Gary Lachman's History of Consciousness
Posted: Thu Mar 05, 2020 8:42 pm
Up until page 144, I'm been pretty impressed by Lachman's work. He manages to trace further back into the past than Jaynes, citing
"The dream culture of the Neanderthals : guardians of the ancient wisdom" by Stan Gooch. Lachman also provides a lucid definition of consciousness based on early thinkers like Rudolf Steiner that seems entirely compatibility with the approach taken by Jaynes. However, things start to go sideways on page 144. It seems as if Lachman did not fully understand the way Jaynes discussed hallucination. Lachman wrote, "Jaynes, unfortunately, was a convinced materialist, and he uses his experience as evidence for his belief that the gods of the ancients were merely similar hallucinations, which our ancestors only mistook for messages from divine beings." Is this accurate? I think not! My impression is that, for a bicameral human, wise guidance would be perceived as the voice of God. Only when we regard this ancient bicameral human from the modern point of view would we re-classify the experience as more like an auditory hallucination.
"The dream culture of the Neanderthals : guardians of the ancient wisdom" by Stan Gooch. Lachman also provides a lucid definition of consciousness based on early thinkers like Rudolf Steiner that seems entirely compatibility with the approach taken by Jaynes. However, things start to go sideways on page 144. It seems as if Lachman did not fully understand the way Jaynes discussed hallucination. Lachman wrote, "Jaynes, unfortunately, was a convinced materialist, and he uses his experience as evidence for his belief that the gods of the ancients were merely similar hallucinations, which our ancestors only mistook for messages from divine beings." Is this accurate? I think not! My impression is that, for a bicameral human, wise guidance would be perceived as the voice of God. Only when we regard this ancient bicameral human from the modern point of view would we re-classify the experience as more like an auditory hallucination.