Reading Notes
- The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
- Probably wrong, but worth taking seriously
- Why should we take it seriously if it’s wrong?
- Jaynes is asking big questions that haven’t been asked before, and even if his answers are wrong in the specifics, they’re still interesting to think about
- Jaynes’ big question: what does the transition between an ape-mind and a modern human mind look like?
- Metaphors for consciousness
- Start by viewing our own consciousness as weird
- Consciousness: awareness of awareness
- “Private headspace”
- “Cartesian theater”
- We think our consciousness is unified and private when psychology and neuroscience tell us otherwise, repeatedly
- This metaphor for our mind isn’t natural, it had to be invented
- Language as a window into the mind
- Translating from one language to another becomes more difficult as concepts become more abstract
- Mental concepts are the most difficult to translate
- Consider the Iliad - what if the psychology of the ancient Greeks was significantly different from our own?
- According to Jaynes, the Iliad portrays a folk theory of the mind that’s split into pieces corresponding to different parts of the body
- The birth of dualism
- Ancient Greeks don’t have a word for “body”
- This implies that they don’t have the same concept of a mind/body distinction that we do
- In turn, this implies that dualism is the invented concept - people started with monism
- So if we want to understand what conscious experience was like for the Ancient Greeks, we have to think monistically - try to understand what it’s like to live without a mind/body distinction
- We have strong biases about what’s possible and legitimate as a conscious experience
- We need to get past these biases if we’re to understand how people from another time thought
- Menagerie of the mind
- The brain is capable of being in many different states that support conscious experiences of some kind
- The question of legitimacy
- Not only are brains plastic, but society is plastic too
- Many brain-states considered deviant today were within the normal range of experience at other times in history
- For example, if people lost the ability to daydream, at some point, they’d look back and think that daydreaming was extremely weird
- Might not even know what we meant by the term
- Trances
- Even though trances have the air of the occult about them, we go into mild trance-states all the time
- Possession
- A very deep trance
- Like self-induced hypnosis
- A different part of your brain is in control, but it’s still your brain
- Hallucinations
- Even though hallucinations don’t exist outside our brains, they still have real effects on us
- The fact that society treats them as illegitimate doesn’t mean they’re not real
- Maybe the greatest hallucination is the concept of a consciousness that is separate from the body
- Can we come up with a scientific explanation for religious experiences?
- Neurons, selfish and feral
- “Selfish” neurons
- Neurons are in a state of competition for resources
- Mental activity feeds neurons
- This competition is the key behind neuroplasticity - neurons actively join more active networks in order to gain resources
- Agents all the way down
- Agent - any entity capable of autonomous goal-directed behavior
- Agency is a matter of degrees
- Agency is not inherent to the system, but is ascribed to the system by post-hoc analysis
- Agency is a fundamental property of the brain
- Because neurons have a higher level of agency than other cells, the brain is configured to run agents by default
- Level 2: Modules
- We can describe the brain at a slightly higher level of abstraction as hundreds or thousands of cooperating and competing modules
- According to Dennett and Seung, these modules have the same sort of selfishness as the neurons they’re made from
- Level 3: Subpersonal Agents
- Drives/instincts
- Can “feel” these agents via introspection
- These agents aren’t capable of using language, but we still speak of them “telling” us things
- Level 4: The self
- Social agent
- Not in control, but is the “voice” of the most powerful faction in our mind
- Birth Defects in the Self
- Is the human mind capable of supporting multiple self-agents?
- Multiple occupancy
- There are multiple psychological disorders where there appear to be multiple agents in the brain
- Schizophrenia - hallucinated voices
- Disassociative identity disorder - 2 or more person-like agents in the same brain
- Posession trances - “gods” who temporarily inhabit minds
- Split-brain - when communication between parts of the brain is severed, each half acts like its own agent
- Could these agents be independently sentient?
- Agent horticulture
- Tulpas - trying to create additional agents
- Taking demons seriously
- What is the psychological or anthropological explanation for demon possession and exorcism?
- Can we think of curing possession as changing the agent that’s in control of the brain?
- The exorcist is a person with the moral authority to negotiate with the currently dominant agent and persuade them to relinquish control
- Julian Jaynes believes that people experienced gods as auditory hallucinations
- The human mind is clearly capable of hallucinating voices
- Not just deviant minds hallucinate voices - many people hallucinate voices when they dream
- Whatever the brain can do when it’s asleep it can, in principle, do when it’s awake
- Jaynes is proposing that the brain is capable of hosting multiple independent intelligences
- The “Bicameral” mind
- Thesis: people had one or more gods (independent agents) living in their brains
- Independent agents, rather than being subordinate, are peers of primary self
- A person living in Sumer in 2000 BC would be much like us, except that they would experience auditory hallucinations that they would interpret as being the voices of gods
- Gods would probably speak up during novel and stressful situations
- Like “gut feelings” with voices
- Training the Gods
- Like all agents in the brain, gods have to be trained to speak
- Done by internalizing the voices of authority figures
- Helped along by external triggers
- Temples
- Idols
- Hallucinogens
- How did people know that they were hearing the same gods? They didn’t.
- Ascribing a particular god to a voice was an act of interpretation, guided by social norms
- Psychosocial phenomena
- Bicameral gods where both neurological and cultural phenomena
- Linked by an interpretive act - identification
- This makes ancient religion a psychosocial phenomenon
- This link between cultural norms and indvidual agents can be used by priests to enforce social norms and social controls
- Banality of the Gods
- If you read closely, the ancients did talk about hallucinating their gods - they just didn’t make a big deal out of it
- Ancient texts speak of relating to gods and divinity on a much more personal and visceral level than we do today
- The reason ancient gods seem so much more human-like than modern gods is because they were much more closely tied to human brains
- No skepticism around people personally relating to gods
- The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
- Some time between 1250 BC and 500 BC, people stop believing in gods in this way
- Lots of literature written in this time period has a common theme of people being forsaken by their gods
- After the breakdown of the bicameral mind, people had to relearn how to make decisions
- This is why so many methods of divination are invented during this time period
- Conclusion
- Jaynes makes extraordinary claims, and while he does back up his claims with some evidence, the evidence he produces is nowhere near enough to validate those claims
- It may be possible that he’s wrong in the details, but he may very well be right in the broad outlines