At home in the digital world

Therapeutic Ethics in the Digital Age – When the Whole World is Watching

By Ofer Zur

This article in the Psychotherapy Networker makes some useful points. I found some useful, but I don’t think of myself as an immigrant in the digital world! That is who he addresses.

The revolution in communication technology has created a new set of ethical dilemmas, which—given the pervasiveness of Internet culture—are invading our sessions, whether we know it or not.

The question that got me thinking is When to Google a client?

digital-ethics.pdf

Awakening the Dead

I was looking for a quote I have in Archetypes of Cyberspace:

it is not only forbidden
but impossible to awaken the dead

~

I’m still looking…

but found this … awoken from the Internet Archive, what I once called my mecca. http://cgjungpage.org/jptechnology.html

Now only here. Internet Archive

~

The www.cgjungpage.organisation site still exists, and there is plenty there. They have a tech page too… Here. But it is nice to be able to find some older stuff from wayback.

Republic of Letters

http://www.readwriteweb.com

The 18th century, more than many, may remind us of our own time. That period was the culmination of what had become known as the “Republic of Letters,” a shared domain of imagination that lasted from 1500 to 1800.

I love the phrase “republic of letters” and I’m surprised I have not head of it before. In the next iteration of my article: Archetypes of Cyberspace I’ll do some more research and add it in.

The Group and its Protagonist – Archetypes of Cyberspace

I completed this psychodrama thesis in 1999 after working on it one way and another since about 1984. One feature of this paper is the discussion about the sociometric matrix, a notion that influences my ideas about cyberspace as well and were at the root of another essay I wrote – Archetypes of Cyberspace

I stumbled across this better pdf version of the The Group and its Protagonist – linked to it on my Writing page.

I’m wonering if there is some way to publish something based on these papers?

Archetypes of Cyberspace

Archetypes of Cyberspace (pdf) HTML
Began this in the late 1990s and got it to this stage by 2003.

I have a Writing page – but it missed this essay, one of the ones I spent a few years on. I have now added it to the writing page.

It is a long essay, it was itself a journey, began just like the one I am on in the blog right now. I doubt it many people have read it. I could find no links to it. I just read it through and found it to my liking, though I would want to edit it all over the place!

Here is a quote from the conclusion, linking the theme of the essay to psychotherapy.

Continue reading “Archetypes of Cyberspace”

Archetypes, teleology and what is real

Archetypes of Cyberspace is the title of an essay I am writing (still!). The research notes are on this weblog, they are this weblog. I will be doing a more research in the next few weeks if I get the time.

What *is* an archetype? It means chief type as I understand it, in other words the BOSS. But not the boss of the other types so much as the boss of the phenomena. Thus Venus and Eros are archetypes of love, Mars is the archetype of war. The question I put then is – who is the architect of cyberspace, the force that governs it, is behind it, whose domain is it? WHO is building cyberspace? It is interesting think if there is an outcome we are being pulled towards. Is there a plan.

That question might look to Terence McKenna as if I am thinking of the pioneers of Cyberspace as human receivers of instructions from the spiritual realm – the mushrooms or the aliens telling them what to do. Terence postulates that we are TV sets who receive our thoughts from angels etc. I don't think like that.

Even less am I thinking of teleology as used in the Catholic proof for the existence of God by design – though that might have some mileage in it for me.

In a way I do think in both those ways, but not literally, not ontologically. The world is *as if* there were these daemons running the show. It is best to behave as if there are. This is because there are objective unknowable structures in their depth and detail, that we can participate in only by allowing our own psyche to mesh with those structures. To do that we need to live, to allow our own unknown depths to mesh. We are not as machines, but living participants in the world. In other words to live as full humans who are not just systems and wo see not just systems. Is fathering the same as being the male in a family system? No, but sadly many people talk like that. Seeing through the mechaniocal world to the living energy might be hallucination but it is the way to fully participate in life.

The paragraphs so far are prelude to an I dea i am dwelling on. Teleology. That we can relate to a living world by knowing the archetypes is the essence of psychology. But to what extent are the archetypes also out there with definite plans – with an end-point in mind?

Thinking that there is a plan, a pre-conceived end point, is teleology. The idea is much maligned in science as nonsense hanging over from God as the literal architect of everything. Let us be struck for a moment with the word tele here. There is something archetypal in this word. Look how it recurrs in various devices we use: television, telescope, telephone etc.. Distance – space in other words – is what it refers to. J.L. Moreno used the word on its own to refer to the feelings and thoughts directed by a person into space – distance – to an entity, imagined or real, I am not sure about how that hangs together… space=tele, if we substitute space with tele we get cybertele. If steering is what the cyber is about we are able in cyberspace to steer our tele in the morenian sense.

This following passage is interesting from Teleology item on Principia Cybernetica. In this item they manage, quite appropriatly for a 20th century science, to take the supernatural out of teleology while still allowing it to have a meaning within the legitimacy of a fairly positivist model.

Originally, the study of ends, goals and purposes. In cybernetics, the STRUCTURal and organizational conditions for systems to exhibit purposeful behavior, reach goals (see goal oriented), maintain steady states (see homeostasis), survive threats from their environments (see evolution, adaptation), etc. (Krippendorff)

Along with the supernatural they take the metaphor out, and thus the psychology out. They see the world as a machine – which is one way. Which is fine – it makes them biologists or physicists of large systems. Someone has to do that, but it is not psychology. So can we think of a metaphorical teleology? Can we rescue teleology from religion, not for the physical sciences but for psychology? It is the *as if* which cyberneticists leave out that is important.

One reason is role reversal, we can learn about the world from the inside by being the world, or the spitit of a 'system' in the world. Role reversal is the ability we have to step into another's shoes. But we can do this with things and imaginal entities as well as people. As Moreno put it, [1975, p22]

Instead of coming down from the skies, he comes in by way of the stage door. God is not dead, he is alive in psychodrama!

Archetypes are dramatic, imaginal, that is where their power lies, by fully entertaining them we get to know them. But is there some sort of destiny, some sort of pull into the distand future?

I have a sense there is, and that this is not some "transcendental other" hovering out there in any literal sense. More along the lines of a fractal, that a bit of coastline will let us know the shape of the whole coastline, even when that coastline is still in formation.

Arthur M. Young

Young when young!

I had never heard of the man until recently, and now he is everywhere. Seems he has a lot to say relevant to the psyche and cyberspace, and specifically to the questions raised in the Talbott / Kelly discussion.

Here is a bio.

In 1976 The Reflexive Universe and The Geometry of Meaning were published. These books attempt to identify valid universal first principals and correlate them with modern science. As well, they provide a holistic system for organizing the data of science and generating first order hypotheses for scientific research.

“The theory of process,” says Stanislav Grof, “is a serious candidate for a scientific metaparadigm of the future. His metaparadigm is not only consistent with the best of science, but also capable of dealing with non-objective and non-definable aspects of reality far beyond accepted limits of science.”

Arthur Young believed that the real function of science is the exploration of the human spirit. A bold, humorous, patient and original pioneer, he continues to inspire scientists and philosophers alike towards a truly interdisciplinary vocabulary by opening doorways to the universe of the spirit.

Ontology of Cyberspace

koepsell (link dead Tuesday, February 22, 2011 but rescued from the archives now here.). (and in Google Drive 

David R. Koepsell, The Ontology of Cyberspace: Philosophy, Law, and the Future of Intellectual Property. Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 2000.
Reviewed by Arthur L. Morin

Law is a system of categorization. At the ideal level, one purpose of this system is to help the social system achieve justice. Though not stated so straightforwardly, this is David R. Koepsell’s position in his book The Ontology of Cyberspace: Philosophy, Law, and the Future of Intellectual Property.1 There is, of course, a dynamic interrelation between the legal system of categorization and the socio-cultural system(s) of categorization of which it is a part. Koepsell realizes this, or else he would not have been able to detect the disjunction between what software is and how it has been treated in the legal system. But what he does not seem to fully appreciate is that ontology does not necessarily beget justice. This is the First Problem — the distinction between ontology (what something is) and justice — and I will return to it later.