Earth-shattering conclusions may change your outlook on religion

an fascinating intellectual Odyssey | The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind | Julian Jaynes

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	• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Julian Jaynes Mariner Books, 2000 - 512 pages average customer review:based on 141 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Mind blowing. Profound

This book instantly found itself inside my favourire top three. Challenging, compelling, entertaining, and beautifully written. It constitutes a serious challenge to human history, and more specifically the fields of psychiatry and anthroplogy. Great stuff!

Could it really be that only hundreds of years ago we lacked the same degree of self-awareness that we enjoy today, and acted at the mercy of the right side of the brain as if some form of automaton? This is no new age nonsense, and Jaynes makes a compelling case that the bicameral mind may have had evolutionary value.

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Earth-shattering conclusions may change your outlook on religion

I would never have imagined a book with such a heavy-going title would have the page-turning power of a great who-done-it!

In this revolutionary, eloquent and hugely thought-provoking read, Jaynes uses, in part, the Odyssey, the Iliad, neurology and psychology to make the case that our brains made a fundamental developmental leap forward just 3000 years ago that allowed us to be truly "conscious", that is possess a clear sense of self. Before this, the two "bicameral" halves of our brains behaved differently from today and our ancestors took the hallucinated voices arising from one half of the brain (some similarities to modern schitzophrenics are made) as the commands of the gods and elders who had passed on and become gods. Essentially his conclusion is that religion is a side-effect of the brain's evolution. Really a compelling read.

Jaynes is sadly no longer around to write the next book on this subject, but I would be very interested in someone tackling the issue based on Chinese research: written language seems to have developed there even earlier that the 5000 years we have come to know and is a key catalyst for modern consciousness, at least as Jaynes saw it.

If you have read it and liked the book, you might also like to read the slightly heavier-going THE MIND IN THE CAVE by David Lewis-Williams which looks at the notion of higher consciousness from the perspective of western European paleolithic cave art and its origins in shamanistic hallucinations. Both books are based mainly on European source material, although the latter goes to some pains to anchor the debate in the experience of existing shamanistic tradition from around the world.

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an fascinating intellectual Odyssey

Yes, Jaynes' analysis of his corroborating evidence is often highly subjective and debatable.

Jaynes' model actually requires several postulates: 1. that consciousness (a self-examing, self-judging, self-motivating analog 'I') is not employed in many of our activities; our distant ancestors would not have required consciousness in this sense to learn skills like cooperating in the hunt or fashioning simple tools; nor are we today 'conscious' of very much when we drive a car or even type words at a keyboard. (Actually, I'd say much email proves the last point!) This is accepted by many today. Once we (consciously) decide to write an essay, the words just seem to flow quite 'unconsciously'; we are not 'conscious' of grammar or even the development of our ideas; too much self-awareness (consciousness) may even slow the task. 2. that our mental process historically evolved relatively slowly to produce consciousness through some intermediary steps; this also seems reasonable, despite some AI people that believe that reaching some critical processing capability may cause a computer to suddenly become 'conscious'. 3. that a metaphorically rich language is a necessary substrate for consciousness to exist. I think he's right here, though there is disagreement. (We can now trace Indo-European languages back by linguistic analysis to perhaps 20,000 BCE, to a equally syntatically (though not necessarily metaphorically) complex parent language, though we have no written samples, of course.)

What is astonishing is Jaynes' placement of the development of full-blown consciousness only 3 thousand or so years ago. This requires that the linguistic metaphorical hypostases necessary (according to Jaynes, and here I agree) for consciousness: 'self', 'mind', 'will', 'morality', etc., are recent, something Jaynes attempts to demonstrate from the use of language in the Iliad and the Old Testament.

Jaynes' conclusion: that the high civilizations of Eqypt, Mesopotamia, Mycenean ('Homeric') Greece and MesoAmerica were developed by unconscious, un-unified beings with 'bicameral' minds: simplistically, 'man' in the left hemisphere, and 'god' (or 'authority' or 'will') in the right. Jaynes acknowledges this is an incredible concept for us to accept. Yet insects build complex structures even without a cerebrum, let alone consciousness, and natural selection supposes the development of a very complex eye through many intermediate stages. (My examples, not his.)

If Jaynes hasn't fully demonstrated his hypothesis at the end, neither is it pure 'science fiction'. In a very real sense it was a 'god' - Pharoah, or rather in Jaynes' view the 'god' half of his mind - that authorized the construction of the pyramids. We now know that this task was performed by corvee labor, rather than slaves. Jaynes would argue that his bicameral theory makes these massive projects more understandable, if the (lesser) 'god' halves of the minds of the laborers provided corroborative authority. The hypothesis also provides a reasonable analysis of the rise, development and persistence of religion. One wonders if today Jaynes would have added god-inspired suicide bombers to his examples of holdovers from 'bicameral' thinking!

If complex linguistic metaphor is required to analyze consciousness (a major concern of classical Greek and Indian philosophy), isn't it required for consciousness itself? The dating is problematic, of course, since we have no writing from before 5,000 years ago. Now, my next project is to get out my copy of the Iliad and a Greek lexicon to try to confirm Jaynes' linguistic analysis!

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pesonal view

Richard Dawkins finds this piece of work either "utter rubbish" or a brilliant piece of science. He believes that it is the former but is willing to hedge his bets! i think this is a brilliant piece of work and would like to congratulate Julian Jaynes on this masterpiece.

Fascinating, but probably wrong.

A few years ago I went to a conference where they had an award for the "most interesting theory most likely to be wrong". Of all the books I have read during the last few years, the late Julian Jaynes' "The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind" would most likely win that honor. Coincidentally, both Jaynes' book as well as the conference contribution deal with the language and the brain; Jaynes also deals with consciousness, literature and history. In short, his theory is that up until about 3000 B.C., Homo sapiens, walked the earth without anything like the conscious, subjective experience of our surrounding and memories we currently possess. Then, agriculture, cities and the first complex societies arose. How were the masses which existed in these radically new social circumstances controlled? According to Jaynes, human beings were still not conscious, but heard voices which commanded them what to do whenever a novel and unfamiliar situation arose. Where did these voices come from? From the right cortical hemisphere, from the brain regions analogous to the language centers on the left. These voices are comparable to what schizophrenics hear today. The difference is that they were not considered something abnormal, but a command from "the gods". The underlings in these first complex civilizations heard the voices of their masters, even when they were absent, and these of their personal gods. Higher ranking members of society heard voices of higher gods, and the king/pharao heard voices of the supreme god and sometimes was considered that god himself. The art of these civilizations was set up to trigger this hallucinating. The brain's division into an obeying left and a commanding, god-like, right cortical hemisphere is what Jaynes calls the "bicameral mind". This mindset kept societies stable and growing. No one questioned what he or she had to do, as no one would ever question "the gods"!

Then, the 2nd century B.C., a time marked by natural catastrophes and societal instability, came along. The bicameral mind was no longer useful under these rapidly changing circumstances. Hearing voices was no longer encouraged societally, and children and adults showing such tendencies were possibly killed in some circumstances. The "gods" had ceased to speak to humans directly. True modern consciousness came about. Modern religions, oracles and various superstitions are the results of the human desire to relive the less uncertain times of the bicameral mind. Neurological conditions like schizophrenia and Tourette-syndrome are the neurobiological remainders of the formerly ubiquitous voices of the "gods".

Jaynes, a Princeton scholar, in his educated and quirky style, does a good job in outlining his theory and he draws support for it from a variety of sources, most notably the writings of the Iliad and Odysee and the old testament. He reconstructs a timeline, in which later literary works show support for truly conscious, subjectively experiencing characters; older ones do not. I am not competent to judge his psycho-literary criticism. I am competent to judge his arguments stemming from neuroscience; although he speculates and obviously leans out the window, he does not say anything unreasonable. He is off on some scientific issues, for instance in his statement that the neanderthals are a part of the lineage leading to us; however none of these factual mistakes seriously undermine his main thesis in my opinion. I think that he is onto something, but that in many cases goes to far in his interpretation of the evidence supporting his ideas. I also think that even though it is very valuable to think along his lines, the core of his thesis is wrong. In my opinion there are two reasons for that:

Firstly, only a part of humanity went trough a historical progression such as the one in the middle East and eastern Mediterranean in the 4th to 2nd century B.C, but all present humans appear to be conscious. I have personally talked to Australian aborigines who's grandparents were hunter-gatherers and who appeared undoubtedly conscious to me. Many peoples who had remained hunter-gatherers or in small-scale agricultural societies only came into contact with European civilization during the last 500 years, and some remain in such forms of social organization. The Kajapo in the Amazon or the New Guinea highlanders are clearly not the non-conscious robots Jaynes imagines pre-bicameral or bicameral humans to be.

Then, Jaynes basically pictures ancient Egypt as a society of constantly hallucinating citizens. Hallucinating wasn't seen as something pathological in these times, he argues, and it in fact contributed to societal functioning. Judging on the behavior of modern schizophrenics, I doubt that such a society is possible. They act too destructively and erratic. Among Jaynes' own examples is a man who was told by his voices to commit suicide by drowning himself. These are psychological forces too fiery to be channeled into avenues beneficial for an ordered, complex society.

Still, despite my disagreement with its basic take-home message, a book I consider highly worth reading. His notion of psychohistory is very, very interesting. Psychological phenomena which nowadays lead to a removal of a individual from society, such as hallucinations, were possibly considered something desirable in previous epochs. I can't picture a society completely composed of constantly hallucinating individuals; but I could see how such hallucinations by kings and priests were valued at times. Not only were technology, art and the organization of political and economic power vastly different at different times in history, but possibly also the basic mindset of humans - although in my opinion, in contrast to Jaynes', not to the degree of the absence of a true mind.

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