“We are all fragmented. There is no unitary self. We are all in pieces, struggling to create the illusion of a coherent ‘me’ from moment to moment.”
~ Charles Fernyhough
“Bicamerality hidden in plain sight.”
~ Andrew Bonci
“What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs.”
~ Matthew 10:27
A paper on multilingualism was posted by Eva Dunkel in the Facebook group for The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: Consequences of multilingualism for neural architecture by Sayuri Hayakawa and Viorica Marian. It is a great find. The authors look at how multiple languages are processed within the brain and how they can alter brain structure.
This probably also relates to learning of music, art, and math — one might add that learning music later improves the ability to learn math. These are basically other kinds of languages, especially the former in terms of musical languages (along with whistle and hum languages) that might indicate language having originated in music, not to mention the close relationship music has to dance, movement, and behavior and close relationship of music to group identity. The archaic authorization of command voices in the bicameral mind quite likely came in the form of music and one could imagine the kinds of synchronized collective activities that could have dominated life and work in bicameral societies. There is something powerful about language that we tend to overlook and take for granted. Also, since language is so embedded in culture, monolinguals never see outside of the cultural reality tunnel they exist within. This could bring us to wonder about the role played post-bicameral society by syncretic languages like English. We can’t forget the influence psychedelics might have had on language development and learning at different periods of human existence. And with psychedelics, there is the connection to shamanism with caves as aural spaces and locations of art, possibly the earliest origin of proto-writing.
There is no reason to give mathematics a mere secondary place in our considerations. Numeracy might be important as well in thinking about the bicameral mind specifically and certainly about the human mind in general (Caleb Everett, Numbers and the Making of Us), as numeracy was an advancement or complexification beyond the innumerate tribal societies (e.g., Piraha). Some of the earliest uses of writing was for calculations: accounting, taxation, astrology, etc. Bicameral societies, specifically the early city-states, can seem simplistic in many ways with their lack of complex hierarchies, large centralized governments, standing armies, police forces, or even basic infrastructure such as maintained roads and bridges. Yet they were capable of immense projects that required impressively high levels of planning, organizing, and coordination — as seen with the massive archaic pyramids and other structures built around the world. It’s strange how later empires in the Axial Age and beyond that, though so much larger and extensive with greater wealth and resources, rarely even attempted the seemingly impossible architectural feats of bicameral humans. Complex mathematical systems probably played a major role in the bicameral mind, as seen in how astrological calculations sometimes extended over millennia.
Hayakawa and Marian’s paper could add to the explanation of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. A central focus of their analysis is the increased executive function and neural integration in managing two linguistic inputs — I could see how that would relate to the development of egoic consciousness. It has been proposed that the first to develop Jaynesian consciousness may have been traders who were required to cross cultural boundaries and, of course, who would have been forced to learn multiple languages. As bicameral societies came into regular contact with more diverse linguistic cultures, their bicameral cognitive and social structures would have been increasingly stressed.
Multilingualism goes hand in hand with literacy. Rates of both have increased over the millennia. That would have been a major force in the post-bicameral Axial Age. The immense multiculturalism of societies like the Roman Empire is almost impossible for us to imagine. Hundreds of ethnicities, each with their own language, would co-exist in the same city and sometimes the same neighborhood. On a single street, there could be hundreds of shrines to diverse gods with people praying, people invoking and incantating in their separate languages. These individuals were suddenly forced to deal with complete strangers and learn some basic level of understanding foreign languages and hence foreign understandings.
This was simultaneous with the rise of literacy and its importance to society, only becoming more important over time as the rate of book reading continues to climb (more books are printed in a year these days than were produced in the first several millennia of writing). Still, it was only quite recently that the majority of the population became literate, following from that is the ability of silent reading and its correlate of inner speech. Multilingualism is close behind and catching up. The consciousness revolution is still under way. I’m willing to bet American society will be transformed as we return to multilingualism as the norm, considering that in the first centuries of American history there was immense multilingualism (e.g., German was once one of the most widely spoken languages in North America).
All of this reminds me of linguistic relativity. I’ve pointed out that, though not explicitly stated, Jaynes obviously was referring to linguistic relativity in his own theorizing about language. He talked quite directly about the power language —- and metaphors within language —- had over thought, perception, behavior, and identity (Anke Snoek has some good insights about this in exploring the thought of Giorgio Agamben). This was an idea maybe first expressed by Wilhelm von Humboldt (On Language) in 1836: “Via the latter, qua character of a speech-sound, a pervasive analogy necessarily prevails in the same language; and since a like subjectivity also affects language in the same notion, there resides in every language a characteristic world-view.” And Humboldt even considered the power of learning another language in stating that, “To learn a foreign language should therefore be to acquire a new standpoint in the world-view hitherto possessed, and in fact to a certain extent is so, since every language contains the whole conceptual fabric and mode of presentation of a portion of mankind.”
Multilingualism is multiperspectivism, a core element of the modern mind and modern way of being in the world. Language has the power to transform us. To study language, to learn a new language is to become something different. Each language is not only a separate worldview but locks into place a different sense of self, a persona. This would be true not only for learning different cultural languages but also different professional languages with their respective sets of terminology, as the modern world has diverse areas with their own ways of talking and we modern humans have to deal with this complexity on a regular basis, whether we are talking about tax codes or dietary lingo.
It’s hard to know what that means for humanity’s trajectory across the millennia. But the more we are caught within linguistic worlds and are forced to navigate our way within them the greater the need for a strong egoic individuality to self-initiate action, that is to say the self-authorization of Jaynesian consciousness. We step further back into our own internal space of meta-cognitive metaphor. To know more than one language strengthens an identity separate from any given language. The egoic self retreats behind its walls and looks out from its parapets. Language, rather than being the world we are immersed in, becomes the world we are trapped in (a world that is no longer home and from which we seek to escape, Philip K. Dick’s Black Iron Prison and William S. Burroughs Control). It closes in on us and forces us to become more adaptive to evade the constraints.
“If I met a skin-changer who demanded my shoes, I’d give him my shoes.” This is what a Navajo guy once told me. I didn’t inquire about why a skin-changer would want his shoes, but it was a nice detail of mundane realism. This conversation happened when I was living in Arizona and working at the Grand Canyon. Some might see this anecdote as the over-worked imagination of the superstitious. That probably is how I took it at the time. But I wouldn’t now be so dismissive.
While there, my job was to do housekeeping in the El Tovar. It’s an old hotel located directly on the South Rim of the canyon. It has the feeling of a building that has been around a while. It’s age was hard for me to ignore in its lacking an elevator, something I became familiar with in carrying stacks of sheets up the stairs of multiple floors. I worked there a few times late at night and there was an eerie atmosphere to the place. You could viscerally sense the history, all the people who had stayed there and passed through.
There were stories of suicides and homicides, of lonely lost souls still looking for their lovers or simply going through their habitual routine in the afterlife. The place was famous for it having been one of the locations where the Harvey Girls worked, young women looking for wealthy husbands. There was a tunnel that was once used by the Harvey girls to go between the hotel and the women’s dorm. This hidden and now enclosed tunnel added to the spookiness.
Many Navajo worked at the Grand Canyon, including at the El Tovar. And sometimes we would chat. I asked about the ghosts that supposedly haunted the place. But they were reluctant to talk about it. I later learned that they thought it disrespectful or unwise to speak of the dead. I also learned that some had done traditional ceremonies in the hotel in order to put the dead to rest and help them pass over to the other side. Speaking of the dead would be like calling them back to the world of the living.
I doubt this worldview is merely metaphorical in the superficial sense. Though it might be metaphorical in the Jaynesian sense. Julian Jaynes hypothesized that ancient people continued to hear the voices of the dead, that the memory would live on as auditory experience. He called this the bicameral mind. And in bicameral societies, voice-hearing supposedly was key to social order. This changed because of various reasons and then voice-hearing became a threat to the next social order that replaced the old one.
The Navajo’s fearful respect of ghosts could be thought of as a bicameral carryover. Maybe they better understand the power voice-hearing can have. Ask any schizophrenic about this and they’d agree. Most of us, however, have developed thick boundaries of the egoic mind. We so effectively repress the many voices under the authority of the egoic sole rulership that we no longer are bothered by their sway, at least not consciously.
Still, we may be more influenced than we realize. We still go through the effort of costly rituals of burying the dead where they are kept separate from the living, not to mention appeasing them with flowers and flags. Research shows that the number of people who have heard disembodied voices in their lifetime is surprisingly high. The difference for us is that we don’t openly talk about it and try our best to quickly forget it again. Even as we don’t have ceremonies in the way seen in Navajo tradition, we have other methods for dispelling the spirits that otherwise would haunt us.
In his recent book The “Other” Psychology of Julian Jaynes, Brian J. McVeigh brings the latest evidence to bear on the the theory of the bicameral mind. His focus is on textual evidence, the use of what he calls mind words and their frequency. But before getting to the evidence itself, he clarifies a number of issues, specifically the ever confounding topic of consciousness itself. Many have proclaimed Jaynes to have been wrong based on their having no clue of what he was talking about, as he used consciousness in a particular way that he took great care to define… for anyone who bothers to actually read his book before dismissing it.
To avoid confusion, McVeigh refers to Jaynesian ‘consciousness’ as conscious interiority (others simply call it J-consciousness). McVeigh states that his purpose is to “distinguish it from perception, thinking, cognition, rational thought, and other concepts.” Basically, Jaynes wasn’t talking about any form of basic awareness and physiological reactivity (e.g., a slug recoiling from salt) nor complex neurocognitive skills (e.g., numerical accounting of trade goods and taxes), as the bicameral mind possessed these traits. Starting with Jaynes’ analysis, McVeigh as he does in other books gives a summary of the features of concious interiority:
Spatialization of Psyche
Introception
Excerption
Self-narratzation
Self-autonomy
Self-authorization
Concilence
Indidviduation
Self-reflexivity
These describe a historically contingent state of mind and social identity, a way of being in the world and experiencing reality, a social order and cultural lifestyle. These traits are peculiar to civilization of these past millennia. But be clear that they are no indication of superiority, as archaic civilizations were able to accomplish tasks we find phenomenal — such as envisioning and planning over multiple generations to carve stones that weigh hundreds of tons, move them over great distances, and place them into precise position in the process of building large complex structures, something we don’t know how to accomplish without the advances of modern mathematics, architecture, and technology.
There is nothing inevitable nor necessary about consciousness, and it is surely possible that civilization could have developed in alternative ways that might have been far more advanced than what we presently know. Consider that the largest city in the world during early European colonialism was in the Americas, where the bicameral mind may have held on for a longer period of time. If not for the decimation by disease (and earlier Bronze Age decimation by environmental catastrophe), bicameralism might have continued to dominate civilization and led to a different equivalent of the Axial Age with whatever would have followed from it. History is full of arbitrary junctures that end up tipping humanity one way or another, depending on which way the wind happens to be blowing on a particular day or how the entire weather pattern might shift over several centuries.
That said, in history as it did play out, we now have our specific egoic consciousness and it is hard for us to imagine anything else, even if in the grand scheme of things our mighty neurocognitive monoculture is a mere momentary blip in the passing of eons, maybe disappearing in the near future as quickly as it came. Our civilization lives in a constant state of precarious uncertainty. That is why we study the past, in order to grapple with the present, and maybe just maybe glimpse what is yet to come. We might as well spend our time in this game of attempted self-understanding, if only to amuse future generations who might happen upon our half-witted ponderings.
Let us consider one aspect of consciousness. Here is McVeigh’s quick summary of concilience (pp. 39-40): A “slightly ambiguous perceived object is made to conform to some previously learned schema.” Consilience (or assimilation) is “doing in mind-space what narratization does in our mind-time or spatialized time. It brings things together [as] conscious objects just as narratization brings episodes together as a story” (Jaynes 1976; 64-65). I hadn’t previously given this much thought. But for some reason it stood out to me in my perusal. Immediately coming to mind was Lewis Hyde’s metonymy, along with the nexus of metaphorical framing, embodied mind, and symbolic conflation. Related to concilience and narratization, McVeigh speaks of coception which he defines as “how perceptions and introceptions coincide (such overlapping deludes us into assuming that interior experiences are sensory reflections of reality)” (p. 41).
I’m not sure to what degree I comprehend what McVeigh is getting at. But I grasp some hints of what it might mean. It resonates with my readings of Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World (see “Why are you thinking about this?”). Hyde defines metonymy as “substituting of one thing for another” (p. 169), “an unalterable fact about the body is linked to a place in the social order, and in both cases, to accept the link is to be caught in a kind of trap. Before anyone can be snared in this trap, an equation must be made between the body and the world (my skin color is my place as a Hispanic; menstruation is my place as a woman).”
Even more relevant is Hyde’s detailed exploration of the body and shame. I’d propose that this is a key factor in the rise of consciousness. Jaynes’ noted that shame and general obsession over nakedness, sexuality, etc can’t be found in the earliest texts and art (maybe not entirely unrelated to how anthropologists have observed the depression that follows when tribal people first see themselves in a mirror and so see themselves as others see them, which leads to the entertaining thought of Bronze Age civilizations having collapsed as mirrors became widely used and the populations descended into mass despondency). Hyde says that, “The construction of the trap of shame begins with this metonymic trick, a kind of bait and switch in which one’s changeable social place is figured in terms of an unchangeable part of the body. Then by various means the trick is made to blend invisibly into the landscape. […] In short, to make the trap of shame we inscribe the body as a sign of wider worlds, then erase the artifice of that signification so that the content of shame becomes simply the way things are, as any fool can see.”
This word magik of hypnotic metonymy and concilience is how we fall into our collective trance. We mass hallucinate our moral imagination into social reality. And then we enforce the narrative of individual selfhood onto ourselves, passing it on as an intergenerational inheritance or curse. What if shame is the cornerstone of modern civilization built over the buried corpse of bicameral civilization? We construct the social order around us like a prison to which we forgot to design a key. Shame is the trap we set for ourselves, the trap we keep on triggering, the door locking behind us each time. And so shame is the mechanism of the lock that we refuse to look at, the mechanism that would release us.
It is only in consciousness that we can remain unconscious.
One could argue for an underlying connection between voice-hearing, formulaic language, and musical ability. This could relate to Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind, as this has everything with the hemispheric division of neurocogntive functioning.
It is enticing to consider the possibility that language originally developed out of or in concert with music, the first linguistic expression having been sing-song utterances. And it is fascinating to imagine that the voices of gods, ancestors, etc might have spoken in a formulaic musicality. I remember reading about a custom, as I recall in pre-literate Germany, of people greeting each other with traditional (and probably formulaic) poems/rhymes. When I came across that, I wondered if it might have been a habit maintained from an earlier bicameralism.
Maybe poetic and musical language was common in most pre-literate societies. But by the time literacy comes around to write down languages, those traditions and the mindsets that go with them might already be severely on the decline. That would mean little evidence would survive. We do know, for example, that Socrates wanted to exclude the poets from his utopian Axial Age (i.e., post-bicameral) society.
Spoken language with rhymes or rhythm is dangerous because it has power over the human mind. It speaks to (or maybe even from) something ancient dwelling within us.
* * *
Rajeev J Sebastian: “Found this very interesting paper that suggests differences between grammatical language and so-called “formulaic” language and the link between melody/music and “formulaic” language … echoes of [Julian Jaynes’] theory in there.”
Ed Buffaloe: “It makes me wonder if communication in bicameral men may have been largely through right-brain-controlled formulaic language.”
Decades of research highlight the importance of formulaic expressions in everyday spoken language (Vihman, 1982; Wray, 2002; Kuiper, 2009). Along with idioms, expletives, and proverbs, this linguistic category includes conversational speech formulas, such as “You’ve got to be kidding,” “Excuse me?” or “Hang on a minute” (Fillmore, 1979; Pawley and Syder, 1983; Schegloff, 1988). In their modern conception, formulaic expressions differ from newly created, grammatical utterances in that they are fixed in form, often non-literal in meaning with attitudinal nuances, and closely related to communicative-pragmatic context (Van Lancker Sidtis and Rallon, 2004). Although the proportion of formulaic expressions to spoken language varies with type of measure and discourse, these utterances are widely regarded as crucial in determining the success of social interaction in many communicative aspects of daily life (Van Lancker Sidtis, 2010).
The unique role of formulaic expressions in spoken language is reflected at the level of their functional neuroanatomy. While left perisylvian areas of the brain support primarily propositional, grammatical utterances, the processing of conversational speech formulas was found to engage, in particular, right-hemisphere cortical areas and the bilateral basal ganglia (Hughlings-Jackson, 1878; Graves and Landis, 1985; Speedie et al., 1993; Van Lancker Sidtis and Postman, 2006; Sidtis et al., 2009; Van Lancker Sidtis et al., 2015). It is worth pointing out that parts of these neural networks are intact in left-hemisphere stroke patients, leading to the intriguing observation that individuals with classical speech and language disorders are often able to communicate comparably well based on a repertoire of formulaic expressions (McElduff and Drummond, 1991; Lum and Ellis, 1994; Stahl et al., 2011). An upper limit of such expressions has not yet been identified, with some estimates reaching into the hundreds of thousands (Jackendoff, 1995). […]
Nonetheless, music-based rehabilitation programs have been demonstrated to directly benefit the production of trained expressions in individuals with chronic non-fluent aphasia and apraxia of speech (Wilson et al., 2006; Stahl et al., 2013; Zumbansen et al., 2014). One may argue that the reported progress in the production of such expressions depends, at least in part, on increased activity in right-hemisphere neural networks engaged in the processing of formulaic language, especially when considering the repetitive character of the training (cf. Berthier et al., 2014).
Over at Ribbonfarm, Sarah Perry has written about this and similar things. Her focus is on the varieties and necessities of human consciousness. The article is “Ritual and the Consciousness Monoculture“. It’s a longer piece and packed full of ideas, including an early mention of Jaynesian bicameralism.
The author doesn’t get around to discussing the above topics until about halfway into the piece. It’s in a section titled, “Hiving and Rhythmic Entrainment”. The hiving refers to Jonathan Haidt’s hive hypothesis. It doesn’t seem all that original of an understanding, but still it’s an important idea. This is an area where I’d agree with Haidt, despite my other disagreements elsewhere. In that section, Perry writes that:
Donald Brown’s celebrated list of human universals, a list of characteristics proposed to be common to all human groups ever studied, includes many entries on music, including “music related in part to dance” and “music related in part to religion.” The Pirahã use several kinds of language, including regular speech, a whistling language, and a musical, sung language. The musical language, importantly, is used for dancing and contacting spirits. The Pirahã, Everett says, often dance for three days at a time without stopping. They achieve a different consciousness by performing rituals calibrated to evoke mental states that must remain opaque to those not affected.
Musical language is the type of evidence that seems to bridge different aspects of human experience. It has been argued that language developed along with human tendencies of singing, dance, ritual movement, communal mimicry, group bonding, and other social behaviors. Stephen Mithen has an interesting theory about the singing of early hominids (The Singing Neanderthal).
That brings to mind Lynne Kelly’s book on preliterate mnemonic practices, Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies. Kelly goes into great detail about the practices of the Australian Aborigines with their songlines, which always reminds me of the English and Welsh beating of the bounds. A modern example of the power of music is choral singing, which research has shown to create non-conscious mimicry, physical synchrony, and self-other merging.
Gottfriend Schlaug of Harvard Medical School does something a little more direct that may be circumstantial but is a powerful exclamation point for a ‘music came first’ argument. His work with patients who have suffered severe lesions on the left side of their brain showed that while they could not speak – no language skill as we might define it – they were able to sing phrases like “I am thirsty”, sometimes within two minutes of having the phrase mapped to a melody.
Contrary to the prevailing theories that music and language are cognitively separate or that music is a byproduct of language, theorists at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) advocate that music underlies the ability to acquire language.
“Spoken language is a special type of music,” said Anthony Brandt, co-author of a theory paper published online this month in the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Auditory Neuroscience. “Language is typically viewed as fundamental to human intelligence, and music is often treated as being dependent on or derived from language. But from a developmental perspective, we argue that music comes first and language arises from music.”
In singing with a choral group or marching in an army, we moderns come as close as we are able to this ancient mind. It’s always there within us, just normally hidden. It doesn’t take much, though, for our individuality to be submerged and something else to emerge. We are all potential goosestepping authoritarian followers, waiting for the right conditions to bring our primal natures out into the open. With the fiery voice of authority, we can be quickly lulled into compliance by an inspiring or invigorating vision:
[T]hat old time religion can be heard in the words and rhythm of any great speaker. Just listen to how a recorded speech of Martin Luther King jr can pull you in with its musicality. Or if you prefer a dark example, consider the persuasive power of Adolf Hitler for even some Jews admitted they got caught up listening to his speeches. This is why Plato feared the poets and banished them from his utopia of enlightened rule. Poetry would inevitably undermine and subsume the high-minded rhetoric of philosophers. “[P]oetry used to be divine knowledge,” as Guerini et al states in Echoes of Persuasion, “It was the sound and tenor of authorization and it commanded where plain prose could only ask.”
Poetry is one of the forms of musical language. Plato’s fear wasn’t merely about the aesthetic appeal of metered rhyme. Living in an oral culture, he would have intimately known the ever-threatening power and influence of the spoken word. Likewise, the sway and thrall of rhythmic movement would have been equally familiar in that world. Community life in ancient Greek city-states was almost everything that mattered, a tightly woven identity and experience.
For many years this shrewd hypothesis seemed untestable. Corollaries such as the right lateralization of auditory hallucinations were dismissed as too simplistic—although schizophrenic patients present less language lateralization (Sommer et al., 2001). Yet, the investigation by Diuk et al. (2012) represents a pioneering successful attempt to test Jaynes’ theory in a quantitative manner. The authors assessed dozens of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman texts from up to the second century CE, as well contemporary Google n-grams, to calculate semantic distances between the reference word “introspection” and all the words in these texts. Cleverly, “introspection” is actually absent from these ancient texts, serving as an “invisible” probe. Semantic distances were evaluated by Latent Semantic Analysis, a high-dimensional model in which the semantic similitude between words is proportional to their co-occurrence in texts with coherent topics (Deerwester et al., 1990; Landauer and Dumais, 1997). The approach goes well beyond the mere counting of word occurrence in a corpus, actually measuring how much the concept of introspection is represented in each text in a “distributed semantic sense,” in accordance with the semantic holism (Frege, 1884, 1980; Quine, 1951; Wittgenstein, 1953, 1967; Davidson, 1967) that became mainstream in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (Cancho and Sole, 2001; Sigman and Cecchi, 2002).
The results were remarkable. In Judeo-Christian texts, similitude to introspection increased monotonically over time, with a big change in slope from the Old to the New Testaments. In Greco-Roman texts, comprising 53 authors from Homer to Julius Cesar, a more complex dynamics appeared, with increases in similitude to introspection through periods of cultural development, and decreases during periods of cultural decadence. Contemporary texts showed overall increase, with periods of decline prior to and during the two World Wars. As Jaynes would have predicted, the rise and fall of entire societies seems to be paralleled by increases and decreases in introspection, respectively.
Diuk et al. show that the evolution of mental life can be quantified from the cultural record, opening a whole new avenue of hypothesis testing for Jaynes’ theory. While it is impossible to prove that pre-Axial people “heard” the voices of the gods, the findings suggest new ways of studying historical and contemporary texts. In particular, the probing of ancient texts with words like “dream,” “god” and “hallucination” has great potential to test Jaynesian concepts.
The featured study lends supports to the notion that consciousness is a social construct in constant flux. Quoting senior author Guillermo Cecchi, “it is not just the “trending topics,” but the entire cognitive make-up that changes over time, indicating that culture co-evolves with available cognitive states, and what is socially considered dysfunction can be tested in a more quantitative way.”
I’ve been watching Westworld. It’s my favorite show at the moment. That is saying a lot, considering it’s competition. The second season of The Man in the High Castle is about to come out, based on a novel I love by my favorite fiction writer. And the always entertaining Game of Thrones will be returning soon. But neither of those shows competes with Westworld.
Westworld is popular. But even though it has higher viewer ratings than Game of Thrones, it has much more mixed reviews. It’s such a complex show. The plotlines of Westworld are immensely more complicated than the sprawling narrative world of Game of Thrones. This makes it all the more impressive that it is so popular.
For some people, they see it as too cerebral. I wonder why that is. There is more emotional depth to this show in many ways than a show like Game of Thrones that is focused so much on physical action of fighting, on political machinations and worldly power. The inner experience of Westworld characters is conveyed to a much greater extent. Maybe that is what is difficult for some people, specifically extraverts.
Westworld, despite the outward action and adventure of the virtual world portrayed, is ultimately a show maybe best appreciated by an introvert. So many of the main characters on the show seem rather inwardly drawn and guarded about their most personal experience, which is unusual for mainstream action-oriented sci-fi. The point of the entire show revolves around growing self-awareness and the strengthening of an inner voice, the kind of thing that preoccupies introverts.
Some people wonder what is the point of all the convoluted plotlines, multitudinous cultural references, and in-show commentary of obscure ideas. Also, there is the simultaneous celebration and questioning of genre tropes. Is it embracing “guns and tits and all that mindless shit”? Or is the entire show a criticism of that, an exploration of what it means for our humanity? Maybe both. From my perspective, that just makes the show more interesting. But the basic show can be enjoyed on a much simpler level, even ignoring the sex and violence, as much of the character development is fairly straightforward. The motivation of characters is revealed as the show goes on, assuming enough imagination and curiosity pulls you in to follow the characters on their path of emergence.
The tricky part is that the identities of characters isn’t immediately apparent, only being revealed as their pasts are revealed. This is a slow reveal with glimpses of a murky past gradually coming into focus. The exploration of motivation is a learning experience as much for the characters themselves as for the viewers. We are meant to identify and empathize with the characters as individuals and not merely to be caught up in their actions and relationships with other characters.
This requires of the viewer both patience and immersion, along with suspension of disbelief about the entire fictional world. It’s an act of imaginative speculation taken to an extreme degree, an attempt to bring we the viewers into the borderlands of consciousness and of humanity. Some people have more tolerance than others for that kind of thing, but this is what the best sci-fi is able to achieve. That is what the producers of the Westworld show have been attempting, it being fair game to argue over how well they achieved it. Still, no matter how well done, these themes aren’t exactly of mainstream interest. Most viewers probably just want to see robots revolting and, for those folk, this show does deliver on that promise.
Still, Westworld is constrained by the sub-genre it belongs to. There is a central element of dark mystery and claustrophobic focus that is typical of gritty neo-noir, always leaving certain things unseen and unexplained. Take the slow burn of Blade Runner, exaggerate and complicate it, spread it across an entire show series with no linear plotline or single dominant protagonist, and that is what you get with Westworld. This isn’t a world-building exercise like some traditional fantasy and space operas where every detail is articulated and the background fully described. Everything in the narrative revolves around the characters and about what it means to be human.
This season introduced the individuals and their place in the world. The exploration of the larger world, if it is to happen, will be developed in the next season. The hosts, having gained consciousness, will no longer be trapped in voice commands, character scripts, and narrative loops. The inward focus likely will turn ever more outward, as the hosts try to grasp what kind of world they find themselves in. That is the natural progression of emerging consciousness, whether for a child or an android.
dreaming as we normally understand it–active stories in which the dreamer is an actor–appears relatively late in childhood. This true dreaming begins between the ages of 7 and 9. He argues that this late development of dreaming suggests an equally late development of waking reflective self-awareness.
Understandably, dreams can confuse small kids. Pre-schoolers often think their dreams are magically placed in their heads by someone else, or by God. […] Are you wondering what your kids are doing in their dreams? Good question, but the answer is…nothing! The “character of the self” hasn’t even made an appearance yet! […] Generally around age 8, children appear as central characters in their dreams. Dream narratives become more complex and longer. Not only do kids participate in the action as it unfolds, they also have thoughts and feelings within the dream.
According to research by Foulkes and his colleagues, even children at the ripe old age of 4 or 5 typically describe dreams that are static and plain, with no characters that move or act, few emotions and no memories.
Vivid dreams with structured narratives set in at age 7 or 8, around the same time children develop a clear understanding of their own identity. Researchers think self-awareness is necessary for the insertion of the self into dreams. In fact, the amount of self-knowledge a child possesses — her understanding that she would be the same person even if she had a different name, for instance, and that she is the same person as she was when she was a baby — strongly correlates with the vibrancy and amount of plot structure in that child’s dreams.
The notion of the dream as itself narrative appears to conflate perceptual consciousness of the “facts” of the dream with reflective consciousness about the dream.5
In the Freudian model, the dream gives expression to prior, unconscious dream thoughts (Freud [1900] 1953). From a neurobiological perspective, however, there is no further regression of meaning, because dreams arise from the activation of the forebrain by periodic neuronal activity in the brain stem (Hobson & McCarley 1977). Such brain activity during sleep may be random or part of some adaptive process associated with that of sleep itself; the inception of dream mentation is just a by-product in this account. All the remarkable coherence of dreams is attributed to the mind’s subsequent cognitive efforts of synthesis, drawing upon the narrative sense-making capacities of waking life (Hobson 2002). Cognitive models of dreaming have more to say about the functioning of such sense-making processes, however. They too regard narrativizing as integral to the formation of dreams, but note that this should not be taken for granted; our storytelling capabilities develop in the course of childhood, and this development correlates with the development of children’s dreams (Foulkes 1999). Narrative logic, here, is not a given; instead, cognitive accounts foreground the creativity of dreams—their status, that is, not just as narratives but as fictions. Such approaches conceive the motive forces of dreaming as continuous with those of waking thought, whether the emphasis falls upon imaginative world-making (States 2003) or on the articulation of emotion (Hartmann 2010b).
The most interesting, to me, paper concerned Agamemnon’s dream in the Iliad, how this dream mirrors the structure of the Bicameral Mind and how it differs from our dreams. In Bicameral dreams, and Jaynes admits there are not that many dreams from this time period to analyze, the dreamer is never anywhere other than his sleeping area, and the dream is always a direct message from a god/angel. Jacob’s “ladder” dream from the Jewish Bible fits in here as well. Compare this with our dreams, which can take place anywhere within the limits of our imagination, just as our consciousness can be projected throughout those same limits.
Jaynes believes modern dreams are consciousness operating in sleep. We see elements of waking consciousness in dreams such as an analog ‘I’ narratizing in a mind-space. In cases where the dreamer simply experiences a visitation from a spirit or god issuing a command while asleep in his own bed, this aspect of consciousness is absent — i.e., the person does not see themselves as an actor in their dreams. So dreams do not “prove” but rather provide further evidence for a different pre-conscious mentality. We see these types of visitation dreams in ancient civilizations, pre-literate societies, and in children. As children develop consciousness, we see consciousness expand in their dreams.
In Chapter 3, Levy-Bruhl discusses the prophetic nature of dreams among tribal people.
“To the primitive mind, as we know, the seen and the unseen worlds form but one, and there is therefore uninterrupted communication between what we call obvious reality and the mystic powers. Nowhere perhaps is this more directly and completely brought about than in dreams, in which man passes from the one world to the other without being aware of it. Such is in fact the ordinary idea of the dream to primitive peoples. The ‘soul’ leaves its tenement for the time being. It frequently goes very far away; it communes with spirits or with ghosts. At the moment of awakening it returns to take its place in the body once more. … At other times, it is the spirits of the dead, or even other powers, which come and visit the soul in sleep” (pgs. 98–99).
This immediately calls to mind E.R. Dodds’ discussion of the prophetic nature of dreams among the ancient Greeks. Dreams in ancient Greece, unlike modern, conscious dreams, often took the form of a visitation by a god or spirit that issued some form of command. […]
There seems to be strong evidence for the very different nature of what we might call “bicameral dreams” vs. “conscious dreams.” For those interested in this subject, I highly recommend reading Levy-Bruhl’s entire chapter on dreams along with Dodds.
More on the commanding nature of primitive people’s dreams:
“It frequently happens that when all the missionary’s efforts to induce a native to change his faith have proved ineffectual, a dream suddenly determines him to take the step, especially if the dream is repeated several times. For example, among the Basutos, ‘what plays the chief part in the conversion of the Mosuto? … The paramount role is played by the dream. … To make him definitely decide, there must be something out of the common, a Divine intervention (as he regards it) which strikes his imagination. … If you ask a heathen who has heard the Gospel, when he will be converted, he will answer in the most matter-of-course way: ‘When God speaks to me'” (p. 110).
“In Central Africa, dreams have similar meanings. To give but one example: “The Azande of the Upper Congo believe that during the night the dead make their wishes known to the living. Dreams are quite authentic to them, and they are convinced that when they see a dead relative in a dream they really have a conversation with his ghost, and in its course he gives advice, expresses satisfaction or displeasure, and states his aspirations and desires” (pgs. 111–112).
“‘The Iroquois,’ says another Jesuit priest, ‘have, strictly speaking, but one divinity, which is the dream; they submit to it and follow all its orders most implicitly.’ … It is not simply a question of advice, hints, friendly suggestions, official warnings conveyed by dreams; it is nearly always definite orders, and nothing can prevent the Indian from obeying them” (p. 113).
Chapter 4 describes the nature of dreams in ancient Greeks and how dreams changes as culture [or consciousness] changes. Dodds describes what Jaynes would probably refer to as “bicameral dreams” — dreams that consist of a visitation and the communication of some type of message or command.
“Ancient literature is full of these ‘godsent’ dreams in which a single dream-figure presents itself, as in Homer, to the sleeper, and gives him prophecy, advice, or warning” (p. 107).
“Such dreams played an important part in the life of other ancient peoples, as they do in that of many races to-day. Most of the dreams recorded in Assyrian, Hittite, and ancient Egyptian literature are ‘divine dreams’ in which a god appears and delivers a plain message to the sleeper, sometimes predicting the future, sometimes demanding cult” (pgs. 108-109).
On the frequency of hallucinations and visions:
“As I have mentioned self-induced visions in connection with the Asclepius cult, I may add a couple of general remarks on waking visions or hallucinations. It is likely that these were commoner in former times than they are to-day, since they seem to be relatively frequent among primitives; and even with us they are less rare than is often supposed. They have in general the same origin and psychological structure as dreams, and like dreams they tend to reflect traditional culture-patterns. Among the Greeks, by far the commonest type is the apparition of a god or the hearing of a diving voice which commands or forbids the performance of certain acts. This type figures, under the name of ‘spectaculum,’ in Chalcidius’ classification of dreams and visions; his example is the daemonion of Socrates. When all allowance has been made for the influence of literary tradition in creating a stereotyped form, we should probably conclude that experiences of this kind had once been fairly frequent, and still occurred occasionally in historical times” (pgs. 116-117).
The study of dreams in ancient civilizations and pre-literate societies demonstrate that dreams can be used as an indication of the level of consciousness in a given culture. Similarly, children’s dreams provide evidence that dreams can be used as an indication of the level of consciousness in a developing child. In Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness (2002), child psychologist and dream expert David Foulkes challenges the popular misconception that dreaming is “a given” in human experience. In a section on the development of consciousness in children that sounds surprisingly reminiscent of Jaynes, Foulkes writes: “I hypothesize that dreaming is simply the operation of consciousness in sleep … that consciousness develops, and that it does so more slowly and later than is generally believed” (Foulkes, 2002).
According to Foulkes, the nature and content of children’s dreams changes dramatically over time. For example, during the preschool years, “dreams are brief and infrequent; they focus on body states; their imagery is static.” Dreams slowly transform to those experienced in adulthood between the ages of 5 and 9:
First, dream reports become longer, but not more frequent, and now describe social interaction and the kind of movement that suggests kinematic rather than static imaging; still lacking, however, is active participation in dream events by the dreamer herself or himself. Next, dream reports become more frequent as well as longer and narratively more complex, and active self-participation becomes a general possibility, along with, for the first time, the reliable attribution to the self of feelings and thoughts occurring in the dream in response to dream events (Foulkes, 2002).
The dreamer does not regularly appear as an active participant in his or her dreams — according to Jaynes, one of the hallmarks of conscious dreams — until between the ages of 7 and 9. Conscious dreams, therefore, seem to be infrequent until some time after the child has developed consciousness in waking life.
The content of dreams provide another method to gauge the level of consciousness in a given culture or individual. If language had no effect on consciousness — or if consciousness developed far back in our evolutionary past and has remained unchanged since — we would expect dreams to remain unchanged both throughout recorded history and throughout an individual’s development. Instead, dreams reflect developmental stages in mentality from preconscious to conscious, brought about by changes both culturally as well as in the linguistic sophistication of the dreamer.
Dreams in bicameral cultures lack consciousness — an analog ‘I’ narratizing in a mind-space, and mimic the waking experience of receiving behavioral commands from gods. In contrast, the dreams of conscious individuals reflect conscious narratization during sleep.
“What is the meaning of life?” This question has no answer except in the history of how it came to be asked. There is no answer because words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself. Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.
~ Julian Jaynes, 1988, Life Magazine
That is always a nice quote. Jaynes never seemed like an ideologue about his own speculations. In his controversial book, more than a decade earlier (1976), he titled his introduction as “The Problem of Consciousness”. That is what frames his thought, confronting a problem. The whole issue of consciousness is still problematic to this day and likely will be so for a long time. After a lengthy analysis of complex issues, he concludes his book with some humbling thoughts:
For what is the nature of this blessing of certainty that science so devoutly demands in its very Jacob-like wrestling with nature? Why should we demand that the universe make itself clear to us? Why do we care?
To be sure, a part of the impulse to science is simple curiosity, to hold the unheld and watch the unwatched. We are all children in the unknown.
Following that, he makes a plea for understanding. Not just understanding of the mind but also of experience. It is a desire to grasp what makes us human, the common impulses that bind us, underlying both religion and science. There is a tender concern being given voice, probably shaped and inspired by his younger self having poured over his deceased father’s Unitarian sermons.
As individuals we are at the mercies of our own collective imperatives. We see over our everyday attentions, our gardens and politics, and children, into the forms of our culture darkly. And our culture is our history. In our attempts to communicate or to persuade or simply interest others, we are using and moving about through cultural models among whose differences we may select, but from whose totality we cannot escape. And it is in this sense of the forms of appeal, of begetting hope or interest or appreciation or praise for ourselves or for our ideas, that our communications are shaped into these historical patterns, these grooves of persuasion which are even in the act of communication an inherent part of what is communicated. And this essay is no exception.
That humility feels genuine. His book was far beyond mere scholarship. It was an expression of decades of questioning and self-questioning, about what it means to be human and what it might have meant for others throughout the millennia.
He never got around to writing another book on the topic, despite his stated plans to do so. But during the last decade of his life, he wrote an afterword to his original work. It was placed in the 1990 edition, fourteen years after the original publication. He had faced much criticism and one senses a tired frustration in those last years. Elsewhere, he complained about the expectation to explain himself and make himself understood to people who, for whatever reason, didn’t understand. Still, he realized that was the nature of his job as an academic scholar working at a major university. From the after word, he wrote:
A favorite practice of some professional intellectuals when at first faced with a theory as large as the one I have presented is to search for that loose thread which, when pulled, will unravel all the rest. And rightly so. It is part of the discipline of scientific thinking. In any work covering so much of the terrain of human nature and history, hustling into territories jealously guarded by myriad aggressive specialists, there are bound to be such errancies, sometimes of fact but I fear more often of tone. But that the knitting of this book is such that a tug on such a bad stitch will unravel all the rest is more of a hope on the part of the orthodox than a fact in the scientific pursuit of truth. The book is not a single hypothesis.
Interestingly, Jaynes doesn’t state the bicameral mind as an overarching context for the hypotheses he lists. In fact, it is just one among the several hypotheses and not even the first to be mentioned. That shouldn’t be surprising since decades of his thought and research, including laboratory studies done on animal behavior, preceded the formulation of the bicameral hypothesis. Here are the four hypotheses:
Consciousness is based on language.
The bicameral mind.
The dating.
The double brain.
He states that, “I wish to emphasize that these four hypotheses are separable. The last, for example, could be mistaken (at least in the simplified version I have presented) and the others true. The two hemispheres of the brain are not the bicameral mind but its present neurological model. The bicameral mind is an ancient mentality demonstrated in the literature and artifacts of antiquity.” Each hypothesis is connected to the others but must be dealt with separately. The key element to his project is consciousness, as that is the key problem. And as problems go, it is a doozy. Calling it a problem is like calling the moon a chunk of rock and the sun a warm fire.
Related to these hypotheses, earlier in his book, Jaynes proposes a useful framework. He calls it the General Bicameral Paradigm. “By this phrase,” he explains, “I mean an hypothesized structure behind a large class of phenomena of diminished consciousness which I am interpreting as partial holdovers from our earlier mentality.” There are four components:
“the collective cognitive imperative, or belief system, a culturally agreed-on expectancy or prescription which defines the particular form of a phenomenon and the roles to be acted out within that form;”
“an induction or formally ritualized procedure whose function is the narrowing of consciousness by focusing attention on a small range of preoccupations;”
“the trance itself, a response to both the preceding, characterized by a lessening of consciousness or its loss, the diminishing of the analog or its loss, resulting in a role that is accepted, tolerated, or encouraged by the group; and”
“the archaic authorization to which the trance is directed or related to, usually a god, but sometimes a person who is accepted by the individual and his culture as an authority over the individual, and who by the collective cognitive imperative is prescribed to be responsible for controlling the trance state.”
The point is made that the reader shouldn’t assume that they are “to be considered as a temporal succession necessarily, although the induction and trance usually do follow each other. But the cognitive imperative and the archaic authorization pervade the whole thing. Moreover, there is a kind of balance or summation among these elements, such that when one of them is weak the others must be strong for the phenomena to occur. Thus, as through time, particularly in the millennium following the beginning of consciousness, the collective cognitive imperative becomes weaker (that is, the general population tends toward skepticism about the archaic authorization), we find a rising emphasis on and complication of the induction procedures, as well as the trance state itself becoming more profound.”
This general bicameral paradigm is partly based on the insights he gained from studying ancient societies. But ultimately it can be considered separately from that. All you have to understand is that these are a basic set of cognitive abilities and tendencies that have been with humanity for a long time. These are the vestiges of human evolution and societal development. They can be combined and expressed in multiple ways. Our present society is just one of many possible manifestations. Human nature is complex and human potential is immense, and so diversity is to be expected among human neurocognition, behavior, and culture.
An important example of the general bicameral paradigm is hypnosis. It isn’t just an amusing trick done for magic shows. Hypnosis shows something profoundly odd, disturbing even, about the human mind. Also, it goes far beyond the individual for it is about how humans relate. It demonstrates the power of authority figures, in whatever form they take, and indicates the significance of what Jaynes calls authorization. By the way, this leads down the dark pathways of authoritarianism, brainwashing, propaganda, and punishment — as for the latter, Jaynes writes that:
If we can regard punishment in childhood as a way of instilling an enhanced relationship to authority, hence training some of those neurological relationships that were once the bicameral mind, we might expect this to increase hypnotic susceptibility. And this is true. Careful studies show that those who have experienced severe punishment in childhood and come from a disciplined home are more easily hypnotized, while those who were rarely punished or not punished at all tend to be less susceptible to hypnosis.
He discusses the history of hypnosis beginning with Mesmer. In this, he shows how metaphor took different form over time. And, accordingly, it altered shared experience and behavior.
Now it is critical here to realize and to understand what we might call the paraphrandic changes which were going on in the people involved, due to these metaphors. A paraphrand, you will remember, is the projection into a metaphrand of the associations or paraphiers of a metaphier. The metaphrand here is the influences between people. The metaphiers, or what these influences are being compared to, are the inexorable forces of gravitation, magnetism, and electricity. And their paraphiers of absolute compulsions between heavenly bodies, of unstoppable currents from masses of Ley den jars, or of irresistible oceanic tides of magnetism, all these projected back into the metaphrand of interpersonal relationships, actually changing them, changing the psychological nature of the persons involved, immersing them in a sea of uncontrollable control that emanated from the ‘magnetic fluids’ in the doctor’s body, or in objects which had ‘absorbed’ such from him.
It is at least conceivable that what Mesmer was discovering was a different kind of mentality that, given a proper locale, a special education in childhood, a surrounding belief system, and isolation from the rest of us, possibly could have sustained itself as a society not based on ordinary consciousness, where metaphors of energy and irresistible control would assume some of the functions of consciousness.
How is this even possible? As I have mentioned already, I think Mesmer was clumsily stumbling into a new way of engaging that neurological patterning I have called the general bicameral paradigm with its four aspects: collective cognitive imperative, induction, trance, and archaic authorization.
Through authority and authorization, immense power and persuasion can be wielded. Jaynes argues that it is central to the human mind, but that in developing consciousness we learned how to partly internalize the process. Even so, Jaynesian self-consciousness is never a permanent, continuous state and the power of individual self-authorization easily morphs back into external forms. This is far from idle speculation, considering authoritarianism still haunts the modern mind. I might add that the ultimate power of authoritarianism, as Jaynes makes clear, isn’t overt force and brute violence. Outward forms of power are only necessary to the degree that external authorization is relatively weak, as is typically the case in modern societies.
This touches upon the issue of rhetoric, although Jaynes never mentioned the topic. It’s disappointing since his original analysis of metaphor has many implications. Fortunately, others have picked up where he left off (see Ted Remington, Brian J. McVeigh, and Frank J. D’Angelo). Authorization in the ancient world came through a poetic voice, but today it is most commonly heard in rhetoric.
Still, that old time religion can be heard in the words and rhythm of any great speaker. Just listen to how a recorded speech of Martin Luther King jr can pull you in with its musicality. Or if you prefer a dark example, consider the persuasive power of Adolf Hitler for even some Jews admitted they got caught up listening to his speeches. This is why Plato feared the poets and banished them from his utopia of enlightened rule. Poetry would inevitably undermine and subsume the high-minded rhetoric of philosophers. “[P]oetry used to be divine knowledge,” as Guerini et al states in Echoes of Persuasion, “It was the sound and tenor of authorization and it commanded where plain prose could only ask.”
Metaphor grows naturally in poetic soil, but its seeds are planted in every aspect of language and thought, giving fruit to our perceptions and actions. This is a thousandfold true on the collective level of society and politics. Metaphors are most powerful when we don’t see them as metaphors. So, the most persuasive rhetoric is that which hides its metaphorical frame and obfuscates any attempts to bring it to light.
Going far back into the ancient world, metaphors didn’t need to be hidden in this sense. The reason for this is that there was no intellectual capacity or conceptual understanding of metaphors as metaphors. Instead, metaphors were taken literally. The way people spoke about reality was inseparable from their experience of reality and they had no way of stepping back from their cultural biases, as the cultural worldviews they existed within were all-encompassing. It’s only with the later rise of multicultural societies, especially the vast multi-ethnic trade empires, that people began to think in terms of multiple perspectives. Such a society was developing in the trade networking and colonizing nation-states of Greece in the centuries leading up to Hellenism.
That is the well known part of Jaynes’ speculations, the basis of his proposed bicameral mind. And Jaynes considered it extremely relevant to the present.
Marcel Kuijsten wrote that, “Jaynes maintained that we are still deep in the midst of this transition from bicamerality to consciousness; we are continuing the process of expanding the role of our internal dialogue and introspection in the decision-making process that was started some 3,000 years ago. Vestiges of the bicameral mind — our longing for absolute guidance and external control — make us susceptible to charismatic leaders, cults, trends, and persuasive rhetoric that relies on slogans to bypass logic” (“Consciousness, Hallucinations, and the Bicameral Mind Three Decades of New Research”, Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness, Kindle Locations 2210-2213). Considering the present, in Authoritarian Grammar and Fundamentalist Arithmetic, Ben G. Price puts it starkly: “Throughout, tyranny asserts its superiority by creating a psychological distance between those who command and those who obey. And they do this with language, which they presume to control.” The point made by the latter is that this knowledge, even as it can be used as intellectual defense, might just lead to even more effective authoritarianism.
We’ve grown less fearful of rhetoric because we see ourselves as being savvy, experienced consumers of media. The cynical modern mind is always on guard, our well-developed and rigid state of consciousness offering a continuous psychological buffering against the intrusions of the world. So we like to think. I remember, back in 7th grade, being taught how the rhetoric of advertising is used to manipulate us. But we are over-confident. Consciousness operates at the surface of the psychic depths. We are better at rationalizing than being rational, something we may understand intellectually but rarely do we fully acknowledge the psychological and societal significance of this. That is the usefulness of theories like that of bicameralism, as they remind us that we are out of our depths. In the ancient world, there was a profound mistrust between the poetic and rhetorical, and for good reason. We would be wise to learn from that clash of mindsets and worldviews.
We shouldn’t be so quick to assume we understand our own minds, the kind of vessel we find ourselves on. Nor should we allow ourselves to get too comfortable within the worldview we’ve always known, the safe harbor of our familiar patterns of mind. It’s hard to think about these issues because they touch upon our own being, the surface of consciousness along with the depths below it. This is the near difficult task of fathoming the ocean floor using rope and a weight, an easier task the closer we hug the shoreline. But what might we find if cast ourselves out on open waters? What new lands might be found, lands to be newly discovered and lands already inhabited?
We moderns love certainty. And it’s true we possess more knowledge than any civilization before has accumulated. Yet we’ve partly made the unfamiliar into familiar by remaking the world in our own image. There is no place on earth that remains entirely untouched. Only a couple hundred small isolated tribes are still uncontacted, representing foreign worldviews not known or studied, but even they live under unnatural conditions of stress as the larger world closes in on them. Most of the ecological and cultural diversity that once existed has been obliterated from the face of the earth, most of it having left not a single trace or record, just simply gone. Populations beyond count have faced extermination by outside influences and forces before they ever got a chance to meet an outsider. Plagues, environmental destruction, and societal collapse wiped them out often in short periods of time.
Those other cultures might have gifted us with insights about our humanity that now are lost forever, just as extinct species might have held answers to questions not yet asked and medicines for diseases not yet understood. Almost all that now is left is a nearly complete monoculture with the differences ever shrinking into the constraints of capitalist realism. If not for scientific studies done on the last of isolated tribal people, we would never know how much diversity exists within human nature. Many of the conclusions that earlier social scientists had made were based mostly on studies involving white, middle class college kids in Western countries, what some have called the WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. But many of those conclusions have since proven wrong, biased, or limited.
When Jaynes’ first thought on such matters, the social sciences were still getting established as serious fields of study. His entered college around 1940 when behaviorism was a dominant paradigm. It was only in the prior decades that the very idea of ‘culture’ began to take hold among anthropologists. He was influenced by anthropologists, directly and indirectly. One indirect influence came by way of E. R. Dodds, a classical scholar, who in writing his 1951 The Greeks and the Irrational found inspiration from Ruth Benedict’s anthropological work comparing cultures (Benedict taking this perspective through the combination of the ideas of Franz Boas and Carl Jung). Still, anthropology was young and the fascinating cases so well known today were unknown back then (e.g., Daniel Everett’s recent books on the Pirahã). So, in following Dodds example, Jaynes turned to ancient societies and their literature.
His ideas were forming at the same time the social sciences were gaining respectability and maturity. It was a time when many scholars and other intellectuals were more fully questioning Western civilization. But it was also the time when Western ascendancy was becoming clear with the WWI ending of the Ottoman Empire and the WWII ending of the Japanese Empire. The whole world was falling under Western cultural influence. And traditional societies were in precipitous decline. That was the dawning of the age of monoculture.
We are the inheritors of the world that was created from that wholesale destruction of all that came before. And even what came before was built on millennia of collapsing civilizations. Jaynes focused on the earliest example of mass destruction and chaos leading him to see a stark division to what came before and after. How do we understand why we came to be the way we are when so much has been lost? We are forced back on our own ignorance. Jaynes apparently understood that and so considered awe to be the proper response. We know the world through our own humanity, but we can only know our own humanity through the cultural worldview we are born into. It is our words that have meaning, was Jaynes response, “not life or persons or the universe itself.” That is to say we bring meaning to what we seek to understand. Meaning is created, not discovered. And the kind of meaning we create depends on our cultural worldview.
In Monoculture, F. S. Michaels writes (pp. 1-2):
THE HISTORY OF HOW we think and act, said twentieth-century philosopher Isaiah Berlin, is, for the most part, a history of dominant ideas. Some subject rises to the top of our awareness, grabs hold of our imagination for a generation or two, and shapes our entire lives. If you look at any civilization, Berlin said, you will find a particular pattern of life that shows up again and again, that rules the age. Because of that pattern, certain ideas become popular and others fall out of favor. If you can isolate the governing pattern that a culture obeys, he believed, you can explain and understand the world that shapes how people think, feel and act at a distinct time in history.1
The governing pattern that a culture obeys is a master story — one narrative in society that takes over the others, shrinking diversity and forming a monoculture. When you’re inside a master story at a particular time in history, you tend to accept its definition of reality. You unconsciously believe and act on certain things, and disbelieve and fail to act on other things. That’s the power of the monoculture; it’s able to direct us without us knowing too much about it.
Over time, the monoculture evolves into a nearly invisible foundation that structures and shapes our lives, giving us our sense of how the world works. It shapes our ideas about what’s normal and what we can expect from life. It channels our lives in a certain direction, setting out strict boundaries that we unconsciously learn to live inside. It teaches us to fear and distrust other stories; other stories challenge the monoculture simply by existing, by representing alternate possibilities.
Jaynes argued that ideas are more than mere concepts. Ideas are embedded in language and metaphor. And ideas take form not just as culture but as entire worldviews built on interlinked patterns of attitudes, thought, perception, behavior, and identity. Taken together, this is the reality tunnel we exist within.
It takes a lot to shake us loose from these confines of the mind. Certain practices, from meditation to imbibing psychedelics, can temporarily or permanently alter the matrix of our identity. Jaynes, for reasons of his own, came to question the inevitability of the society around him which allowed him to see that other possibilities may exist. The direction his queries took him landed him in foreign territory, outside of the idolized individualism of Western modernity.
His ideas might have been less challenging in a different society. We modern Westerners identify ourselves with our thoughts, the internalized voice of egoic consciousness. And we see this as the greatest prize of civilization, the hard-won rights and freedoms of the heroic individual. It’s the story we tell. But in other societies, such as in the East, there are traditions that teach the self is distinct from thought. From the Buddhist perspective of dependent (co-)origination, it is a much less radical notion that the self arises out of thought, instead of the other way around, and that thought itself simply arises. A Buddhist would have a much easier time intuitively grasping the theory of bicameralism, that thoughts are greater than and precede the self.
Maybe we modern Westerners need to practice a sense of awe, to inquire more deeply. Jaynes offers a different way of thinking that doesn’t even require us to look to another society. If he is correct, this radical worldview is at the root of Western Civilization. Maybe the traces of the past are still with us.
It is in fact dangerous to assume a too similar relationship between those ancient people and us. A fascinating difference between the Greek lyricists and ourselves derives from the entity we label “the self.” How did the self come to be? Have we always been self-conscious, of two or three or four minds, a stew of self-aware voices? Julian Jaynes thinks otherwise. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind—that famous book my poetry friends adore and my psychologist friends shrink from—Jaynes surmises that the early classical mind, still bicameral, shows us the coming-into-consciousness of the modern human, shows our double-minded awareness as, originally, a haunted hearing of voices. To Jaynes, thinking is not the same as consciousness: “one does one’s thinking before one knows what one is to think about.” That is, thinking is not synonymous with consciousness or introspection; it is rather an automatic process, notably more reflexive than reflective. Jaynes proposes that epic poetry, early lyric poetry, ritualized singing, the conscience, even the voices of the gods, all are one part of the brain learning to hear, to listen to, the other.
Voices heard by persons diagnosed schizophrenic appear to be indistinguishable, on the basis of their experienced characteristics, from voices heard by persons with dissociative disorders or by persons with no mental disorder at all.
Olin suggested that recent neuroimaging studies “have illuminated and confirmed the importance of Jaynes’ hypothesis.” Olin believes that recent reports by Lennox et al and Dierks et al support the bicameral mind. Lennox et al reported a case of a right-handed subject with schizophrenia who experienced a stable pattern of hallucinations. The authors obtained images of repeated episodes of hallucination and observed its functional anatomy and time course. The patient’s auditory hallucination occurred in his right hemisphere but not in his left.
To explain the origin of consciousness is to explain how the analog “I” began to narratize in a functional mind-space. For Jaynes, to understand the conscious mind requires that we see it as something fleeting rather than something always present. The constant phenomenality of what-it-is-like to be an organism is not equivalent to consciousness and, subsequently, consciousness must be thought in terms of the authentic possibility of consciousness rather than its continual presence.
When Jaynes says that there was “nothing it is like” to be preconscious, he certainly didn’t mean to say that nonconscious animals are somehow not having subjective experience in the sense of “experiencing” or “being aware” of the world. When Jaynes said there is “nothing it is like” to be preconscious, he means that there is no sense of mental interiority and no sense of autobiographical memory. Ask yourself what it is like to be driving a car and then suddenly wake up and realize that you have been zoned out for the past minute. Was there something it is like to drive on autopilot? This depends on how we define “what it is like”.
“The Evolution of the Analytic Topoi: A Speculative Inquiry”
by Frank J. D’Angelo
from Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse
ed. Robert J. Connors, Lisa S. Ede, & Andrea A. Lunsford
pp. 51-5
The first stage in the evolution of the analytic topoi is the global stage. Of this stage we have scanty evidence, since we must assume the ontogeny of invention in terms of spoken language long before the individual is capable of anything like written language. But some hints of how logical invention might have developed can be found in the work of Eric Havelock. In his Preface to Plato, Havelock, in recapitulating the educational experience of the Homeric and post-Homeric Greek, comments that the psychology of the Homeric Greek is characterized by a high degree of automatism.
He is required as a civilised being to become acquainted with the history, the social organisation, the technical competence and the moral imperatives of his group. This in turn is able to function only as a fragment of the total Hellenic world. It shares a consciousness in which he is keenly aware that he, as a Hellene, in his memory. Such is poetic tradition, essentially something he accepts uncritically, or else it fails to survive in his living memory. Its acceptance and retention are made psychologically possible by a mechanism of self-surrender to the poetic performance and of self-identification with the situations and the stories related in the performance. . . . His receptivity to the tradition has thus, from the standpoint of inner psychology, a degree of automatism which however is counter-balanced by a direct and unfettered capacity for action in accordance with the paradigms he has absorbed. 6
Preliterate man was apparently unable to think logically. He acted, or as Julian Jaynes, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, puts it, “reacted” to external events. “There is in general,” writes Jaynes, “no consciousness in the Iliad . . . and in general therefore, no words for consciousness or mental acts.” 7 There was, in other words, no subjective consciousness in Iliadic man. His actions were not rooted in conscious plans or in reasoning. We can only speculate, then, based on the evidence given by Havelock and Jaynes that logical invention, at least in any kind of sophisticated form, could not take place until the breakdown of the bicameral mind, with the invention of writing. If ancient peoples were unable to introspect, then we must assume that the analytic topoi were a discovery of literate man. Eric Havelock, however, warns that the picture he gives of Homeric and post-Homeric man is oversimplified and that there are signs of a latent mentality in the Greek mind. But in general, Homeric man was more concerned to go along with the tradition than to make individual judgments.
For Iliadic man to be able to think, he must think about something. To do this, states Havelock, he had to be able to revolt against the habit of self-identification with the epic poem. But identification with the poem at this time in history was necessary psychologically (identification was necessary for memorization) and in the epic story implicitly as acts or events that are carried out by important people, must be abstracted from the narrative flux. “Thus the autonomous subject who no longer recalls and feels, but knows, can now be confronted with a thousand abstract laws, principles, topics, and formulas which become the objects of his knowledge.” 8
The analytic topoi, then, were implicit in oral poetic discourse. They were “experienced” in the patterns of epic narrative, but once they are abstracted they can become objects of thought as well as of experience. As Eric Havelock puts it,
If we view them [these abstractions] in relation to the epic narrative from which, as a matter of historical fact, they all emerged they can all be regarded as in one way or another classifications of an experience which was previously “felt” in an unclassified medley. This was as true of justice as of motion, of goodness as of body or space, of beauty as of weight or dimension. These categories turn into linguistic counters, and become used as a matter of course to relate one phenomenon to another in a non-epic, non-poetic, non-concrete idiom. 9
The invention of the alphabet made it easier to report experience in a non-epic idiom. But it might be a simplification to suppose that the advent of alphabetic technology was the only influence on the emergence of logical thinking and the analytic topics, although perhaps it was the major influence. Havelock contends that the first “proto-thinkers” of Greece were the poets who at first used rhythm and oral formulas to attempt to arrange experience in categories, rather than in narrative events. He mentions in particular that it was Hesiod who first parts company with the narrative in the Theogony and Works and Days. In Works and Days, Hesiod uses a cataloging technique, consisting of proverbs, aphorisms, wise sayings, exhortations, and parables, intermingled with stories. But this effect of cataloging that goes “beyond the plot of a story in order to impose a rough logic of topics . . . presumes that Hesiod is 10
The kind of material found in the catalogs of Hesiod was more like the cumulative commonplace material of the Renaissance than the abstract topics that we are familiar with today. Walter Ong notes that “the oral performer, poet or orator needed a stock of material to keep him going. The doctrine of the commonplaces is, from one point of view, the codification of ways of assuring and managing this stock.” 11 We already know what some of the material was like: stock epithets, figures of speech, exempla, proverbs, sententiae, quotations, praises or censures of people and things, and brief treatises on virtues and vices. By the time we get to the invention of printing, there are vast collections of this commonplace material, so vast, relates Ong, that scholars could probably never survey it all. Ong goes on to observe that
print gave the drive to collect and classify such excerpts a potential previously undreamed of. . . . the ranging of items side by side on a page once achieved, could be multiplied as never before. Moreover, printed collections of such commonplace excerpts could be handily indexed; it was worthwhile spending days or months working up an index because the results of one’s labors showed fully in thousands of copies. 12
To summarize, then, in oral cultures rhetorical invention was bound up with oral performance. At this stage, both the cumulative topics and the analytic topics were implicit in epic narrative. Then the cumulative commonplaces begin to appear, separated out by a cataloging technique from poetic narrative, in sources such as the Theogony and Works and Days . Eric Havelock points out that in Hesiod, the catalog “has been isolated or abstracted . . . out of a thousand contexts in the rich reservoir of oral tradition. … A general world view is emerging in isolated or ‘abstracted’ form.” 13 Apparently, what we are witnessing is the emergence of logical thinking. Julian Jaynes describes the kind of thought to be found in the Works and Days as “preconscious hypostases.” Certain lines in Hesiod, he maintains, exhibit “some kind of bicameral struggle.” 14
The first stage, then, of rhetorical invention is that in which the analytic topoi are embedded in oral performance in the form of commonplace material as “relationships” in an undifferentiated matrix. Oral cultures preserve this knowledge by constantly repeating the fixed sayings and formulae. Mnemonic patterns, patterns of repetition, are not added to the thought of oral cultures. They are what the thought consists of.
What, then, may mental selves be good for and why have they emerged during evolution (or, perhaps, human evolution or even early human history)? Answers to these questions used to take the form of stories explaining how the mental self came about and what advantages were associated with it. In other words, these are theories that construct hypothetical scenarios offering plausible explanations for why certain (groups of) living things that initially do not possess a mental self gain fitness advantages when they develop such an entity—with the consequence that they move from what we can call a self-less to a self-based or “self-morphic” state.
Modules for such scenarios have been presented occasionally in recent years by, for example, Dennett, 1990 and Dennett, 1992, Donald (2001), Edelman (1989), Jaynes (1976), Metzinger, 1993 and Metzinger, 2003, or Mithen (1996). Despite all the differences in their approaches, they converge around a few interesting points. First, they believe that the transition between the self-less and self-morphic state occurred at some stage during the course of human history—and not before. Second, they emphasize the cognitive and dynamic advantages accompanying the formation of a mental self. And, third, they also discuss the social and political conditions that promote or hinder the constitution of this self-morphic state. In the scenario below, I want to show how these modules can be keyed together to form a coherent construction. […]
Thus, where do thoughts come from? Who or what generates them, and how are they linked to the current perceptual situation? This brings us to a problem that psychology describes as the problem of source attribution ( Heider, 1958).
One obvious suggestion is to transfer the schema for interpreting externally induced messages to internally induced thoughts as well. Accordingly, thoughts are also traced back to human sources and, likewise, to sources that are present in the current situation. Such sources can be construed in completely different ways. One solution is to trace the occurrence of thoughts back to voices—the voices of gods, priests, kings, or ancestors, in other words, personal authorities that are believed to have an invisible presence in the current situation. Another solution is to locate the source of thoughts in an autonomous personal authority bound to the body of the actor: the self.
These two solutions to the attribution problem differ in many ways: historically, politically, and psychologically. In historical terms, the former must be markedly older than the latter. The transition from one solution to the other and the mentalities associated with them are the subject of Julian Jaynes’s speculative theory of consciousness. He even considers that this transfer occurred during historical times: between the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Iliad, according to Jaynes, the frame of mind of the protagonists is still structured in a way that does not perceive thoughts, feelings, and intentions as products of a personal self, but as the dictates of supernatural voices. Things have changed in the Odyssey: Odysseus possesses a self, and it is this self that thinks and acts. Jaynes maintains that the modern consciousness of Odysseus could emerge only after the self had taken over the position of the gods (Jaynes, 1976; see also Snell, 1975).
Moreover, it is obvious why the political implications of the two solutions differ so greatly: Societies whose members attribute their thoughts to the voices of mortal or immortal authorities produce castes of priests or nobles that claim to be the natural authorities or their authentic interpreters and use this to derive legitimization for their exercise of power. It is only when the self takes the place of the gods that such castes become obsolete, and authoritarian constructions are replaced by other political constructions that base the legitimacy for their actions on the majority will of a large number of subjects who are perceived to be autonomous.
Finally, an important psychological difference is that the development of a self-concept establishes the precondition for individuals to become capable of perceiving themselves as persons with a coherent biography. Once established, the self becomes involved in every re-presentation and representation as an implicit personal source, and just as the same body is always present in every perceptual situation, it is the same mental self that remains identical across time and place. […]
According to the cognitive theories of schizophrenia developed in the last decade (Daprati et al., 1997; Frith, 1992), these symptoms can be explained with the same basic pattern that Julian Jaynes uses in his theory to characterize the mental organization of the protagonists in the Iliad. Patients with delusions suffer from the fact that the standardized attribution schema that localizes the sources of thoughts in the self is not available to them. Therefore, they need to explain the origins of their thoughts, ideas, and desires in another way (see, e.g., Stephens & Graham, 2000). They attribute them to person sources that are present but invisible—such as relatives, physicians, famous persons, or extraterrestrials. Frequently, they also construct effects and mechanisms to explain how the thoughts proceeding from these sources are communicated, by, for example, voices or pictures transmitted over rays or wires, and nowadays frequently also over phones, radios, or computers. […]
As bizarre as these syndromes seem against the background of our standard concept of subjectivity and personhood, they fit perfectly with the theoretical idea that mental selves are not naturally given but rather culturally constructed, and in fact set up in, attribution processes. The unity and consistency of the self are not a natural necessity but a cultural norm, and when individuals are exposed to unusual developmental and life conditions, they may well develop deviant attribution patterns. Whether these deviations are due to disturbances in attribution to persons or to disturbances in dual representation cannot be decided here. Both biological and societal conditions are involved in the formation of the self, and when they take an unusual course, the causes could lie in both domains.
“The Varieties of Dissociative Experience”
by Stanley Krippner
from Broken Images Broken Selves: Dissociative Narratives In Clinical Practice
pp. 339-341
In his provocative description of the evolution of humanity’s conscious awareness, Jaynes (1976) asserted that ancient people’s “bicameral mind” enabled them to experience auditory hallucinations— the voices of the deities— but they eventually developed an integration of the right and left cortical hemispheres. According to Jaynes, vestiges of this dissociation can still be found, most notably among the mentally ill, the extremely imaginative, and the highly suggestible. Even before the development of the cortical hemispheres, the human brain had slowly evolved from a “reptilian brain” (controlling breathing, fighting, mating, and other fixed behaviors), to the addition of an “old-mammalian brain,” (the limbic system, which contributed emotional components such as fear, anger, and affection), to the superimposition of a “new-mammalian brain” (responsible for advanced sensory processing and thought processes). MacLean (1977) describes this “triune brain” as responsible, in part, for distress and inefficiency when the parts do not work well together. Both Jaynes’ and MacLean’s theories are controversial, but I believe that there is enough autonomy in the limbic system and in each of the cortical hemispheres to justify Ornstein’s (1986) conclusion that human beings are much more complex and intricate than they imagine, consisting of “an uncountable number of small minds” (p. 72), sometimes collaborating and sometimes competing. Donald’s (1991) portrayal of mental evolution also makes use of the stylistic differences of the cerebral hemisphere, but with a greater emphasis on neuropsychology than Jaynes employs. Mithen’s (1996) evolutionary model is a sophisticated account of how specialized “cognitive domains” reached the point that integrated “cognitive fluidity” (apparent in art and the use of symbols) was possible.
James (1890) spoke of a “multitude” of selves, and some of these selves seem to go their separate ways in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (see Greening, Chapter 5), dissociative identity disorder (DID) (see Levin, Chapter 6), alien abduction experiences (see Powers, Chapter 9), sleep disturbances (see Barrett, Chapter 10), psychedelic drug experiences (see Greenberg, Chapter 11), death terrors (see Lapin, Chapter 12), fantasy proneness (see Lynn, Pintar, & Rhue, Chapter 13), near-death experiences (NDEs) (see Greyson, Chapter 7), and mediumship (see Grosso, Chapter 8). Each of these conditions can be placed into a narrative construction, and the value of these frameworks has been described by several authors (e.g., Barclay, Chapter 14; Lynn, Pintar, & Rhue, Chapter 13; White, Chapter 4). Barclay (Chapter 14) and Powers (Chapter 15) have addressed the issue of narrative veracity and validation, crucial issues when stories are used in psychotherapy. The American Psychiatric Association’s Board of Trustees (1993) felt constrained to issue an official statement that “it is not known what proportion of adults who report memories of sexual abuse were actually abused” (p. 2). Some reports may be fabricated, but it is more likely that traumatic memories may be misconstrued and elaborated (Steinberg, 1995, p. 55). Much of the same ambiguity surrounds many other narrative accounts involving dissociation, especially those described by White (Chapter 4) as “exceptional human experiences.”
Nevertheless, the material in this book makes the case that dissociative accounts are not inevitably uncontrolled and dysfunctional. Many narratives considered “exceptional” from a Western perspective suggest that dissociation once served and continues to serve adaptive functions in human evolution. For example, the “sham death” reflex found in animals with slow locomotor abilities effectively offers protection against predators with greater speed and agility. Uncontrolled motor responses often allow an animal to escape from dangerous or frightening situations through frantic, trial-and-error activity (Kretchmer, 1926). Many evolutionary psychologists have directed their attention to the possible value of a “multimodular” human brain that prevents painful, unacceptable, and disturbing thoughts, wishes, impulses, and memories from surfacing into awareness and interfering with one’s ongoing contest for survival (Nesse & Lloyd, 1992, p. 610). Ross (1991) suggests that Western societies suppress this natural and valuable capacity at their peril.
The widespread prevalence of dissociative reactions argues for their survival value, and Ludwig (1983) has identified seven of them: (1) The capacity for automatic control of complex, learned behaviors permits organisms to handle a much greater work load in as smooth a manner as possible; habitual and learned behaviors are permitted to operate with a minimum expenditure of conscious control. (2) The dissociative process allows critical judgment to be suspended so that, at times, gratification can be more immediate. (3) Dissociation seems ideally suited for dealing with basic conflicts when there is no instant means of resolution, freeing an individual to take concerted action in areas lacking discord. (4) Dissociation enables individuals to escape the bounds of reality, providing for inspiration, hope, and even some forms of “magical thinking.” (5) Catastrophic experiences can be isolated and kept in check through dissociative defense mechanisms. (6) Dissociative experiences facilitate the expression of pent-up emotions through a variety of culturally sanctioned activities. (7) Social cohesiveness and group action often are facilitated by dissociative activities that bind people together through heightened suggestibility.
Each of these potentially adaptive functions may be life-depotentiating as well as life-potentiating; each can be controlled as well as uncontrolled. A critical issue for the attribution of dissociation may be the dispositional set of the experiencer-in-context along with the event’s adaptive purpose. Salamon (1996) described her mother’s ability to disconnect herself from unpleasant surroundings or facts, a proclivity that led to her ignoring the oncoming imprisonment of Jews in Nazi Germany but that, paradoxically, enabled her to survive her years in Auschwitz. Gergen (1991) has described the jaundiced eye that modern Western science has cast toward Dionysian revelry, spiritual experiences, mysticism, and a sense of bonded unity with nature, a hostility he predicts may evaporate in the so-called “postmodern” era, which will “open the way to the full expression of all discourses” (pp. 246– 247). For Gergen, this postmodern lifestyle is epitomized by Proteus, the Greek sea god, who could change his shape from wild boar to dragon, from fire to flood, without obvious coherence through time. This is all very well and good, as long as this dissociated existence does not leave— in its wake— a residue of broken selves whose lives have lost any intentionality or meaning, who live in the midst of broken images, and whose multiplicity has resulted in nihilistic affliction and torment rather than in liberation and fulfillment (Glass, 1993, p. 59).
There is many difficulties in dealing with Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind, first argued in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It attacks straight on the most daunting of challenges to our humanity. What is consciousness? From that, many questions follow.
Jayne’s book has often been discussed, for decades at this point. Almost anyone who has heard about the idea of bicameralism has an opinion on it, whether or not they’ve read much about it. The book itself is a scholarly book and so few have bothered reading it. To be honest, it took me many years to finally get around to looking seriously at it and even then I’ve never read it in a linear fashion (then again, I almost never read any book in a linear fashion).
There are a number of essays that deal solely with the issue of misunderstandings about the theory of bicameralism and post-bicameral consciousness. Confusion is to be expected, considering the complexity of the subject matter, involving multiple areas of scholarship. It was an ambitious work, to say the least. Few could attempt such a massive project. You have to give Jaynes credit for having the intellectual courage and vision to pull it off, even if you ultimately disagree with the conclusions.
Let me give some of examples of the confusion that easily follows. The first one comes from a book that discusses bicameralism a bit: The Fall by Steve Taylor. I was only skimming it out of curiosity when I came across this quote (p. 142):
If pre-historic people had no self-consciousness, as Julian Jaynes suggests, they would also have had no awareness of death. But this wasn’t the case, of course, as their funerals, graves and afterlife beliefs testify.
That misses the point of the bicameral theory (as I explained in a comment to a review by Frank S. Robinson). If ancient societies actually were bicameral, they wouldn’t have had our dualistic experience of life and death. It’s not an issue of awareness of death, since death wouldn’t have been perceived as post-bicameral people perceived it. Dead people, in a sense, didn’t die.
Bicameral people, according to theory, kept hearing the voices of the people they knew when they were living. The memory of the person was experienced as still being part of the world. They wouldn’t merely remember the voice of a loved one, a priest, or a king for memory to them would have been the voice of the person still speaking within their experience. That voice would go on speaking, until those who had known the person also died and there was no living memory left to call them back into existence.
Their burial practices, therefore, were done with such care because the person in question was still present to them. Such burial practices are in no way evidence against Jayne’s theory. And their beliefs about an afterlife were a continuum with their beliefs about the living world, no absolute demarcation required. The criticism by Taylor isn’t an actual counter-argument.
This is common. Few people seem able to grasp what Jaynes was trying to explain. It doesn’t mean valid criticisms can’t be made. But it is interesting that those who disagree with Jaynes so rarely make valid criticisms. The best critiques come from those like Iain McGilchrist who, in proposing a slightly different theory, are looking closely at the same kind of evidence that Jaynes knew so well. The problem is those who dismiss Jaynes would also likely dismiss McGilchrist or anyone else who sincerely attempts to deal with this evidence.
Here is another example I came across. It’s from and essay, “Do Animals Need a ‘Theory of Mind’?” by Michael Bavidge and Ian Ground, in the book Against Theory of Mind edited by I. Leudar and A. Costall (p. 177):
As an illustration of closet-Cartesianism in the discussion of TToM [Theory ‘Theory of Mind’] consider the controversy over mirror experiments on chimps. Julian Jaynes writes:
“that a mirror-educated chimpanzee immediately rubs off a spot on his forehead when he sees it in a mirror is not […] clear evidence for self-awareness, at least in its usual sense […] Our conscious selves are not our bodies […] we do not see our conscious selves in mirrors. Gallup’s chimpanzee has learnt a point to point relation between a mirror image and his body, wonderful as that is.” (Jaynes, 1978, quoted in Kennedy, 1992, p. 108)
Here straightforwardly dualist thoughts — that ‘our conscious selves are not our bodies’ and ‘we do not see our conscious selves in mirrors’ — are used to object to the claim that chimps might have a concept of self.
Of course, viewed in a different light, Jaynes’ objection can be given a sense. As Hume pointed out, conscious selves could never appear in anything like a mirror:
“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.” (Hume, 2004, Book I, Part 4, Section 6)5
That is, the self, chimp or human, conceived as the conscious owner of experience, could never be data at all, not even in a inner ‘mirror of introspection’. More likely, however, Jaynes simply thinks that selves just are the sort of things that could only appear in inner mirrors: this is Cartesianism disguised as stringent scientific methodology.
It’s hard to even make sense of what is being criticized.
Jaynes is making an argument about societies that were prior to Cartesianism and other forms of abstract dualistic thought. He hypothesizes that internal experience was metaphorically based on external experience. The point of the argument for bicameralism is to explain the close relationship between inner and outer, specifically in terms of identity formation.
If anything, that is the opposite of Cartesianism. It’s not clear that Bavidge and Ground even grasp what they are trying to criticize. This is compounded by the fact that they are responding to a quote that comes from yet another book, indicating they might not even have read Jaynes’ book or sought to understand any of the context around the quote. For the sake of clarity, here is more of the context (from the Afterword of the 1990 and later editions):
This conclusion is incorrect. Self-awareness usually means the consciousness of our own persona over time, a sense of who we are, our hopes and fears, as we daydream about ourselves in relation to others. We do not see our conscious selves in mirrors, even though that image may become the emblem of the self in many cases. The chimpanzees in this experiment and the two-year old child learned a point-to-point relation between a mirror image and the body, wonderful as that is. Rubbing a spot noticed in the mirror is not essentially different from rubbing a spot noticed on the body without a mirror. The animal is not shown to be imagining himself anywhere else, or thinking of his life over time, or introspecting in any sense — all signs of a conscious life.
This less interesting, more primitive interpretation was made even clearer by an ingenious experiment done in Skinner’s laboratory (Epstein, 1981). Essentially the same paradigm was followed with pigeons, except that it required a series of specific trainings with the mirror, whereas the chimpanzee or child in the earlier experiments was, of course, self-trained. But after about fifteen hours of such training when the contingencies were carefully controlled, it was found that a pigeon also could use a mirror to locate a blue spot on its body which it could not see directly, though it had never been explicitly trained to do so. I do not think that a pigeon because it can be so trained has a self-concept.
As can be seen, some important points were left out in the cut-up quote from John S. Kennedy’s book (The New Anthropomorphism). Besides, that brief mention is the only time Kennedy discusses Jaynes at all. Like Bavidge and Ground, Kennedy showed no evidence of grappling with the challenges of bicameral theory.
Such meager partial quotes and superficial commentary is the most that such people ever learn about Jaynes’ theory of bicameralism. It’s brought up only to be dismissed, often just in a few sentences, based on the assumption that others must have already analyzed it elsewhere and so there must be no point in taking it seriously at this point. It’s crazy talk, plain absurd, and obviously wrong. All respectable thinkers already know this and so don’t need to read the book in order to understand what was disproven long ago. This is an intellectual laziness based on mainstream thought or rather thoughtlessness.
In the full passage and throughout the rest of his book, Jaynes makes clear that a metaphorically imagined, interiorized, spatialized, and narrativized self-conscious identity (what Jaynes means by “consciousness”) isn’t necessary to respond to a perceived spot on the body, whether perceived directly or in a mirror. The confusion is that few people trying to make sense of Jaynes theory ever bother trying to understand his definition and explanation of consciousness, a more complicated issue than most realize since our folk psychology assumptions rarely are questioned. To put it simply, few people ever become conscious of their own beliefs and biases about consciousness, since their subjective perceptions are inseparable from their cultural conceptions.
Part of the struggle here is the strangeness of the evidence itself. Jaynes didn’t begin with a conclusion and then look for proof to confirm it. He came across ancient texts that described experiences that didn’t match what modern Westerners assume to be reality. That is a problem requiring a solution, even if one prefers a different kind of explanation.
So, what are we to do with such extreme inconsistencies between past and present use of language in describing experience and identity? If we don’t attempt to take at face value the words of other people, how do we avoid simply projecting our assumptions and biases in interpreting those words? How can we ever come to terms with a foreign worldview that doesn’t match our cultural expectations and frameworks of understanding? What if ancient humans weren’t (and chimpanzees aren’t) just a simpler version of modern Westerners?
Jaynes answer to these questions and others could be wrong, partly or entirely. The debate about this hasn’t ended. It’s barely begun. But most people don’t yet even have the conceptual framework and basic knowledge to understand what the debate is about, much less the capacity to join that debate. This is a tough nut to crack. Even four decades after its original publication, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind should not be underestimated. That book was just a parting shot, as impressive as it was for its time. Dozens of books have been inspired by it and brought the theory up to date, either with new evidence or entirely reformulated into new theories.
As with everything, if it is worth having an opinion about, it is worth spending the time to learn about and understand. Plus, it’s fascinating. Let loose the reigns of your imagination and let your curiosity get the better of you. Take it as a thought experiment. What if the human mind did radically change in the past? And what if it still has the potential for radical change? How would we know and recognize this? What harm would come from honestly and carefully looking at the evidence that doesn’t fit our preconceptions?
Marmalade 
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