts with good thinking.

Good thinking requires a love of knowledge and an eagerness to learn. But one also has to care about reaching accurate conclusions and having the right beliefs, not just conclusions and beliefs that are comforting or convenient. Good thinking, therefore, also requires a strong dose of intellectual humility.

“Being intellectually humble means being open to the possibility you could be wrong about your beliefs,” explains Eranda Jayawickreme, PhD, a professor of psychology at Wake Forest University. “Without acknowledging the possibility that your current beliefs may be mistaken, you literally can’t learn anything new.”

Intellectual humility is not the same as being generally humble or modest. It pertains specifically to how we think about our knowledge and our cognitive processes. It goes beyond open-mindedness, which does not necessarily involve pondering one’s cognitive limitations.

And intellectual humility does not mean lack of conviction. You and I can argue vehemently about something. We can both be firm in our beliefs, hard-headed as hell. Odds are at least one of us is not 100% right.

“While part of being a good thinker involves recognizing one’s possible ignorance, it also requires an eagerness to learn, curiosity about the world, and a commitment to getting it right,” Jayawickreme wrote last month in The Conversation.

“Intellectual humility is rational in the sense that we can’t all be right in most of our disagreements, we are often irrationally overconfident, and the evidence on which our beliefs and viewpoints are based is often rather flimsy,” Leary writes in the Greater Good Magazine.

Problem is, intellectual humility is inversely proportional to the perceived import or weight of an issue. I might admit to my wife I took a wrong turn on the way to the restaurant (though, c’mon, what does Google Maps really know?) but don’t tread on my dearly held cultural beliefs.

“Although acknowledging the limits of one’s insights might be easy in low-stakes situations, people are less likely to exhibit intellectual humility when the stakes are high,” Jayawickreme and colleagues explained last year in the journal Nature Reviews Psychology. “People are unlikely to act in an intellectually humble manner when motivated by strong convictions or when their political, religious or ethical values seem to be challenged.”

Here’s why intellectual humility is so important:

If we don’t care enough to find the truth, if we don’t acknowledge potential flaws in our belief systems, if we don’t seek experiences that challenge what we think we know — if we don’t think good — then we fail to nurture one of the most important human qualities: empathy.

Empathy is poorly understood by many of us. It’s not about donating to the Red Cross or volunteering at the soup kitchen or visiting an old person in a nursing home. Those are acts of compassion. All well and good. But empathy is a more deeply seated skill and sensibility. It helps us feel compassion and act upon it, but it is much more than that. At its core, empathy involves understanding the feelings and viewpoints of another person so we can consider a situation or a conversation or the individual’s very existence from their perspective.

Empathy is hard! Many of us — particularly men — suck at it. Here’s how one expert put it, based on findings from his research:

“There is a common assumption that people stifle feelings of empathy because they could be depressing or costly, such as making donations to charity,” said C. Daryl Cameron, PhD, a professor of psychology at Penn State University. “But we found that people primarily just don’t want to make the mental effort to feel empathy toward others, even when it involves feeling positive emotions.”

Like most human emotions and abilities, empathy arises through both nature and nurture. We can cultivate it. Science shows that good thinking and intellectual humility are worthy starting points.

“Intellectual humility was associated with higher levels of empathy, gratitude, altruism, benevolence, and universalism, and lower levels of power-seeking,” researchers concluded in a 2015 study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology.

And that’s why getting out of our comfort zone is so vital to the human experience. It stretches the mind and opens us to new ways of looking at ourselves and the world, and developing empathy and compassion for people who are not like us, but who are often a lot more like us than we realize, separated mostly by a gulf of circumstance and the mental hamstring of cognitive bias.

Empathy requires taking a good, hard look at ourselves, acknowledging our foibles and flaws. Practiced with intention, it leads to greater tolerance, better listening skills, more respect for others and, in a collective sense, less acrimony and polarization.

Empathy, in turn, is known to be among the foundation blocks of wisdom.

Wisdom is poorly understood by many of us, too. It’s not a product of age or knowledge. It doesn’t come automatically with experience or education. It certainly isn’t guaranteed by intelligence.

“Wisdom is more about acquiring a deeper understanding about meaning in life, of being able to see how and where you fit into the grander scheme of things and how you can be a better person for yourself and for others,” write co-authors Dilip Jeste, MD, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at UC San Diego, and Scott Lafee, in their book Wiser.

Your level of wisdom, Jeste says, is determined by how many of the following characteristics you possess, and to what degree:

  • Self-reflection: Understand your own thoughts, motivations, and actions.
  • Prosocial behaviors: Maintain positive social connections and act with compassion, empathy, altruism, and a sense of fairness.
  • Emotional regulation: Manage negative emotions and stress that can get in the way of decision-making, and lean into positive emotions.
  • Acceptance of diverse perspectives: Learn about and accept perspectives and value systems outside your own.
  • Decisiveness: Make decisions in a timely manner with comfort.
  • Social advising: Give good advice to others.
  • Spirituality: Connect with yourself, with nature, or with a transcendent entity such as the soul or God.

(As a great starting point toward building empathy on the path to wisdom, my colleague Kathleen Murphy offers some excellent, specific tactics for engaging in productive conversations with family during the holidays, when relationships can be at their most tense.)

I grew up in a small town that engendered, at least for me, narrow-minded beliefs. It’s shocking how uninformed my views and convictions were as a young adult. I went away to college, but dropped out and moved back to my hometown to work in the family business. It was a wonderful experience. No regrets. But in my late 20s, I quit that great job with a clear and prosperous future and went back to school to pursue the mediocre pay offered by a career in journalism.

That led me to the most mind-expanding year of my life.

I lived and studied in Europe, learning a new language and immersing myself in entirely foreign cultures while traveling throughout the continent and to Russia. The experience radically altered my worldview. I woke up to how little I knew about what I thought I knew. I came back with a much greater appreciation for how alike we all are, despite superficial differences in appearance, education, work, culture or beliefs. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still stubborn in my beliefs, but less so.

If I could wave a wand and improve the lives of young Americans and the destiny of this country, I would have every high school student spend a semester abroad in a distinctly different culture, or otherwise get way out of their comfort zones, geographically, socially and politically. Seeing the world, any little part of it, actually living somewhere else, meeting the people, getting beyond the hotels and the tourist spots and the fancy restaurants to see life as it really is, in all its glory and gloomy reality, is a profoundly life-altering experience.

Short of my fantasy for all, any of us can choose to be more intellectually humble.

We can change the channel or otherwise tune out the drumbeat of narrow-minded, polarized partisan bickering. We can read more history, learn more about other cultures, seek to understand people who disagree with us — not just grasp their argument, but understand where they’re coming from and what led them to the particular set of beliefs. Often we’ll find it’s totally logical, based on their upbringing, education, or other life influences. Does that make them wrong? Does that make us right?

I’ll admit to still being stuck in my ways of thinking as much as the next idiot. I believe certain things not because I’ve been there, done that, not because I’ve walked in those shoes, but simply because I’ve listened to and accepted certain facts and narratives, avoided and ignored others.

I’m human. Most of us are. This is how our brains work.

While my travels and my college education might foster some intellectual humility that affords a bit of wisdom, I’m 100% confident that such an outcome is far from assured.

“On one hand, the more people learn, the more they see how much they do not know and come to realize that knowledge is exceptionally complicated, nuanced, and endless,” Leary, the Duke University professor, points out. “On the other hand, the more people learn, the more justifiably confident they become in the areas in which they develop expertise.”

And if we wish to be a little wiser and improve our human relationships, the only thing we should not have confidence in is confidence itself.

Thanks for your support, which makes my reporting and writing possible. To make your days better, check out my book: Make Sleep Your Superpower. And if you’re a writer, sign up for my Writer’s Guide newsletter.

Robert Roy Britt

Written by Robert Roy Britt

·Editor for Wise & Well

Founder/editor of Wise & Well on Medium & the Writer’s Guide at writersguide.substack.com & author of Make Sleep Your Superpower amazon.com/dp/B0BJBYFQCBFollow

Carl Jung on the Anxiety of the Modern Man

Matthew

Matthew

Aug 27, 2023 (Medium.com)

La Belle au Bois Dormant — Gustave Doré

For the psychologist Carl Jung the modern condition is not one inherently different from that of our far past. However it is one we are forced to interpret differently. He says:

I recall a professor of philosophy who once consulted me about his cancer phobia . He suffered from a compulsive conviction that he had a malignant tumor , although nothing of the kind was ever found in dozens of X-ray pictures. “Oh . I know there is nothing.’ “ he would say. “but there might be something. “ What was it that produced this idea ? It obviously came from a fear that wasn’t installed by conscious deliberation . The morbid thought suddenly overcame him. and it had a power of its own that he could not control . It was far more difficult for this educated man to make an admission of this kind than it would have been for a primitive to say that he was plagued by a ghost. The malign influence of evil spirits is at least an admissible hypothesis in a primitive culture , but it is a shattering experience for a civilized person to admit that his troubles are nothing more than a foolish prank of the imagination . The primitive phenomenon of obsession has not vanished : it is the same as ever, it is only interpreted in a different and more obnoxious way. (Jung, Man and His Symbols)

For Jung much of the modern world, by refusing to partake in the symbols that might allow us to understand our unconscious minds, means we find ourselves paralysed by an inability to properly relate to the parts of our minds not superficially accessible to us.

Indeed as the world has been increasingly literalised we have come to believe that aspects of our minds, emotions, instincts, behaviours are either transparent to us or else are or in time will be transparent the investigation of the physical sciences. We might observe that in the age of hyper-technology forms such as social media cause us to become even more driven by impulse and self-projection. Jung again says in Man and His symbols:

What we call civilized consciousness has steadily separated itself from the basic instincts. But these instincts have not disappeared. They have merely lost their contact with our consciousness and are thus forced to assert themselves in an indirect fashion. This may be by means of physical symptoms in the case of a neurosis, or by means of incidents of various kinds, such as unaccountable moods, unexpected forgetfulness, or mistakes in speech. A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master.

Yet for Jung the solution lies in his own psychological work. Much of Man and His Symbols focuses on the importance of things such as dream interpretation, and the understanding of the unconscious psyche through Jung’s schema of mythology and psychology. Myths and dreams both have an importance in Jung’s work.

Yet some problems arise for anyone who tries to make coherent sense of Jung’s body of writings. Some of his observations have become integrated into modern language (such as introvert/extrovert) but many have largely been rejected or are seen as too mystical for science to take seriously. At times Jung’s reliance on his own dream interpretations seems to border on the superstitious, and his assimilating of all religious and mythic traditions into his own scheme mean a heavy reliance lies upon his own ability to winnow and interpret. As profound as some of his observations may be Jung is the centre of his own religion. So what can we learn from Jung’s observations at the very cusp of the modern world?

Perhaps we can learn the obvious but disregarded idea that stories, myths and images relate us to ourselves in a way that is as useful as anything else. While there is some use in understanding ourselves physically, seeking psychological wholeness involves a wider comprehension of ourselves as selves in a narrative and symbolic world.

We might consider this from the perspective of the problem of perception. When we look at a table we see a table, but no physical analysis can understand how this is so. There are no “table atoms”, just atoms, nor is there some constituent substance that makes a table partake in table-ness and so make it in some sense the same in kind as any other table. We interpret the world in forms that have their own meaning, and a belief that these forms can be reduced to some underlying reality that is more real than the forms themselves leaves us no nearer properly understanding them. The current approach of much modern neuroscience and philosophy is to use words like “illusion” or “epiphenomenon”, or to use language such as Anil Seth in his Ted Talk titled “Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality”.

Yet we find unavoidably as Jung has pointed out that metaphors and stories have a kind of truth we lose if we simplify them to mechanistic explanations. Even if it were true that the brain “hallucinates” reality, however contradictory such a phrase may be, it leaves us no closer to understanding ourselves, let alone finding a path to wholeness. To consider Jung’s earlier comparison between a person haunted by a ghost and a person who has some neurosis they know is neurosis but seem to in some sense not have control over themselves, we see the same problem manifesting itself. Sometimes we have not gained anything by refusing to call a table a table.

You could argue in many ways Jung tried to create a psychological religion, one that synthesised myth into his own Scheme and turned them into his own psychological heuristics. Perhaps this in itself could be argued to be a kind of reductionism, one that does not allow us to see the context of religious ideas. But Jung like many other great thinkers and philosophers of the pre-hypermodern age foresaw many of the profound problems we ourselves now have to find a path beyond.

Matthew

Written by Matthew

I’m not here at all, you’re dearly fooled. https://thisisleisfullofnoises.substack.com/

The Andromeda Galaxy

This image of the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as Messier 31, is Jeffrey Mishlove’s very first photograph of a deep space object. This spiral galaxy, located about 2 million light years away, is the companion to our Milky Way. This image is a composite of 172 individual, 5 second exposures – for a total exposure time of just over 14 minutes. You can also see two satellite galaxies in this image. The diameter of Andromeda is about 152,000 light years making it somewhat larger than the Milky Way. Jeffrey made this image with a 4″ refracting telescope.

(jmishlove@newthinkingallowed.com)

The transformative potential of AGI — and when it might arrive

Shane Legg and Chris Anderson | TEDAI 2023

• October 2023

As the cofounder of Google DeepMind, Shane Legg is driving one of the greatest transformations in history: the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). He envisions a system with human-like intelligence that would be exponentially smarter than today’s AI, with limitless possibilities and applications. In conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, Legg explores the evolution of AGI, what the world might look like when it arrives — and how to ensure it’s built safely…SHOW MORE

About the speakers

Shane Legg

Machine learning researcher, entrepreneurSee speaker profile

Shane Legg is driving one of the greatest transformations in history: the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson

Head of TEDSee speaker profile

After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED’s editors chose to feature it for you.

Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more