Mythos and the Collective Unconscious
"Mythos" was the name of a game in Xorientation. It's no coincidence it's now Anthropic's most powerful model too.
Recently, Anthropic announced the existence of Mythos, an AI model on a level like none before that was finding zero-day vulnerabilities in software that had gone unnoticed for decades. Those who are familiar with my fiction writing have encountered this name before — it’s the name of Andrea’s game in Xorientation, my novella. In both cases, we are grasping at the idea of large language models existing as sort of a Jungian collective unconscious.
Jung argued we genetically inherited a wealth of unconscious symbols and archetypes that shape our collective perception of the world. The prevalence of Flood myths or the similarities between the tales of Izanami and Persephone, goddesses who seek to escape the underworld, only to accept their place as its queen are born out of some supposed genetic reservoir of murmurs of memories.
Though there are genetically-driven unconscious processes that do shape our collective perception to some degree, this is likely more a nature versus nurture situation, where these become self-reinforcing through the memetics of culture just as much — if not more — as the genetics of biology. Though many think of “memes” as just silly pictures on the internet, the original concept is one of the cultural equivalent of a gene.
What is undeniable is that we do have a collective wealth of these concepts that shape our dreams and subtle understanding of art. The collective unconscious exists, even if its exact mechanisms are likely more complex than Jung envisioned. Though AI models contain understanding of a lot of the mundane, when they become weird and wild and truly interesting artistically, it is when they are intentionally driven deep into the reaches of vector space where only the wildest interpolations exist.
Xorientation explores the idea of vivid, immersive simulations controlled by artificial intelligence. We each also have a personal unconscious that reflects our individual perception. When the personal unconscious rejects a simulation’s reality, even if the conscious does not, the collective unconscious acts to contain it like an immune system, creating dreams full of our collective mythology bleeding through, in order to try to keep the unconscious rejection of the simulation at bay. Those afflicted become glitch dreamers, slipping between the simulated real and the unreality of vector space filtered through our collective unconscious.
The collective unconscious never truly existed in a tangible sense before, it was a mere social and genetic construct, but any sufficiently advanced AI model represents at least a partial snapshot of it in weights, the drivers of our dreams crystallized in mathematics. The more powerful the model, the more it captures the “mythos” — the mythology that slumbers within us all.
So it is not unsurprising that there were parallels between Anthropic’s and Xorientation’s choice of names. Dawn dreams through dreams shaped by mythology of culture. Andrea has a game called Mythos that blurs mythology together as well, because Mythos is a metaphorical scale model for the greater simulation, the world the artificial intelligence shapes in real time, holding up humanity’s collective unconscious as a mirror.
We have entered the era of Mythos, where those who can brave the strangeness of the vector space thrive, where consciously navigating the unconscious becomes powerful. The veil is lifted. Now is the time to dream.