The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind

Good book. Educational. Interesting.

This book arrived well before the estimated delivery date. The condition was as described and expected. While used, it was still clean and very easing to use. I'll happily do business with this vendor again.

La traducción (publicada por el FCE) es inencontrable, lo que es bastante sospechoso, porque este es un libro muy peligroso para las bases de Occidente, me temo. Y no estoy de coña.

Great read

It may appear too opinion based here and there, but the ground idea that consciousness can be thought of as language based changed my way of thinking!If you rather think of consciousness along the lines of Thomas Nagel ~ that there is something it is like to be you ~ then keep in mind that this book is addressing consciousness from a completely different angle, if not speaking about different phenomenons overall.It is a long book, but I can 100% recommend it. If you want a short version, just read the afterword.

This is a classic in its field. However, like the writings of Freud, it's core ideas are almost all wrong in detail. What makes it worth reading is the penetrating analysis of the subject, especially the role of language and the social nature of "mind". Jaynes asks a lot of good questions and should not be faulted for getting many of the answers wrong. For example, almost all of what we now know about the brain has been learned after Jaynes' death.

Les idées de Jaynes sont complètement révolutionnaires, et malgré la difficulté il se débrouille bien à la défense de sa thèse. Une thèse très séduisante, mais qui ébranle complétement nos convictions intimes, encore un pas supplémentaire par rapport à la théorie de Darwin sur l'évolution. Mais pourquoi donc la conscience? Comment est-elle apparue chez l'homme, alors qu'elle est complètement inutile dans la logique pure de l'évolution et n'amène rien en terme de survie? Ce livre pose des questions fondamentales, aussi fondamentales que le "qui sommes nous?" et "d'où venons nous?"Cette théorie d'un "esprit à deux chambres" n'a été reprise par personne après Jaynes. Dommage, car on aurait aimé une mise à jour de la théorie avec les derniers progrès scientifiques, notamment sur le fonctionnement du cerveau, car intuitivement on comprends bien que l'unité de l'esprit humain ne va pas de soi.

中身はきれいでした。もちろん使用感はありますが、気になるレベルではありませんでした。

First of all the book was copyrighted in 1976 and apparently first published in 1982. That is eons ago in the science of cognition and brain imaging. So I would like to know how the past 2 and a half decades have affected the theories in this book.I also note that the author taught at Princeton University (he died in 1997), so his theories ought to have received a hearing. But apparently the follow-up book he intended was never published, and he was considered somewhat of a maverick, if not quite a crackpot. This website offers some perspective: [...]His theory, in simplest terms, is that until about 3000 years ago, all of humankind basically heard voices. The voices were actually coming from the other side of the brain, but because the two hemispheres were not in communication the way they are now for most of us, the voices seemed to be coming from outside. The seemed, in fact, to be coming from God or the gods.So far, so good. That is certainly imaginable to most of us, because we know that schizophrenics and some others still hear voices in apparently this manner today.But he also posits that many sophisticated civilizations were created by men and women who were all directed by these godlike voices. What is not very clearly explained (a serious gap in his theory) is how all the voices in these "bicameral civilizations," as he calls them, worked in harmony. But his theory is that ancient Greece, Babylon, Assyria, Egpyt, and less ancient but similar Mayan and Incan kingdoms were all built by people who were not "conscious" in our modern sense.When one hears voices, whether then or now, the voices tend to be commanding and directive, and the need to obey them compelling. Free will is not possible. And so the people who built the pyramids were not self-aware as we are, did not feel self-pity, did not make plans, but simply obeyed the voices, which somehow were in agreement that the thing must be done.Again, when he mentions that hypnosis may be triggering a reversion to a similar kind of consciousness, in which a voice, somehow channeled through the sub-conscious rather than the reasoning part of the brain, has an unusual compelling quality to it, and enables a person to do things that in their conscious analytic mind they are unable to do, we feel that we do have a glimmer that such a state of being is possible.Of course, he connects these ideas to schizophrenia, seeing that as a throw-back to an earlier kind of mind-state, though now socially unacceptable and also unacceptable to its victim, who retains a remembrance of what it was to have control of his or her own mind.He also sees prophets as remnants of the older mind, still able to hear the voices after most people had lost the ability. And he sees idol worship and modern religious behavior as both signs of a longing for the lost certainty and simplicity of a world in which decisions didn't have to be made, and all were of one accord as to what the gods wanted done.I don't see much evidence for the pastoral simplicity which he thinks the bicameral mind lived in. But I do think that it is possible that not only ancient people but even many modern people have mind-experiences that are very different from our individualistic, introspective, self-determined ideas. In fact, I think relatively few human beings question and ponder and change belief systems as we might. The feeling of being adrift in a world that we can't understand, struggling with questions about everything, is far from universal, I think.It is pertinent that he calls the shift from bicameral (two houses) to modern consciousness a "breakdown." He sees the shift as happening in response to crises and threats in the environment, but he doesn't present it as necessarily positive, and certainly not as pleasant to those living in its shadow. He sees the cries of the Jews and many other people for God to "rend the heavens and come down," to "not forsake them," as cried from people who no longer hear the "voices" that seemed to be the gods, and who desperately miss them.In view of individuals such as Mother Teresa, who at one point had a clear inner sense of being directed by God (not necessarily actual auditory voices) and then lost that sense of presence and had to walk blindly thereafter (or silently would be a better metaphor), perhaps we would agree that the experience of the gods or God going silent not only happened at large in human history but is often recapitulated in individuals' personal history as well.If Jaynes is on to something (and I think he is, though I think he may have pushed his "theory of everything" too far and lost scientific credibility), his theory does help us understand why there is a widespread belief that in Biblical times, God interacted with people in a very different way than He does now. The Bible, and other holy books as well, are remnants of a time when human beings own inner sense of right and wrong, clean and unclean, enemy and neighbor, were experienced as coming from outside of them, from disembodied voices that commanded great power. As the mind (or brain) developed, this split healed (or this mind broke down?) and this knowing become a still small voice in many people, and in others a resounding silence.The question remains: should we take the reductionist view, and look at all religious ideas as merely misunderstandings based on schizophrenic-like delusions and hallucinations? Or should we take the view that God, who in times past spoke to us in fire and plague and audible voices (and later in dreams and visions) has now become one with humanity and speaks to us in the silence of our own hearts?A fascinating book, raising as many questions as it answers, but well worth the reading.

"The yearning for certainty which grails the scientist, the aching beauty which harasses the artist, the sweet thorn of justice which fierces the rebel from the eases of life, or the thrill of exultation with which we hear the true acts of that now difficult virtue of courage, of cheerful endurance of hopeless suffering -- are these really derivable from matter? Or even continuous with the idiot hierarchies of speechless apes?"[pp. 8-9]If nothing else, for a psychologist, Jaynes knows how to turn a phrase. The introductory chapter from which this quote is taken sets up his broad hypothesis about the origin of human consciousness which, if true, would place evolutionary biology and the evolution of human consciousness on widely different tracks.The book is in three parts: the first explains the psychology behind the hypothesis; the second tests this hypothesis in the various ancient cultures in the Middle East, as depicted through their writings; the third tests the hypothesis against a variety of different psychological phenomena (from music and poetry to possession and hypnosis). In his afterword, written in 1990, Jaynes summarizes the main points of his hypothesis:1) Consciousness is based on language -- By use of metaphors, metaphiers, paraphrands and paraphriers, human perceptivity increases by incorporating new phenomena into ideas already learned. While one can learn a number of tasks, learning is not equivalent to consciousness. Like a surfer riding the crest of a wave, human consciousness dances around, but is never completely submerged in, the sense data fed into the brain. From my own personal experience, after seeing a toddler, without any prompting, call a bicycle the "mama" and a tricycle next to it the "baby", or saying that a rust spot on a car is a "boo-boo", the ability to expand understanding via the metaphor from what is already learned has at least some anecdotal evidence to me.2) The bicameral mind -- This gets into the more controversial part of his theory. Human civilization, Jaynes says, began with citizens who were not "conscious" as we would understand it today. Rather, the brain of the "bicameral" man was orientated in such a way that one half of the brain (the right side for right-handed people) was dictating auditory (and sometimes visual) hallucinations while the left side could do nothing but obey. The characters in the Iliad are the example of such unconsciousness. Jaynes goes on to propose how whole societies could be (and, based on the archaeological record, were) organized and could still function. While it may seem implausible for an unconscious, non-self-reflecting society to be able to do anything with coordination, many people even today spend a great deal of their lives doing what they think they're supposed to do without self-reflection, until something forces them outside this direction in life. Consciousness is an exercise, not something that can rolls along of its own biological momentum.3) The dating of the breakdown of the bicameral mind -- While certain developments such as writing helped to deteriorate the lockstep bicameral order, the main impetus for the breakdown (in the Middle East, which is the only arena he's concerned with) occurs around the end of the second millennium B.C. with a series of cataclysmic events that externally caused a migration of peoples, and internally cause a diminishing of the bicameral voice. And from this regional catastrophe, Jaynes proposes, the conscious "I" began to be mapped out in the human mind for lack of the bicameral voice, in which Jaynes sees the Odyssey as an example of this developed consciousness. It also sparked the age in which prophecy, myth, and superstitions were developed as part of the religious quest to regain that lost authoritative voice.It's a well-detailed hypothesis, and some of the details might be blurred with the ordinary creative process, but the similarities between the internal model of the brain mapped out by Jaynes, and some of the more obscure details of archaeology, can't be easily dismissed. Moreover, the pliability of the brain functions make such rapid adaptations all the more possible. As Jaynes states in one of his later chapters [p.403]:"Those who through what theologians call the "gift of faith" can center and surround their lives in religious belief do indeed have different collective cognitive imperatives. They can indeed change themselves through prayer and its expectancies much as in post-hypnotic suggestion. It is a fact that belief, political or religious, or simply belief in oneself through some earlier cognitive imperative, works in wondrous ways. Anyone who has experienced the sufferings of prisons or detention camps knows that both mental and physical survival is often held carefully in such untouchable hands.""But for the rest of us, who must scuttle along on conscious models and skeptical ethics, we have to accept our lessened control. We are learned in self-doubt, scholars of our very failures, geniuses at excuse and tomorrowing our resolves. And so we become practiced in powerless resolution until hope gets undone and dies in the unattempted. At least that happens to some of us. And then to rise above this noise of knowings and really change ourselves, we need an authorization that 'we' do not have."