The Universe of Discourse : The Origin of Consciousness

The Origin of Consciousness

One of my favorite books is The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes, a
psychologist at Princeton University. Nearly everyone seems to agree
that this is either a work of profound genius, or of profound
crackpottery, and also that they aren’t sure which it is. Jaynes’
theory, as nearly as I can summarize the book, is something like
this:

Human consciousness (which Jaynes describes and defines in
considerable detail) is a relatively recent development, dating
back at most only about 3,000 years or so.

That is the shocking part of the theory. Most people probably
imagine consciousness arising much, much earlier, perhaps before
language. Jaynes disagrees. In his theory, language, and in
particular its mediation of thought through the use of metaphors, is
an essential prerequisite for consciousness. And his date for the
development of consciousness means that human consciousness would
postdate several other important developments, such as metalworking,
large-scale agriculture, complex hierarchical social structures, and
even writing. Jaynes thinks that the development of consciousness is
a historical event and is attested to by written history. He tries to
examine the historical record to find evidence not only of
preconscious culture, but of the tremendous upheavals that both caused
and were the result of the arrival of consciousness.

If preconscious humans farmed, built temples and granaries, and kept
records, they must have had some sort of organizing behavior that
sufficed in place of consciousness. Jaynes believes that prior to the
development of consciousness, humans had a very different mentality.
When you or I need to make a decision, we construct a mental
narrative, in which we imagine ourselves trying several courses of
action, and attempt to predict the possible consequences. Jaynes
claims that Bronze Age humans did not do this. What then?

Instead, says Jaynes, the two halves of the brain were less
well-integrated in preconscious humans than they are today. The
preconscious mentality was “bicameral”, with the two halves of the
brain operating more independently, and sometimes at odds with each
other. The left hemisphere, as today, was usually dominant. Faced
with a difficult decision,
preconscious human would wait, possibly undergoing (and perhaps even
encouraging) an increasingly agitated physical state, until they heard
the voice of a god directing them what to do. These hallucinated
voices were generated by the right hemisphere of the brain, and
projected internally into the left hemisphere.

For example, when the Iliad says that the goddess Athena
spoke to Achilles, and commanded and physically restrained him from
killing Agamemnon, it is not fabulating: Achilles’ right brain
hallucinated the voice of the Goddess and restrained him.

In Jaynes’ view, there is a large amount of varied literary,
anthropological, and neurological evidence supporting this admittedly
bizarre hypothesis. For example, he compares the language used in the
Biblical Book of Amos (bicameral) with that in Ecclesiastes
(conscious). He finds many examples of records from the right period
of history bewailing the loss of the guidance of the gods, the
stilling of their voices, and the measures that people took, involving
seers and prophets, to try to bring the guiding voices back.

Jaynes speculates that mental states such as schizophrenia, which are frequently
accompanied by irresistible auditorily hallucinated commands, may be
throwbacks to the older, “bicameral” mental state.

Whether you find the theory amazingly brilliant or amazingly stupid, I
urge to to withhold judgment until you have read the book.
It is a
fat book, and there is a mass of fascinating detail. As I implied,
it’s either a work of profound genius or of profound crackpottery, and
I’m not sure which. (Yaakov Sloman tells me that the response to
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was
similarly ambivalent when it was new. I think the consensus is now on
the genius side.) Either way, it is quite fascinating. There needs
to be some theory to account for the historical development of
consciousness, and as far as I know, this is the only one on offer.

Anyway, I did not mean to get into this in so much detail. The reason
I brought this up is that because of my continuing interest in Jaynes’
theory, and how it is viewed by later scholars, I am reading
Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science,
and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination by Daniel B. Smith. I am
not very far into it yet, but Smith has many interesting things to say
about auditory hallucinations, their relationship to
obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other matters.

On page 37 Smith mentions a paper, which as he says, has a wonderful
title: “Involuntary
Masturbation as a Manifestation of Stroke-Related Alien Hand
Syndrome”. Isn’t that just awesome? It gets you coming and
going, like a one-two punch. First there’s the involuntary
masturbation, and while you’re still reeling from that it follows up
with “alien hand syndrome”.

To save you the trouble of reading the paper, I will summarize. The
patient is a 72-year-old male. He has lesions in his right frontal
lobe. He is experiencing “alien hand syndrome”, where his hand seems
to be under someone else’s control, grabbing objects, like the TV
remote control, or grabbing pieces of chicken off his plate and
feeding them to him, when what he wanted to do was feed himself with
the fork in his right hand. “During his hospital stay, the patient
expressed frustration and dismay when he realized that he was
masturbating publicly and with his inability to voluntarily release
his grasp of objects in the left hand.”

Reaction time tests of his hands revealed that when the left hand was
under his conscious control, it suffered from a reaction time delay,
but when it was under the alien’s control, it didn’t.

Whee, freaky.

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