Here are the talks and workshops that happened at the Monterey Friends of CG Jung.

Library Talks: The Anima

We invite you to participate in a new series of events taking place in the Monterey Friends of CG Jung library. This evening in the library, we will host a forum of ideas centered around the concept of Anima in Jungian psychology. The participants will share their thoughts and insights on the topic while referencing the books and publications available in the library. To make this event accessible to remote participants, we will be filming the discussion and pulling books “live” from the shelves, allowing everyone to follow along in a quite immersive way! Don’t miss out on this exciting opportunity to explore the concept of Anima and be a fellow librarian for an evening….

The Hungry Ghosts of Silicon Valley: Tech’s Shadow—with Gregory Brun and Lisa Maroski

The idealism marketed by the tech industry has been shattered by recent events, including self-driving cars that kill people, mental health issues and cultural disruption arising from social media, addiction to our phones or to people “liking” our posts, and now with the exponential improvement and democratization of Large Language Models (such as chatGPT-4), it will soon be impossible to distinguish man-made from machine-made content. How do these developments affect us psychologically (aside from known increases in depression)? What will become of trust, of spirituality? More generally, how do we deal with the shadow of such developments?

We recommend that you watch the movie The Social Dilemma, available here, and if you are interested in more recent developments, also watch this presentation.

Art and Artificial Intelligence—facilitated by Robin Robinson

This evening, we’ll discuss the fascinating topic of AI’s impact on art. The art world has been forever transformed by the advent of sophisticated AI-driven image software. In fact, artists using AI for image creation have won significant juried shows in the last year, with judges completely unaware of the image origin. This has sparked a fascinating debate on the role of AI in the wider art industry.

We’ll delve into some of the most pressing questions surrounding this topic, such as how these AI-generated creations fit into our human experience of making art. We’ll also explore how we value images and image-making and consider whether certain methods or artists may become obsolete in the face of AI’s rise. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll explore the deeper meaning behind this disruption and what it tells us about who we are and why we create art. Through a showcase of AI-generated art examples and open discussion, we’ll seek to shed light on this fascinating and ever-evolving topic.

The English Woman, Nairobi 1925—with Gary Lowe

On November 12, 1925, a twenty-nine-year-old English woman disembarked the steamer Wangoni in Mombasa, Kenya, after twenty-eight days at sea. She was escorting her sister to be married in Nairobi, another 330 miles inland by train. Her chance encounter with Jung and two other gentlemen is the subject of tonight’s travelog about the adventures of three men and an English woman in search of…….

(“The Bugishu Psychological Expedition,” Jung: A Biography [2003] by Deirdre Bair)

The Dense Philosophy of Iain McGilchrist, Part 2—with Robert “Doc” Hall

In this session, we will attempt to deal with McGilchrist’s take on religion. The most readable sections on this are at the end of Appendix 7 and through Appendix 8, way at the end of The Matter with Things. The first issue is what is religion. Then in Appendix 8, he takes up four issues: 1) Scientists and religious belief. 2) Religious institutions and science. 3) Religion as brainwashing. And 4) Religious belief and the health of individuals and societies. After all this, he minimally deals with a global ideology, economic expansion as mass psychosis—which is Doc’s favorite fallout from such discussions.

The Dense Philosophy of Iain McGilchrist, Part 1—with Robert “Doc” Hall

Many of us are reading McGilchrist’s tome, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 28 chapters in all, and not designed to need reading front-to-back. We will concentrate only on Chapter 22, “Time,” which appears to a hinge point connecting the warm-up chapters on how we think to McGilchrist’s final chapters on the nature of reality and human values and purpose in life. Even Ch 22 bounces from one deep concept to another, so if we can address the opening dozen pages of it in one session, we will do well. What is time technologically, and what is it psychologically? (Right brain and left brain.) Doc will attempt to provide a copy of these pages for everyone to read before the meeting.

Robert “Doc” Hall is Prof Emeritus of Supply Chain Management, Indiana University, and spent a career promoting lean methods to managers who rarely understood either the human side of them, or the environmental fallout from them.

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