The Universe of Discourse : The Origin of Consciousness
The Universe of Discourse
Mark Dominus (陶敏修)
mjd@pobox.com
About me
RSS<br>Atom
12 recent entries
The road to epsilon-zero: Productive programs and well-founded orders<br>There are two kinds of theorems<br>The road to epsilon-zero: Coin-moving games with no coins<br>Seven books I keep close because I love them<br>The road to epsilon-zero: Infinite Nim as a coin-moving game<br>“Steph Curry: fluke or breakthrough” ten years later<br>The road to epsilon-zero: Nim always ends, even with infinite ordinals<br>The road to epsilon-zero: ordinals as nim-heaps<br>Starting to understand epsilon-zero<br>It's our language now!<br>I owe my life to a 1913 road rage incident<br>Deciphering basmala
Archive:
2026:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JA<br>2025:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2024:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2023:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2022:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2021:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2020:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2019:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2018:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2017:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2016:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2015:<br>JFMAMJ JASOND<br>2014:<br>JFMAMJ JASOND<br>2013:<br>JFMAMJ JASOND<br>2012:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2011:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2010:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2009:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2008:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2007:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2006:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2005: OND
Subtopics:
Mathematics252<br>Programming102<br>Language98<br>Miscellaneous75<br>Book51<br>Tech49<br>Etymology36<br>Haskell33<br>Oops30<br>Unix27<br>Cosmic Call25<br>Math SE25<br>Law23<br>Physics21<br>Perl17<br>Biology16<br>Brain15<br>Calendar15<br>Food15
Comments disabled
Thu, 08 May 2008
The Origin of Consciousness
Buy<br>The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
from Bookshop.org<br>(with kickback)<br>(without kickback)
One of my favorite books is The Origin of Consciousness in the<br>Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes, a<br>psychologist at Princeton University. Nearly everyone seems to agree<br>that this is either a work of profound genius, or of profound<br>crackpottery, and also that they aren't sure which it is. Jaynes'<br>theory, as nearly as I can summarize the book, is something like<br>this:
Human consciousness comprises:
Linguistic mediation of the universe through use of metaphor<br>A spatial model of time
-->
Human consciousness (which Jaynes describes and defines in<br>considerable detail) is a relatively recent development, dating<br>back at most only about 3,000 years or so.
That is the shocking part of the theory. Most people probably<br>imagine consciousness arising much, much earlier, perhaps before<br>language. Jaynes disagrees. In his theory, language, and in<br>particular its mediation of thought through the use of metaphors, is<br>an essential prerequisite for consciousness. And his date for the<br>development of consciousness means that human consciousness would<br>postdate several other important developments, such as metalworking,<br>large-scale agriculture, complex hierarchical social structures, and<br>even writing. Jaynes thinks that the development of consciousness is<br>a historical event and is attested to by written history. He tries to<br>examine the historical record to find evidence not only of<br>preconscious culture, but of the tremendous upheavals that both caused<br>and were the result of the arrival of consciousness.
If preconscious humans farmed, built temples and granaries, and kept<br>records, they must have had some sort of organizing behavior that<br>sufficed in place of consciousness. Jaynes believes that prior to the<br>development of consciousness, humans had a very different mentality.<br>When you or I need to make a decision, we construct a mental<br>narrative, in which we imagine ourselves trying several courses of<br>action, and attempt to predict the possible consequences. Jaynes<br>claims that Bronze Age humans did not do this. What then?
Instead, says Jaynes, the two halves of the brain were less<br>well-integrated in preconscious humans than they are today. The<br>preconscious mentality was "bicameral", with the two halves of the<br>brain operating more independently, and sometimes at odds with each<br>other. The left hemisphere, as today, was usually dominant. Faced<br>with a difficult decision,<br>preconscious human would wait, possibly undergoing (and perhaps even<br>encouraging) an increasingly agitated physical state, until they heard<br>the voice of a god directing them what to do. These hallucinated<br>voices were generated by the right hemisphere of the brain, and<br>projected internally into the left hemisphere.
For example, when the Iliad says that the goddess Athena<br>spoke to Achilles, and commanded and physically restrained him from<br>killing Agamemnon, it is not fabulating: Achilles' right brain<br>hallucinated the voice of the Goddess and restrained him.
In Jaynes' view, there is a large amount of varied literary,<br>anthropological, and neurological evidence supporting this admittedly<br>bizarre hypothesis. For example, he compares the language used in the<br>Biblical Book of Amos (bicameral) with that in Ecclesiastes<br>(conscious). He finds many examples of records from the right period<br>of history bewailing the loss of the guidance of the gods, the<br>stilling of their voices, and the measures that people took, involving<br>seers and...