'The researchers explain their findings through a "privileged window" hypothesis. Professor Michel Pham elaborates on the hypothesis. "When we rely on our feelings, what feels 'right' or 'wrong' summarizes all the knowledge and information that we have acquired consciously and unconsciously about the world around us. It is this cumulative knowledge, which our feelings summarize for us, that allows us make better predictions. In a sense, our feelings give us access to a privileged window of knowledge and information -- a window that a more analytical form of reasoning blocks us from." In accordance with the privileged window hypothesis, the researchers caution that some amount of relevant knowledge appears to be required to more accurately forecast the future.'

'What is the Minotaur? First, the Minotaur represents our primal fear of the unconscious. The unconscious is that which is unknown to us. For this reason, we humans are born not only with an instinctive fear of the unknown and of death, but also an archetypal fear of the unconscious. This is one of the factors that make the psychotherapy process so threatening: a profound fear of encountering our own unconscious, of entering the dark, lonely labyrinth and meeting the Minotaur. Fundamentally, the Minotaur represents the primal fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown is deeply-seated in the human psyche. Indeed, the Minotaur may be seen as a metaphor for death and death anxiety. Existentially, death is a symbol of non-being or non-existence, and, therefore, death anxiety can be understood, in Kierkegaard's words, as the "fear of nothingness." As existential psychologist Rollo May (1977) points out, "the threat of non-being lies in the psychological and spiritual realm as well – namely, in the threat of meaninglessness in one's existence." The Minotaur also embodies both fate (our biological nature) and destiny (our freedom) and the integral interrelationship between the two. But why do we find it such a dreadful image? Because to confront the Minotaur in the dark labyrinth is to confront ourselves: our fears of the unknown, our ferocious, beastly nature, our rage, aggression, sexuality, mortality, the daimonic. This self-confrontation is successfully accomplished by proceeding carefully yet courageously along one's own Ariadnean thread. The secret is that, metaphorically, we each have been given this thread to follow and lead us to our destiny – but only if we are brave enough to do so. Psychotherapy sometimes entails helping the patient who has lost touch with this precious thread to find it, take hold of it, and follow it wherever it may lead, inching along blindly on hands and knees in the darkness through the unknown. ...once grasped, proceeding slowly but steadily along one's Ariadnean thread provides a profound sense of purpose and meaning in life. As though one is being pulled or guided by some power greater than oneself.'

'Mental health is not defined by the absence of anxiety. The experience of anxiety is universal. No one is immune to it. Anxiety is an inevitable part of the human condition. Chronically avoiding or repressing existential anxiety gives rise to neurotic or pathological anxiety, such as phobias and panic attacks. The secret to dealing positively with anxiety is to accept it, tolerate it, listen to its message, and learn to channel it's immense energy constructively. Anxiety can, when correctly utilized, motivate, energize, invigorate and vitalize. And it is closely connected with creativity of all kinds. As philosopher Soren Kierkegaard recognized, "Anxiety is our greatest teacher." He also called anxiety "the dizziness of freedom." The trick is first to transform your negative attitude toward anxiety. To normalize rather than pathologize it. To welcome rather than run from it. To, whenever practically possible, tolerate rather than medicate it. To embrace rather than escape from it. To try to understand rather than dismiss out of hand its psychobiological, spiritual and existential significance. -- When the daimonic is habitually denied, it becomes more negative and dangerous. But when we acknowledge its presence and reality, it can be the life-giving source of energy, strength, power, spirituality and creativity. This can be said of the unconscious in general. So it is vitally important to learn to listen to one's unconscious carefully, and to what it has to say about what's happening in the psyche now and what needs to happen if the future, both inwardly and outwardly.'

'Philosophers and psychologists down the centuries have tried to bring our attention to two important but generally neglected facts: we know more than we realize, and we affect more than we realize. Look at the human organism from an evolutionary standpoint and this isn’t hard to understand. Our rational, conscious, symbol-using minds are recent and rather rickety structures built over the top of a superbly adapted mammalian nervous system. ...a great deal of what goes on in our lives depends not on our rational, linguistic, symbol-using minds, but on an intricate and richly communicative nonrational substructure inherited from our animal ancestors, most of which we never notice at all and much of which is highly resistant to any kind of conscious control. Today’s science treats the placebo effect as an obstacle to be gotten out of the way... The operative mage doesn’t want to get rid of the placebo effect. Quite the contrary, he or she wants to amplify it and use it...'

"The only way forward is down."

Gisted -- Ethics is the theory; virtue is the practice. The challenge of philosophy is that the vast majority of ethical decisions we need to make are not universally preferable but are aesthetically preferable – and these are the tough gray area virtues like honesty, integrity, courage and so on. The reason these virtues are tough is because they are conditional and not absolute. UPB trumps APA every time. And so if a murderer is asking you for the location of a loved one, you cannot honestly tell them because that would be to value honesty (APA) more than a human life (UPB). An ethical life requires a very strong degree of self-knowledge and a very good relationship with your unconscious because the unconscious can process vast amounts of information in real-time. You need to have trust within your self and a comfort with instantaneous instinct and feelings of ambivalence because if you try to think through with your conscious every possible result of APA actions, you will fail.

'Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. He worked on his red book on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. -- “I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can—in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal—but then you need to do that—then you are freed from the power of them... Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book and turn over the pages and for you it will be your church—your cathedral—the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them—then you will lose your soul—for in that book is your soul.”'

'"There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know." - This statement was made at a press briefing given by former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on February 12 2002. -- Psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Zizek extrapolates from these three categories a fourth, the unknown known, that which we don't know or intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know - the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to known about, even though they form the background of our public values.' -- "What you don't know you know controls you but you don't control it." (The Reality of the Virtual, Zizek)

"Despite their differences, psychoanalysis and AI have always shared theoretical affinities –among these, the challenge to the idea of the autonomous, intentional actor, the need for self-reference in theory building, and the need for objects such as censors to deal with internal conflict. The strength and the weakness of object theories are the same in both psychoanalysis and AI: the strength is a conceptual framework that offers rich possibilities for models of interactive process; the weakness is that the framework may be too rich. The postulated object may be too powerful: they explain the mind by postulating many minds within it."