"It renders whole shelves of books obsolete."

by **yesferatu** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 1:10 am

<<"O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it? And where did it come from? And why?" - excerpt from the introduction to The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind >> <<"When Julian Jaynes...speculates that until late in the second millennium B.C. men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis through all the corroborative evidence..." - John Updike, in The New Yorker "This book and this man's ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century. It renders whole shelves of books obsolete." - William Harrington, in Columbus Dispatch "Having just finished The Origin of Consciousness, I myself feel something like Keats' Cortez staring at the Pacific, or at least like the early reviewers of Darwin or Freud. I'm not quite sure what to make of this new territory; but its expanse lies before me and I am startled by its power." - Edward Profitt, in Commonweal "He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior." - Raymond Headlee, in American Journal of Psychiatry "The bold hypothesis of the bicameral mind is an intellectual shock to the reader, but whether or not he ultimately accepts it he is forced to entertain it as a possibility. Even if he marshals arguments against it he has to think about matters he has never thought of before, or, if he has thought of them, he must think about them in contexts and relationships that are strikingly new." - Ernest R. Hilgard, Professor of Psychology, Stanford University "The weight of original thought in it is so great that it makes me uneasy for the author's well-being: the human mind is not built to support such a burden." - D.C. Stove, in Encounter At the heart of this book is the revolutionary idea that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but is a learned process brought into being out of an earlier hallucinatory mentality by cataclysm and catastrophe only 3000 years ago and still developing. The implications of this new scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion - and indeed, our future. In the words of one reviewer, it is "a humbling text, the kind that reminds most of us who make our livings through thinking, how much thinking there is left to do." >> <a href="http://www.julianjaynes.org/" target="top">www.julianjaynes.org/</a> <<Summary Jaynes asserts that until the times written about in Homer's Iliad, humans did not have the "interior monologue" that is characteristic of consciousness as most people experience it today. Instead, he argues that something like schizophrenia was the typical human mental state as recently as 3000 years ago. Jaynes describes this state as a bicameral mind by analogy with bicameral legislatures and parliaments. Jaynes argues that preconscious humans effectively had a "split brain" which allowed one part of the brain to appear to be "speaking" to another part that listened and obeyed, and that commands that at some point were believed to be issued by "gods"--so often recorded in ancient myths, legends and historical accounts--were in fact emmanating from individuals' own minds. Specifically, he hypothesises that these commands were being issued by a now usually dormant area in the right hemisphere of the brain that corresponds to the location of Wernicke's area in the left which is believed to be involved in understanding speech. He says, with neurosurgery, these commands can be recreated with electrical stimulation of the area. Jaynes builds a case for this theory by citing evidence from many diverse sources including historical literature. For example, he asserts that, in The Iliad and sections of the Old Testament in The Bible that no mention is made of any kind of cognitive processes such as introspection and that there is no apparent indication that the writers were self-aware. He asserts that some later writings in the New Testament as well as later works such as The Odyssey show indications of a profoundly different kind of mentality which he believes is indicative of conciousness. According to Jaynes, this bicameral mentality began malfunctioning or "breaking down." He speculates that was due to increased societal complexity making more education a matter of necessity; resulting in the dominance of the conscious hemisphere. The mind began exercising conscious thought almost exclusively, for the first time, to enable the continued survival and success of the species or the individual. Jaynes further argues that divination arose during this breakdown period, in an attempt to summon commands that had previously been interpreted as emanating from "gods." His hypothesis is bolstered by a period of time in this transition where children who had contact with the "gods" were prized by their community, but as their education progressed they lost their abilities.>> Picking the book up tomorrow...any RIer's read it? Thoughts?

by **dude h homeslice ix** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 1:20 am

OMG YES! IN COLLEGE! i wish i recalled more of it...

by **MASONIC PLOT** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 1:52 am

That is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. You need to read it yourself since nothing I have to say will do it any justice, but it is powerful, just powerful stuff.

by **Jim F You** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 3:22 am

New here. The History and Origin of Conciousness by Erich Neumann had a somewhat similar thesis I believe; that the evolution of conciousness in a human individual, from births through adulthood, mirrors the evolution of the history of human conciousness itself, or something like that. Cool book.

by **Hugh Manatee Wins** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 3:46 am

But not discussion boards. I frequently have hallucinations where my thoughts go out my fingers to where I can see them and then they talk back to me. Sorry. Dr. Leonard Schlain is a surgeon who has been writing about his hypotheses on the evolution of the mind-body connection and the evolution of social behaviors, especially between the sexes as key to the development of consciousness. Lots of insight to be had from following the bio-rationalist school of analysis.

by **Cosmic Cowbell** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 11:43 am

So-Crates and Bi-Cameralism....some interesting commentary... Apparently Socrates "heard voices" which he attributed to the "daimon"--which is probably the search term that will be most productive. In any case once cannot diagnose schizophrenia on the basis of auditory hallucinations alone. Regarding these voices, it might be interesting to understand them in terms of Julian Jaynes's analysis in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Houghton Mifflin 1976)-- Jaynes does use Socrates as an example of possession, which is the first stage of breakdown of the bicameral mind. Many of the Socratic dialogues are available online. Try the Project Gutenberg website and search for Plato. I suspect Phaedrus is one of the relevant dialogues.  -- Hendrika Vande Kemp I think it is very close to ridiculous to believe that Socrates was schizophrenic. No schizophrenic could possibly have functioned as Socrates did in his socitey. He was a renowned member of the military in his youth. In his middle adulthood he was a prominent member of a citizen commission investigating an important naval defeat (reportedly the only member of the commission to argue that the commanders were not at fault). He publicly spoke out against the tyranical government that took over Athens after its defeat by Sparta. His arguments were, by most accounts, devastatingly logical (not exactly the "disordered thinking" characteristic of schizophrenics). It is not clear what the "daimon" that he reportedly spoke of at his trial was, exactly, but there is no reason to believe it was any more psychpathological than when people say that a "little voice" told them something or other. In all probability it was a "façon de parler" for things that were matters of strong conviction for him rather than a literal report of having hallucinated voices. As for Julian Jaynes' theory of the bicameral mind: (1) no one I know of who is qualified to comment with expertise on the preclassical Greek era believes that Jaynes was correct about this, (2) Socrates lived after the age in which even Jaynes believed people were dominated by bicameral minds. -- Christopher Green It is hypothesised that Socrates experienced auditory hallucinations, but not necessarily in the way in which people nowadays experience them. Rather than being classed as mentally ill, Socrates was thought of as gifted as he could communicate with the Gods - or the divine as it is often referred to. Read "Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity" by Ivan Leudar and Philip Thomas for accounts of how Socrates and Achilles could have experienced hallucinations. -- Vicky Callaghan <a href="http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=00C0TF">www.greenspun.com/bboard/..._id=00C0TF</a> I kinda suspected hallucinogens, but whatever...maybe an ancient 'speedball' of a sort (Bi-Cam+ Whatever? ~C

by **Et in Arcadia ego** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 12:00 pm

Watership Down will never be rendered obsolete. I doubt your book even has a Black Rabbit of Inle, much less so aptly describes the 'Tharn' state that most Americans perpetually exist in. [I'll add you book to my list. I may even have it packed away as I was a..moderate..bibliophile for a few years(3,000+ books at peak level.) Cheers, D ____________________ Wehret den Anfängen

by **isachar** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 12:43 pm

I read this book more than 20 years ago, and it struck me as very profound then. The idea that the human brain has evolved its way of perceiving the world (consciousness) strikes me as being self-evident. Of course it has evolved. What Jaynes lends to this is that this evolution can be traced through the historical record. More specifically that the highest levels of consciousness (at least on a mass scale) have been achieved only recently. I suppose one could refute Jaynes by saying the methods of social control by those who ruled ancient civilizations (Inca, Aztec, Maya, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, etc.) did not necessary emanate from or rely on bi-cameralism. But the argument seems circular to me. For example today, much of the methods of social control rely on mass media programming that is accepted by the large majority of its intended audience. The mass media are today's equivalent of the large-eyed depictions of gods Jaynes speaks of which evoke feelings of awe and powerlessness. Essentially, the large mass of people in highly organized societies are infantalized by their rulers - today and in the historical past. What is interested about Jaynes' work is that he believed even the rulers in these societies were operating under the bi-cameral brain. This country seemed to be founded on the basis that this would not be the case. Clearly, those that founded this country were an extraordinary group of free thinkers and their level of consciousness - as evidenced by the writings of (for example) soldiers during the Revolutionary and later Civil War and others of higher station - were highly evolved. That much of the population consisted of self-employed farmers, traders and yeoman would have bolstered these tendencies. There can be little doubt that this country has gone backwards since then. On edit: <a href="http://p216.ezboard.com/frigorousintuitionfrm10.showMessage?topicID=6478.topic">p216.ezboard.com/frigorou...6478.topic</a> Related discussion posted by 1tal on concurrent thread: Learning to Be Stupid in the Culture of Cash By Luciana Bohne 08/12/03 You might think that reading about a Podunk University's English teacher's attempt to connect the dots between the poverty of American education and the gullibility of the American public may be a little trivial, considering we've embarked on the first, openly-confessed imperial adventure of senescent capitalism in the US, but bear with me. The question my experiences in the classroom raise is why have these young people been educated to such abysmal depths of ignorance. "I don't read," says a junior without the slightest self-consciousness. She has not the smallest hint that professing a habitual preference for not reading at a university is like bragging in ordinary life that one chooses not to breathe. She is in my "World Literature" class. She has to read novels by African, Latin American, and Asian authors. She is not there by choice: it's just a "distribution" requirement for graduation, and it's easier than philosophy -she thinks. The novel she has trouble reading is Isabel Allende's "Of Love and Shadows," set in the post-coup terror of Pinochet's junta's Nazi-style regime in Chile, 1973-1989. No one in the class, including the English majors, can write a focused essay of analysis, so I have to teach that. No one in the class knows where Chile is, so I make photocopies of general information from world guide surveys. No one knows what socialism or fascism is, so I spend time writing up digestible definitions. No one knows what Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is, and I supply it because it's impossible to understand the theme of the novel without a basic knowledge of that work - which used to be required reading a few generations ago. And no one in the class has ever heard of 11 September 1973, the CIA-sponsored coup which terminated Chile's mature democracy. There is complete shock when I supply US de-classified documents proving US collusion with the generals' coup and the assassination of elected president, Salvador Allende. Geography, history, philosophy, and political science - all missing from their preparation. I realize that my students are, in fact, the oppressed, as Paulo Freire's "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed" pointed out, and that they are paying for their own oppression. So, I patiently explain: no, our government has not been the friend of democracy in Chile; yes, our government did fund both the coup and the junta torture-machine; yes, the same goes for most of Latin America. Then, one student asks, "Why?" Well, I say, the CIA and the corporations run roughshod over the world in part because of the ignorance of the people of the United States, which apparently is induced by formal education, reinforced by the media, and cheered by Hollywood. As the more people read, the less they know and the more indoctrinated they become, you get this national enabling stupidity to attain which they go into bottomless pools of debt. If it weren't tragic, it would be funny. Meanwhile, this expensive stupidity facilitates US funding of the bloody work of death squads, juntas, and terror regimes abroad. It permits the war we are waging - an unfair, illegal, unjust, illogical, and expensive war, which announces to the world the failure of our intelligence and, by the way, the creeping weakness of our economic system. Every man, woman, and child killed by a bomb, bullet, famine, or polluted water is a murder - and a war crime. And it signals the impotence of American education to produce brains equipped with the bare necessities for democratic survival: analyzing and asking questions. Let me put it succinctly: I don't think serious education is possible in America. Anything you touch in the annals of knowledge is a foe of this system of commerce and profit, run amok. The only education that can be permitted is if it acculturates to the status quo, as happens in the expensive schools, or if it produces people to police and enforce the status quo, as in the state school where I teach. Significantly, at my school, which is a third-tier university, servicing working-class, first-generation college graduates who enter lower-echelon jobs in the civil service, education, or middle management, the favored academic concentrations are communications, criminal justice, and social work--basically how to mystify, cage, and control the masses. This education is a vast waste of the resources and potential of the young. It is boring beyond belief and useless--except to the powers and interests that depend on it. When A Ukranian student, a three-week arrival on these shores, writes the best-organized and most profound essay in English of the class, American education has something to answer for--especially to our youth. But the detritus and debris that American education has become is both planned and instrumental. It's why our media succeeds in telling lies. It's why our secretary of state can quote from a graduate-student paper, claiming confidently that the stolen data came from the highest intelligence sources. It's why Picasso's "Guernica" can be covered up during his preposterous "report" to the UN without anyone guessing the political significance of this gesture and the fascist sensibility that it protects. Cultural fascism manifests itself in an aversion to thought and cultural refinement. "When I hear the word 'culture,'" Goebbels said, "I reach for my revolver." One of the infamous and telling reforms the Pinochet regime implemented was educational reform. The basic goal was to end the university's role as a source of social criticism and political opposition. The order came to dismantle the departments of philosophy, social and political science, humanities and the arts--areas in which political discussions were likely to occur. The universities were ordered to issue degrees only in business management, computer programming, engineering, medicine and dentistry - vocational training schools, which in reality is what American education has come to resemble, at least at the level of mass education. Our students can graduate without ever touching a foreign language, philosophy, elements of any science, music or art, history, and political science, or economics. In fact, our students learn to live in an electoral democracy devoid of politics - a feature the dwindling crowds at the voting booths well illustrate. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that, in the rapacity that the industrial revolution created, people first surrendered their minds or the capacity to reason, then their hearts or the capacity to empathize, until all that was left of the original human equipment was the senses or their selfish demands for gratification. At that point, humans entered the stage of market commodities and market consumers--one more thing in the commercial landscape. Without minds or hearts, they are instrumentalized to buy whatever deadens their clamoring and frightened senses--official lies, immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt educations. Meanwhile, in my state, the governor has ordered a 10% cut across the board for all departments in the state - including education. Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=isachar>isachar</A> at: 10/10/06 11:15 am

by **FourthBase** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 6:10 pm

Cosmic Cowbell wrote:So-Crates and Bi-Cameralism....some interesting commentary... Apparently Socrates "heard voices" which he attributed to the "daimon"--which is probably the search term that will be most productive. In any case once cannot diagnose schizophrenia on the basis of auditory hallucinations alone. Regarding these voices, it might be interesting to understand them in terms of Julian Jaynes's analysis in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Houghton Mifflin 1976)-- Jaynes does use Socrates as an example of possession, which is the first stage of breakdown of the bicameral mind. Many of the Socratic dialogues are available online. Try the Project Gutenberg website and search for Plato. I suspect Phaedrus is one of the relevant dialogues.  -- Hendrika Vande Kemp I think it is very close to ridiculous to believe that Socrates was schizophrenic. No schizophrenic could possibly have functioned as Socrates did in his socitey. He was a renowned member of the military in his youth. In his middle adulthood he was a prominent member of a citizen commission investigating an important naval defeat (reportedly the only member of the commission to argue that the commanders were not at fault). He publicly spoke out against the tyranical government that took over Athens after its defeat by Sparta. His arguments were, by most accounts, devastatingly logical (not exactly the "disordered thinking" characteristic of schizophrenics). It is not clear what the "daimon" that he reportedly spoke of at his trial was, exactly, but there is no reason to believe it was any more psychpathological than when people say that a "little voice" told them something or other. In all probability it was a "façon de parler" for things that were matters of strong conviction for him rather than a literal report of having hallucinated voices. As for Julian Jaynes' theory of the bicameral mind: (1) no one I know of who is qualified to comment with expertise on the preclassical Greek era believes that Jaynes was correct about this, (2) Socrates lived after the age in which even Jaynes believed people were dominated by bicameral minds. -- Christopher Green It is hypothesised that Socrates experienced auditory hallucinations, but not necessarily in the way in which people nowadays experience them. Rather than being classed as mentally ill, Socrates was thought of as gifted as he could communicate with the Gods - or the divine as it is often referred to. Read "Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity" by Ivan Leudar and Philip Thomas for accounts of how Socrates and Achilles could have experienced hallucinations. -- Vicky Callaghan <a href="http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=00C0TF">www.greenspun.com/bboard/..._id=00C0TF</a> I kinda suspected hallucinogens, but whatever...maybe an ancient 'speedball' of a sort (Bi-Cam+ Whatever? ~C

The schizophrenia hypothesis is fucking absurd, for the reasons listed above. But I've always thought it was obvious that Socrates was manic-depressive. Talking endlessly for hours upon hours, outlasting everyone else at parties, engaging in risky behavior, inspired by daimons. Sounds like mania. Not that there's anything wrong with mania, in moderation, sublimated.

by **the_last_name_left** » Thu Nov 27, 2008 12:05 am

Is it falsifiable? It sounds like it might not be?

what would a test be?

"It renders whole shelves of books obsolete."

"It renders whole shelves of books obsolete."

Re: "It renders whole shelves of books obsolete."

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Re: "It renders whole shelves of books obsolete."

Re: "It renders whole shelves of books obsolete."

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All books are equal, but some are more equal than others..

Re: "It renders whole shelves of books obsolete."

Re: "It renders whole shelves of books obsolete."

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