Evidence of the Bicameral Breakdown
Posted: Fri Dec 23, 2011 4:56 pm
I want to start out by saying that Jaynes' book is an impressive piece of thinking. I don't think that I have ever learned so much from a book when I disagreed with the basic premises. Simply following the exploration of a first class mind, such as Jaynes', makes his book a must read. But ultimately I am not convinced that consiousness came into being roughly 3,000 years ago. I have read the critiques section as well as the myth and facts section at this site, and it seems to me that most of the objections that have been raised against Jaynes are simply misunderstandings of his ideas or of the facts of neuroscience. But I think that there are still many objections that go unanswered.
Jaynes' approach to dating the evolution of consiousness is to use the literature of the period as a reflection of the mental processes that were active for the period. The problem that I have with such an approach is that I see no necessary link between what is written about and what is thought about. Writing has undoubtedly had its own evolution. In the beginning the ability to write was held by the very few. And people were not taught to write so that they could express their inner thoughts or emotions. Writing was more of a pragmatic tool for recording commerce or the major actions and campaignes of kings and gods. So I cannot agree that the nonexistence in writing of elements that Jaynes considers to be markers for consiousness is equivalent to those processes not happening in everyday life. The other side of this equation is that the breakdown of the bicameral mind is, at least in part, attributed to writing - that there was a connection between writing and people no longer "hearing" their gods. But in the period where this transition was suppose to occur, the vast majority of people were still illiterates. Writing could not have caused them to loose their gods, because they could not read or write to begin with.
Another problem that I have is the idea that thinking could not have been happening in a mindspace that involved the narratization of the problem to be dealt with. Instead the solutions to problems were given to people as auditory hallucinations from gods. The problem with this is that we would expect such auditory hallucinations to result in recommendations that are no better than advice from a lower aninal if there was, in fact, no working out of the problems in a mindspace of some sort. Let us remember that those auditory hallucinations from god were coming from the right hemisphere. And how did the right hemisphere generate the solutions that it fed to the left by way of auditory hallucinations. We are dealing with fairly advanced cultures here, indicating that the right hemisphere was not just feeding nonesense to the left. The quality and advancement of the culture would seem to indicate that what the right hemisphere was doing required a level of abstraction that could only be done if there was a spacial and temporal mindspace to do it in. Where would the idea of representing objects in the real world as cuniform on a tablet occur if not is some mindspace. Certainly, the words of the cuniform do not look anything like the objects that they represent. Those words are complete abstractions. And when those words are read, they must once again be reconstructed from raw symbols to ideas that are located in a mindspace. Let's go back even further in time and say that I am a stone age human living in a cave. I begin to draw a picture of a buffalo on the wall of my cave. It is highly unlikely that the buffalo is standing there as my model. What am I drawing that image from if not from a corresponding image that I can investigate at will in my own mindspace?
I have many more questions about Jaynes' book, but I will stop here for the moment.
Jaynes' approach to dating the evolution of consiousness is to use the literature of the period as a reflection of the mental processes that were active for the period. The problem that I have with such an approach is that I see no necessary link between what is written about and what is thought about. Writing has undoubtedly had its own evolution. In the beginning the ability to write was held by the very few. And people were not taught to write so that they could express their inner thoughts or emotions. Writing was more of a pragmatic tool for recording commerce or the major actions and campaignes of kings and gods. So I cannot agree that the nonexistence in writing of elements that Jaynes considers to be markers for consiousness is equivalent to those processes not happening in everyday life. The other side of this equation is that the breakdown of the bicameral mind is, at least in part, attributed to writing - that there was a connection between writing and people no longer "hearing" their gods. But in the period where this transition was suppose to occur, the vast majority of people were still illiterates. Writing could not have caused them to loose their gods, because they could not read or write to begin with.
Another problem that I have is the idea that thinking could not have been happening in a mindspace that involved the narratization of the problem to be dealt with. Instead the solutions to problems were given to people as auditory hallucinations from gods. The problem with this is that we would expect such auditory hallucinations to result in recommendations that are no better than advice from a lower aninal if there was, in fact, no working out of the problems in a mindspace of some sort. Let us remember that those auditory hallucinations from god were coming from the right hemisphere. And how did the right hemisphere generate the solutions that it fed to the left by way of auditory hallucinations. We are dealing with fairly advanced cultures here, indicating that the right hemisphere was not just feeding nonesense to the left. The quality and advancement of the culture would seem to indicate that what the right hemisphere was doing required a level of abstraction that could only be done if there was a spacial and temporal mindspace to do it in. Where would the idea of representing objects in the real world as cuniform on a tablet occur if not is some mindspace. Certainly, the words of the cuniform do not look anything like the objects that they represent. Those words are complete abstractions. And when those words are read, they must once again be reconstructed from raw symbols to ideas that are located in a mindspace. Let's go back even further in time and say that I am a stone age human living in a cave. I begin to draw a picture of a buffalo on the wall of my cave. It is highly unlikely that the buffalo is standing there as my model. What am I drawing that image from if not from a corresponding image that I can investigate at will in my own mindspace?
I have many more questions about Jaynes' book, but I will stop here for the moment.