Julian Jaynes


PDS

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As I've said previously, I also have a hard time believing that people were simply confused about the origin of the voices in their heads for many millennia. Many people might have been, but I have a hard time believing all people were.

Me, too.

Ellen

Me, three.

Michael

To be fair to Jaynes, he pegs 2000-3000 years ago as a likely date (based partly on his reading of the Old Testament and the Illiad), but leaves room for the idea that he was wrong about that and that the cutoff point for introspection could have been as early as the Ice Age era, or earlier. This would make the building of the Pyramids, development of writing, etc., to fall within a post-introspection timeframe.

3000 years ago seem pretty recent for such a large jump, but then again, there was some crazy shit going on back then....

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As I've said previously, I also have a hard time believing that people were simply confused about the origin of the voices in their heads for many millennia. Many people might have been, but I have a hard time believing all people were.

Me, too.

Ellen

Me, three.

Michael

To be fair to Jaynes, he pegs 2000-3000 years ago as a likely date (based partly on his reading of the Old Testament and the Illiad), but leaves room for the idea that he was wrong about that and that the cutoff point for introspection could have been as early as the Ice Age era, or earlier. This would make the building of the Pyramids, development of writing, etc., to fall within a post-introspection timeframe.

3000 years ago seem pretty recent for such a large jump, but then again, there was some crazy shit going on back then....

If surviving the Great Ice age did not scare the human race into going sane, then what would?

Ba'al Chatzaf

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To be fair to Jaynes, he pegs 2000-3000 years ago as a likely date (based partly on his reading of the Old Testament and the Illiad), but leaves room for the idea that he was wrong about that and that the cutoff point for introspection could have been as early as the Ice Age era, or earlier. This would make the building of the Pyramids, development of writing, etc., to fall within a post-introspection timeframe.

3000 years ago seem pretty recent for such a large jump, but then again, there was some crazy shit going on back then....

I think it still makes no sense genetically, considering the distribution of hominids by the Ice Age era. However, you have gotten me curious to re-peruse the book.

Ellen

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To be fair to Jaynes, he pegs 2000-3000 years ago as a likely date (based partly on his reading of the Old Testament and the Illiad), but leaves room for the idea that he was wrong about that and that the cutoff point for introspection could have been as early as the Ice Age era, or earlier. This would make the building of the Pyramids, development of writing, etc., to fall within a post-introspection timeframe.

3000 years ago seem pretty recent for such a large jump, but then again, there was some crazy shit going on back then....

I think it still makes no sense genetically, considering the distribution of hominids by the Ice Age era. However, you have gotten me curious to re-peruse the book.

Ellen

Jaynes' theory may be inadvertant corroboration of the creation myth of the Bible.

Here is something I find rather fascinating about Jaynes' theory: as many already know, Bishop James Ussher "calculated" the beginning of time according to the Old Testament. "God created heaven and earth, which beginning of time, according to this chronology, occurred at the beginning of the night which preceded the 23rd of October in the year 710 of the Julian period." Putting aside the overarching wisdom of attempting this calcuation in the manner he did, the good Bishop's "begin date" for all important matters is 4004 BC, apparently.

We all know that what got Adam and Eve in trouble was taking a bite from the Tree of Knowledge. In fact, they didn't even know they were naked until they ate from that tree.

If consciousness is introspection, more or less, and if Jaynes' theory is only off by a handful of years in the big scheme of things, he has done a nice job of confirming an ancient myth.

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Here is something I find rather fascinating about Jaynes' theory: as many already know, Bishop James Ussher "calculated" the beginning of time according to the Old Testament. "God created heaven and earth, which beginning of time, according to this chronology, occurred at the beginning of the night which preceded the 23rd of October in the year 710 of the Julian period." Putting aside the overarching wisdom of attempting this calcuation in the manner he did, the good Bishop's "begin date" for all important matters is 4004 BC, apparently.

Having read the transcripts of the Scopes trial, it is a tribute to the playwrites and the screenplay of the movie that they did their best to be faithful to the testimony.

Good film - Inherit the Wind...

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From Ray Jackendoff’s Consciousness and the Computational Mind (1987):


Some writers on consciousness appear to use the term to encompass only reflective awareness. Jaynes (1976, chapter 2), for instance, speaks of consciousness as a “metaphor” for the structure of the world, including the self as actor and deliberator. Among the characteristics of consciousness in his sense are the detection of one’s own emotions and the ability to discriminate between reality and hallucination—functions that have been localized here [in Jackendoff’s work] in reflective awareness. (6)

I will call the feature percept versus image a feature of affect. This feature has to do neither with the form of phenomenal entities nor with their category, but rather with how they “feel.” It cuts across all distinctions of form, category, and even modality—for . . . one can have linguistic, musical, tactile, and olfactory images as well as visual ones.

An affect is not associated with the phenomenal field as a whole. Rather, it goes with an individual constituent of the phenomenal field. . . .

Further, although a feature of affect may be derived by self-monitoring of processing, its phenomenological manifestation is not as a kind of self-awareness. Rather, the status of a phenomenological entity as percept or image is experienced as an objective fact about the entity itself—just like its size, form, and location.

The difference between percepts and images is, I think, only one of a family of distinctions of “feel” that appear in awareness. Here are some candidates for this family. Each is a binary distinction that is associated with individual entities in the phenomenal field but that belongs neither to phenomenal form nor to conceptual category. I have made an effort to make them as general as possible, though I am far from certain about their taxonomy.

1. Outer versus inner. This is a generalization of percept versus image to include output modalities. . . .

2. Ego-initiated versus non-ego-initiated. This has to do with the sense of will. . . .

. . .

7. Congruous versus incongruous. I have in mind here the curious and unsettling affect that comes with illusions and paradoxes. I would like to designate this as incongruous, by contrast with the affect congruous that comes with ordinary percepts. . . .

. . .

This is perhaps an appropriate place to bring up the controversial work of Jaynes (1976). On the basis of the historical record and archaeological evidence, Jaynes claims that people of early civilizations, such as the Homeric Greeks and the Hebrews of the early Old Testament period, had radically different consciousness than we do. According to Jaynes, they did not experience themselves as thinking beings; rather, the verbal images that we experience as our own thought were experienced by them as the voices of eternal gods, much like the verbal hallucinations experienced by some schizophrenics today.

The reader is advised to consult Jaynes’s work for the reason behind this startling claim, and I leave the task of evaluating the historical evidence to others more capable than I. Suppose, though, that there is something to Jaynes’s observations: what sense can we make then of the phenomenology he attributes to early civilizations? Jaynes himself claims that these people were literally unconscious and that their verbal images emanated from the right hemisphere—a physiologically unlikely possibility.

Within the present framework there is a less elaborate story available for the phenomenology: the differences appear in the affect system. In particular, suppose the verbal images these people experienced came with the affects outer, non-ego-initiated, and congruous. They would then experience their own thought as being produced by something in the external environment, like a perception; since the percept was congruous, its externality would seem okay to them, the way things should be. This is a relatively minor difference in the systems that monitor processing, even if it does produce a striking difference in the character of the experienced world. Such a minor difference is perhaps easier to contemplate as actually possible than Jaynes’s radical reorganization of the brain.

Whichever account one adopts, Jaynes’s or mine, the question arises, How could it come about that the computational minds of a whole society gradually changed over some hundreds of years? There are two possibilities: biological change accompanying the cultural change (that is, natural selection imposed by the culture actually effecting changes in the brain) or cultural change alone. Jaynes (personal communication) believes the difference to be due to cultural change alone; no biological change has taken place. In this case the implication is that something as basic as the way one experiences one’s own imagery—in our framework, the affects—is not totally innate but must be partly learned, like language, on the basis of one’s cultural environment; moreover, the affect system, like the grammar of language, can change over time.

Now we are getting into deep water indeed. Yet surprisingly, we are also approaching empirical testability. For now we can ask questions such as when children learn the difference between reality and imagination, on what evidence such learning is based (if any), and whether it might differ from one culture to another. Such questions are being asked in work such as that of . . . . (304–11)

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There's too much of the 'en masse' approach by Jaynes for me to swallow.

Not denying the necessity of the science, but it's beloved of anthropologists to view early man, in huge swathes, over massive periods.

Were there differences in emerging consciousness, from time to time and region to region? Naturally. Were some individuals, as now, further developed than others in making sense of nature and the nature of their own existence and consciousness? Yes.

Sorry, PDS - I haven't absorbed enough of Jaynes' work to really criticize, but I can't buy his simultaneous 'cut-off point' for all men everywhere.

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I wonder if dreaming could be a state where an inner voice runs wild. It seems to be.

I know cats and dogs dream. I've had these pets all my life until the last 10 years or so and I've always seen them sleeping and working their paws as if playing.

I really need to read the Jaynes book, but even if I don't sign on to the scope of his way of thinking, I do believe he is on to something. I know we think in stories and probably did so before we started thinking in concepts (or, at least, higher level concepts).

We all have a little nonstop voice in our heads, along with random and not so random images. In the instruction material for marketing and advertising (and persuasion in general), they pound over and over that, on first contact, you need to jump into the conversation already going on in the target's mind to establish bonding and relevance, then proceed. That's how they get you caught unawares.

Apropos, I once got into a kerfuffle on determinism on the old SoloHQ (in 2006). Back then a group of people were diehard determinists. It was fashionable to proclaim that since the future could only provide one outcome (meaning after the future became the past), that only one specific outcome was possible for existents before the future happened--it was predetermined.

To be clear, these folks were not arguing that you could only have one outcome from among many, which is true. They were arguing that the outcome you would experience was already "chosen" or "determined" for you before it happened.

It was weird. It was like talking to a bunch of people with a God perspective--folks who saw the past, the present and the future as if these three were one fixed, unchanging thing--time frozen in time, so to speak. This led them to conclude that free will was an illusion, or didn't exist, etc.

Or the opposite (and I don't recall the twisted logic of how it got there)--that a pair of dice and other inanimate things had free will (probably because randomness exists).

Over the years, I have started becoming very suspect when someone shows me something red, says it is green, but anyway, color doesn't exist. My default now is to say WTF? Or say he is nuts. I realize common sense is not proof, but if you want to fly in the face of common sense and get me to consider it seriously, you better have something more than just doublespeak and an urge to feel superior.

The following example I provided for dogs having free will was actually called "not sound inference." I'll let you, the reader, decide.

Doggy is sleepy (alternative 1). Doggy sees and smells food (alternative 2). Tail thumps (consideration). Doggy decides he is more tired than hungry, so he closes eyes and drifts off to sleep (choice).

I've actually seen this many times, including with a different outcome. It just now came to mind when I started thinking about dogs and cats having dreams.

The dog in the example clearly (at least to me) was able to envision two different future scenarios--two different stories for the future, so to speak--and choose between them. Anyone who has had pets knows about this kind of behavior.

Here's another example. Tell me there are no stories going on in this dog's head during the scolding and that in the future when he is alone, he will be faced with some clear choices--different stories of what he can do. He will discern them in his mind and choose--or worse, see the different stories internally but not choose and instead go with his primary impulse like so many humans do all the time. In other words, he has a fundamental choice: to think or not to think. :)

:)

I wonder how much these scenarios play out in the dogs minds like Jaynes claims humans used to experience in antiquity.

Michael

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I can't wrap my head around the idea of a non(pre?)conceptual human consciousness. Even if Jayne's assertion of an internal voice seeming to be external(from god), what or how did these people decipher the vocabulary , without a conceptual capacity? Aren't words without concepts sounds?

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I can't wrap my head around the idea of a non(pre?)conceptual human consciousness. Even if Jayne's assertion of an internal voice seeming to be external(from god), what or how did these people decipher the vocabulary , without a conceptual capacity? Aren't words without concepts sounds?

How do young infants manage prior to acquiring language? They learn stuff and they recognize stuff.

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I can't wrap my head around the idea of a non(pre?)conceptual human consciousness. Even if Jayne's assertion of an internal voice seeming to be external(from god), what or how did these people decipher the vocabulary , without a conceptual capacity? Aren't words without concepts sounds?

How do young infants manage prior to acquiring language? They learn stuff and they recognize stuff.

Exactly. Jaynes compares our unconscious ancestors to modern children who have not yet acquired the capacity for intospection. They do all kinds of sophisticated things, but do not reflect upon them, or themselves for that matter.

I read a book this past summer about the Commanches called Empire of the Summer Moon. The Commanches were like this. Each day was a new day. They had no outward deities. They simply lived life as one headlong "experience", without reflection. Apropos of Jaynes, they were highly tecnhically competant with weapons, the best horse-riders in the Western Hemisphere, and virtually free of conscience. They had very little in the way of societal norms, and very little, if anything, in the way of myths. They were also the baddest-ass fighters in what is now middle America for at least 2 centuries. It took the Texas Rangers to tame them.

The moment I started recently reading Jaynes I was reminded of the Commanches.

I think Jaynes would call the Egyptians who built the Pyramids--for instance--more technically sophisicated versions of the Commanches.

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I can't wrap my head around the idea of a non(pre?)conceptual human consciousness. Even if Jayne's assertion of an internal voice seeming to be external(from god), what or how did these people decipher the vocabulary , without a conceptual capacity? Aren't words without concepts sounds?

How do young infants manage prior to acquiring language? They learn stuff and they recognize stuff.

Right. "I fall down". ("Mmm, all things fall down!"). "Mommy is big!. No, now she's smaller than my foot". ("Huh - near, then far away - size changes!")

You don't need words for concepts like gravity and distance, you experience them first.

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I have only skimmed the site the link directed to about Jayne. It seems that part of his theory is either evidenced by or explaining of the ideas of god or gods in ancient cultures. Which could be evidence that humans at this time lacked the ability to introspect, though they were aware of some inner voice(s) giving them instruction. Even if this was the experience of these early men, what were they hearing and how did they know what to do?

Didn't Rand demonstrate that communication was a secondary or derivative feature of 'language', that language is actually a requirement of a conceptual consciousness? Thatt when a concept is formed a mental tag is associated with the contents of the concept so formed to make it available to awareness, the whole idea and mechanics of unit economy?

Even if I thought I heard god tell me to "put it on the table" , I would still need the concept of table.

And for a conceptual consciousness , at least as is now recognized as human consciousness, it would seem that 'introspection' would be inseparable, I do not think that particular attribute is something that can just come in off the shelf, or any other attribute of conceptuality for that matter. If Jayne's theory is true , he is not talking about man.

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I can't wrap my head around the idea of a non(pre?)conceptual human consciousness. Even if Jayne's assertion of an internal voice seeming to be external(from god), what or how did these people decipher the vocabulary , without a conceptual capacity? Aren't words without concepts sounds?

How do young infants manage prior to acquiring language? They learn stuff and they recognize stuff.

Right. "I fall down". ("Mmm, all things fall down!"). "Mommy is big!. No, now she's smaller than my foot". ("Huh - near, then far away - size changes!")

You don't need words for concepts like gravity and distance, you experience them first.

Where do babies get the idea that the pointed finger indicates the thing named and it is not the thing named?

ba'al Chatzaf

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  • 1 month later...

I very much enjoyed reading his book.

When scientists were mapping the brains functions via open surgery and electrically stimulating the right brain area that corresponds to the wernike's area the subject always heard a voice. A very powerful commanding voice. His hypothesis that modern day schizophrenics brains right brain area is not dormant is a compelling one. Also the way in which "oracles" were selected and trained was also interesting.

I first read his book in 1987. Much of it I remember quite well so that to me speaks volumes.(pun intended)

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I very much enjoyed reading his book.

When scientists were mapping the brains functions via open surgery and electrically stimulating the right brain area that corresponds to the wernike's area the subject always heard a voice. A very powerful commanding voice. His hypothesis that modern day schizophrenics brains right brain area is not dormant is a compelling one. Also the way in which "oracles" were selected and trained was also interesting.

I first read his book in 1987. Much of it I remember quite well so that to me speaks volumes.(pun intended)

That is all well and good. But a theory that postulates that somehow in the last 10,000 years a radical reprogramming of the way our brains work took place world wide and in a relatively short time is rather implausible. I think our brains work according to their physical and neurophysiological nature.

Ba'a Chatzaf

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