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The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

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Smith, Daniel (2007). Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination. Penguin Press. ISBN 9781594201103. It is important here to draw attention to the issue of responsibility. The great psychological and social weight of self-agency comes from the fact that one can be held responsible for one's actions. What then of bicameral people and the societies in which they lived? Jaynes does not dwell on this issue, but is unequivocal in his stance, making the rather bold claim that “...early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality from our own, that in fact men and women were not conscious as are we, were not responsible for their actions, and therefore cannot be given the credit or blame for anything that was done over these vast millennia of time” (Jaynes, 1993, p. 201). Although perfectly consistent with his theory, Jaynes' suggestion that the notion of responsibility was absent from human societies until very recently is rather jarring. If true (and of course, with Jaynes' theory, this is not a given) it would force us to re-write the very narrative of human history. An early (1977) reviewer considered Jaynes's hypothesis worthy and offered conditional support, arguing the notion deserves further study. [3] [4]

Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Book Review: Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The

Smith, Daniel (2007). Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the history, science, and meaning of auditory hallucination. ISBN 978-1-59420-110-3. Kuijsten, Marcel (2016). Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind: The Theories of Julian Jaynes. Julian Jaynes Society. ISBN 978-0979074431.

References

McVeigh, Brian (2018). The 'Other' Psychology of Julian Jaynes: Ancient Languages, Sacred Visions, and Forgotten Mentalities. Imprint Academic. ISBN 978-1845409517. As support for Jaynes's argument, these command hallucinations are little different from the commands from gods which feature prominently in ancient stories. [3] Indirect evidence supporting Jaynes's theory that hallucinations once played an important role in human mentality can be found in the 2012 book Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination by Daniel Smith. [5] Breakdown [ edit ] Originally published in 1976, [5] it was nominated for the National Book Award in 1978. It has been translated into Italian, French, German, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, and Persian. [6] Dennett, D. (1986). Julian Jaynes's software archeology. Can. Psychol. 27, 149–154. doi: 10.1037/h0080051

The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral

Burmon, Andrew. "A Scholar Explains How Bicameral Mind Theory Predicts the 'Westworld' Plot". Inverse . Retrieved 2021-12-07.The 'Other' Psychology of Julian Jaynes: Ancient Languages, Sacred Visions, and Forgotten Mentalities (2018) by Brian J. McVeigh [26] McVeigh, Brian (2020). The Psychology of the Bible: Explaining Divine Voices and Visions. Imprint Academic. ISBN 978-1788360371.

Origin of Consciousness in the Readers who enjoyed The Origin of Consciousness in the

The theory of bicamerality has been cited in thousands of books and articles, both scientific and popular. [15] It inspired early investigations of auditory hallucination by psychologist Thomas Posey [16] and clinical psychologist John Hamilton. [17] With further research in the late 1990s using new brain imaging technology, Jaynes's ideas received renewed attention [18] [19] and recognition for contributing to a rethinking of auditory hallucinations and mental illness. [20] Conferences [ edit ] W. T. Jones, a sociologist who has been described as "one of Jaynes's most thoroughgoing critics", asked in 1979, "Why, despite its implausibility, is [Jaynes's] book taken seriously by thoughtful and intelligent people?" [30] Jones agreed with Jaynes that "the language in which talk about consciousness is conducted is metaphorical", but he contradicted the basis of Jaynes's argument – that metaphor creates consciousness – by asserting that "language (and specifically metaphor) does not create, it discovers, the similarities that language marks". Jones also argued that three "cosmological orientations" biased Jaynes’s thinking: 1) "hostility to Darwin" and natural selection; 2) a "longing for 'lost bicamerality'" (Jones accused Jaynes of holding that "we would all be better off if 'everyone' were once again schizophrenic"); 3) a "desire for a sweeping, all-inclusive formula that explains everything that has happened". Jones concluded that "... those who share these biases... are likely to find the book convincing; those who do not will reject [Jaynes's] arguments..." [30]

The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Emergence of Self-Agency

For a bicameral human, life would be a state of autopilot – with the hallucinated voice only manifesting when something novel happened: the dropped fork, the broken glass, etc. A voice that one might interpret as a god or the spirit of an ancestor would tell us how to respond.

origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral

The Bronze age collapse of the 2ndmillenniumBCE 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 bicameral mentality, emerged as a neurological adaptation to social complexity in a changing world. [ citation needed]

So the experience of self-agency was absent during the bicameral era. The subsequent breakdown of the bicameral mind that followed the era of The Iliad therefore created something of a volitional void—humans no longer felt commanded by their gods. According to Jaynes, before this void was filled with a modern self-agency, there was an intermediary solution in the form of divination. Humans turned away from gods and towards surrogate decision-making systems located in the external world. The aim of divination was to summon up the commands of these lost gods, and could be achieved through a variety of means, such as the casting of lots. Divination rituals acted as external proxies for the hallucinated commands that had previously controlled action in bicameral people.

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