Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
C R Culver
Friends,
What does this book have to do with linguistics? Could someone please
summarise the comments it makes concerning linguistics?
Christopher R. Culver <crcu...@aol.com>
http://members.aol.com/crculver/index.html
------------------------------------------------
"Ignorance, that light of fools steers a wayward path"
-Brendan Perry
Peter T. Daniels
C R Culver wrote:
>
> Friends,
>
> What does this book have to do with linguistics? Could someone please
> summarise the comments it makes concerning linguistics?
>
I read it many years ago, when it first came out, as did people in all
sorts of humanities, and everyone's reaction was exactly the same: "Of
course he doesn't know what he's talking about in my particular
subfield, but all the rest of it seems plausible." What that means is
that Jaynes is a very good writer.
I don't, in fact, remember what claims he made about language. (I don't
think he said anything at all about linguistics.) But since his basic
"insight" was that before consciousness we had voices talking to us
inside our heads, he must have assumed the existence of language and
not worried about its nature or origins.
--
Peter T. Daniels gram...@worldnet.att.net
Greg Lee
Peter T. Daniels <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
: C R Culver wrote:
: >
: > Friends,
: >
: > What does this book have to do with linguistics? Could someone please
: > summarise the comments it makes concerning linguistics?
: >
: I read it many years ago, when it first came out, as did people in all
: sorts of humanities, and everyone's reaction was exactly the same: "Of
: course he doesn't know what he's talking about in my particular
: subfield, but all the rest of it seems plausible." What that means is
: that Jaynes is a very good writer.
: I don't, in fact, remember what claims he made about language. (I don't
: think he said anything at all about linguistics.) But since his basic
...
My memory is also a little foggy, but I recall that Jaynes argued that
the earliest parts of Homer and the Old Testament were composed before
consciousness arose, while later Homer and the New Testament were
composed after, evidence being that personal volition never came into
the motivations of the actors in the older literature. More literary
criticism than linguistics, I guess.
--
Greg Lee <l...@Hawaii.edu>
Ralph Frost
If my memory of this isn't too crossconnected, the author made the point
that our pre-Homo Sapien ancestors' experience and awareness of their
experience differed from that of our distant ancestors; and theirs
differed from that of our grandparents, parents and teachers, etc.,
down to the present moment and beyond. (Perhaps I am extrapolating a bit
here...)
It seems there was some undercurrent of macro-physiological change or
re-alignment correlating with awareness of "I" and the feelings of
separation that accompany moving out into rational analysis. This being
in contrast to what we might now better imagine as a prior state of
blissful synthenesia, intuition or "at-one-ment".
What the author said specifically of language or linguistics, I don't
remember, but the general gist was all things come into being
"unconsciously" and only later give way to "conscious" consideration,
classification and explanation.
In my subfield, despite things partitioning into
rational/counter-rational and inituitive/counter-intuitive quadrants,
the breakdown, fortunately, is still very much in progress.
Er, I think...
Best wishes,
Ralph Frost
STAN MULAIK
Greg Lee <l...@Hawaii.edu> writes:
>Peter T. Daniels <gram...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>: C R Culver wrote:
>: >
>: > Friends,
>: >
>: > What does this book have to do with linguistics? Could someone please
>: > summarise the comments it makes concerning linguistics?
>My memory is also a little foggy, but I recall that Jaynes argued that
>the earliest parts of Homer and the Old Testament were composed before
>consciousness arose, while later Homer and the New Testament were
>composed after, evidence being that personal volition never came into
>the motivations of the actors in the older literature. More literary
>criticism than linguistics, I guess.
His argument builds on a theory of metaphor, which I find not dissimilar from
George Lakoff's but antedating Lakoff. Of course, Lakoff says that metaphor
is about conceptualization and only secondarily linguistic. Fair enough.
Jaynes argues that "consciousness" is a metaphor, an operator, like
mathematics (Lakoff suggests that mathematics is built from metaphors).
The metaphor of "consciousness" allows us to deal with "mental events"
using metaphors taken from the world. Consciousness is a place, a container,
a "mental space" (Fauconier?) we have invented "inside our heads" as well
as in the heads of others. It is characterized by visual metaphors, like
"introspection is seeing inward". Much of what we see in "consciousness"
are little "excerpts" of experience, (I like "snapshots" to convey the idea).
Like when you think of a circus you may have a fleeting image of trapeze
artists. These "images", "snapshots", "excerpts" that occur in
"consciousness" can be associated to, to produce others. There is also an
"Analog 'I'" that does this seeing inwardly, analogous to the public "I"
of first-person expressions in public speech. And there is a metaphoric
"Me", an object of thought, perhaps based on being able to think of oneself
from others' points of view. Consciousness further is where one narratizes,
constructs stories about oneself, relating it to a past, present and future,
assigning causes to our choices and acts. And then there is conciliation,
assimilation, making everything compatible and orderly in our conscious
space. As Jaynes puts it, "conciliation is essentially doing in mind-space
what narratization does in mind-time or spatialized time. As James put it:
"We have said that consciousness is an operation rather than a thing, a
repository, or a function. It operates by way of analogy, by way of
constructing an analog space with an analog 'I' that can observe that space,
and move metaphorically in it. It operates on any reactivity, excerpts
relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together in a metaphorical
space where such meanings can be manipulated like things in space. Conscious
mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily
acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or,
to say it another way that echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in
consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first."
That having been said, his next point is that he was inspired to form
his hypothesis about how consciousness developed from another kind of
mind by reading the Iliad and the literature that had developed around it.
To Jaynes the Iliad captures in language a kind of mind that lacked the
kind of consciousness he has described above, which he says originated
sometime after about 1200 b.c.. Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, is
a man who does not think with a consciousness where he plans, narratizes
to himself, weighs his options, or thinks about himself somewhat objectively.
His vocabulary, and that of his fellow Greeks did not have terms that
functioned that way. But what functions for Achilles and his fellow
Greeks to perform all these planning and reasoning functions that are
done by us today (and even by Aristotle many centuries after Achilles)?
The gods. Current neurocognitive science postulates that much of
thinking is conducted unconsciously, and then (because we have the
metaphor of consciousness that allows us to say this) comes into
consciousness as images or verbalizations that we attribute to our
analog "I" (I thought that thought). But Achilles didn't have that
metaphoric place in his head and a language for expressing it. He just
had voices suddenly telling him what to do, which he regarded as his
god or gods talking to him. The gods were not identified with the self
as we with "consciousness" identify our thoughts with ourselves. So,
where in the brain did these voices come from? Jaynes argues they came
from language centers in the right side of the brain, and were interpreted
by language centers in the left side of the brain. The right side of the
brain was thinking and planning and then "telling" the left side what to
do. Hence Jaynes' term for Achilles' mind, "the bicameral mind".
Jaynes sought to test his theory against recording writings of other
cultures contemporary with the Mycenean Greeks, to see if they had similar
ways of referring to being directed by the gods in a normal everyday manner.
And he thinks he finds that in the writings of the Mesopotamian city states.
He then weaves a fascinating tale about how the bicameral mind broke down
as peoples from different cultures with different gods came increasingly
into contact with each other through trade, or as merchants lost contact
with their gods and shrines in their home cities. But the greatest breakdown
resulted from historical cataclysms, like the explosion of Thera, and
the rise of the first self-conscious people, the Assyrians, who were able
to be deceptive, to think of themselves inwardly as different from their
outward appearance. The Assyrians, ancient Saddam Husseins, lied and
cheated and conned their neighbors in throwing open their gates, then
slaughtered them all. So people fled their cities, their altars, their
household shrines where they communicated and got instruction for daily
living from their gods, ahead of the coming Assyerians. This just broke down
the psychological ties to the appropriate stimuli that maintained this kind
of mind. And they became refugees. The Hebrews were among these (Hebrew,
I think means "refugee"). They no longer could relate to idol gods, and
so they developed a new concept of God, seeking in Him a reunification with
their lost gods. In the meantime consciousness developed among the Greeks,
epitomized in the story of Odysseus as the man who learned deception
(the ability to think of himself inwardly as different from his way of
presenting himself to others). And Odysseus' story becomes the greatest
epic for young Greeks who are being trained by the story in how to be
conscious humans, to have a metaphoric way of thinking about themselves and
others, and taking advantage of the more naive bicameral peoples.
Fascinating hypothesis. How to validate it? It helps make sense out of
things in the writings of the Assyrians, where at a definite point in their
history, we find them complaining that they no longer hear their gods speak
to them. That's because their minds have been transformed by a new metaphor
for thinking about themselves. And we see among the Greeks the development
of numerous new metaphors of consciousness in the centuries that followed.
But full self-consciousness doesn't come into flower until the late
middle ages with the introspective Anabaptists and Quakers, and Descartes,
who lives among them in Holland, who develops a philosophy based on "I think,
therefore, I am".
>--
>Greg Lee <l...@Hawaii.edu>
--
Stanley A. Mulaik
School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332
uucp: ...!{decvax,hplabs,ncar,purdue,rutgers}!gatech!prism!pscccsm
Internet: psc...@prism.gatech.edu
floaiza
In article <68mpma$k...@acmez.gatech.edu>, psc...@prism.gatech.edu (STAN MULAIK) wrote:
:>But full self-consciousness doesn't come into flower until the late
:>middle ages with the introspective Anabaptists and Quakers, and Descartes,
:>who lives among them in Holland, who develops a philosophy based on "I think,
:>therefore, I am".
I thought that the claim to "full self-consciousness" had a much earlier date,
namely the Late Antitquity with the writings of St. Augustin. He is--according
to some--the father of the "psychological" novel and the first writer to delve
into the thick "soup" of his inner mind workings with an analytical intent,
isn't he?
(just an opinion)
Francisco