Reddit mentions of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Julian Jaynes - The origin of Consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

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If you're just getting started researching Church History, I'm sure you've stumbled across the CES Letter. It didn't have enough footnotes for me, so I started my own essay as I was doing my research. Lots of references. Thought it might be helpful.

On another note, I just finished the book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes. In it he makes the case that as recently as 4,000 years ago, humans had a bicameral mind ("two-chambered") where "cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be 'speaking', and a second part which listens and obeys," a mind, in short, which would exhibit an internal life much like what a modern day schizophrenic might experience. Although we might say the ancients were hallucinating, when ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Hebrews said that a particular diety spoke to them, they meant it literally.

A "god" was simply that voice in your head compelling you to act a certain way. Maybe that voice sounded like your tribal elder, or if you were the tribal elder, your father. Ancients assumed people kept on living after death because the voices in their head kept speaking even after the bodies they were originally attached to stopped moving. Idols, iconography, etc., were basically hallucination inducing artifacts. To them, the idols did speak. According to his theory, all of this occurred prior to humans being conscious, in much the same way that a dog will respond to commands, ants and bees will organize, but none of them are "aware" per se.

Jaynes posits that Bicameralism developed as language developed (language being an efficient way to transmit complex instructions from one side of the brain to the other) and as groups of humans (tribes, cities, civilizations) became more complex and clashed as cultures, the rigid nature of command-by-hallucination broke down.

He claims that consciousness is a byproduct of this collapse in the two-chambered mind; a function of the intersection of language, culture, and the neuroplasticity of the brain. If you've seen the movie Arrival, the underlying theme is based on the idea of linguistic relativity, which "holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition." Kind of like Orwell's essay, The Principles of Newspeak, at the end of his book "1984,".

This all fits in the current discussion because if his hypothesis is true, there is still part of our brain that wants to be told what to do, to compulsively obey, to accept the existence of gods. We seek the certainty of religion, government, and (sadly) the daily grind at work. Although consciousness, the ability to break free of these voices in our heads, is thousands of years old, that is a flash in the pan speaking in evolutionary terms. We are still new at this, still growing out of old ways of thinking.

Taking a cue from where Jaynes left off, his analysis implies that as our culture and language evolve, so will our consciousness, our ability to perceive and understand our reality (whatever that means).

As far as Church History not being as bad as it seems, I guess it depends on what you expect. If you are expecting fear mongering, war mongering, misogyny, fraud, oppression, repression, manipulation, theft, attempted murder, and censorship, then yeah, it's probably better than you expected. Or at least not worse.

TL;DR Our brain is wired to accept authority and the existence of a "god." A lot of cultural puzzle pieces (religion, politics, business) fit in that spot. Good news is, we're growing out of it.

Edit: the part about where religion came from.

First, I think you're confusing me and /u/monkeypack.

Let's take a look at the source material and the actual contents of the show, shall we?

In Episode 3 @ 39:33, Ford tells us a story about the early days of the park.

Ford:The hosts began to pass the Turing Test after the first year. But that wasn't enough for Arnold. He wasn't interested in the appearance of intellect. He wanted the real thing. He wanted to create consciousness.

He imagined it as a pyramid. Memory, improvisation, self-interest...

Bernard: And, at the top?

Ford: He never got there.

So Arnold in this telling believed that "consciousness" and "intellect" were two different things. Passing the Turing Test just means an AI can think enough like a human to fool a human into believing it's conversing with another human. Arnold didn't accept that as the definition of "conscious".

Ford says Arnold based his theory of what might go at the top of the pyramid on the Theory of the Bicameral Mind. In Julian Jaynes' book about this theory Jaynes says that consciousness is not a copy of experience, it is not necessary to conceptualize, it is not necessary for learning, it isn't necessary for "thinking", and it isn't necessary for reason. So what is it necessary for? Jaynes says "It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision." Jaynes thinks consciousness is what generates free will.

Jaynes identifies the most important metaphor that consciousness acts on as the analog "I", the self-awareness we have of ourselves, which is also the metaphor "Me". We can conceive both of having a conversation with "ourselves", and we can consider ourselves from outside ourselves as if watching a movie of our lives.

Jaynes argues that all animals are unconscious because they cannot metaphorically manipulate the analog "I" and "Me", and that humans were not conscious until they gained the ability to do that. Until then, the "unconscious" humans, like animals, existed in a pure Newtonian state - if you had a computer sophisticated enough to model every neuron in the brain and you had sensors capable of detecting every stimuli, you could always predict with total accuracy what behavior the entity would exhibit. These "unconscious" things have no free will.

Arnold believed that something happened to transform unconscious intellect into consciousness. He tried to kick-start that process using Jaynes' theory of the bicameral mind - to replicate Jaynes' ideas on how humans crossed that threshold by first externalizing their inner voices into "the voices of the gods" and then internalizing those voices as "speaking to themselves" as they crossed the threshold.

Let's call this the Arnold model of consciousness.

But what does Ford believe?

Ford is a highly unreliable narrator who is manipulating everyone around him for his own purposes so we have to be very careful accepting anything he says as "true". Even more so when he's talking about his own motives. So we must tread carefully.

In Episode 8 @37:45 Bernard and Ford have this conversation:

Bernard: Pain only exists in the mind. It is always imagined. So what is the difference between my pain and yours? Between you and me?

Ford: This was the very question that consumed Arnold. Filled him with guilt. Eventually drove him mad. The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts. No inflection point at which we become fully alive. We cannot define consciousness because consciousness does not exist.

Let's call this the Ford model of consciousness.

But does Ford believe it?

The answer appears to be no.

In Episode 10 @ 1:20:20, we start to get a new side of Ford's philosophy.

Ford: It was Arnold's key insight. The thing that led the hosts to their awakening. Suffering. Pain that the world is not as you want it to be. It was when Arnold died when I suffered that I began to understand what he had found. To realize I was wrong.

Thus we appear to have Ford indicating that what he originally told Bernard he doesn't actually believe, and that after Arnold's death he had a conversion to Arnold's model of consciousness. That there is something different between unconscious animals (and hosts) and conscious humans (and hosts).

Ford doesn't know what that is. He might speculate, but neither he nor Arnold ever fill in the top box of the pyramid. Ford has to treat consciousness like a black box. He knows it when he sees it but he cannot define it.

Unfortunately in Season One, no conscious or semiconscious host is ever hooked up to a diagnostic so we can see their thought processes. We come closest with Maeve but what we see is her programming not the actual flow of the execution thread of her programming. So we don't know if Delos has the technology to look inside a conscious hosts' mind and see how it is different than an unconscious host.

All we know is that in the end, Ford believed it would be.

Sure. Without anything to go on, I'll just recommend some of my favorites. :)

• Godel Escher Bach - Mindbending book that delves into connections between art, music, math, linguistics and even spirituality.
  
• Code - The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software - Ever wondered how the black box you're using to read this comment works? "Code" goes from transistor to a fully functioning computer in a sequential way that even a child could grasp. It's not at the "How to build your own computer from Newegg.com parts". It's more at the "How to build your own computer if you were trapped on a desert island" level, which is more theoretical and interesting. You get strong intuition for what's actually happening.
  
• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - An intriguing looking into the theory that men of past ages actually hallucinated the voices of their gods, and how that led to the development of modern civilization and consciousness.

You might be interested in some of oliver sack's various books, such as this. Regarding the schizophrenia, you might enjoy this in case you haven't read it or read about his theory.

You would find this book very interesting:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009MBTRHA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Julian Jayes hypothesizes that our minds, at one point in human development, were bicameral- two independent halves. He states that the right hemisphere would give orders to the left through hallucinations or commands. It's some seriously fascinating stuff.

This is a crazy book detailing a debunked theory about how humans used to hear "gods" in our heads telling us to do things. So great.

yes, kind of correct, but at some stage of evolution the bicameral mind will come into play. Animals haven't reached the same stage of Consciousness as humans, so they don't have religion forming as a result.

If you're interested I highly recommend reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

but be warned it's a big, heavy book, but well worth the read.