Julian Jaynes — The Origin Of Consciousness
Notes
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People whose reviews of this book I would love to read: Graham Hancock (shamans, hallucinogens), Jordan Peterson (Osiris), Neil Stephenson (Snowcrash, language beaming straight through to someone’s subordinate brain),
8 theories: all matter (physicists) but this explains interaction not qualia, all life but protozoa don’t seem to learn, all synaptic life, natural selection of Darwin, Metaphysical imposition of Alfred Russell Wallace who felt at least 3 times (life, consciousness, civilization) there was too much of a step change he tried explaining through spiritualists which is why he’s less known; conscious automata or helpless spectator of Huxley/Spencer etc where it’s irrelevant but this doesn’t explain why there’s neat negative correlation of consciousness with habitual action (least conscious) and indecisive action (most conscious); Emergent phenomenon like wetness from H2 and O2 that gave biologists finally a leg to stand on on par with physics/chemistry; Behaviorism takes automata further to say consciousness isn’t even there, after WW1 there’s need for objective pragmatic fact so golden age of behaviorism in psychology 1920–1960 even though it was more of a method than people actually believing they themselves were not conscious;
Experiment where you’re given instructions then a visual where you come up with a word, stage 1 is conscious, stage 2 is unconscious. We finish doing our thinking before we are given the stimulus to think about.
If we have words for everything, metaphors become extinct. We won’t say love is like a red rose if we have a specific word for love that is like that. Metaphors let us make infinite concepts from finite set. In Sanskrit we just include the metaphor as a synonym, what does this say?
A theory explains the relation between a model (Bohr’s solar system of atoms) and reality. An analog is not a model, at every point it recreates the thing it is an analog of, like a map. Subjective consciousness might be an analog of reality, a map.
Generative potential of a metaphor: snow blankets the ground. Metaphier blanket. Metaphrand, the layer of snow. But Metaphier has Paraphiers, warmth, protection, sleep. Thus Paraphrand attains associations of earth sleeping warmly, protected by snow until spring.
Map-maker starts with metaphrand blank paper and metaphier the land he knows well. The map-user the other way around, metaphier is the map and metaphrand is the unknown land it represents. Same with generation and function of consciousness?
Features: a) convert everything into spatial, including time. b) ‘See’ inside head, actually incomplete excerpts. c) narratization creates story over time d) conciliation creates compatibility among different parallel stories in space
Agamemnon blames his mistress-stealing on Zeus and the Erinyes, the cool thing is that Achilles accepts it.
Greek Gods act within laws of nature, unlike Abrahamic.
The Iliad is about Achilles’ actions and their consequences, not of his mind. Karma?
Stress threshold causes hallucination in schizophrenics today. Could ancients have had very low threshold where any novel stimulus outside habit causes stress and therefore auditory hallucination?
Decision-making is stress. If 1 of 2 monkeys has to press lever periodically to avoid shock for both, then it is the decision-maker who develops ulcers not the other, despite equal shocking. But if immediate feedback about success of decision, no ulcers.
Listening is obedience. Obey = ob+audiere, hear facing someone. Spatial distance is control, go closer to someone to dominate them. Hold someone in high esteem and their language has more power over you. In bicameral culture, voice within head is a) close and b) high-esteem god. Absolute obedience.
Why most brain function is on both hemispheres for safe redundancy but speech is only in left, even though right also contains neurological structures for it? Right kept free for the gods?
Anterior commissure connects hallucinatory area in right-lobe with Wernicke’s speech area in left.
Right hemisphere sees parts as meaningful within context of a whole, left hemisphere sees just the parts. Cultural difference of West foreground and East background focus?
Cool experiment that worked on me. 2 mirror image faces, one-half frown one-half smile. Right-handers pick happier-face using left-half of face ie using right-lobe. Left-handers choose right-half. I chose right-half and confirmed.
Modifiers (near-tiger vs far-tiger) to commands (near-anything vs far-anything) to nouns (tiger, bear) and gradual development of language from just sounds
Instinctive behavior needs no priming, like beaver’s dam, but what about us building a dam. Verbal hallucinations of language commands kept nonconscious man at task.
Enduring tasks became selective pressure that split articulate brain (left half) from hallucinating god-brain right-half.
Why around 10,000BC, we start burying/commemorating dead? Maybe we started giving names, and therefore can think up a person collectively when they’re not there? Proper nouns.
General settlement style has been a large god-house surrounded by man-houses, whether Jericho or Ur or Native American.
Monuments as hallucinogenic aids.
More than guns, germs and steel, does bicameral mind explain the tame defeat of huge American civilizations to tiny European armies? God-voices and lack of subjectivity meant vulnerable to deception, manipulation?
Indus Valley had cemetery next to citadel, with pots of food, treating dead as still living
Idols as mnemonic devices to retrieve admonitory experience, like rosary beads or knot-string literature. Sudden profusion of idols, is it because voices went away or multiplied into confusion?
Eye is important communicator in social primates. Idols have disproportionately large eyes, some with encrusted gems. Speaking to us. Seeing into us.
Cuneiform had 600 signs, each with multiple meanings, can be a syllable, idea, name, word etc. Concrete tablets, like inventories then translation is fine, but for more abstract, especially with psychological interpretations, translations are impossible.
Sumer: god owned all land, king was his steward.
Culture complexity reduces hallucinations, hence ritual purifications to rejuvenate the voices
Mesopotamia is a large contiguous region gradually going from Euphrates/Tigris to Arabian desert to Persian mountains. But Egypt is self-contained little bubble, uniform in space and time. People had remarkably similar physique, homogeneity is fertile for god-king pharoahs.
Osiris not as dying/dead god, but hallucinated voice of a dead king in mind of present king Horus.
Egyptian ‘ka’ or voice of command, where hearing it is tantamount to obeying it. King shown as made on potter wheel by god Khnum with twin ka who points to mouth, verbal function.
Relation of god, king, and people are entirely in terms of ‘ka’, key to understanding the culture
Egypt collapses in 2100BC. Nile might have dried. No rebellion of independent sections, just total anarchy. Then reunified in Middle Kingdom. Similar in Near East and Mayans. Breakdown of bicameral mind in this intermediate period.
Southern Mesopotamia no collapse. Writing put to use as law of god, Ur.
‘Code of Hammurabi’ has pomp/fury in prologue/epilogue (Hammurabi himself) sandwiching tablets of very different sounding calm reason of law/judgment (Marduk part of mind).
Modern scholars translate tablets imposing modern concepts to make them more familiar, like money/loan/rent/transactions, when these didn’t exist back then.
Once word of god is written down, and its location is controllable, no longer the undeniable command of auditory hallucination. Divine power weakens.
Assyria collapses starting 1700BC. Maybe because of size and trade? Merchants have to communicate with foreign tongues. ToM?
Middle Assyria rises more brutal than ever before. Santorini volcano erupts, suddenly the area is full of refugees pushing at borders of neighboring regions. Hittites collapse under refugee stress. Assyria goes on rampage. Why unprecedented harshness? Cruelty at the start of subjective consciousness after breakdown of bicameral?
What if logic of Theory Of Mind (infer others minds from our own) is inverse, we infer our own from the deduction that others have minds because they are behaving/speaking differently.
Writing turns from inventory/laws to recording events. This becomes narratized epics of gods. Reading as hallucination, occurs in right-hemisphere. Seat of memory.
What about thoughts that we don’t act on? Deceptive behavior might have started only with subjective consciousness.
Suddenly, starting 1230 BC, with Assyrian tyrant Tukulti Ninurta, gods vanish. Literature abounds with how Babylonian gods have forsaken them. Without divine authority, kings need cruelty. He’s first case of parricide/regicide? Probably Nimrod/Ninos
Schizophrenics don’t ask to hear voices. Bicameral man didn’t pray. Voices just spoke in times of stress/uncertainty. Once god disappears, prayers begin.
Angels/Demons enter the fray when gods vanish. Human hybrid intermediaries. All silent. Myth has begun. If gods are silent, they are angry, hence demons enter power vacuum.
Ziggurats change, from house of god, to tower to which gods can descend from heaven, like Sargon’s ziggurat with spiral stairway, or tower of Babel, named e-temen-an-ki, temple of receiving platform between heaven and earth. Herodotus actually climbed it.
4 types of divination: Omens (Astrology), Sortilege (throwing sticks, see how they fall), Augury (oil in a cup, extispicy or exta of animals), Spontaneous divination all explode. Pattern recognition better in right-hemisphere, so our attempt to regain right-hemisphere divine voices.
Why are fearful letters of 700BC era Assyrian kings more like our own consciousness than Hammurabi’s.
Can we have spatialization of time without subjective consciousness? Invention of history without spatialization of time? Herodotus going to Mesopotamia is a paradigm shift.
Most common hypostases in Iliad (thing which stands under an action): thumos (spirit. stress response), phrenes (diaphragm: breath, like catching breath, deep breaths, laughing, sobbing); kradie (kroteo to beat, heart as sense organ for anxiety); etor (guts, stomach most reactive to thought/emotion, hence most psychosomatic), noos (noeo to see, perception in general, the mind’s eye); psyche (psychein to breathe, spirit like thumos, a prize to be taken by someone else by spear, but no internal quality of feeling/thinking).
% of breath cycle that is inspiration: 16 percent in speech, 23 percent in laughter, 30 percent in attentive mental work, 43 percent when at rest, 60 percent or more in excitement, 71 percent in subjects imagining a wonder-ful or surprising situation, and 75 percent in sudden fright.
Odyssey likely written century atleast after Iliad (so not Homer in youth vs age), cult of wily-Odysseus that allowed conquered tribes to survive. Huge contrast with Iliad, gods have become feeble. Omens, witches, wandering and discovery like social breakdown post Dorian invasions and birth of subjective consciousness. Striking drop in ‘thumos’, increase in others.
Phrenes, thumos, noos, psyche now have agency, commanding decisions where in Iliad the gods would’ve spoken. Secrets are born, in phrenes. Odysseus can even deceive Athena.
Odyssey has more spatialization of time, words like begin, hesitate, endure. More future. More abstract, ‘ness’ words, less similies.
Hesiod Theogony is after Odyssey. Very few hypostatic words, nostalgic for golden age of gods? ‘Works and days’ full of advice from Hesiod to brother foolish Perses, but what if not Hesiod but Perses himself commanded by bicameral mind?
Justice depends on spatialization of time. Commit crime, be punished later. Do good now, reap benefits. But don’t animals pass the marshmallow test?
7th Century BC, Suddenly, Greek Greatness: anaximander, thales, pythagoras and..Solon: first poet to ramp up use of noos. Personal responsibility, don’t blame gods. Morality. Know thyself (not Socrates!), inconceivable for Iliad-era. Unitary noos becomes nous absorbs other hypostases.
Psyche attains space. Pythagoras’ transmigration of soul, from Egyptian mysticism, concept of ka and ba, which they didn’t have a word for, so made it psyche. Soul. Thus Soma which meant corpse as opposite of living psyche, now becomes body, opposite of dead-soul psyche.
Pindar/Heraclitus: psyche/nous merge, immaterial mind vs soma. Psyche as water (thales), air (Anaximenes), Fire (Heraclitus), breath (Xenophanes). Dualism takes off, Plato through to Descartes.
Parmenides/Democritus take nous/psyche further to truth/beauty through invention of logos
Refugee crisis from volcano/Assyria/Hittite collapse etc were called vagrants in Akkad language ‘khabiru’, which became Hebrew
Oldest OT: Amos, bicameral gods, no thinking/feeling/heart, righteous, assured, rude. Newest is Ecclesiastes, no god, analog ‘i’, self-reflection, concerned, hesitant, surveying.
Why specific 5 books compiled as Pentateuch (first 5: Torah)? Nostalgia for god after voices no longer heard?
God is constantly seen as visual presence, until Moses who only speaks face-to-face once. Then never seen. Only in thunder, clouds, fire.
Nabiim, or prophets, seem to be bicameral and pass down genetic line, just like schizophrenia. Amos, Jeremiah, Ezekiel,
Is Oracle of Delphi daughter of farmer because illiterate might still be bicameral?
Girls less lateralized than boys, for eg: haptic recognition (boys primarily right hemi), speech loss (men with left-hemi stroke).
Tourette’s shares features with stress-induced possession. Usually left-handed, symptoms start when hemispheric dominance of language is completed.
Think of accent in meter not as stress but as pitch, such that dactyl would be GCC notes. Speech is left-hemi, but song is right-hemi. Ancient poetry was sung, involving right posterior temporal lobe responsible for organizing auditory hallucinations.
Improvised singing is so hard because making words in left-hemi and singing in right-hemi which is making its own words in the meantime.
Music as neural excitants for the hallucinatory voices of gods? Named after the muses, divine inspiration. Instrumental music of lyre/flute for lyric/elegiac poets. Stops being used much later, when poem is no longer sung from right hemi. Early poetry is called song, later it is spoken or told, lyre to rhapsodes (sticks beating out meter). Bicameral to conscious. Oral to written.
Big difference between calm/stately early poets Demodocus/Hesiod and during Solon/Plato time where they’re insane, wild trance. Because need to circumvent/shortcircuit consciousness to access both hemis? Gradually Muses hush and freeze.
Milton’s celestial patroness who dictates unpremeditated verse. Blake’s visions/hallucinations. RIlke.
In Iliad, Thamyris the poet claims he will conquer the Muses. They are enraged and take away his gift, make him forget harping. Is this similar to how when we try consciously have ideas and force inspiration, it is impossible?
Hypnotic trance as bicameral mind: reduced narratization, no introspection constant monitoring of self. Metaphor of water submersion: deeper and deeper.
Hypnotized person who’s told there is no obstacle in his path, will still walk around it, there is no hallucination induced. Unhypnotized person faking it will crash into it, falsely believing that’s what hypnosis is, superficial alteration of reality. Paralogical compliance, rules of logic are put aside. Same with religion, schizophrenics.
Asked a question, if your eyes move to the left, you’re using rightbrain more. More susceptible to hypnosis.
Schizophrenia as relapse into bicameral: in bicameral world, nobody is seen as ‘insane’. Plato calls insanity a divine gift — 4 madnesses, prophetic (Apollo), ritual (Dionysus), poetic (Muses) and erotic (Eros/Aphrodite). Mantike (prophetic) same as manike (mad). Paranoia = para + nous (more than one mind).
No analog ‘I’, no mind-space, no narratization (can’t explain self, logic), behavior either responds to hallucination or by habit. Memories, emotions all feel forced on me from alien source. Poorly defined fuzzy boundaries on Rorschach test. Thicker corpus callosum.
Evolutionary advantage of schizo: tirelessness (much fatigue is product of conscious mind), sensory perception.
Left-brain lesion: 90% become schizo with hallucination. Rightbrain lesion: less than 10%. Instead manic-depressive.
“The modern schizophrenic is an individual in search of such a culture. But he retains usually some part of the subjective consciousness that struggles against this more primitive mental orga-nization, that tries to establish some kind of control in the middle of a mental organization in which the hallucination ought to do the controlling. In effect, he is a mind bared to his environment, waiting on gods in a godless world”
3000BC we head gods. 2000BC we stop. 1000BC those of us who still hear them write down. 1000AD we use these as divine instruction. 2000AD they lose authority, scientific revolution,
Obsessed with ‘fall of man’ or gaining of consciousness? From Plato to Rousseau corruption by civilization, Marx corruption by money, Freud neurosis by childhood,
