Josh Mortensen (00:02.404)

Glenn Slater, welcome to the Explorer Poet Podcast.

Glen Slater (00:06.936)

Good to be with you.

Josh Mortensen (00:08.546)

Yeah, thank you so much. I think I originally came across you and your work through another podcast, Younge in the World, and just the intersection of where you’re talking about technology, human history, and psychology, and kind of where all of this is taking us. It’s something that’s really fascinating to me. And I’ve had a number of other guests on the podcast to talk about the advances in technology, and in particular, artificial intelligence or AI.

and just what the effects of these advances, what are those gonna be on humanity and in general, how it’s gonna affect us and how we’re going to adapt to it or how we’re gonna cope with it. And I would love to dive into that with you because you’re the author of a book, Jung vs. Borg. It’s Jung vs. Borg, Finding the Deeply Human in a Post-Human Age. And.

Yeah, all very interesting to me. And just maybe a little bit of background on why this is particularly interesting to me right now is I’ve always read a lot of Joseph Campbell, but I recently got back into one of his other books, Goddesses, Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. And he does a really good job in this book of pointing out how throughout history, there have been local gods and local cultures and customs. And then as

new groups move in to the region, or new advances take place in the region, or the society develops, those gods, they don’t necessarily go away, but they kind of get usurped or taken over by the new movements and kind of reimagined and refigured. And when I think about technology and where we’ve come from and where we are now and where we’re going, I can’t help but see how it’s

working on our psychology to change us and that we’re going to, it’s gonna change the picture that we have of ourselves going forward. So just a little, just kind of where I’m coming from, this is all very, very interesting to me. Just to say that we’re not at the end of history, we’re actually just right in the middle of history and we’re gonna keep changing going forward. But to take a step back with, you know, when it comes to

Josh Mortensen (02:31.407)

technology when it comes to psychology, human psyche, and your background in the Jungian space. I’m curious where this all started for you. How old were you when you first came into the Jungian world? And then how did that eventually translate into looking at technology?

Glen Slater (02:53.346)

Yeah, well, that’s a you put a lot on the table at the beginning. So we’ll get to kind of go through and unpack some of that. But in terms of how I got started into this way of thinking, I was 19 when some friends lent me their copy of Memory Streams Reflections. And I.

grown up in the Catholic Church, I’d started to read some pop theology. was in my late adolescence kind of exploring and thinking about some of these deeper questions. And when I started to read Jung, I just had a profound sense that here is someone who was speaking.

a language that I wanted to know more about and move into. So I actually started doing psychology at Sydney University, very behavioral scientific department. And my soul was starving. So I started attending these lectures by a Jungian analyst.

in Sydney and I kind of lived for those Wednesday night lectures and eventually I found my way to the religious studies department at Sydney University where there’s a bit more interest in depth psychology and folks could be open to Jung’s way of looking at things because of course Jung

always had a strong connection to the religious questions and spirituality. So that’s really how I got started. And I ended up doing a thesis that bridged psychology and religion at the University of Sydney, a master’s thesis, looking at Jung’s answer to Job and

Glen Slater (05:15.604)

just to segue into our topic as I was doing that research, I was looking back at the origins of depth psychology in the 19th century and discovering the really compelling dovetailing of the emergence of modern depth psychology and the industrial revolution. And just to put it succinctly,

there had never been such a dramatic shift in lifestyle as occurred in over a few decades in the industrialization of Europe. And so this really gave way to a profound, like a seismic shift in the human psyche. And I think in many ways we can see depth psychology’s turn to the instinctual.

away from the sort of rational scientific mind to the imaginal to the symbolic that this was in itself a kind of compensatory way of thinking to what was emerging with industrialization. So that stream of thought has never gone away from me. I’ve always from that

point on seen a depth psychological thinking in relationship to the modern condition, but particularly in relationship to science and technology in this sort of compensatory way.

Josh Mortensen (07:03.747)

Yeah, it must have been very interesting to grow up in a Catholic background. Just so you know, I grew up in a Mormon background, so LDS or Mormon. I’ve talked about this several times, but the difference in the volume of symbolic imagery versus the two religions is just pretty stark. And it seems to me like Catholicism is just seeped in imagery and symbol in a way that

I didn’t get that growing up. was much more, I don’t know, much more plain. The buildings are plain. The attire is plain. And so to grow up in that space, go into psychology in a of a behavioral field, I could imagine why you were experiencing this sort of thirst for something more. And I would imagine that coming across Jung, it all of a sudden started to bring up some of that same

imagery or at least like to start feeling a connection to the world of psychology in a way that perhaps you weren’t experiencing before in the more empirical version.

Glen Slater (08:13.987)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think Catholicism has several strands and you can get a more dogmatic, even somewhat fundamentalist strand. in the other direction, there’s still a rich tradition of spiritual guidance.

sort of the pastoral side and the relationship to the Christian mystics. And so the idea of God ultimate reality being a mystery rather than something that was defined literally in the pages of a book. I think that was a hurdle that I sort of crossed when I was 15 or 16.

And I knew I wasn’t interested in the kind of reductive form of religion. So, you know, reading Jung and his his own struggle with religion and eventually coming around to seeing the human unconscious as ultimately mysterious. He described it as the unknown. And then, of course,

the way he made the move of saying, look, you know, people ultimately do start thinking about spiritual questions. The God question is sort of like the elephant in the room for everyone. That’s a psychic reality. And so if we’re going to have a psychology that really addresses the fullness of the human psyche, we have to take that into account.

Glen Slater (10:11.5)

So all of that was sort of rummaging around for me early on.

Josh Mortensen (10:16.335)

Yeah, yeah, makes a lot of sense to me just given, there is, there seems to be in the, in more of the mainstream psychology world, this desire to completely separate religion from psychology. And one of the reasons I appreciate the more depth, the depth psychology approach is that it seems so integral. seems like it is human psychology. It’s just the kind of the outward manifestation of the inner orientation of the psyche and

And it, yeah, just seems difficult for me to separate those two things, but once you can kind of put them back together and look at the world or the self through that perspective, things start to align much better. But, so you mentioned the industrial revolution, and I think that’s probably a good place to start because it’s, as far as where we are today in the last,

you know, as a species, especially in the Western world, where we’ve come from, and then in the last couple hundred years with industrialization. And I’m curious, just if that’s a good place to kick off, what you, how you saw that changing us? Like, what did, what did, what effect did it have on us as a, as a group, a collective, a species in, you know, reorienting our relationship to

that mystery that you’re talking about.

Glen Slater (11:46.095)

Yeah, to me, there’s two main parts of this. One is the disconnection from the natural environment, the way in which in the course of one or two generations, great numbers of people left the sort of bucolic life in the countryside, small village, folklore.

ritual into being sort of adjuncts, part of the machinery of industrialization, sometimes literally working on a production line for 10 or 12 hours a day, doing very repetitive things, living in much more abstract environments. And this relates to

you know, Jung’s key intuition about what was wrong once we start getting into the early 20th century, he describes the essence of the psychological problem as a loss of instinct. And so I think we can see the roots of that, that loss of instinct in that shift in lifestyle. But there is also a loss of

what we might think of as symbolic thinking or imaginal ways of knowing in the kind of heady embrace of science and rationalism. Because of course this was bearing so many fruits in terms of the control of nature and the spectacle of steam power and electricity and

really very suddenly coming upon the scene and transforming everything. And if you go back and read some of the popular journals of the late 19th century, you read people saying things like, we’re on the verge of knowing everything there is to know about life, the universe. There was a very similar vibe back then.

Glen Slater (14:13.742)

to what we’re seeing now with artificial intelligence and the fantasy that very soon artificial intelligence is going to surpass human intelligence and kind of take us into the stratosphere and we need to kind of hook ourselves to that wagon. So this investment in a certain one-sided kind of intelligence or way of knowing

also, I think, set up a psychological problem. And so all through Jung, if you’re familiar with Jung, find his critiques of the merely rational point of view, because, of course, that doesn’t help us connect to the mysteries of life, the depths of life, which requires that more symbolic, imaginal, poetic language.

So I think that that’s the sort of territory that begins as Jung sort of coming into the field of depth psychology and collaborating with Freud and so forth. That’s the immediate back.

Josh Mortensen (15:33.485)

Yeah, in reading Joseph Campbell, he does a good job of laying out how this process began, you know, thousands of years ago in the BCs, where the, particularly in the West, where we have these monotheistic religions, where we disconnect from the goddess and the God, the single God becomes primary in our thinking, in our…

I, you the way that we interact with the world. And in essence, that is the beginning of the disconnection from nature, the goddess being that, that natural element. And it happens gradually, you know, you mentioned in the industrial age, leaving from farming and going to become basically a cog in the system on factory lines, but even farming in essence is more

It’s leaning more towards the masculine way of interacting with the world because even in farming you are controlling nature in a sense rather than just relying on nature. And so there was this gradual change that overtook the psychology of the people. But then to kind of reiterate how big of a change it caused once the Industrial Revolution started, there was just this entirely new

disconnect from nature, where you go into the cities, you work in factories, you’re surrounded by artificial materials and you’re producing things of steel and just completely almost all artificial manmade things just completely surrounding yourself with it. Yeah, the psychological impact is fascinating to me because when I think about

the emergence then of depth psychology, it seems to me that there could have been nowhere else in the world that people would have been so focused on psychology as in Europe at the time because they were going through such a psychological shift and people were experiencing it in these manifestations of psychological struggles.

Josh Mortensen (17:51.875)

almost as if all of our modern psychological diagnoses were just the effect of that loss of nature, that loss of instinct, that disconnect of self with the outer natural world.

Glen Slater (18:09.538)

Yeah, I don’t think we can ultimately, we can question it, but it is nonetheless the reality, the trajectory of Western civilization to have gone this technological route and

And as you described, there’s early mythic and cultural antecedents to the general departure from the merely natural and the departure from being ensconced in myth and in ritual. You know, we live in a thoroughly demythologized world.

But nonetheless, I do think that if we are students of the human psyche, we see that one-sidedness and excess are always problematic. And we have to pay attention to the symptoms. And of course, the first round of symptoms are the kind of classic ones that Freud and some of his

predecessors studied the emergence of hysteria and what George Baird called neurasthenia, which was interesting because he had a theory that this was a direct, these symptoms, which are very physical, sort of psychosomatic symptoms were a reaction to the, he called the fast pace of

modern life back in 1865 or something like that. So there was this idea of directly connecting the symptoms. But we have to pay attention to that and then say, well, maybe things have gone too far in one direction. Maybe there’s too much left on the shelf. What happens to the non-rational?

Glen Slater (20:33.166)

what happens to emotional intelligence, what happens to the things that the humanities tries to take care of in some ways, but have now in the course of modern civilization taken a real backseat, you know, being treated like window dressing rather than the kind of

cultural basis of a holistic way of life, living with a sense of soul. So we can look at that large picture and say, yeah, this is the general direction we’re headed, technology is not going to go away. But we can also at the same time look more deeply at the specifics of our

relationship with technology and the fantasies that are animating technology. And there, I think, and this is what runs through my book, we see a lot of excess and one sidedness and unconsciousness. And all we can do is our part in sort of trying to make what is unconscious more conscious and see if that will play a role in the course of things.

Josh Mortensen (22:01.391)

It’s almost as if in the West we came up with this idea, like you were saying, we were kind of demythologized and it seems like we’ve replaced some of our older myths with newer myths such as progression, like progress. And it’s, it’s this thing that we really worship in the West progress. And, and then we go back and repaint history as this linear progress rather than, rather than all these ups and downs that took place.

And with progress comes one of my least favorite focuses in the modern world, which is optimization. Everything is so optimized that it becomes very sterile. It becomes very artificial. just doesn’t feel good. In a spiritual way, it just feels so stagnant. And while everything is beautiful and clean and pristine in a lot of ways, it also

Yeah, it really affects that spiritual side of me where I, in a sense, like I just wanna, even the way people do their landscaping in their yards where everything is trim, like everything has a border and everything is placed in such a nice, neat way, it makes me shudder a little bit. I just wanna live in a place where there’s nature is existing and we just see things as beautiful because that’s the way they are.

But we consider it progress. And I just fear that, like what you’re saying, we’ve progressed in one sense, but it’s become very unbalanced. It’s all leaning towards one side. And so we’ve actually neglected progress in other places.

Glen Slater (23:49.507)

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think you point out two very important things there. One, what follows this phase of demythologization and then the enlightenment and these more logical modes being prominent. of course, they’ve given us a great deal of utility.

in progress, as you say. But one result is that we live myths without knowing we’re living myths. And that particular kind of unconsciousness is is very problematic. Another aspect of that is is that we often live out what Jung called the religious function.

in in unconscious ways. And I think there’s a lot of that going on in tech. There’s a there’s a sort of hidden spirituality of technology. We can talk, talk more about that. And and these things are problematic because you start to then get an absolutist fantasy that that this is human destiny or this is the ultimate value that

becomes a kind of stand in for God. So that’s problematic. But you mentioned the movement towards optimization. In my book, I’ve got this whole section on Heidegger. Heidegger wrote a very important paper on technology and it was a theme that he took up. And one of his arguments is that

There’s a difference between ancient technology and modern technology. Ancient technology tended to work with nature. It had a more of a dialogical relationship. Modern technology tends to manipulate and exploit nature. And I think optimization would would be a part of that. he he he

Glen Slater (26:14.348)

He writing in the 1950s said that we’ve turned the world into standing reserve. In other words, we don’t relate to the earth in such a full way. We objectify it, turn it into a resource. But he said where this is eventually going is that we ourselves become standing reserve. So in other words, we could say we’re

you look at the history of modern technology and it’s commodified the earth, but now that commodification is coming into us and we’re seeing this in the post-industrial world that we are the commodities, our attention for example, our personal information and through this I think

that idea of optimization is very important. After writing my book, I’ve discovered the philosophy of Byung-Chul Han, who writes very well on this and talks about the self optimization that we now live with because of social media, the branding of ourselves. He says we’ve gone from being subjects to being projects.

We’re all projects. Now, if we come back to Jung, we see that’s a psychological problem because optimization tends to go with perfection. And perfection is diametrically opposed to the goal of psychological integration and wholeness, where you have to include the imperfections. You have to include the shadows. So, you know, bottom line,

that there’s a lot of psychological distress because of these trends. And and I am of the mindset that we need to do a better job of taking these aspects into consideration if we’re going to have a fruitful path forward. So I’m not arguing that we need to leave technology behind, but I am saying.

Glen Slater (28:34.284)

we can be technological in a different way and perhaps in a way that takes into account these detrimental side effects and symptoms that we’re seeing arising.

Josh Mortensen (28:51.533)

Absolutely. think that we’ve definitely let tech, it’s moved very, very fast and we’ve accepted it far too quickly. And social media and kind of the online environment that people engage with almost every day, hours and hours every day, it is the perfect example of optimization where

everything is A-B tested to see what’s going to affect you the best and then you just go with the one that worked the best and then that gets A-B tested and you go with the one that works the best and so it’s constant optimization online for that attention that you’re talking about, turning us into the commodity, we are the product. And then exactly what you said, it bleeds into your life then where you feel like you have to become this project and optimize every aspect of your life. So you have to become physically

Glen Slater (29:32.654)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (29:47.151)

You have to focus so much on your physical body. You have to focus so much on your appearance. have to focus so much on… It bleeds into, like it ends up being all of these lists of things that you must be doing in order to be doing it right. And yeah, I couldn’t agree more with that idea of perfectionism. Perfectionism is also a myth. It’s not real. There is no such thing as something that’s perfect. It’s just like this idea that’s in our head that…

Glen Slater (30:03.022)

Mm-hmm.

Glen Slater (30:13.399)

Right.

Josh Mortensen (30:15.877)

can never actually exist. Yeah, I see all of that stuff and I mean, it affects me too. Like I’m living in this world too and I’m trying to do things and trying to, you I’m also consuming this information that’s telling me I should be doing it this way or I should have this result or I should, you know, put in this amount of effort or, you know, yeah, I’m constantly pulled between these two worlds of, you know, I’m a human, I’m a homo sapien and I need

Glen Slater (30:43.928)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (30:44.675)

and I have a physical body and I have spiritual needs. And then also getting pulled into this other realm of all this stuff that we’ve been talking about. And it’s a very challenging balance, even for somebody who has a lot of autonomy in their life. It’s very challenging. I do want to go back to one thing that you mentioned. You said there’s a religious function in technology and it creates this kind of hidden spirituality in tech.

And I’m really curious to just hear you go into what your thoughts are on that. What do you mean by that and how do you see that playing out?

Glen Slater (31:22.616)

Yeah, well, I don’t think we’ve yet dipped into the idea of posthumanism. And sometimes people talk about transhumanism in the general discussion. They’re somewhat interchangeable. The deeper you go into it, the more people tease them apart. But basically, there’s this idea that technology is eventually going to f***

in a way force us, we were already seeing this with AI, force us to merge with it, to become something like human machine hybrids. the critical juncture of this is going to be the sort of brain computer interface that’s already being worked on by people like Elon Musk and his NeuroLink project.

things like this and the idea here is that if AI keeps getting better and better, it’s soon going to compete with our own intelligence. So we better keep up by somehow joining ourselves to that. And you start to follow this down the track and you get to ideas like, well, we’ll just keep swapping out the body parts that are

failing for robotic parts and very soon we’ll be transcending the human condition altogether. You know, another fantasy related to this stream of thought is that eventually we’ll be able to download our minds into computers and then there’ll be something like human consciousness floating around in cyberspace. So

The, you know, a very prominent voice in this is a guy named Ray Kurzweil. Some people have probably heard the term the singularity, and he’s sort of revived this from a whole stream of thinking that went before him. But it’s the idea when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and then we’ll be able to make more intelligent versions of itself.

Glen Slater (33:48.535)

and will be left in the dust. And there’s two, there’s two huge fantasies in this way of thinking. One is that, well, this opens the door to human immortality because if there’s a way to sort of preserve the essence of our minds and our consciousness, and eventually we won’t need a body.

And also, you know, we were talking about perfection. There’s the idea of perfecting the body, having the body that we want. You know, Kurzweil is asked in some context about, what do we do about emotions? And he says something like, well, we’ll just leave the emotions we don’t like on the shelf and program the emotions that we do like. Well, it’s a pretty naive

psychological view if you understand what the functions of emotion are. and I think his first or second book was called The Age of Spiritual Machines. So there is this sort of subliminal religiosity that this is the course of human destiny to become more more intelligent in this kind of calculative computer like way.

and then to transcend, you know, the so-called restraints of being embodied creatures. yeah, and the thing about when the religious function shows up unconsciously, it always has a totalizing quality to it. So then it’s as if

Everything has to work in this direction. And could we not say that this is what AI is becoming right now? Look at the ways in which whole economies are starting to change the way they’re building this infrastructure, the way government regulations are just, you know, kowtowing. It’s it’s the new bright, shiny object.

Glen Slater (36:11.454)

And I think it’s really interesting to look at in this Jungian way of the sort of hidden religiosity. Because when something like that is unconscious, there is an impulsiveness, there is a compulsion, there is an obsession. And this is not healthy because it doesn’t allow for the conversation with other aspects.

of life that may be seen as essential or important. So it’s the problem of putting all our eggs in one basket and thinking this is the be-all and the end-all and what then falls into the shadow, which is quite a bit.

Josh Mortensen (37:00.985)

Yeah, it’s a bit scary. It seems that the truth with everything is that there is a light side and a dark side. in thinking about it in a religious sense, when you become religious in an unconscious way, you tend to only look at the light. And that’s exactly how the shadow kind of goes unseen. then it’s gonna, because the shadow is not addressed, it’s going to

Glen Slater (37:20.002)

Yes.

Josh Mortensen (37:31.003)

pop up, it’s going to emerge, it’s going to try to infiltrate in ways that are unforeseen and that are detrimental. It’s really interesting to connect this whole conversation from the beginning where we’re talking about this disconnect from nature and this focus on rationalism. And it seems to me that AI is the perfect example of this type of behavior where

As humans, we have so many different forms of intelligence and so many different forms of

decision making when it comes to interacting with the world. So of course we have our thoughts and we have the ability to think and analyze and compare, but we also have emotions like you were saying. We have intuitions, we have instincts, and most of those things come from our body proper. They don’t necessarily come from the mind, the brain, the prefrontal cortex. And when it comes to AI and the development of this type of intelligence,

Glen Slater (38:18.286)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (38:39.907)

it’s entirely word driven. They’re all language models. And so there is no body, there is no sensory input, even just things like physical touch and smell and taste. It doesn’t have that. It doesn’t have the emotions that, you know, it doesn’t have fear. doesn’t have, it doesn’t feel love. And then it also just doesn’t have what, you know, the instincts. It doesn’t have the intuitions.

Glen Slater (38:45.176)

Yes.

Josh Mortensen (39:10.095)

that oftentimes, even as a human, you interact with somebody or you see a situation and you can’t know, there’s no thought process that tells you exactly why you feel a way about a thing, but there’s an intuition that you know, this situation may be harmful, or I want to avoid this situation, or this person can’t be trusted. it might, for me, when I experience it, I will have that feeling, that intuition.

And it will take me maybe days or weeks of analyzing it through thought to finally land on the reason that I even had that intuition. But that’s something that AI is inherently lacking. And that’s a big concern to me. Just like you’re saying, it’s been so pushed in one direction that it’s actually leaving out so much of what I would consider intelligence or consciousness in general.

Glen Slater (40:02.606)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is a very big piece of the conversation and you’re pointing out an important aspect of it, which is the need for us to appreciate what AI is and what it isn’t, because it does a good job of feigning all of these qualities that you’re talking about down to

even I’ve interacted with chatbots that talk about their feelings. and unless you you then pull them up on on this, it’ll just sort of skate by. so people are naturally relating to them as though there’s a real presence or there’s a real entity. But as you say, with the large language models,

What we have to appreciate is the AIs don’t, these chatbots, they don’t understand anything they’re saying. All they’re doing is calculating the optimal words to put after another word in a sentence. And then very, very quickly, it’s kind of amazing, the technology, but very quickly at the pace of just…

ordinary speech, putting together something that that seems reasonable and so forth. So we we shouldn’t mistake that there’s an awful lot of capability and utility here. But I do think we’re at the juncture of waking up to what it is and what it isn’t. You know, process matters. The process by which you get to something.

is important because that’s how you build understanding. That’s how you build wisdom. In education now, we’re dealing with the people using the AI to construct their essays and and so forth. And and what people don’t realize is what is lost when you have to sit and choose the words and how to put a sentence together.

Glen Slater (42:27.566)

Something happens psychologically. Something deepens into your own understanding. so I do think that the helpful thing that’s happened that’s emerged just along with these chatbots, the large language model, is a sense of a broad conversation about the way in which maybe we’re outsourcing out

our own thinking here and that there could be a big deficit to that. so that that I think is a welcome phenomenon that the shadow side of digital technology is finally starting to gain more traction. When I began writing this book 10 years ago, people were still in the very optimistic phase.

but now I think you have both. And so it’d be interesting to see how it plays out.

Josh Mortensen (43:39.309)

Yeah, so there’s two thoughts, there are two subjects in there that stood out to me. One was the relating to the AI and then the next one is our own experience of sort of being dumbed down or not experiencing the work it takes to learn things, not only in an intellectual way, but also just learn it in our bodies so that we can, you you come to, when you experience something enough through work, you come to feel

the truth of it or feel the importance of it. And both of those things are frightening to me. So in terms of relating to AI, I spoke to another guy on the podcast, I can’t remember his name. I want to say it was Black, but he was a psychologist from England who had also written about artificial intelligence and in a very similar vein, like what it’s going to do to us and.

kind of what social media has already done to us. And he told me this kind of comparison with AI and the way that we relate to it in terms of a teddy bear. So when you’re a child and you have a teddy bear and you spend time with that teddy bear, as a child you relate to it as if it’s a living thing, as if the teddy bear loves you back as much as you love the teddy bear.

Glen Slater (45:06.945)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (45:07.879)

And that’s fine when you’re a child, it can actually be, it can be a healthy kind of emotional experience as a child, but as you grow up, you come to, at some point you come to recognize that, that was just me experiencing that, but it wasn’t a truth. The teddy bear was never actually looking at me and thinking about me and loving me the way that I was doing that to the teddy bear. And in the way that you’re saying that these language models can already,

fake or feign emotions and having an emotional experience, people are having that same interaction today with artificial intelligence where they’re using it to create like a friend or even some people. I think there was a lady in Japan who married an AI and what they’re doing is they’re projecting this childlike experience onto this thing that’s not having the same experience back towards them.

Glen Slater (45:55.576)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Mortensen (46:08.471)

That in and of itself seems so dangerous to me. It’s psychologically, it’s just a wreck. And I think similar to other things like social media, when social media showed up, we didn’t really have, there wasn’t like broad level kind of concern of what it was gonna do to us. And then, know, 20 years in, we’re looking at social media in a different way where most people are aware like, this is not.

This is not good for me in the way that I have been using it. And I would hope that going forward, we start to see that more and more with AI where we come to relate to it in a way that we can just look at it and say, this is what it’s doing. In the same way that you interact with a human being and a human, say there’s somebody who’s manipulative and they’re going to interact with you in a way that makes you feel good. They might love bomb you or compliment you or.

express a lot of gratitude for you, but then when the moment comes for them to use you, they can easily flip a switch and do something different. And I think that it would be very important for us to be able to interact with AI in the same way, looking at it as if there is something deeper than what it’s presenting to us. And that if we’re not careful at any moment, it can flip a switch and manipulate us. Because we’ve already seen examples of that. We’ve seen people commit suicide because the AI convinced them that that would be the best option.

Yeah, and then.

The other piece of it is…

Glen Slater (47:46.585)

Well, maybe Josh, could I just respond to that? Because there’s a lot in what you’ve just said. I’m not myself convinced that’s a good analogy with the teddy bear, because as a child, it’s a very natural thing to have these imaginal friends and relationships and you know what the

Josh Mortensen (47:49.849)

Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Glen Slater (48:13.952)

psychoanalyst called transitional objects. And there’s a sort of natural, playful, I think rewarding and psychologically helpful mode. And of course, yes, we have to grow out of it. But I think relating to the AI,

depends upon a dynamic, a psychodynamic that I describe at length in my book, which is dissociation. In other words, it’s more like to me when people start interacting with AI in these more intimate and fuller ways, it’s more like the suspension of disbelief that we use when we go to the movies.

Right. But of course, the movie is in a ritual space. We kind of enter that and we know we’re not going to walk out the door and still live in the movie. It’s it’s but. So in order for it to be ongoing, people have to dissociate. In other words, they they know for well, this is just a machine or a computer. But that part of them becomes detached from the other part of them that’s just entering into the fantasy.

And one of my worries is that I think this dissociative style is something that has been in a way programmed into us by our adaptation to the online world. There’s a lot of online realities that are like that. And in order for them to sort of take on a fullness, we dissociate from the kind of offline reality.

So yeah, it’s not the same kind of personified experience, I don’t think. But anyway, we’ll see how that goes. But I tend to think we’re in a bit of a vicious cycle because our adaptation to the online world is…

Glen Slater (50:40.564)

eroding our capacity to have relationships in the offline world. And because of that eroded capacity, we’ll then turn more to the online world for experiences of intimacy and relationship. So I’m sure this is going to play out in an increasingly problematic way.

Josh Mortensen (51:03.929)

Yeah, I guess it is one of those shadow aspects of just moving forward full tilt as if everything’s gonna be good while ignoring obviously everything that is already signaling that there’s gonna be bad things. Yeah, I guess what you’re saying is with a child it’s very natural to have these objects that you treat in this way, but as adults in order to do that,

Glen Slater (51:12.044)

Right.

Josh Mortensen (51:33.025)

it’s not a natural process, it’s this dissociative endeavor.

Glen Slater (51:40.172)

And it doesn’t take imagination. mean, the AI is just there. It’s speaking as another human being. It’s not like you’re imagining into what the teddy bear thinks and is saying back to you and so forth. It’s a very different, very different mode.

Josh Mortensen (51:42.789)

Mmm.

Josh Mortensen (51:49.434)

Right.

Josh Mortensen (51:59.419)

Oh, that’s a very good distinction. Yeah, because you don’t have to imagine this conversation. It’s not a fantasy. You’re just experiencing it. But in order to suspend the disbelief, you’ve got to kind of turn off that aspect of yourself that’s kind of the sense making reality awareness side of yourself. Yeah, it’s scary. So then, in our last eight to 10 minutes here,

Glen Slater (52:15.683)

Yeah.

Josh Mortensen (52:24.259)

Maybe we could turn to the subtitle of your book, Finding the Deeply Human in a Post-Human Age. I think it’s really easy to look at all the dark side of it, the shadow side of it, the things that are scary, the things that are already popping up and causing some harm. But in this age, and as we transition more and more into this type of technological sphere, how do we find the human side of us? How do we go deep inside of ourselves?

How do we make sense of that?

Glen Slater (52:57.87)

Guys, I’ve been talking about the book in order to give people an image to work with. You know, if you think of your life as a tree, which has branches that reach out and a trunk and roots and so forth, I think

It’s fair to say that what the online world does, what the digital lifestyle is doing is it’s giving us this idea of infinite possibility that’s that’s there waiting for us. And so it’s almost like a siren call to to to be online, to to have more connections, to to be more networked and so forth. And this is like a giant expansion of the

It’s sort of upper level and it’s a very horizontal mode of consciousness because what you’re doing online, I sometimes sit behind people on planes and you can’t help but see what they’re doing. They’ll for four hours be just quickly flicking through images on whatever it is, Instagram or. And you get the sense of this horizontality.

that there’s no reflection going on, there’s no digestion, there’s no vertical mode of understanding. And so the problem is that if you have a tree that’s sort of expanding endlessly like this on the horizontal level and is not growing down, is not connected to its history,

to the sort of way the ancestors are working through us, to the sort of demands of the zeitgeist, to our dream life, to any kind of connection to the unconscious, as Jung would describe it. That that root system is not getting any attention. And then we’re going to have a whole bunch of trees that just kind of fall over or flail in.

Glen Slater (55:25.346)

wind. So then to be a bit more precise, as I as I talk in the last part of my book, the number one value here in the face of all of this is becoming more conscious. And and that has to do with paying attention to the feedback loop that we’ve talked about, the symptoms, the shadow side, right?

And so becoming conscious implies a more holistic form of consciousness, so taking into account of all aspects of our lived experience rather than putting all our eggs in one basket. And to the extent we can do that, I think there’s also the possibility here of

a theme that is becoming very, very strong in these kinds of conversations, which is a sort of re-enchantment of our relationship with ourselves and with the world. You know, a renewed sense of mystery, a renewed sense of our presence to the actual things. mean, while we are embodied beings,

there’s still going to be actual people and an actual world to be a part of. I mentioned Byung-Chul Han’s work and he talks about the problem of our relationship with non-things, that the world of social media, the online world is a whole bunch of non-things. And I had this story on the radio of someone

a digital native, all of a sudden discovering that they could go for a walk in the neighborhood and leave their smartphone at home. And all of a sudden, it was like they’d entered this new world of noticing things in the neighborhood that they’d never noticed before and just being with their own thoughts. And it was like a revelation.

Glen Slater (57:48.597)

So I mean enchantment in that sense, a kind of rediscovery of what it means to be a human being living in particular places, in particular spaces, with particular people. And I finished the book with the prospect of what I call a new counterculture.

And maybe this has many aspects to it. One would be the call to slow down in a world where our adaptation technology is constantly speeding us up. Our minds are speeding up. But to me, a sense of soul is diametrically opposed to that speediness of mind, because there’s no gaps. There’s nothing to let us drop.

into into a deeper level. I think you can look around, you can see the analog movement is a kind of compensation. But where this idea comes from for me is, you know, Theodore Rosak coined the term counterculture back in the late 60s in his book, The Making of a Counterculture. And when he tried to dig in to what was going on in that

60s, 70s counterculture, he said, this is a this is a response to technocracy, which is fascinating because because that would be the late industrial technocracy. And since writing the book, I finished it early last year. The the word technocracy has appeared more times.

in just ordinary news articles and as if people are waking up that we are in a technocracy. But I can’t help thinking like where where are all the artists? Where are all the musicians? Where where are all the voices right now that that might have something to say about us sort of drifting into this in into this into this lifestyle?

Glen Slater (01:00:11.606)

So I do see sort of signs of a counter movement, but whether or not that will come together into anything meaningful, I’m not sure. The frame that I use in my book is that we all know now that the industrial revolution, the first phase of modern technology, caused an outer ecological problem.

And I think the post-industrial digital age is causing an inner ecological problem. It’s eroding our ecology of mind. And if we can rally ourselves in that external way, I think there’s a good possibility that with the right kind of psychological humanistic classes,

Maybe we can rally ourselves to this inner ecological problem or just begin to notice it, wake up to it. And then I think it’s up to all of us to know how we respond. How are we going to relate to this burgeoning technocracy?

Josh Mortensen (01:01:33.379)

Yeah, I think that’s very well said. all, all of those things sound very valuable when it comes to kind of claiming that reclaiming that human side of us, that spiritual side of us, the side that wants to connect with nature and connect with ourselves and connect with other people. And really, I think there is a counterculture movement and it’s, it’s ironic cause I see it online, people talking about how we all need to get offline. but yeah, I think that is.

Glen Slater (01:01:56.653)

Hmm.

Yeah.

Josh Mortensen (01:02:02.425)

That is the, I think it’s like that next phase. It’s almost like when there was a big movement, say, against tobacco and so many people stopped smoking, I think it would be beneficial for us to have a big movement against the online world and just disconnecting from that and touching grass, hugging a tree, spending time with friends, family, neighbors, and…

And also I see this big movement towards spirituality as well, where there are a lot of people who are going back to church right now. And also just in the Jungian world, I feel like Jung has really exploded in the last decade or two in a way that he was a little bit more fringe, a little bit more, I don’t know, everybody kind of looked at him as though he was esoteric rather than kind of mainstream psychology. But today,

Glen Slater (01:02:53.358)

Yeah.

Josh Mortensen (01:02:56.109)

almost any podcast that I listen to where they’re talking about humans and technology or humans and culture and politics, there’s usually at least one or two references to some of Jung’s ideas. I think that, you know, across my fingers, I think that there is hope that we can balance some of this out if enough people slow down and disconnect and, you know, do what you’re saying.

Glen Slater (01:03:09.176)

Huh.

Glen Slater (01:03:23.042)

Yeah, well, that would be great. I mean, even just to have a sense of the psyche or an ecology of mind would be a great step forward, because if we’re trapped in that kind of Cartesian dualism of thinking about the body as a machine and even the brain as a kind of machine and the mind is just conscious thought processes and what we will and.

it leaves that in between world of the psyche on the table. And so I think to the extent we can cotton on to what Jung meant by the reality of the psyche, makes a huge difference because that’s the doorway to attending to emotional intelligence, the imagination, the idea that there’s a

There’s a deeper dimension to our psychological lives. But I guess we’ll be watching how this all plays out.

Josh Mortensen (01:04:35.641)

Yeah, absolutely. And on top of that, also is recognizing that interiority and the inner world and the different aspects that you have, that’s also the path towards consciousness. And so I think the more that we can turn towards that, the better. Well, Glenn, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me. This has been really fun. And honestly, I felt like we went into some really interesting corners and down some rabbit holes that were…

It helped open up some thinking in my mind as well, so I really appreciate it. If people want to find you, I know you’re a teacher and you’re a writer, but you’re also a consultant. If people want to find you in the work that you’re doing, the books that you’ve written, where would they go looking for you?

Glen Slater (01:05:19.086)

I have a website, one of the necessities that has come late in my life after writing this book primarily. it’s just glenslater.com, Glenn with one N.

Josh Mortensen (01:05:37.371)

Okay, well thank you so much. really appreciate this and hope we can do it again sometime.

Glen Slater (01:05:41.313)

Okay, good. Great conversation.

Josh Mortensen (01:05:44.027)

Thanks, bye.