Curiosity and psychic growth: psychoanalyst Eva Rider profiled

Eva Ryder has had a long private practice as a licensed psychotherapist in California, based in Santa Cruz. Her work is based on the psychotherapy initiated by the radically innovative and influential work of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, which has helped people to expand their lives and heal, plus the additional Jungian psychotherapy of Marion Woodman. 

Rider had a mystical experience under a tree when she was 17, after the death of her father when she was 12. That death, she says, affected her deeply, which is also a connection to empathy with her patients. 

“It was a black hole. It was a hole. It was an abyss. And I fell into that abyss. And over the years of my life, when I had relationship, romantic relationships that ended, I always fell into that same black hole… It's an experience of falling, falling endlessly. And it's an abyss experience. It's so terrifying that I had to learn what comes, what happens after you come through the black hole? Where do you land?” 

The mystical experience when she was 17 also affected her deeply. 

“It was a moment that changed everything. And for me, that repeating, that symbol of the tree, has always, always been what has led me through life.” 

Psychotherapy is about healing, even healing for a psychoanalyst, and curiosity is an openness that can lead to that healing. 

“I think curiosity, of course, is at the heart of therapy because … that's how we work even with dreams, is we're asking questions… I'm also overwhelmed by my curiosity because there's so much to learn in the course of our lifetime. And we realize as we get older that there's less time to really understand it all. I think that I've lived a very, some people might say, chaotic life because I followed this thread that has led me from one place to another. And I think, to a large extent, it's curiosity battling with fear and security about where is this going to lead. But ultimately curiosity is what definitely points the path forward.” 

I asked her, “We usually don't expect what happens in our dreams. Are our dreams related to curiosity? Do our dreams show what we are curious about and how we are curious?” 

“Like you said, we don't have control over our dreams. Most of us don't think about that, the answer to that question. I don't think we do control the dreams. I think that they are coming from other places and the images and the dreams are oftentimes coming sometimes, of course, from the personal unconscious and very often from the collective. 

“Dreams never tell us what we already know. So, I don't know that they tell us about what our ego consciousness is about, but they will tell us what might be hidden from us and give us clues as to how we can follow on a soul level, what is being asked.” 

I asked, “So, there's something there that knows what we don't know or knows what we're not conscious of. And you've talked about the aspect of curiosity being going into the unknown. And you've just described something that is by design taking us into the unknown, which sounds like curiosity… Were Jung's dreams a mystical experience or something else? Are dreams a mystical experience?”

"That's a great question. I think sometimes, yes. Jung referred to … the big dreams; they stay with you for a lifetime. And they're the dreams that even if we don't write [them] down, we remember, and they inform us through the years, and we may not understand them in the moment, but they have a kind of an ephemeral... energy to them that stays with us and everyone has those, but they are rare and most dreams are what Jung called compensatory … They are the things that we're not aware of, are conscious of, in our daily life, [that] will emerge as in the dream so that we can step back and get a reflection and find balance.” 

I asked, “But the ones, however rare, that aren't compensatory, that aren't strictly based on the biography of a person, are those dreams mystical or is that the wrong word for them?” 

“No, I think that's a very accurate word. They are mystical. They're coming from somewhere else. And they're coming from the collective. Just as one of the things that I find fascinating is that, you even said, that our thoughts are not our own. And so, the dream figures that come to us, we don't know who they are, where they're coming from. They're not coming from our personal psyche. They're coming from somewhere else. So... it is mystical, absolutely.”

This is an excerpt from a podcast with Eva Rider. The full interview can be found in my podcast on YouTube.

My podcast with Eva Rider: Eva Rider

My podcast channel: The Old Curiosity Podcast

Eva Rider's website

Getting intimate with a curious octopus: wildlife writer Sy Montgomery profiled

“I wanted to touch an alternate reality. I wanted to explore a different kind consciousness, if such a thing exists. What is it like to be an octopus? Is it anything like being a human? Is it even possible to know?” Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness, 2. 

Sy Montgomery is an exceptional writer about wildlife, with amazing diversity. She has written about pink dolphins, octopuses, sharks, gorillas, elephants, tigers, snow leopards, cheetahs, eagles, hawks, tree kangaroos, turtles, pigs, hummingbirds and much more. I interviewed her for my podcast on curiosity.

Here are some excerpts from my podcast about her experiences with octopuses: 

“It was clear she wanted to know what I was and I wanted to know what she was. So, I plunged my hands and arms into the water and immediately she started covering me with her soft questing suckers. And the thing about octopus skin is they can taste with every inch of their skin, but this is most exquisitely developed in the suckers of which, on the giant Pacific, there are 200 on each arm, and each sucker is capable of a pincer grip so they can conform the sucker to almost any surface. And it is now known that they actually can taste the biome of various creatures. They can probably taste beneath our skin and taste our blood, too.” 

"So, here's this creature who is very distantly related to humans. The last time we shared a common ancestor, everyone was a tube half a billion years ago, who is looking into my face, who has chosen to leave its lair, who again has chosen to take its arms and suckers and lift them out of the water at considerable effort to see what the heck I was. I was certainly not the first human that she met, but it is now known that octopuses can recognize individual humans. This has been tested. So, I was a new human to her. And we spent quite some time kind of exploring each other. So, immediately it was clear to me that she was just as curious about me as I was about her."

………….. 

"Curiosity does expose you to risk often, but the risks are often worth it because you're finding out more about the world around you. … Giant Pacific octopuses only live three to five years. So, their curiosity from the point that they hatch is quite intense. They have to learn everything that they need to survive. They are not being taught it by their parents. They hatch out of tiny eggs the size of a grain of rice. The father's long gone. He has nothing to do with caring for the eggs. The mother may care for the eggs until they hatch, but then shortly after that, she dies. So curiosity is a really important tool for an octopus. And I think their curiosity is even more intense in their short lives than ours is."

………….. 

“The first octopus I met, Athena. And I knew she was old, but I didn't think that I would only get to see her like two or three times before she died. And I was so upset when she died. And usually, you know, with a person that you've only met two or three times, you're not as upset with their death. But when you are singled out, by someone like an octopus, it makes you feel so special. And she was my first. I'd never known anyone so unlike me. … Athena was suddenly my friend and I was very upset when she died. And the same, my gosh, worse, worse, worse with Octavia, because I'd known her ever since she pretty much arrived at New England Aquarium till almost the very day she died. And I loved her. I don't know how she felt about me. I don't know if we could call it love. I don't even know if we could call it affection, if it felt like to her, if affection felt the same to her as it did to me. But I do know that she chose my company. And at the end of her life, she not only remembered me, but she made a huge effort when she was sick and old and dying. She made a huge effort to come from the bottom of her tank up to the surface to greet me, to look into my face, and to touch and to taste me for one last time.” 

………….. “

"This really deeply affected me, my relationships with these animals. It changed my understanding of what a mind is. It changed and widened my appreciation for consciousness. And Thales of Miletus, the presocratic Greek philosopher, I'm sure you're familiar with him, he said this great thing. And it kind of sums up how these animals and knowing them changed the way I understood the world. And he is believed to have said, the universe is alive and has fire in it and is full of gods. And to me, what that says is that our universe is far more animate, far more sentient, far more emotional than we might think at first. Our universe, our world is incandescent with lives who love their lives as much as we love our own. And full of gods, it tells me that we look around us and everything we see is holy. And we need to treat our world in that way.”

This is an excerpt from a podcast with Sy Montgomery. The full interview can be found in my podcast on YouTube.

Photo credit for photo of Montgomery with an octopus: Amy Kunze

Photo credit for photo of Montgomery underwater: David Scheel

Podcast with Sy Montgomery on The Old Curiosity Podcast

The Old Curiosity Podcast

What exactly do you mean by "original?"

It used to be that at least human beings were the ones formulating the questions for AI to answer. At least that was a sign of the originality and creativity of the human mind. But that has quickly changed. ChatGPT now prompts human beings to ask if it wants questions answered that the human being hasn't yet asked. Is there a limit to the ability of AI to ask questions it hasn't been asked yet? Can AI be original?

So, what makes a question original? Obviously, if a question has't been asked before, then it would be original. But someone might think a question is original simply because the person is unaware that it has already been asked. Before the digital area, knowledge of whether a question had been asked before was limited to access to printed books and to the time needed to search those books. Now, that's not a factor. With AI, a person can search the internet to see if a specific question has already been asked. AI can expose the illusion that a person has original thoughts. Too bad for humans.

That still leaves the problem of what originality is. What is it? One of the strengths of human culture is that we share innovations and become so accustomed to what has been shared that we don't think that we didn't create it. On a basic level, as individuals we don't create the language we use. We don't create many of the ideas that are standard for us. We don't create the type of emotions we can feel And, in terms of creative arts like novels, we don't create the realistic behaviour of fictional characters that follows well-known patterns. Individual writers usually don't create the genres in which they write.

For instance, a romance novel or a science fiction novel follow the patterns of the genre that readers expect to find. Science fiction novels had an origin that developed with new science and technology, with pioneers in the genre like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Some science fiction writers occasionally introduce variations and innovations to the genre. But, after the initial stages of the creation of a new genre, what follows is generic and thus not essentially original.

The history of discovery and innovation is fascinating, even if there is some distortion in isolating discovery and innovation from the historical context that led to it. Thus there were a series of ideas that led to the moment that Charles Darwin wrote his book on natural selection. Unfortunately for Darwin, he worked so long on the unpublished manuscript, about 20 years, that Alfred Russel Wallace independently made the same discovery and Darwin had to share the honour with Wallace.

But what an individual thinks and feels seems original to the individual, even if it isn't.

I imagine that genuine originality might meet all these conditions:

• It makes sense in some way and is not simply an indecipherable, chaotic jumble.
• It has a form of truth or consistency to it.
• It is speculative.
• It is a unique reinterpretation, redefinition or reconfiguration. For example, the discoveries in psychology of Carl Jung built on reinterpreting dreams, myths and occult literature.
• It is counter-intuitive, paradoxical or contradictory to conventional thinking. For example, Zen questions.
• It has otherness and difference and yet still fits life.
• It is verifiably original.

So, to what extent are these criteria essentially human and will remain essentially human -- or can AI meet some of these criteria and maybe all of them some time in the future?

My podcast The Old Curiosity Podcast

Will the dreaded AI dragon slay
the human author?

Artificial intelligence (AI) can now produce quick, cheap novels that apply the formulas of human novels to generate new versions.

Personally, I think there are good reasons for thinking that AI can never duplicate human ingenuity, creativity and originality. That's because AI is an algorithm that can find patterns quickly in massive amounts of information, but it can't actually think, feel, intuit, feel compassion and empathy, or experience spirituality. It is an echo machine of what is stereotypical and sometimes biased in human beings. It's a Narcissus machine of what's generic in humans. But, if human beings have the choice, will they find AI-authored books satisfying enough to buy them at cheaper prices? Or, do human beings want more than a Narcissus machine? George R.R. Martin, the author of the Game of Thrones series and a multi-millionaire, is one of the plaintiffs involved in the copyright infringement lawsuit of the Authors Guild against OpenAI. I'm a member of the guild, but I have some differences of opinion. The problem with the claim that AI "steals" from human authors when it "trains" on the writings of human authors is that it doesn't do anything essentially different from what human authors do. There's a popular myth that thinkers and writers are individuals working at a solitary task to produce unique works. That's fiction and humans are good at producing fictions. The truth, as writers like myself know, is that we authors read the works of other authors and thinkers and are deeply influenced by them. For instance, Martin, the dragon master, says he's been influenced by reading J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E Howard, Jack Vance, and Fritz Leiber. He didn't invent dragons, warring kingdoms, different character types or typical plot lines. Writers in genres like romance, science fiction, fantasy and horror, shape their novels on what is typical in these genres, to fit the expectations of readers. In a wider sense, human writers and their audience are influenced by the myths and archetypes of basic human psychology. In terms of the law, this is not "copying" but "transformative" use. In the most creative and original writers, there is a kind of collaboration with what has been thought and written in the past. So, what are creativity and originality? How would you judge when you or someone else is creative and original? And what is the purpose of these two activities in human existence?

My curiosity podcast channel