Reading Notes

Mr. Jaynes’ Wild Ride

  • 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

Accepting Deviant Minds

  • 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

Neurons Gone Wild

  • 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

Hallucinated Gods

  • 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