The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

Jan 19, 2010 Terence rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Terence by: GR friend Jim's review

Shelves: science-general, science-psych-brain-science, science-evolution

I am giving Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (The Origin) four stars not because I’ve become a devoted follower of his theory – I haven’t – but because it reflects exactly how I feel about it – I “really liked it.” Jaynes writes in such a commanding manner that you’re helplessly swept along to the end (at which point, you can finally catch your breath and begin to assess what’s just happened). Once he’s determined the correctness of his hypothesis ...more

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May 17, 2007 Bill rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: science fiction buffs

Shelves: pop-science

Coming in a close third after Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward As Science and Beeban Kidron's To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar in the World's Clunkiest Title competition, TOoCitBotBM is surprisingly accessible given the amount of ground it covers. Combining analyses of psychology, archeology, and ancient literature, Jaynes comes up with an astounding hypothesis: early man's mind was nothing like the thing we carry around in o Coming in a close third after Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward As Science and Beeban Kidron's To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar in the World's Clunkiest Title competition, TOoCitBotBM is surprisingly accessible given the amount of ground it covers. Combining analyses of psychology, archeology, and ancient literature, Jaynes comes up with an astounding hypothesis: early man's mind was nothing like the thing we carry around in our skulls today. It was more like that of a modern schizophrenic's, egoless and subject to manipulation by hallucinated gods. This was not a defect. Mass hallucination was an essential tool for early social organization, one that evolved into modern individuated consciousness only as circumstances changed. Perhaps most intriguingly, Jaynes maintains that this variety of consciousness persisted until the dawn of recorded history. So books like the Bible and the Iliad are glimpses not only into different eras, but entirely different modes of human thought. Homer and Moses are as strange to us as Martians.

As fascinating as Jaynes' ideas may be, it's not clear what we're supposed to do with them. Even at its most specific, his hypothesis is wholly unfalsifiable, and the supporting data, while extensive, is hard to evaluate. The lay reader has to take Jaynes' word for it when he uses linguistic evidence from ancient Greek to claim that somatic metaphors in the Iliad should be interpreted literally, or draws detailed inferences from the size of eye sockets in ancient Mesopotamian statues. Despite the even scholarly tone, Jaynes often sounds like a crank, though it's not clear if it's his scholarship that's at fault or the fact that his thesis is just too marijuana-friendly.

This book's weirdness, however, is an essential part of its continued popularity. Like C.G. Jung, Jaynes has a mystical appeal. He explores the spooky intersection of madness, consciousness, and the ancient world in a scientific theory that accounts for gods and oracles without wholly explaining them away. Perhaps it's best to approach "Origin" as a masterfully detailed work of science fiction (where "Julian Jaynes" is a pseudonym for Jorge Luis Borges). Bicameral breakdown or no, human consciousness had to have an origin somewhere, and a meditation on where that origin might lie makes for heady reading. ...more

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Jan 30, 2009 Manny rated it liked it

Either a work of unparalleled genius, or completely out-to-lunch loopy. No one, not even Richard Dawkins, appears quite certain which description to apply.

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There are surprising resonances between Jaynes's ideas and those proposed by Feyerabend in Chapter 16 of Against Method. I was particularly struck by the following passage (italics as in original):

The transition from [the Homeric/archaic Greek view of the world] to [the classical Greek view of the world] thu

Either a work of unparalleled genius, or completely out-to-lunch loopy. No one, not even Richard Dawkins, appears quite certain which description to apply.

____________________________________

There are surprising resonances between Jaynes's ideas and those proposed by Feyerabend in Chapter 16 of Against Method. I was particularly struck by the following passage (italics as in original):

The transition from [the Homeric/archaic Greek view of the world] to [the classical Greek view of the world] thus introduces new entities and new relations between entities (this is seen very clearly in painting and statuary). It also changes the concept and the self-experience of humans. An archaic individual is an assemblage of limbs, connections, trunk, head, neck, (s)he is a puppet set in motion by outside forces such as enemies, social circumstances, feelings (which are described and perceived as objective agencies): 'Man is an open target of many forces which impinge on him, and penetrate his very core'. He is an exchange station of material and spiritual, but always objective, causes. And this is not just a 'theoretical' idea, it is a social fact. Man is not only described in this way, he is depicted in this way, and he feels himself to be constituted in this manner. He does not possess a central agency of action, a spontaneous 'I' that produces its own ideas, feelings, intentions, and differs from behaviour, social situations, 'mental' events of [the Homeric/archaic view]. Such an I is neither mentioned nor is it noticed. It is nowhere to be found within [the Homeric/archaic view]. But it plays a decisive role within [the classical view]. Indeed, it is not implausible to assume that some outstanding peculiarities of [the classical view] such as aspects, semblances, ambiguity of feeling enter the stage as a result of a sizeable increase of self-consciousness.

Oddly enough, Feyerabend makes no reference to Jaynes, despite the fact that the third edition, which I am reading, was published in 1990, 14 years after Jaynes.
...more

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Sep 22, 2008 Erik Graff rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: everyone

Recommended to Erik by: Linda Sue Harrington

Shelves: psychology

This was one of the most stimulating and important books I've ever encountered by a psychologist. Although flawed in some important respects, it is profoundly provocative, suggesting areas for further speculation and research not only in psychology, but also in the cultural anthropology of religions.

The primary flaw of Jayne's work is his literary evidence for the claim that humans didn't develop reflective consciousness until ca. 1000 BCE. He relies too much on the earlier texts of the Iliad fo ...more

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Aug 15, 2019 Bradley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2019-shelf, science

This book is very stimulating.

That is not to say it is correct or incorrect as a theory of consciousness, but there are enough examples and provocative ideas to make me *think* it might be right. And that's the whole problem. I can't immediately discount it. It keeps creeping back into my consciousness.

Even when reading it with deep suspicions, the very meme of this core idea breaks down the wall between my right and left hemispheres and I no longer have an external agent telling me what I must This book is very stimulating.

That is not to say it is correct or incorrect as a theory of consciousness, but there are enough examples and provocative ideas to make me *think* it might be right. And that's the whole problem. I can't immediately discount it. It keeps creeping back into my consciousness.

Even when reading it with deep suspicions, the very meme of this core idea breaks down the wall between my right and left hemispheres and I no longer have an external agent telling me what I must do. No voices, no riding in my body like I'm not an agent of my own destiny, and not even the god of the right side of my brain giving me instructions!

I jest, kinda. For this is the key to the book. It postulates that humanity was more like a zombie agent in the philosophical parlance than any true consciousness before the advent of writing. That language, itself, was a meme that forced us to develop, and re-develop our cognitions until we became our own agents, doing things by our own decisions.

Before, we were all highly perceptive creatures that always acted without reflection. We went through our lives, followed orders, did what needed to be done, but never thought of ourselves as actors. No "I". Language, as a meme, destroyed that boundary. Brought creativity into motive, the idea of self into all equations.

It explains why a mass of humanity could accomplish the pyramids on either side of the ocean, probably without complaint. There was no self. Death masks and spirits of the dead, gods, oracles, etc., could be heard by anyone and it all came from the "outside". Separate from us, but undeniable, like an edict from high. The theory is that these commands came from the right hemisphere. The creative center of the brain.

It fits. And so much of this book is devoted to the Homeric epics, to poetry, to possession, art, and music. When it became commonplace, the reliance on "gods" diminished. Rapidly. We internalized it, and it was thanks to language.

So seductive.

And it sparks my imagination, too. I think about how many people today want to submerge their consciousnesses again, be it by faith in God, alcohol, drugs, or any number of addictions (including internet!). It feels like a biological callback to the times when we did not have guilt or worry. We just followed outside orders from kings and gods, not caring if we lived or died because there was no "self" at all to care. It's a freedom in the most literal sense of the word. Freedom from self. I think of Buddhism. Or being welcomed in the arms of God in heaven. Of raptures and release.

This is what language freed us from. This is also the story of the Tree of Knowledge. Which happens to come from right after the time we developed this facility, according to Jaynes.

Interesting, no? Why have we come so far, so fast? Our humanity is much older than this timeframe, and yet it is not this chaotic, developed, or fractured. We selected ourselves, either genetically or socially, to increase the likelihood of a greater mix of both the left and right hemispheres of our brains. And here we are.

Very interesting. ...more

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Jul 04, 2015 Taka rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2-nonfiction-you-must-read, 2015, nonfiction

Amazing--

Reading The Iliad and the Old Testament of the Bible, I've always wondered about one distinctive feature they both share: an utter lack of interiority, of introspection by the characters. I brushed it aside as the literary style of the times in which they were composed (orally and then textually), but Julian Jaynes has quite a different take: the characters—like the rest of their contemporaries—were not conscious at all.

This claim alone was enough reason to pick this book up. His thesis ...more

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May 07, 2013 Jan Rice rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: psychology, read-in-the-60s-or-70s

In the process of trying to decide where to begin my review of The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, it suddenly occurred to me that revisiting Julian Jaynes' 1976 book would be a place to start. Since this morning I've lost the thread of why I thought so, but maybe I'll remember as I go along.

I have the original 1976 hardback, but since there's a bookstore sticker on the back that says "2/28/78," I know I didn't read it until then. The impetus was that I was a graduate stude ...more

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Dec 03, 2008 Matt rated it really liked it

A mind-fuck of the highest order. A work of polymathemetical genius, probably wrong on many accounts but absolutely original in its approach. Extremely readable, unpretentious prose and probings into one of life's coolest mysteries. You'll never read the Oddessey the same way again, or think about schizophrenia or Ancient Sumeria in the same way. It's speculative power has made many a head spin, I think.

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Jun 22, 2007 Eric Hertenstein rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: The Ancient Greeks

Shelves: poetry, science-fiction

Synopsis: "Consciousness" is a skill wherein people create a mental world analogous to the physical world in order to attempt hypothetical solutions to novel problems. This skill was developed over thousands of years, following the collapse of an earlier system for responding creatively to unique stimuli. This system, dubbed "the Bicameral Mind" involved the right hemisphere of the brain generating solutions and communicating them to the acting left hemisphere using language as the encoding syst ...more

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Jul 18, 2012 Leigh Jackson rated it it was amazing

Shelves: psychology, philosophy-of-mind, evolution, epistemology, reviewed

Impressive, beautiful, amazing, and totally wrong. Rivals Leibniz for elegant incorrectness.

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Dec 17, 2018 Josh Friedlander rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: philosophy, anthropology-sociology, religion, psych-and-lifehacking

There seems to be a popular perception that this book is sort of "crazy, but might just be true" (possibly inspired by a Richard Dawkins quip). I'm here to say: this book is crazy! But it's a fascinating read, as sort of creative nonfiction. Jaynes, a pretty respected psychologist writing in a time that was perhaps more receptive to New Age-y big picture ideas, thinks that a) schizophrenia is the natural, pre-conscious state of humans, which b) explains idolatry, ancestor worship and basically a ...more

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Jul 23, 2007 Kate rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction

I did read this book, or at least part of it, but really I just put it on here to impress people.

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Jul 14, 2019 Vladimir rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philosophy-and-social-sciences

This book is very strange. Julian Jaynes came out with strong thesis that our consciousnesses is the result of culture i.e. that the organization of our mind was different two millennia B.C. and started to breakdown around the first millennium B.C. Highly speculative but at the same time very well founded. The author studied thoroughly the ancient texts in order to support his view. Definitely worth of reading.

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Jul 05, 2015 Richard rated it really liked it

Shelves: d-mind

Here's an idea: what if consciousness - self-awareness, the 'I' and that private inner 'space' it seems to inhabit - is no emergent phenomenon, result of millions of years of brain evolution, but a purely cultural one derived from language, via metaphor, and which didn't appear sometime back in the Pleistocene, but recently (very recently, around 1200 BC in Julian Jaynes' estimation)?

As ideas go, it's a corker. By that date we were already tilling fields and founding the first cities, the Pyrami Here's an idea: what if consciousness - self-awareness, the 'I' and that private inner 'space' it seems to inhabit - is no emergent phenomenon, result of millions of years of brain evolution, but a purely cultural one derived from language, via metaphor, and which didn't appear sometime back in the Pleistocene, but recently (very recently, around 1200 BC in Julian Jaynes' estimation)?

As ideas go, it's a corker. By that date we were already tilling fields and founding the first cities, the Pyramids had been built and the Iliad written - all by non-conscious human beings according to Jaynes. He was no crank though: graduate of Yale and lecturer at Princeton, the nature of consciousness was the lifelong focus of his work as an ethologist. His theory was presented at a meeting of the American Psychological Society in Washington DC (admittedly to a mostly nonplussed audience) and The Origin of..., published in 1976, was runner-up in the USA's National Book Awards' nonfiction category a couple of years later. His theory rests on the brain's division into two hemispheres: earlier than around 1200 BC, instead of the introspective thinking familiar to us today, the right hemisphere solved problems non-consciously, passing on its instructions to the left where they were experienced as hallucinations (particularly auditory hallucinations) which the people themselves interpreted as the voices of gods. The gods, in other words, seemed entirely real to them and directed their lives; the resulting societies were authoritarian, rigidly stratified and stable, almost like those of social insects (think Ancient Egypt). In the Near East though, around Jaynes' critical date, this 'bicameral' mentality broke down due to demographic (and other) stresses, and was gradually replaced by the self-aware modern mind; the resulting societies, this time, were composed of true individuals.

This book is in three parts: the first outlines the theory, the second examines the evidence and the third considers possible vestiges of the bicameral mind still around today; and if all this sounds like Velikovsky or von Daniken, well it isn't exactly. In Jaynes' case the most common reaction, from academics in particular, has been a sort of head-scratching bafflement. I think this is at least partly because The Origin is beautifully written - even its trickiest ideas are explained simply, clearly, and in prose which a lot of good fiction writers would envy. What criticism there has been has focused mostly on the extraordinary timescale involved, and on Jaynes' interpretation of the Iliad - and anyone interested in Mesopotamian archaeology, or who knows the Iliad well (or the Old Testament, or the Epic of Gilgamesh) will soon see why.

I can't help wondering, too, how much of the scepticism is a gut-reaction to Jaynes' choice of the term 'hallucinations' (a word which comes with a lot of baggage: drug use, mental disorder) and the idea of Achilles and Abraham resembling schizophrenics. There's also the presence of the Julian Jaynes Society which issues newsletters and books defending and promoting the theory, but which has precisely the opposite effect (on me at least): it makes the whole thing look a bit cultish, like Scientology. My own scepticism comes from a different direction altogether though: another implication of this theory is that, if true, it would mean that only human beings are conscious - something I don't believe for a minute. Apes, elephants, cetaceans, corvids and perhaps others all show every sign of self-awareness.

Overall, I'm left with the feeling that this isn't all nonsense, that there's truth lurking at the heart of Jaynes' theory; I thought the first chapter, where he outlines what consciousness is not, what it doesn't do, by far the best - I agreed with every word of that. It's just that, from that starting point, he immediately veered off in a direction very different from the one I would have gone in. It's still, though, as thought-provoking a read as I've come across for some time. ...more

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Sep 10, 2010 Kristina rated it it was amazing

Shelves: psychology, loved-em, social-sciences, my-book, non-fiction, religion-and-philosophy, library-book

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 monologues and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointment and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns exclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden her

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 monologues and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointment and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns exclusively 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 nothing at all—what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why?

So begins Julian Jaynes’s eloquently written and fascinating book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Very few books delight and intrigue me the way this one has. I was (and still am) blown away by the theory of consciousness that Jaynes presents, and its implications regarding mankind’s history and future. Just wow.

Jaynes disagrees with the idea that consciousness is a product of animal evolution, but instead cites scientific studies, archaeological evidence and a close examination of ancient texts such as the Illiad and the Old Testament to offer an alternative theory of consciousness: it was a gradual, learned response to catastrophic events of 3000 years ago. Ancient men were not conscious and did not think the way we do. They could not introspect nor think for themselves. Instead they relied upon auditory hallucinations which were produced by the brain’s right hemisphere. These voices were considered gods who spoke directly to people and told them what to do in times of stress or uncommon, unusual situations. This ancient mentality is called the bicameral mind. Jaynes lays out the evidence to support his theory in this 450+ page book (which he charmingly refers to as “this essay”) by first exploring what consciousness is not and the origin of civilization, then turning to in depth examinations of archaeological records. The last section in the book deals with the vestiges of bicamerality in the modern age.

I’m not really going to pick apart the book and discuss what impressed me the most because I can’t. The whole book is absolutely fascinating and presented me with a completely new perspective on history, religion, science, and psychology. I have a million post-it notes stuck to the pages because on almost every page is something that made me have a “holy crap!” moment. This is one of those books that I will have to read a couple of times to truly take it all in. Which is probably why this review will not do this mind-blowing book justice—I finished this book almost a week ago and I’m still thinking about it. While Book I (“The Mind of Men”) defines consciousness and explores the evidence of bicamerality, Book II (“The Witness of History”) discusses the beginning of consciousness and the causes of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Specific citations from the Old Testament which show mankind grasping for answers from the now (mostly) absent gods make me want to go buy an excellent (linguistically accurate) translation of the Old Testament and read it to find evidence myself of this breakdown of the bicameral mind.

After looking over historical events of the past 3000+ years, one of Jaynes’s conclusions is: humans are still searching for authorization, for that voice of absolute truth, for the gods. Religion and science, Jaynes argues, have only recently been portrayed as enemies. However, both are ways of searching for divine certainties: “If we would understand the Scientific Revolution correctly, we should always remember that its most powerful impetus was the unremitting search for hidden divinity…without this religious motivation, science would have been mere technology, limping along on economic necessity…The real chasm was between the political authority of the church and the individual authority of experience. And the real question was whether we are to find our lost authorization through an apostolic succession from ancient prophets who heard divine voices, or through searching the heavens of our own experience right now in the objective world without any priestly intercession” (435). When our search for god/divine truth is frustrated, we turn to substitutions: astrology, meditation, pseudosciences (scientology and UFOs), drugs, among other practices. Modern science, he says, can also be susceptible to quasi-religious tendencies (that is, portraying itself as the divine/absolute truth). He calls these “scientisms” as and they possess these characteristics: a rational splendor that explains everything, a charismatic leader or succession of leaders who are highly visible and beyond criticism, a series of canonical texts which are somehow also outside normal scientific scrutiny, certain gestures of idea and rituals of interpretation and a requirement of total commitment. Nineteenth century Medical Materialism and Marxism are two examples he cites as scientisms. (If he were writing this book now, he'd include Scientology in that list. It fits perfectly.)

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind was published in 1976, and I am amazed that it is not more mainstream. I feel as if high school and college cheated me by not throwing this book at me and making me read it. It is controversial (still) because if flies in the face of accepted theories and truisms. However, Jaynes writes so persuasively and his evidence is so astounding that one has to—at the very least—entertain the possibility that his theory is correct. Even if, in the end, the idea of consciousness as a learned behavior is rejected, it’s still necessary to re-examine the idea of consciousness and historical motivations. And it’s never a bad idea to re-examine your mostly closely held beliefs.

The very notion of truth is a culturally given direction, a part of the pervasive nostalgia for an earlier certainty. The very idea of a universal stability, an eternal firmness of principle out there that can be sought for through the world as might an Arthurian knight for the Grail, is, in the morphology of history, a direct outgrowth of the search for lost gods in the first two millennia after the decline of the bicameral mind. What was then an augury for direction of action among the ruins of an archaic mentality is now the search for an innocence of certainty among the mythologies of facts (446).

...more

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Oct 17, 2014 Gary Beauregard Bottomley rated it did not like it

Shelves: physical

His theory is really way out there. I prefer to think that Homer was just made up and not real as all religious books are. Will Durant's "Life of Greece, Story of Civilization, Vol II" irritated me to no end because the first 8 hours or so assumed Homer was based directly on real history. Now there is some truth in Homer, but I figure one can say there is some truth in the bible, but most of it is not historical. Hollywood movies are just as fake and I won't develop a theory based on reality fro ...more

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Feb 13, 2009 George rated it it was amazing

This book is actually comprised of three books. Jaynes had intended on writing four separate books, but wound up putting three of them together into one. He was to write the fourth book later, but never got around to it before passing away, which is a shame since I think he's onto something.

Book 1: "The Mind of Man".

Originally published in 1976 and quite controversial, Jaynes posited that human consciousness is a relatively recent trait of humans occurring around 3000 to 3500 years ago. Origin This book is actually comprised of three books. Jaynes had intended on writing four separate books, but wound up putting three of them together into one. He was to write the fourth book later, but never got around to it before passing away, which is a shame since I think he's onto something.

Book 1: "The Mind of Man".

Originally published in 1976 and quite controversial, Jaynes posited that human consciousness is a relatively recent trait of humans occurring around 3000 to 3500 years ago. Origin (as I will refer to it henceforth) touches on history, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and anthropology. A few other "ologies" are thrown in for good measure too.

The introduction which is called "The Problem of Consciousness"challenges all theories which mankind has used to ascribe consciousness as an innate part of man and to try and say what consciousness actually is: consciousness as a property of matter, consciousness as a property of protoplasm, consciousness as the natural outcome of learning, and consciousness as a metaphysical imposition just to name a few. He meticulously explains why these views may not be true. For example (a weak one), he states, regarding consciousness as learning:

  "And hence a third solution, which states that consciousness began not with matter, nor at the beginning of animal life, but at some specific time after life had evolved. It seemed obvious to all the active investigators of the subject that the criterion of when and where in evolution consciousness began was the appearance of associative memory or learning. If an animal could modify its behavior on the basis of its experience, it must be having an experience; it must be conscious".

In the first chapter of Book 1 called "The Consciousness of Consciousness". This chapter is quite like the introduction, but instead of trying to work through all the things that people have used to describe consciousness as an unquestionable requirement in humans, he takes the reader on a quest to discover just how many of the things we do day-to-day are not conscious activities no matter how mentally involved they may be. Just as the introduction did he has sections such as: "Consciousness Not Necessary for Concepts", "Consciousness Not Necessary for Learning", "Consciousness Not Necessary for Thinking" and my personal favorite "Consciousness Not Necessary for Reasoning".

A few small excerpts from, Consciousness Not Necessary for Reasoning: "Reasoning and logic are to each other as health is to medicine, or --- better --- as conduct is to morality..." "...Logic is how we ought to think if objective truth is our goal --- and the everyday world is very little concerned with objective truth..." "...My point here is that for such natural reasoning to occur, consciousness is not necessary. The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all".

Then he presents an example: "A boy having observed on one or more past occasions that a particular piece of wood floats on a particular pond, will conclude directly in a new instance that another piece of wood will float on another pond. There is no collecting together of past instances in consciousness, and no necessary conscious process whatever when the new piece of wood is seen directly as floating on a new pond. This is sometimes called reasoning from particulars, and is simply expectation based on generalization..." "...Such reasoning is the structure of the nervous system, not the structure of consciousness".

As a juxtaposition against the introduction where we were told what consciousness is not a property of, this section gets you prepared to accept that many of the things that we view as indicators of consciousness are in fact completely non-conscious activities. My favorite quote from this chapter is regarding reason and logic: "Surely, we exclaim, this cannot be true of the highest processes of intellectual thought! Surely there at last we will come to the very empire of consciousness, where all is spread out in a golden clarity and all the orderly processes of reason go on in a full publicity of awareness. But the truth has no such grandeur. The picture of the scientist sitting down with his problems and using conscious induction and deduction is as mythical as a unicorn".

Chapter 2 is called "Consciousness" and he focuses on language, specifically written language, as being a requirement for the the start of consciousness in humans. The very first section of this chapter is about metaphor and how most of the words in any language, if you dig far back enough started out as metaphors. Essentially, when new concepts are introduced, the best way to convey the new concepts is via metaphor. He provides a series of examples and then works up to the idea that metaphor is really the "language of the mind". As he progresses he becomes more specific about language and how the concepts of "I" and "me" fit into our existing experience with consciousness. There is a lot of bouncing back and forth between the history of languages and human consciousness today with the linking entity being metaphors.

It is in the third chapter that we start getting to why he supposes that consciousness arose in humans 3000 to 3500 years ago when written language first began to appear. He starts by using Homer's The Illiad as some of his supporting evidence: "There is in general no consciousness in the Illiad. I am saying 'in general' because I shall mention some exceptions later. And in general therefore, no words for consciousness or mental acts". He uses the lack of internal motivation in all characters as some evidence. The characters are only made to do things at the whim of the gods: "When, toward the end of the war, Achilles reminds Agamemnon of how he robbed him of his mistress, the king of men declares, 'Not I was the cause of this act, but Zeus, and my portion, and the Erinyes who walk in darkness: they it was in the assembly put wild ate upon me on that day when I arbitrarily took Achilles' prize from him, so what could I do? Gods always have their way.' (19:86-90). And that this was no particular fiction of Agamemnon's to evade responsibility is clear in that this explanation is fully accepted by Achilles, for Achilles is also obedient to the gods".

Just after this point, Jaynes finally gets to the meat of the theory behind Origin. He suggests that the point of view that all men in the Illiad are driven by "the gods" and no sense of individual motive at all was not a mere poetic device. Instead he suggests that at this point in human development most humans were in fact experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations which they perceived as gods. These hallucinations were essential to humans at this time to allow them to function day to day. To give them guidance and structure. This is what he calls the Bicameral mind: "In distinction to our own subjective conscious minds, we can call the mentality of the Myceneans a bicameral mind. Volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness whatever and then 'told' to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend of authority figure or 'god', or sometimes as a voice alone. The individual obeyed these voices because he could not 'see' what to do by himself".

The purpose of the auditory and visual hallucinations, according to Jaynes, has a physiological basis. His point is that the vastly larger number of neurons firing on either side of the brain need some efficient way to communicate information to the other hemisphere over the small bridge between them. After explaining the power of auditory stimuli and how it cannot be shut out, especially if emanating from within and then moving onto auditory and visual hallucinations, he suggests that these experiences are the communications protocol between both halves of the brain.

If you look at it from the perspective of computers, Jaynes suggests that hallucinations are a form of data compression for both halves of the brain to exchange information. Or at least they were, for the bicameral man. This need became superfluous when consciousness began and humans started functioning as individuals. He doesn't believe this happened right away and suddenly everyone was conscious. He believes that this happened over a long period of time and that there are still lingering elements of bicameralism in humans.

After making this bold statement, he then walks through a few assumed counter-responses and provides his answer why he believes these arguments against him are incorrect. At one point in the chapter he also points to the greek gods in the Illiad and their limitations. They are not supernatural. They are limited by the laws of the natural world. They cannot create anything out of nothingness. They are not at all like the Hebrew god.

The remainder of book one clarifies the rest of his reasoning as to why he came to his conclusion about humans living without consciousness. He writes more on the origins of language, the experience of modern day schizophrenics, his views on how and when language arose, the development from crude burial rituals to religions and then eventually when and why consciousness happened in humans.

I enjoyed book one a lot. Partially because it pokes holes in well established and very sound beliefs, but also because it's a fascinating prospect and fairly well thought out. If only there was more room in the review to write about how good this book is.
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Sep 09, 2014 Alex Lee rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, philosophy, 2014, science

What's particularly hard to swallow about this book is that Jaynes goes far to argue for undermining not only how we know ourselves but also how we are to account for what we are doing. One of the basic rubrics of science and philosophy is our concept of consciousness, as a container for our individuality and our ability to comprehend/experience. To question consciousness itself in the form that we believe it comes in, in the method by which we determine ourselves is to question the very possibl What's particularly hard to swallow about this book is that Jaynes goes far to argue for undermining not only how we know ourselves but also how we are to account for what we are doing. One of the basic rubrics of science and philosophy is our concept of consciousness, as a container for our individuality and our ability to comprehend/experience. To question consciousness itself in the form that we believe it comes in, in the method by which we determine ourselves is to question the very possible ordering of how we coexist today. This isn't to say that our conception of ourselves isn't natural, or that consciousness itself isn't natural, but that is to say that we don't have to live as we do or be how we are.

When one argues for the dissolution of such a basic structural artifact, it becomes terribly difficult for people to follow in how to evaluate that argument. Many of the comments around this book reflect both how clear and powerful Jaynes is in setting up his argument, but also many of the comments display a complete lack of trust in his argument because they do not see a deeper underlying appraisal of how to evaluate what he says.

Its true that in a big way, his ideas are unfalsifiable. We can't disprove them. We can't do EEG readings on people that were alive many generations ago. We only have textual analysises. And we can't reproduce the results of the past either because it's unethical or we have become so tainted with our own evaluations of consciousness that such "experimentation" would be impossible to reproduce in a pure clinical environment. In this sense, what Jayne is doing isn't science, even if he is coming from a scientific background. What he is doing is doxa, or opinion. And science really only likes questions that it can readily answer... meaning that it only poses questions it can answer, in general, questions that do not shake things up too badly so that we lose our ability to even know if a question has or has not been answered.

What I like especially about this book is that Jayne takes us to a far away place. He throws his thesis out there, marks it as a point for us to follow. In doing so, he begs us to loosen our sense of what we take to be knowledge and consider the reality that our given ideas of ourselves limit how we even frame the things we are desirous to study. The objects of knowledge are objects created by what we think we know. But what is the proper basis for authority?

This is one of the most frightening implications of what he says. There is no proper basis. All authority is self referential. The most rigid of us (or unimaginative) would consider that he makes no sense, because sense making requires certain correlations in our thinking that are made unavailable if we are to consider what he says as being actual. His chapter in hypnosis is most telling. If we consider what he says to be true: that different hypnotic experiments parrot the ideas of what the hypnotized subjects thought was hypnosis then it frighteningly follows that our own ideas of what is true inexorably alters what we believe can be true... which means a rejection of everything which cannot follow the ideas we have to be given.

I don't want to make a review of this book too long. I do want to point out that consciousness and language today can be studied under the rubric of cognitive linguistics. And the idea that metaphors are the basic mode of understanding does follow many contemporaneous thinkers today, even if it was less compellingly so when he wrote this book. So we seem to be catching up to him, although we will wonder about the possibility of an awareness that isn't as discrete and individualized as the consciousness he describes being so in past humankind. Matching his idea to the contours of what we know to be history (as a series of events) isn't proof of truth, but it does add his reasoning among everything else... including the question as to what is the proper authority of how we should know things.

For me, the key to what seems to be confusion in reading Jaynes' work comes from the position of understanding as metaphor. As anything can be metaphorized, so can any position be created as a justified reality. This goes against science's desire for rigor, that to know the universe means its mathematical formulation... even though mathematicians themselves may disagree as to what are ultimately valid constructs by which understanding can extend, and those extensions may be incomplete in the sense that they cannot be translatable to the daily experiential lived positions we take for granted. For example, the birth of life explained by biology does not follow our lived experience of life among the living... not only to say that while someone who maybe an interbehaviorial psychologist or a physicist may claim that their field can explain reality, it can never justify why one twin may become a psychologist and the other a strict mormon or any other ridiculously constrained situation... for such "explanations" always require endless deferral into other regimes which can then mirror the movement as an originary "cause". We can talk about this as a discursive form of Hume's take down of causation.

In other words, formal understanding explained without content can never justify particular contents and particular understandings even as understanding exploded into such a general paradigm may lead to any number of contingencies that we may find to be without cause. The confusion has to do with description or prescription. Is science (or any collection of relations that constitute a system) only to describe or is it to prescribe?

For Jayne, science rests wholly on the former, and for that I applaud his efforts. We may not like what we read, but if we find that we cannot take sense of it, then the failure is wholly on our part. What is so objectionable that how we conceive of ourselves today is wholly contingent on a very basic conception of how we fit in with one another? Are we so into our set ideas of social groups that we cannot accept what we call as madness as a more general position of what we call sanity as it insists on itself for-itself?

In the end though, how one reader, you or I, apprehend this work, or any other work, is a very personal question. But I find his intensity and clarity to be rare among thinkers. At the end of the day though, who knows? We might as well look into it. And if he inspires it, so all the better it must be. ...more

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May 23, 2019 Betawolf rated it it was ok

As an argument that Jaynes' thesis actually is true, severely disappointing. I can only assume that the people rating this as 5 stars are impressed by Jaynes' bold and outlandish theory, and not the actual argument that Jaynes sets out for it, which is quite clearly shoddy reasoning with the occasional lyrical flourish to smooth over the logical leaps. Some examples:

- Jaynes establishes that what he calls consciousness -- a sort of mind-scape -- depends on metaphor. He points out that language a
As an argument that Jaynes' thesis actually is true, severely disappointing. I can only assume that the people rating this as 5 stars are impressed by Jaynes' bold and outlandish theory, and not the actual argument that Jaynes sets out for it, which is quite clearly shoddy reasoning with the occasional lyrical flourish to smooth over the logical leaps. Some examples:

- Jaynes establishes that what he calls consciousness -- a sort of mind-scape -- depends on metaphor. He points out that language also depends heavily on metaphor. Therefore, consciousness must post-date language! (Uh, what?)
- Jaynes wants to review evidence for consciousness from the ancient world. But not the most ancient world, "in which modern scholars project their own subjectivity with little awareness of the importance of their distortion" (i.e., provide translations that challenge his thesis). He focuses primarily on the Iliad, which he claims has no words for thought, except the ones he lists which he insists shouldn't really be interpreted as being about thought, and except the sections that are probably later additions... I'm no classicist, but this comes off as an argument based entirely on special pleading. An extremely worrying amount of his argument is based on his own, highly selective reading of sections of the Iliad, with reference to his own (seemingly unvalidated and controversial) translations.
- He several times makes the strange assertion that bicameral people are not responsible for their actions, because their 'man' brain (left hemisphere) was just following orders from their 'god' brain (right hemisphere). This makes about as much sense as declaring that a man is not responsible for theft because his hand was just following orders from his brain. I think what has happened here is that Jaynes has let the labels he assigns to each hemisphere run away with him -- something certainly borne out by Jaynes' attempts to link all religious behaviour to bicamerality.
- Of which: In his review of ancient cultures, Jaynes proceeds from a tenuous and unverified speculative link between his bicameral thesis and religion, to taking any evidence of any religion, including ancestor-worship, as being evidence of a bicameral society. He ignores, in a manner I do not fully comprehend, the surely obvious fact that definitely 'subjective' modern humans also have all of those same structures in their societies, and so at best their presence in archaeological or historical accounts of cultures cannot be meaningful evidence either way.

There is much more, and it was hard to keep track of the numerous dubious-sounding assertions that would be worthy of fact-checking (a couple: there is "nothing like" possession in the Iliad? Ancients had no concept of 'madness'?). So much of Jaynes' argument, though, is just naked speculation piled on top of more speculation, in a towering construction of connections that has essentially no foundation at all.

As for Jaynes' idea about bicamerality, it was certainly an intriguing thought, but... Look, let's talk about Stargate. The premise of Stargate is that the ancient human world was actually ruled by technologically-advanced aliens, who presented themselves as gods. It's cool because it connects ancient deities like Ra and Kronos to modern sci-fi hijinks. It's especially fun, if you're into that sort of thing, to read histories and translations of ancient materials and search out things that conform to the theory. There are lots of easy wins -- gods living in the heavens, flying magic chariots through the air, things that you could read as energy weapons, references to other worlds, et cetera. Of course, you have to smooth out or ignore various details in order to make it fit properly, but that's perfectly harmless as a bit of fun.

Jaynes is doing that for his bicamerality thesis, but: 1. it's not just for fun, he's serious; 2. he does it quite poorly. The readings are obviously tortured in some places, and honestly the Stargate thesis makes for much simpler and more compelling answers to the things he describes. Example: people in certain ancient cultures talk about a war in heaven and then lament the absence of gods. Is this a) because they have all simultaneously gone through a profound psychological change for no clear reason and no longer collectively hallucinate the presence of their gods [though will continue to have religions and talk about talking to gods for millennia] or b) because their gods had a big space-battle and some of them died? Okay, the alien gods theory has a lot of hidden explaining to do, but so does Jaynes and at least Stargate's brain-control snakes seem logistically possible.

I tried to treat the book as an extended conjecture about what if Jaynes' (quite possibly unfalsifiable) thesis were true, but it was not really possible -- he kept reminding me inadvertently of a leap he had made previously (often by building on a speculation's conclusion as if it were now established), so I was often somewhere between annoyed and rolling my eyes. However, the book is not all negative. Jaynes is a good writer, and he holds your attention well on the page, something helped by his choice of topics -- he brings in interesting snippets from psychological studies, archaeology, ancient history, philosophy and poetry. His argument may be terrible, but it has some fascinating examples bound up in it which centre around 'weird brain stuff', and he might be worth reading for his coverage of these alone.

...more

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Oct 20, 2014 Barry King rated it it was amazing

I'm giving this one five stars not because I agree with it, but because it is so unique and remarkable. It's important to understand that "consciousness" to Jaynes is nothing like perception, but strictly a type of subjective deliberation that we associate with reasonableness, debate, and so on, the stuff that makes modern life: the ability to enter into agreements, law versus appeal to authority, and so on. His contention is that mankind's idea of thought was a different beast three thousand ye I'm giving this one five stars not because I agree with it, but because it is so unique and remarkable. It's important to understand that "consciousness" to Jaynes is nothing like perception, but strictly a type of subjective deliberation that we associate with reasonableness, debate, and so on, the stuff that makes modern life: the ability to enter into agreements, law versus appeal to authority, and so on. His contention is that mankind's idea of thought was a different beast three thousand years ago, and that the kind of experience of reality that this kind of thinking ran on was what we would now characterize as hallucinogenic, inspired, and beyond the control of the thinker.

I've returned to the book after having put it down for a quarter century, and I'm glad I did. Reading the (very readable, despite the ridiculous title) book again, I was left with the feeling that there is a kernel of truth here, that in Jaynes' attempt to be universal, he never quite strikes directly. If anything, he suffers from an excess of classical education, in that he has, unconsciously (if I can be so crass as to use the term in this context), fallen into the fallacy of believing that civilization progresses in a unified fashion towards greater complexity and urbanity. Like futurists and historians alike, he does not seem to take into account that cultural transmission is uneven even in the smallest populations, and that the theory he puts together can't be extended globally in any way.

However, I don't think anyone with the slightest tinge of cynicism can read the Old Testament and not be struck with the degree to which Abraham and many of the prophets resemble schizophrenics in the full florid expression of their disease, and Jaynes draws many parallels between schizophrenia and the "bicameral mind" he attempts to isolate and describe. Drawing on archaeological evidence and making a very good case of it, he shows how this other state of mind, where gods spoke and men found themselves obeying unconsciously (in the same way that we unconsciously brush our teeth or go about our habitual routine without deliberation) the demands of what would later be characterized as religion. His case that religion as we know it now is the attempt to capture in legal code a way of thinking that came naturally to the residents of Greece, Mesopotamia, the Levant, and the region. He captures how religions at the time slowly felt the pang of losing their gods and relying more and more on written dogma, oracular mechanisms, and the like.

And that's what makes this book particularly interesting, is how convincing a picture he builds. Certainly, there is a lot to digest, but somehow, I'm left with the "gut" feeling that he's onto something, and while he's wrong in the generalization of the narrative, there is a genuine understanding of the changes that come to the average or prevalent mindset as it grows out of a monoglot, heavily habituated state into something more ritualized, then onto true deliberation and negotiation, which brings us into the modern era. It's easy to relax into this idea and see the transformation of (admittedly very western ideas of) civilization from a superstitious, god-laden, tribal past into a time of abstract thought and precedent-based legal tradition in the modern nation-state.

And yet, I think of chimpanzees exercising deceit and propaganda, and feel he's missed something very fundamental. Somewhere between the two, though, I think the book helps the reader understand an earlier age. ...more

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Jan 07, 2013 Keith Swenson rated it really liked it

I must fall back on description of the book given by someone else: it is "either complete rubbish or the work of a consummate genius ... nothing in between."

Gave the book 4 stars because it is one of those books that really makes you think about everything.

What Jaynes does do is to look at the periods of history and identify a pattern of psychological differences over time by analyzing the writing left to us by those people. He sees a rather distinct change happen about 1000 BCE in the middle e I must fall back on description of the book given by someone else: it is "either complete rubbish or the work of a consummate genius ... nothing in between."

Gave the book 4 stars because it is one of those books that really makes you think about everything.

What Jaynes does do is to look at the periods of history and identify a pattern of psychological differences over time by analyzing the writing left to us by those people. He sees a rather distinct change happen about 1000 BCE in the middle east (other times in other parts of the world). He sees that trend as part of a cultural-psychological arc that extends across history in several stages: the "Enlightenment" as a more recent development in this trend.

The idea is so wacky: that the pyramids were built by unconscious people; that consciousness is a behavior that you learn from others in the your culture. I would imagine an unconscious person as wandering around as if in a dream. Jaynes' definition of consciousness might better be termed 'meta-consciousness': being aware that you are aware. The biggest flaw in the book is to call this property "consciousness" because it grates against the pop-psychology notion of consciousness. Had he invented a word (e.g. "grok") the book might be easier to discuss. Even with that, I can't say that I "believe" or even "agree" with his central thesis -- it is just too sketchy.

If you can get past this limitation, there are undeniable truths in the book that explain things that few have tried to explain. Why did so many major cultures trace their roots back to around 600BC? Why did the Oracle at Delphi persist as an institution for 1000 years with the region's smartest people visiting it regularly. There are so many beginnings at that time period that it is only natural to ask: what really changed at that time? And what is it that has really changed since then? I keep thinking of Monte Python's "Life of Brian" where they depict a time when prophets and miracle workers were a daily occurrence.

There is no doubt that members of our modern cultures think about the world in a vastly different way than people did a few thousand years ago. Jaynes attempts to plot the course of that change, and show evidence from writing at different times in history. There is certainly no question that people today think about the world the way we do because we learned it from our culture. How then does a culture change from believing in demons and gods in everything around, to a more rational view of the world? It probably didn't happened the way that Jaynes describes it, but then there still is always a chance that he is right. There is at least a germ of truth in what he says.

It is not an easy read, and draws on a hefty understanding of ancient history. Yet, it is one of those "mind blowing" books that may change your view of some things forever. I feel certain, that some future philosopher will work out actual course of such social/psychological development, and that work will no doubt cite Julian Jaynes as one of the initial sparks of innovation in that direction. ...more

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Dec 07, 2011 Bethany rated it liked it

Shelves: other-nonfiction

A remarkable book, even if it's crazy. It's already been reviewed and critiqued in far more detail then I shall. Instead I'll summarize the book with a passage therefrom:

"I have endeavored in these two chapters to examine the record of a huge time span to reveal the plausibility that man and his early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality than our own, that in fact men and women are not conscious as are we, were not responsible for their actions, and therefore cannot be given the c A remarkable book, even if it's crazy. It's already been reviewed and critiqued in far more detail then I shall. Instead I'll summarize the book with a passage therefrom:

"I have endeavored in these two chapters to examine the record of a huge time span to reveal the plausibility that man and his early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality than our own, that in fact men and women are not conscious as are we, were not responsible for their actions, and therefore cannot be given the credit or blame for anything that was done over these vast millennia of time; that instead each person had a part of his nervous system which was divine, by which he was ordered about like any slave, a voice or voices which indeed were what we call volition and empowered what they commanded and were related to the hallucinated voices of others in a carefully established hierarchy. The total pattern, I suggest, is in agreement with such a view. It is, of corse, not conclusive. However, the astonishing consistency from Egypt to Peru, from Ur to Yucatan, wherever civilizations arose, of death practices and idolatry, of divine government and hallucinated voices, all are witness to the idea of a different mentality from our own...the gods were at the same time a mere side effect of language evolution and the most remarkable feature f the evolution of life since the development of Homo sapient himself. I do not mean this simply as poetry. The gods were in no sense 'figments of the imagination' of anyone. They were man's volition. They occupied his nervous system, probably his right hemisphere, and from stores of admonitory and preceptive experience, transmuted this experience into articulated speech which then 'told' the man what to do."

And there you have it. This book probably shouldn't have been the first one I read on this topic. It's tempting for an uneducated bumpkin like me to infer that for some reason he REALLY hated the idea of millennia of mentally developed, psychologically mostly-modern humans living in violent, squalid ignorance and taking ages to develop reason, science, art, and manners...but who knows? ...more

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May 23, 2009 Cassandra Kay Silva rated it it was amazing

Shelves: psychology-sociology

I am giving this a five not because I buy into what Jaynes is saying, actually if anything I finished the book still a 100% skeptical about his ideas, but because his approach, his idea and his presentation was actually extremely good. Whether this proves true or not it was still vastly interesting and at least a new way at looking at the evolution of man. I mean when we look at evolution as it is we have to determine SOME point in time where man gained this thing we call consciousness. Some poi ...more

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Jul 19, 2007 Jrobertus rated it it was amazing

Shelves: reallygoodbooks

I have read this book several times. His hypothesis about the acquisition of modern linguistic consciousness is controversial and probably wrong in detail. However, it is very thought provoking, gorgeously written, and is the clearest statement of the uniqueness of the human mind that I have read. Jaynes is (was) a true scholar. He taught himself Greek so he could investigate the nuanced differences in temperament between the Iliad and the Odyssey as part of his analysis of the evolution of mode ...more

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Feb 19, 2011 Bob Mayer rated it it was amazing

Not for the faint of heart. I had to read it three times (and it's a very big book) in order to grasp the fundamentals of what the author was saying. I actually used this book a lot in writing my Atlantis series where I explored the untapped power of the subconscious mind. If you want to grasp how our brain developed, I highly recommend this book. It's hard to find, but it is out there.

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Feb 04, 2014 Kayson Fakhar rated it it was amazing

"It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between!"
Richard Dawkins

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Nov 11, 2014 Teo 2050 rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, misc_analogy-metaphor, evolution, _audio, by_psychologists, neuro, _contents, consciousness, sensation-perception, _nonfiction

8h @ 2x. This book presents the theory/hypothesis of bicameralism according to which "the human mind once assumed a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be 'speaking', and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind." This was to me new & interesting & I'll have to read more before deciding what to make of it. At the very least the book was structured so pleasantly that I warmly recommend it as entertaining food for tho 8h @ 2x. This book presents the theory/hypothesis of bicameralism according to which "the human mind once assumed a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be 'speaking', and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind." This was to me new & interesting & I'll have to read more before deciding what to make of it. At the very least the book was structured so pleasantly that I warmly recommend it as entertaining food for thought regarding [consciousness & introspection, mythology, neuro- & cultural evolution, schizophrenia, etc. (see the contents)]. Fav'd for further exploration.

Relevant quote sometimes attributed to Aristotle:

It is the mark of an educated* mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

*or post-bicameral? ;)

Contents:
(view spoiler) ...more

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Mar 24, 2019 Angelina rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-referenced-in-grad-school, non-fiction

If ever an author needed a friend to say, "That's a terrible title, don't use it," this is it. Jaynes' book should have been called something like "We Were All Schizophrenics."

This is an academic look at where consciousness comes from and how consciousness is different from what came before--what Jaynes terms the bicameral mind. The book explores archaeological as well as literary evidence for what brains worked like a long time ago, and my simple sum up is that the language center of our brains ...more

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Sep 22, 2018 Ryan Alsaihaty rated it liked it · review of another edition

In this 1976 book, the author discusses his theory on the origin of consciousness and its relation to what he calls the bicameral mind. The main ideas of this theory are:

1) Before consciousness, human nature was split in two, an executive part called bicameral god, and a follower part called a bicameral man. Together they constitute the bicameral mind.

The bicameral god is auditory voices/hallucinations that guide and direct the bicameral man. The bicameral man follows these directions strictly ...more

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Feb 25, 2013 JJVid rated it it was ok

Shelves: evolution, psychology

In short, Jaynes' theory is highly speculative at best, and intentionally misleading at worst. Jaynes believes that three plus millennia ago humans were, overall, non-conscious automatons similar to Descartes' mechanical animals. There was rationality, there was language (and communication), there was a distinction between "others" and "self", but none of this amounted to what we would call "consciousness". Consciousness, in Jaynes' opinion, did not come about until around the second century B.C In short, Jaynes' theory is highly speculative at best, and intentionally misleading at worst. Jaynes believes that three plus millennia ago humans were, overall, non-conscious automatons similar to Descartes' mechanical animals. There was rationality, there was language (and communication), there was a distinction between "others" and "self", but none of this amounted to what we would call "consciousness". Consciousness, in Jaynes' opinion, did not come about until around the second century B.C. Jaynes spends a good deal of space discussing what consciousness is NOT. Here I believe he errs by taking a single case and generalizing it too far; e.g. Circle, Triangle, Circle, Triangle, Circle, X... what is X? You say Triangle without thought, it was automatic and without thought... thinking, therefore, is non-conscious. What? Just because you can show ONE case where thinking simply is automatic does NOT mean that all forms of thought are relegated to the automatic and non-conscious realm. Over-generalizations like the former are replete within this book, and scientific scrutiny is often left to the wayside and substituted with bold theorizing (read: exceedingly rash speculation).

He says at the close of the first chapter, "unless you are here convinced that a civilization without consciousness is possible, you will find the discussion that follow unconvincing and paradoxical" (47). I found it utterly unconvincing.

In a large portion, Jaynes bases his theory off the anecdotal "evidence" that the earliest known Greek work "The Iliad" was an historical description of the behavioristic actions of seemingly non-conscious men. That there was no description of internal motivations, much less an internal life at all, and that the functionaries of any novel action (aka non-habitual action) was derived from the Gods literally telling the characters to do X is, to Jaynes, evidence that nothing of this sort ever occurred back then. Jaynes believes that the writing of "The Iliad" is definitely NOT a literature device, or an intentional way of conveying a narrative, but is a vivid description of human life at the time it was written. He relies so heavily on "The Iliad" as an historical document that within the text he flat out denies the existence of certain human traits, namely consciousness and introspective deliberation, simply because "The Iliad" made no mention of them. "There is no question of its historical substrate. The Iliad is not imaginative creative literature and hence not a matter for literary discussion. It is history, webbed into the Mycenaean Aegean, to be examined by psychohistorical scientists" (76). I view "The Iliad" as a fictional narrative, Jaynes views it as factual history. Whatever side you tend towards will severely affect your interpretation of this book.

I give Jaynes credit, though, for addressing some very good distinctions between consciousness and functionality. "The actual process of thinking... is not conscious at all and that only its preparation, its materials, and its end result are consciously perceived" (41). We tend to believe that thinking itself if a conscious process, but Jaynes' makes a valid argument that thinking is often automatic -- a result of past experience and learnings (which themselves are not necessarily conscious) -- and that thinking often has no counterpart in reflection; it is more of a reaction. However, like I mentioned before, a single case in favor does not generalize to all.

Jaynes' theory is, by his own admission, speculative and weak. He makes many remarks and caveats warning the reader that "what you are about to read is speculative and my own theory, it is not the orthodox opinion and is not held by most scientists in this particular field" (yes, it's a paraphrase, but he said something almost exactly like this). I thank you, Julian Jaynes, for forewarning me about the unorthodox position from which you are proffering your theories, but I would be remiss if I did not say that I've become wary of even your own belief in this theory since at almost every significant juncture of philosophizing you've felt it necessary to point out the potential and probable ridiculousness of your theorizing. It was a fun speculative adventure, and I won't say that I didn't enjoy your book (I did), but I'll chalk this one up to my "bullshit" category and feel contented that I at least got a good workout of my 'critical thinking' mental muscle. Despite your absurd ideas and wanton neglect of scientific rigor, I enjoyed following you along this delusion. You made some valid points, you forced me to think (albeit in antagonism to yourself), and I leave feeling like I learned something. It wasn't much, but it was something.

It was.... okay. ...more

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