Jung's Unfinished Masterpiece

Much of Carl Jung's prodigious output of books, papers and letters remains untranslated and/or unpublished. According to Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology by Sonu Shamdasani there are "...sufficient unpublished manuscripts to fill half a dozen volumes." Furthermore, in the Jung papers in Zurich there are "...approximately 20,000 letters, and there are many letters scattered in public and private archives around the world ...less that 10 percent of this has been published". No wonder Jung is so misunderstood and misrepresented.

Religion & Consciousness

The word "consciousness" means different things to different people: "To writers on spiritual or religious topics, it frequently connotes the relationship between the mind and God, or the relationship between the mind and deeper truths that are thought to be more fundamental than the physical world."* As such, all that religion has to say about consciousness has already been said. But Crick and Dennett's consciousness, human or otherwise, is a phenomenon of the real or physical world, an emergent property of the brain which has only recently (in the last decade or so) been the subject of serious scientific investigation.

*Quote from Wikipedia.

Psychology & Consciousness

Psychology is mainly concerned with behaviorism . It does not address the question of consciousness and treats the brain as a "black box". In general, psychologists have no particular interest in how the human brain is constructed, how it works or how it evolved. Francis Crick writes in The Astonishing Hypothesis that academic psychology "denied the usefulness of consciousness as a psychological concept...partly because experiments involving introspection did not appear to be leading anywhere and partly because it was hoped psychology would become more scientific by studying behavior."

Philosophy & Consciousness

Daniel Dennett begins his book Kinds of Minds with: "I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers." However, Dennett is more than just a philosopher, he is also a cognitive scientist. He asks the questions, then goes on to answer them too.

He chronicles how life evolved from self-replicating macromolecules to single-celled organisms and, in time, to complex multi-cellular creatures like Homo sapiens. He explains how the mind must have evolved at the same time. So are animals conscious? Are plants conscious? Are bacteria conscious? After reading Dennett's book you would have to say that, to varying degrees, all life is conscious.

Animals have different kinds of minds, each species having evolved differently, nevertheless animal consciousness is likely to share many of the features of human consciousness. Many people would disagree. Others would say it's quite obviously true. Only experimental science will find out for sure e.g. did you know that bees can count?