Afternoon. You are sitting in the car,
facing east, waiting for Carol to finish going over the banking statements. You
forgot to pay Tim for mowing Tuesday and took it over to his daughter to give
to him. - Amorella
1350 hours. This was the first time I forgot. He mentioned it when I saw
him yesterday because he used the new battery for the weed thrasher. It didn't
connect. He mowed after we left for Kim and Paul's on Tuesday, so by Saturday
it didn't look recently mowed.
Below is information you went to after
seeing "bicameralism" in yesterday's post's article. - Amorella
I will
underline the sentences I can relate to through personal experience. - rho
** **
Bicameralism (psychology)
From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bicameralism (the philosophy of "two-chamberedness") is a
hypothesis in psychology that
argues that 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. The term was
coined by Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral
mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as
3000 years ago. The hypothesis is generally not accepted by mainstream
psychologists.
The
Origin of Consciousness was financially
successful, and has been reprinted several times. Originally published in 1976
(ISBN 0-395-20729-0), it was nominated for the National Book Award in 1978. It has been translated into
Italian, Spanish, German, French, and Persian. A new edition, with an afterword
that addressed some criticisms and restated the main themes, was published in
the US in 1990 and in the UK by Penguin Books in 1993 (ISBN 0-14-017491-5)
re-issued in 2000.
The Origin of Consciousness
Jaynes uses
governmental bicameralism as a
metaphor to describe a mental state in which the experiences and memories of
the right hemisphere of the brain are transmitted to the left hemisphere via
auditory hallucinations. The metaphor is based on the idea of
lateralization of brain function although
each half of a normal human brain is constantly communicating with the other
through the corpus callosum. The
metaphor is not meant to imply that the two halves of the bicameral brain were
"cut off" from each other but that the bicameral mind was
experienced as a different, non-conscious mental schema wherein volition in the
face of novel stimuli was mediated through a linguistic control mechanism and
experienced as auditory verbal hallucination.
The
bicameral mentality would be non-conscious in its inability to reason and
articulate about mental contents through meta-reflection, reacting without
explicitly realizing and without the meta-reflective ability to give an account
of why one did so. The bicameral mind would
thus lack metaconsciousness, autobiographical memory and the capacity for
executive "ego functions" such as deliberate mind-wandering and
conscious introspection of mental content. When bicamerality as a method of
social control was no longer adaptive in complex civilizations, this mental
model was replaced by the conscious mode of thought which, Jaynes argued, is
grounded in the acquisition of metaphorical language learned by exposure to narrative
practice.
According
to Jaynes, ancient people in the bicameral state of mind would have experienced
the world in a manner that has some similarities to that of a schizophrenic.
Rather than making conscious evaluations in novel or unexpected situations, the
person would hallucinate a voice or "god" giving admonitory advice or
commands and obey without question: one would not be at all conscious of one's
own thought processes per se.
Research into "command hallucinations" that often direct the behavior
of those labeled schizophrenic, as well as other voice hearers, supports
Jaynes's predictions.
Jaynes
built a case for this hypothesis that human brains existed in a bicameral state
until as recently as 3000 years ago by citing evidence from many diverse
sources including historical literature. He took an interdisciplinary approach, drawing data from many
different fields. Jaynes asserted that, until roughly the times written about
in Homer's Homer's Iliad,
humans did not generally have the self-awareness characteristic of
consciousness as most people
experience it today. Rather, the bicameral individual was guided by mental
commands believed to be issued by external "gods" — commands which
were recorded in ancient myths, legends and historical accounts. This is
exemplified not only in the commands given to characters in ancient epics but
also the very muses of Greek mythology which
"sang" the poems: the ancients literally heard muses as the direct
source of their music and poetry.
According
to Jaynes, in the Iliad and sections of the Old Testament no mention is made of any kind of
cognitive processes such as
introspection, and there is no apparent indication that the writers were
self-aware. Jaynes suggests, the older portions of the Old Testament (such as
the Book of Amos) have few or none of the features of some later books of the
Old Testament (such as Ecclesiastes) as well as later works such as Homer's Odyssey, which show indications of a
profoundly different kind of mentality — an early form of consciousness.
In ancient
times, Jaynes noted, gods were generally much more numerous and much more
anthropomorphic than in modern times, and speculates that this was because each
bicameral person had their own "god" who reflected their own desires
and experiences. He also noted
that in ancient societies the corpses of the dead were often treated as though
still alive (being seated, dressed and even fed) as a form of ancestor worship,
and Jaynes argued that the dead bodies were presumed to be still living and the
source of auditory hallucinations. This adaptation to the village communities
of 100 individuals or more formed the core of religion. Unlike today's
hallucinations, the voices of ancient times were structured by cultural norms
to produce a seamlessly functioning society. In Ancient Greek culture there is
often mention of the Logos, which is a very similar concept. It was a type of
guiding voice that was heard as from a seemingly external source.
Jaynes
inferred that these "voices" came from the right brain counterparts of the left brain language centres—specifically, the
counterparts to Wernicke's area and Broca's area. These regions are somewhat
dormant in the right brains of most modern humans, but Jaynes noted that some
studies show that auditory hallucinations correspond to increased activity in
these areas of the brain.
Jaynes
notes that even in modern times there
is no consensus as to the cause or origins of schizophrenia. Jaynes argues that
schizophrenia is a vestige of humanity's earlier bicameral state. Recent evidence shows that many
schizophrenics do not just hear random voices but experience "command hallucinations"
instructing their behavior or urging them to commit certain acts. As support for Jaynes's argument,
these command hallucinations are little different from the commands from gods
which feature prominently in ancient stories Indirect evidence supporting
Jaynes's theory that hallucinations once played an important role in human
mentality can be found in the recent book Muses,
Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory
Hallucination by Daniel
Smith.
Breakdown
of bicameralism
Jaynes
theorized that a shift from bicameralism marked the beginning of introspection
and consciousness as we know it today. According to Jaynes, this bicameral
mentality began malfunctioning or "breaking down" during the 2nd
millennium BCE. He speculates that primitive ancient societies tended to
collapse periodically (e.g., Egypt's Intermediate Periods, as well as the
periodically vanishing cities of the Mayas) as changes in the environment
strained the socio-cultural equilibria sustained by this bicameral mindset. The
Bronze Age collapse of the 2nd
millennium BCE led to mass migrations and created a rash of unexpected
situations and stresses which required ancient minds to become more flexible
and creative. Self-awareness, or consciousness, was the culturally evolved
solution to this problem. This necessity of communicating commonly observed
phenomena among individuals who shared no common language or cultural
upbringing encouraged those communities to become self-aware to survive in a
new environment. Thus consciousness, like bicamerality, emerged as a
neurological adaptation to social complexity in a changing world.
Jaynes
further argues that divination, prayer, and oracles arose during this breakdown period, in
an attempt to summon instructions from the "gods" whose voices could
no longer be heard. The
consultation of special bicamerally operative individuals, or of divination by
casting lots and so forth, was a
response to this loss, a transitional era depicted, for example, in the book of
1 Samuel. It was also evidenced in children who could communicate with the
gods, but as their neurology was set by language and society they gradually
lost that ability. Those who continued prophesying, being bicameral according
to Jaynes, could be killed. Leftovers
of the bicameral mind today, according to Jaynes, include religion, hypnosis,
possession, schizophrenia, and the general sense of need for external authority
in decision-making.
Reception
Jaynes's
hypothesis remains controversial. The primary scientific criticism has been
that the conclusions drawn by Jaynes had no basis in neuropsychiatric fact.
Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006) wrote of The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind:
"It is
one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate
genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets."
Some early
(1977) reviewers considered Jaynes's hypothesis worthy and offer conditional
support, arguing the notion deserves further study.
According
to Jaynes, language is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for
consciousness: language existed thousands of years earlier, but consciousness
could not have emerged without language. The idea that language is a necessary
component of subjective consciousness and more abstract forms of thinking has
gained the support of proponents including Andy Clark, Daniel Dennett, William
H. Calvin, Merlin Donald, John Limber, Howard Margolis, Peter Carruthers, and
Jose Luis Bermudez.
Williams
(2010) defended Jaynes against the criticism of Block (1981).
In a 1987
letter to the American Journal of
Psychiatry, H. Steven Moffic questioned why Jaynes's theory was left out of
a discussion on auditory hallucinations by Asaad and Shapiro. In response
published in the May 1987 issue, the authors replied:
"...Jaynes'
hypothesis makes for interesting reading and stimulates much thought in the
receptive reader. It does not, however, adequately explain one of the central
mysteries of madness: hallucination."
Drs.
Asaad and Shapiro's comment, that there is no evidence for involvement of the
right temporal lobe in auditory hallucination, was incorrect even at that time.
A number of more recent studies provide additional evidence to right hemisphere
involvement in auditory hallucinations. Recent neuroimaging studies provide new
evidence for Jaynes's neurological model (e.g., auditory hallucinations arising
in the right temporal-parietal lobe and being transmitted to the left
temporal-parietal lobe). This was pointed out by Dr. Robert Olin in Lancet and Dr. Leo Sher in the Journal of Psychiatry and
Neuroscience, and further discussed in the book Reflections on the Dawn of
Consciousness.
The
philosopher Daniel Dennett suggested that Jaynes may have been wrong about some
of his supporting arguments, especially the importance he attached to
hallucinations, but that these things are not essential to his main thesis:
"If
we are going to use this top-down approach, we are going to have to be bold. We
are going to have to be speculative, but there is good and bad speculation, and
this is not an unparalleled activity in science. […] Those scientists who have
no taste for this sort of speculative enterprise will just have to stay in the
trenches and do without it, while the rest of us risk embarrassing mistakes and
have a lot of fun." —Daniel Dennett.
Gregory
Cochran, a physicist and adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of
Utah, wrote:
"Genes
affecting personality, reproductive strategies, cognition, are all able to
change significantly over few-millennia time scales if the environment favors
such change—and this includes the new environments we have made for ourselves,
things like new ways of making a living and new social structures. ... There is
evidence that such change has occurred. ... On first reading, Breakdown seemed one of the craziest books ever
written, but Jaynes may have been on to something."
Author and
historian of science Morris Berman writes:
"[Jaynes's] description of this new consciousness is one of the best I
have come across."
Danish
science writer Tor Norretranders discusses Jaynes's theory favorably in his
book The User Illusion:
Cutting Consciousness Down to Size.
As an
argument against Jaynes' proposed date of the transition from bicameralism to
consciousness, one might refer to the Gilgamesh Epic. It is supposedly many
centuries older than even the oldest passages of the Old Testament, and yet it
describes introspection and other mental processes that, according to Jaynes,
were impossible for the bicameral mind. Jaynes himself, noting that the most
complete version of the Gilgamesh epic dates to post-bicameral times (7th
century BCE), dismisses these instances of introspection as the result of
rewriting and expansion by later conscious scribes, and points to differences
between the more recent version of Gilgamesh and surviving fragments of earlier
versions. ("The most interesting comparison is in Tablet X.")
This,
however, fails to account for either the generally accepted dating of the
"Standard Version" of the epic to the later 2nd millennium BCE or the
fact that the introspection so often taken as characteristic of the
"Standard Version" seems more thoroughly rooted in the Old Babylonian
and Sumerian versions than previously thought, especially as our understanding
of the Old Babylonian poem emerges.
Brian J. McVeigh (2007) maintains that
many of the most frequent criticisms of Jaynes' theory are either incorrect or
reflect serious misunderstandings of Jaynes' theory, especially Jaynes' more
precise definition of consciousness. Jaynes defines consciousness—in the
tradition of Locke and Descartes—as "that which is introspectable".
Jaynes draws a sharp distinction between consciousness ("introspectable
mind-space") and other mental processes such as cognition, learning, and
sense and perception. McVeigh argues that this distinction is frequently
not recognized by those offering critiques of Jaynes' theory
A
"Julian Jaynes Society" was founded by supporters of bicameralism in
1997, shortly after Jaynes' death. The society published a collection of essays
on bicameralism in 2007 with
contributors including psychological anthropologist Brian J. McVeigh,
psychologists John Limber and Scott Greer, clinical psychologist John Hamilton,
philosophers Jan Sleutels and David Stove, and sinologist Michael Carr (see shi "personator"). The book
also contains an extensive biography of Julian Jaynes by historian of
psychology William Woodward and June Tower, and a Foreword by neuroscientist
Michael Persinger.
Divination
is also considerably older than that date and the early writings he claims show
bicamerality; the oldest recorded Chinese Writing was on oracle bones, meaning that
divination arose at the same time or even earlier than writing, in Chinese
Society.
While he
said ancient societies engaged in ancestor worship before this date,
non-ancient societies also engaged in it after that date; very advanced
societies like the Aztecs and Egyptians mummified rulers (see Pyramids and the
philosopher Nezahualcoyotl), the Aztecs all the way up to the meeting with
Hernan Cortes.
Julian
Jaynes' study is mostly based on the writings and culture of the Mediterranean
and Near-Eastern regions, although he occasionally also refers to ancient
writings of India and China. It
does not explain how such bicameralism could also have been near totally lost
at the same time across the whole planet and in the entire human kind. In
particular the aborigine culture
was completely separated from the rest of the world from 4000 BCE to 1600 CE
and appears today to be both historically unchanged but also self-conscious.
Similar ideas
In his
books Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology, transactional
psychologist and author Robert Anton Wilson proposes a similar theory, referring
to the right cortical hemisphere as "Thinker" and the left cortical
hemisphere as "Prover". He summarizes his concept as "Whatever
the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves."
VS Ramachandran proposes a similar
theory as well, referring to the left cortical hemisphere as an
"Apologist", and the right cortical hemisphere as a
"Revolutionary".
In his book
Neuroreality, Bruce E. Morton,
Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii, similarly proposed such a
concept.
In his
book The Master and His Emissary,
psychiatrist Lain McGilchrist reviews
scientific research into the role of the brain's hemispheres, and cultural
evidence, and he proposes that since the time of Plato the left hemisphere of
the brain (the "emissary" in the title) has increasingly taken over
from the right hemisphere (the "master"), to our detriment. McGilchrist, while
accepting Jayne's intention, felt that Jayne's hypothesis was "the precise
inverse of what happened" and that rather than a shift from bicameralism there evolved a separation
of the hemispheres.
Michael Gazzaniga pioneered the
split-brain experiments which led him to propose a similar theory called the
left brain interpreter.
It is
now known that sense of agency is closely connected with
lateralization. The left parietal lobe is active when visualizing actions in
the first person, while the right parietal lobe is active for actions in the
third person. Additionally, Wernicke's area processes the literal meaning of
language, while the homologous region in the right hemisphere processes the
intent of a speaker. It has been found that people with damage to the right inferior
parietal cortex experience alien hand syndrome, as do people who have had a
corpus callosotomy. This reverses the relationship between the right and
left hemispheres posited by bicameralism: it is the left hemisphere that
"speaks" and the right hemisphere that is responsible for
self-awareness.
Neuroscientist
Michael Persinger, who
co-invented the God helmet in the
1980s, believes that his invention may induce mystical experiences by having
the separate right hemisphere consciousness intrude into the awareness of the
normally-dominant left hemisphere.
Selected
and edited from Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia dot org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)
** **
You had a late lunch at Penn Station, then
ran errands and stopped at Natorp's for outdoor flowers. Now a stop at Kroger's
for Graeter's ice cream in a pint because the store is packed with people in a
single long line. -- You have been focusing on the article above and have in
these seven some years of Internet Blog Notes many personal examples that lend
credence to your being a bicameral-like mind; however, in Note context this
includes the 'heartansoulanmind' aspect unconditionally, as such you cannot
make too much for comparing your experiences with those written of in
Wikipedia. - Amorella
1606
hours. You are correct, Amorella. Oranges and apples cannot be compared because
are both fruits of a different substance and climate. . . . Life is
interesting.
You are home relaxing; the temperature is in
the eighties and the air conditioning is on. Life is good for you presently.
Post. - Amorella
1636 hours. These several recent articles on consciousness allow me to
feel more comfortable with my supposed human circumstance -- I am a physical
being with spiritual tendencies.
I would reverse that and add you and your
cohorts are spiritual beings with physical tendencies because I view the soul
as the primary factor not the physical. - The Amorella, a Betweener
Go ahead, say what you
think, boy. - Amorella
1643 hours. The Wikipedia article on "Prophecy" from the other day popped into my head:
** **
Maimonides,
in his philosophical work The Guide for
the Perplexed, outlines twelve modes of prophecy from lesser to greater degree of
clarity:
1.
Inspired actions
2.
Inspired words
3.
Allegorical dream revelations
4.
Auditory dream
revelations
5.
Audiovisual dream
revelations/ human speaker
6.
Audiovisual dream
revelations/angelic speaker
7.
Audiovisual dream
revelations/Divine speaker
8.
Allegorical waking
vision
9.
Auditory waking
revelation
10.
Audiovisual waking
revelation/human speaker
11.
Audiovisual waking
revelation/angelic speaker
12.
Audiovisual waking
revelation/Divine speaker (that refers implicitly to Moses)
The Tanakh
contains prophecies from various Hebrew prophets (55 in total) who communicated
messages from God to the nation of Israel, and later the population of Judea and elsewhere. Experience of prophecy
in the Torah and the rest of Tanakh was not restricted to Jews. Nor was the
prophetic experience restricted to the Hebrew language.
Selected
earlier from Wikipedia - prophecy
** **
1648
hours. I was hit with the curiosity as to where you, the Amorella, would fit in
Maimonides work "The Guide for the Perplexed"? Of course as soon is the unconscious thought
flashed the afterthought consciously rumbled into me, "You are
arrogant to think on such a holy subject." I am embarrassed to have done
so and was going to keep quiet, but you just called me out on it. - rho
You do not want anyone to think you are
implying yourself as a prophet because that was not your intent. The thought
introduced the curiosity. Strangely this shows itself in the Bicameralism
article above, in lines you did not underline because you did not think them pertinent.
Here they are under "Similar Ideas".
** **
In
his books Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology, transactional
psychologist and author Robert Anton Wilson proposes a similar theory, referring
to the right cortical hemisphere as "Thinker" and the left cortical
hemisphere as "Prover". He summarizes his concept as "Whatever
the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves."
** **
1703
hours. Amorella, you amaze me still. Surely, this is coincidence.
Now you are dishonest in
heartansoulanmind. This is worse than arrogant, boy. What do you say? -
Amorella
1705 hours. I should have stated, "This may still be coincidence,
though I find it hard to say such a thing because it is arrogance on a very grand
scale and my forte leans towards the humble person I am. This is very awkward
to say, Amorella. I do not readily have the words, nor, I think would I ever
readily have the words.
1711
hours. Amorella, you ever amaze me to the point I have nothing more to say.
The above statement is an honest one within
your heartansoulanmind, the inner light of your human spirit. - Now, post. -
Amorella
No comments:
Post a Comment