Sneak Preview

Since you all were nice enough to subscribe to my Sunday Night newsletter, I figured it would be right to share my next youtube video with you early.

This is what I have so far. Let me know what you think about it!

Psychology and Reality — Jung, Euclid, Zeno

Human beings are suspended between two worlds: the phenomenological, where meaning is felt and experienced, and the empirical, where reality is measured and described. This essay traces the history thinkers who have confronted that divide. We start with Carl Jung’s interpretations of the alchemists, not merely as early chemists but as philosophers and psychologists, then moving on to Euclid’s book of Elements, a work of mathematics but also metaphysics, and finally Zeno’s famous paradox, all in hopes of understanding how we makes sense of the world. We will conclude by seeking to undersand how psychological reality shifts as the tools we have for measuring the world improve. 

If you enjoy, please like and subscribe. 

Carl Jung discovered that the ancient science of alchemy was about more than just transmuting lead into gold—it was a symbolic journey human beings undertake in hopes of transforming their soul into its purest form. According to Jung, what the Alchemists did was akin to his theory of individuation, or the process of how the conscious and unconscious minds become integrated into a unified self. 

According to the wikipedia article for Jung’s book “psychology and alchemy” — 

“The fundamental thesis Jung is advancing is that for pre-scientific humans there is not a sharp distinction between subject and object and thus this leads them to unconsciously project their own inner states onto external objects (especially objects that are mostly unknown to them), so a reflective analysis of alchemical symbols becomes revelatory about the unconscious psychic life of this time period.” 

This theory of Jung’s is supported by reseracher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his book Phenomenology of Perception (1945)

Merleau-Ponty's argued that perception is embodied and that early human consciousness is not Cartesian (subject-object divided), but immersed in the world.

His work suggests that pre-reflective experience (which pre-scientific people mostly relied on) is one of interbeing, not separation.

At the heart of the alchemical process was the prima materia: the raw, chaotic substance at the bottom of things. The alchemists believed a divine spark lay hidden in this darkness. If gold was ever thought to be transformed from lead, then a speck of that gold must have been there all along. Jung observed that for alchemists, this process was metaphorical, without knowing it to be... The philosopher’s stone wasn’t a literal object, It was the hypothesized, purest form of the soul. 

This is a very clear example, acted out for hundreds of years by alchemists, rediscovered in the modern world by Jung, and supported by the wrold of philosophers and cognitive scientists such as Ponty, that shows the tension between the worlds of reality and the psyche. 

Traveling back 2200 years into the past, we visit ancient Egypt. While today we think of mathematics as a cold, hard science (that we probably are happy to not have to study anymore), as we have already seen, the ancients saw things differently. The ancients understood geometry not merely as a tool for measurement, but as a sacred language that revealed the structure of the universe itself. Euclid’s Elements, often hailed as the foundation of mathematics, opens with a definition: “a point is that which has no part.” This invisible, dimensionless starting place gives rise to the circle, whose center is defined by that very point. The circle, in turn, becomes the basis for constructing all other shapes. This journey from the strange dimensionless starting point of a point, all the way to the complex world of shapes and higher mathematics, is reminiscent of creations myths across cultures. 

Mathematics seems to have a symbolic interpretation as well. 

Philosophers like Plato elevated geometry to a method of contemplating eternal truths. The Egyptians considered the perfect circle of Horus’ pupil to be the source of all generative power in the universe. They referred to it as a “hidden place” and as a geometric form that exists without straight sides and without angles. It is just as imaginary as the point and just as primary. At what point did mathematics go from this cosmic meditation, beginning from nothing and spiraling outward into everything, into a cold, science that kids dread learning and find impractical?

Traveling 700 miles North West, and about a century in the future, we arive in ancient Greece, where a man named Zeno is again contemplating the tension that exists between the abstract world of the mind and the empirical world around him. 

Zeno’s Paradox can be illustrated as follows: To reach a destination, one must first cover half the distance. Then, to cover the remaining distance, one must first cover half of that distance, and so on. You will never cover all the distance! Alas, we know that this is not how things work in practice. 

Zeno’s paradox throws us into the limits of rationality: the idea that movement is impossible despite overwhelming physical evidence to the contrary. The paradox confronts the tension between the infinite (a mental abstraction) and the finite (a physical boundary). The paradox isn't false—it simply belongs to a different level of description.

The examples of Alchemy, mathematics, and logical paradoxes all speak to the truly weird tension between the world of the mental and the world of the physical. Given how weird this space is, people throughout history have been falible to tricksters and con artists who have exploited peoples hopes for finding themselves in a state of meaningful suspension between these two worlds. Tarrot card readers, fortune tellers, hypnotists in my opinion all fall into that category. However, this is obviously only the most unfavorable interpretation of these action. Maybe these mediums are just that, mediums or interpreters between these two worlds. I am still to be convinced...

The essay is about the ways in which human beings make sense of the world, oscillating between abstraction and embodiment, between symbolic inner life and empirical outer reality. It argues that what we call “reality” is always mediated—by the psyche, by language, by mathematics, by metaphor. Understanding and most imnportantly meaning, emerges at the boundary, the creep of the physical into the mental. 

This discussion makes me think of an argument I once heard about God. 

Some people think of God as a placeholder for all the things they do not know. How all the animals and humans came to be was chiefly in the domain of God prior to the theory of evolution; atmospheric events were attributed to the emotions of various gods in the polytheistic relgion of the Ancient Greeks before we came to understand weather systems, even (sometimes) being able to predict the weather. 

As we come to know more about the world, God seems to get crowded out. 

Is this where God should exist though? Only in the places where knowledge lacks? My god exists just as much, if not more, in all the things we do know: The awe inspiring complexity of the physical world which my limited mental scope tried to grapple with and understand. 

A larger related question may be: Are we unearthing meaning from a meaningful world, or ascribing meaning to a world void of meaning, as a psychological survival mechanism? 

When we describe time as a "river," the mind as a "machine," atoms as "solar systems," or the brain as a "computer," we’re not simply using poetic flourishes—we are mapping something unfamiliar onto something more familiar in order to make it intelligible. But this isn't a linguistic afterthought—it’s the fundamental way in which human cognition works. All understanding is metaphorical at root.

Cognitive scientists like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have shown that even our most basic concepts—up/down, in/out, control is up, emotion is heat, ideas are objects—are built on metaphor. Our minds scaffold new knowledge by translating it into pre-existing conceptual frameworks drawn from bodily experience, cultural norms, and collective symbols.

So the boundary between psychology and reality isn’t a gap to be bridged—it’s a site of fusion. We’re not observers standing outside the world, translating it through metaphors like filters. We’re participants in a reality that is always already shaped by our need to interpret it. Every act of knowing is also an act of imagination.

Just to clarify some of the point we have made so far. I believe:

There is a mind-independent reality out there.

That our experience and interpretation of it is shaped by metaphor, symbols, and cognitive frameworks.

and that We never encounter reality in a “raw,” unmediated form.

Importantly, the way the “outside” world flows through to become our “inside” world, is complex and ill-understood. Our vision is one exampe of this, where layers of abstraction are used to decode light particles hitting our retinas from a million different angles, ultimately resulting in a stable “picture” of the world. Take the complexity of this information processing pipeline, and then multiply that by all the other information processing systems that we have. Just goes to show how multifaceted and intriguing the pathways between reality and psychology is.

This journey we have taken today, exploring different examples of where reality and psychology meet, is a fundamental principal of what I always hoped to do with this channel. This channel was always meant to be a way for me to document and spread the ideas I was contemplating at the time, and I feel proud that this video tries to go father down the rabbit hole of interesting ideas about ourselves and the world, always in the hope of finding meaning along the way. Thank you so much for watching. See you next time.