In 1976, the polymathic Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes published The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It is one of those rare books which is mostly wrong but is filled with so many penetrating and provocative insights that it still deserves to be read. It’s a big idea book that aroused considerable scholarly response, most of it critical. While current academic interest in Jaynes is minimal, his popular audience remains large. Some of his followers have formed a society which maintains a cult-like website devoted to all things Jaynes.
Though it isn’t possible to do Jaynes justice in a short space, his most famous idea was that the ancient human mind was of two parts: it was “bicameral.” Inspired by research showing the brain is right-left specialized, Jaynes hypothesized that in the evolutionary past the left brain must have been completely separated from the right brain. The effect, according to Jaynes, would have been disquieting: language generated in the left brain would have been interpreted by the right brain as coming from outside or somewhere else. Ancient people, in other words, were functionally lobotomized and regularly experienced auditory hallucinations. These voices were called gods and this supposedly explains the origin of religion. For Jaynes, the bicameral mind lacked what he calls “consciousness.”
With this hypothesis in hand Jaynes began scouring the historical record looking for evidence of bicamerality. In the Iliad, an ancient oral poem finally written down around 800 BCE, Jaynes thinks he has found it:
[I]f you take the generally accepted oldest parts of the Iliad and ask, “Is there evidence of consciousness?” the answer, I think, is no. People are not sitting down and making decisions. No one is. No one is introspecting. No one is even reminiscing. It is a very different kind of world.
Then, who makes the decisions? Whenever a significant choice is to be made, a voice comes in telling people what to do. These voices are always and immediately obeyed. These voices are called gods. To me this is the origin of gods. I regard them as auditory hallucinations similar to, although not precisely the same as, the voices heard by Joan of Arc or William Blake. Or similar to the voices that modern schizophrenics hear. Verbal hallucinations are common today, but in early civilization I suggest that they were universal.
Jaynes must then explain the origin and evolution of the bicameral or “unconscious” mind, which he does here:
But why is there such a mentality as a bicameral mind? Let us go back to the beginning of civilization in several sites in the Near East around 9000 B.C. It is concomitant with the beginning of agriculture. The reason the bicameral mind may have existed at this particular time is because of the evolutionary pressures for a new kind of social control to move from small hunter-gatherer groupings to large agriculture based towns or cities. The bicameral mentality could do this since it enabled a large group to carry around with them the directions of the chief or king as verbal hallucinations, instead of the chieftain having to be present at all times.
I think that verbal hallucinations had evolved along with the evolution of language during the Neanderthal era as aids to attention and perseverance in tasks, but then became the way of ruling larger groups.
Setting aside for a moment the objection that modern humans are only minimally descended from Neanderthals and we don’t know whether they had language, Jaynes obviously believes that bicamerality is ancient and ancestral. All humans, in other words, descended from these hallucinating hunter-gatherers. Much later in time some of these hunter-gatherers (those in the Near East) developed agriculture and the “voices” were pressed into the service of social control. Even when the ruler-god isn’t present, people hear voices and attribute the commands of those voices to the ruler-god.
It’s all very tidy. The problem, however, is that the bicameral mind on which everything is built and depends eventually breaks down. The story that Jaynes tells about the breakdown is remarkable, indeed fascinating, but for my purposes the details are unimportant. All we need to know is that in complex agricultural societies, pressures and contradictions increase until the bicameral mind finally dissolves: it becomes unified or unicameral. This is the beginning, for Jaynes, of “consciousness.” It is the hallmark of fully modern minds which recognize the voice inside the head not as “god” but as “I.”
It is that this point that Jaynes’ story, still believed by many, runs into deep trouble: some groups of people never practiced agriculture, never lived in complex societies, and never experienced a breakdown of bicameralism. These people are of course hunter-gatherers, many of whom continued foraging until relatively recently and some of whom still do. These groups, descended directly from the hallucinating ancients, presumably retained bicameral minds and lacked “consciousness.”
If this were the case (it isn’t), our histories and ethnographies would be filled with fantastic and unbelievable tales about bicameral hunter-gatherers. They would have been strange beings incapable of recognizing that the voices inside their heads weren’t real. While this is the obvious implication of Jaynes’ theory, we needn’t take my word for it. Here is how recent “pre-literate tribal” people are described by the Jaynes Society:
They have limited inner mental life (and experience frequent auditory hallucinations) but they can be just as animated as non-human primates are. Bicameral people were non-conscious but intelligent, had basic language, and were probably more social than modern conscious people in the sense that they would have typically lived and worked surrounded by others. They would be able to express first tier (non-conscious) emotions such as fear, shame, and anger, but not second-tier (conscious) emotions such as anxiety, guilt, and hatred.
This is stunning. It reads like a racist Victorian description of non-European subhumans, and if I didn’t just pull it from a website advocating Jaynes’ views, that’s what I would think it was.
Here is how we know Jaynes is wrong: there is no evidence that historically recent hunter-gatherers were or are biologically-neurologically different or that their minds were metaphorically bifurcated. Nothing in the ethnohistoric or ethnographic record suggests this and in fact the opposite is true. What we find in the record is that these people, despite their different histories and cultures, were (and are) just like us.
Reference:
Jaynes, Julian. (1986). Consciousness and The Voices of the Mind. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 27 (2), 128-148 DOI: 10.1037/h0080053
That’s quite the website the Jaynesians have.
Two thoughts, not totally related to Jaynes but I will try to bring them back to your post.
A psychology teacher was asked, “Why study Freud when most of his ideas have been debunked?” The teacher said it was important to study Freud because his ideas make “such a good story.”
Is Jaynes in the same boat? The mistakes are important to understand because we don’t want to repeat them?
Also, I’ve read of a different “split” between the ancient mind and the modern mind that is not neurological, but has more to do with upbringing, or training and education.
The’ modern mind’ can separate a thing from the implication the thing has on a person’s behaviour. We can see a religious icon and note the plastic or plaster. We can observe the effect on a person’s behaviour due to the significance or symbolic meaning for the person.
The ‘ancient mind’ didn’t consistently distinguish an object from its effect on behaviour. Depending on the culture, an individual might feel a compulsion around a religious icon, or feel a special weapon invokes invincibility in the wielder. (I hope I’m being clear. If not, I can try a different explanation.)
This isn’t what Jaynes was talking about, but I was curious to know if you’ve dealt with this distinction. If you have, what do you think of it?
Has Freud mostly been proven wrong? I suppose one could say that for some things but not others. His most profound insight — that the mind is partitioned and the subconscious plays an important role — has stood the test of time, and I think his cultural writings remain diagnostic and powerful. I think one can still read Freud fruitfully for these reasons and others, and wouldn’t dismiss him just because he told many stories which have proven wrong. Even within those stories, there are flashes of isolated insight or brilliance. Jaynes is a bit like this, but in his unique way.
If it is true that ancient minds couldn’t distinguish between the composition of an object and the effect of an object, I’m not sure how we would ever prove or falsify the idea. If we began with this as a hypothesis, what sorts of things might we look for in the archaeological record? Or would we have to restrict ourselves to written records? I don’t know how we’d see this in the archaeological record, and if we are restricted to written records then the distinction, if it can be sustained, doesn’t really tell us anything about “ancient” minds.
I guess I’m doubtful such a distinction existed or exists. Whenever people imbue objects with intangibles, there is a curious conflation of ideas about the object in the mind. This is true of even the most modern people.
I think the psych teacher was being glib, and I was probably being a little sloppy if I suggested in my comment that Freud’s work was something to accept or reject as a whole. Apologies. My main point was that something can be learned from what’s wrong as much as from what’s right.
I think I’d agree that many individuals (modern or otherwise) would have a similar trouble distinguishing between composition and implication. Maybe “mind” isn’t the right word to focus on, but other possibilities – like culture, upbringing, education, language use – might be just as troublesome.
I came across the idea in a psychological study of motivation. It focused a lot on mythology and narrative. Your point about proving/falsifying the idea is a good one and at the moment I have little to offer in response.
In your past posts you had something about an inuit man explaining the difference between hunting with guns and hunting with magical amulets. I’m tempted to explore that difference a little more, but I don’t want to force a connection or anything.
Thanks for your response, Cris, and for the website. I have a lot to catch up on.
In your summary you seem to have missed some key ideas. The notion that the brain is bicameral is not controversial. What Jaynes claimed is that this bicamerality facilitated a pre-conscious mode of awareness of the brain’s activities which expressed itself as a commanding voice at critical moments. For this reason he goes on and on about a “bicameral mind,” which I agree is an unfortunate choice of words, but the concept is quite sound. It is not even original, as most of it is a synthesis of established ideas in anthropology, archeology, neurobiology, philology, and psychology. The transition is not to some absurd “unicameralism,” since the genome hasn’t changed and the brain is still bicameral, but rather to a metaphorical mind-space where the brain’s activity can be modeled and a more fully elaborated sense of self can be developed. In other words, consciousness is an acquired skill like language or logical thinking that has certain neurological structures which facilitate it. Jaynes didn’t go looking for confirmation, the idea came to him from more general research into human psychology. The Iliad is only of interest because the orthography is stable enough during the period in question to draw strong inferences from the changes in language over time. Evidence for a similar transition is also noted in a number other texts, most notably the various versions of the Gilgamesh epic and the Old Testament.
Except the notion that the brain is bicameral is controversial. I’m not aware of any scholars or scientists who accept Jaynes’ conception of a bicameral brain. If bicamerality isn’t a sound concept, then nothing else (which you have articulated quite nicely) flows from it.
All this aside, Jaynes argues that certain social formations engendered or facilitated the transition to unicamerality. Because there were certain groups of people in the world who never experienced the pressures or demands of these social formations, it would mean that these people never transitioned to unicameral consciousness. These people lived in various kinds of small-scale societies, with some groups being hunter-gatherers who retained this lifeway until recently.
According to Jaynes, these people should have retained bicameral minds or a “pre-conscious mode of awareness.” There is zero evidence that these peoples had or have minds any different from people living in larger scale, post-Neolithic, or modern societies. This fact alone destroys his entire argument.
What are you reading? The bicamerality of the physical brain is well evidenced and well accepted. Where Jaynes has hijacked the word “bicameral” is in his special hypothesis of a bicameral mind or mentality. I agree that the language is quite sloppy, but after a critical reading I find that the thinking is not. And if you won’t allow a difference between “brain” and “mind” then this critique will not go very far.
Only unicorns made of straw exhibit unicamerality.
The origins of consciousness are not necessarily the same thing as the propagation of consciousness. Since the underlying physiological structure is universally shared, and has been for many millennia, it is a matter of cultural contact and attitude to change that determines the adoption of it. There is no value judgment nor racial profiling involved here. History shows that those who have adopted subjective consciousness as their primary mentality tend to develop their technologies more rapidly. (Whether this is a good thing is another question entirely.) Jaynes never asserts that all peoples need to go through the exact same process to acquire consciousness, nor does he assert that it’s an either or proposition. In book 2 chapter 6 he pointedly mentions evidence of persons and groups who used either mode at different times during the period of time while that particular society’s preference was in transition.
The evidence for a significant change in mentality during the late iron age or its anthropological equivalent in other parts of the world is overwhelming. The only thing new here is Jaynes’s conjecture that this was prompted by the diminution of a mode of brain activity facilitated by bicamerality. The causes for this loss of what had become a trusted source of moral advice included increasing social and environmental complexities, contact with other civilizations through trade, and the emergence of writing as a substitute for the spoken word,
There are some serious gaps in his conjecture that even he saw would prevent him from postulating this as a scientific theory. I’m no fanboi, nor am I associated with the JJS, yet if you are going to critique his work, please be accurate.
I’m looking forward to responding in more detail, but the Tournament is on so it will have to wait. I will say, however, that I spent over three years in graduate school studying brain evolution, neuroscience, and cognition, and then I wrote a thesis on it. You can read a very small portion of my research by going to the Bio tab of the blog and clicking on my article “Human Brain.” It’s a pdf file. Give that a read and let’s talk.
Let’s drop the whole bicameral/unicameral thing. I’ve already conceded that it is sloppy language, which is a general criticism I have of this book. I’m sorry I didn’t “get” your point when you introduced “unicameralism” as a joke neologism, and now that I do I’m laughing with you. It was my mistake to keep on about it; I’ll stop now except when I need to directly reference a claim made by Jaynes.
What I should have written is that some specialization and communication between the two hemispheres has been independently observed, and that this is the factual basis for Jaynes’s conjecture. Perhaps “bilateral brain” would be a better phrase, but even that could go pear-shaped very quickly.
Which brings me to a more serious criticism. To merely state that “bicameralism” is wrong doesn’t tell your readers much. The most succinct way I can think of to critique it is that it doesn’t take into account the evidence for asymmetry in brain evolution that had long been going on before the appearance of primates.
His discussion of consciousness is, indeed, limited in scope to higher order consciousness, aka reflexive, subjective, or introspective consciousness. The main benefit of such a focus, and the saving grace of this book, is that it made it possible to develop a framework for testable hypotheses concerning consciousness and rescue the matter from endless philosophical debate. Others, of course, have done this as well, yet I feel there is value in watching him go through the process during a time when the scientific examination of consciousness was not as widely accepted.
Similarly, as a psychologist of that era, his bias towards brain structures closer to the cortex is understandable. For human psychology, the cortex is where the more interesting brain activity takes place, so it doesn’t surprise me that he looked no deeper than the corpus callosum for support of his hypotheses.
His insight concerning the role of imagined voices as an explanation for evolution of religion as a force in social order and morality is at the very least thought-provoking. It does seem to explain a lot — perhaps too much, since it covers ground where there is already a good deal of evidence for other explanations. I agree (and if one reads carefully enough, so does Jaynes) that a society solely organized by Jaynesian preconsciousness has never been observed, yet such modes of mentality, if you will, are quite common. I’m speaking of gnostic, animist, and similar mystical traditions that ritually invoke trancelike non-conscious mental states for the express purpose of divination or “enlightenment”. Your own blog entry “Encultured Hallucinations” touches on this, which is why I am a bit puzzled by how vehemently you have dismissed Jaynes’s notions. Without even going to a proper library, a web search on “DIFFICULTIES IN DISTINGUISHING PSYCHOPATHOLOGY FROM CULTURE” shows that quite a few people are discussing this phenomenon of auditory hallucinations as normal and healthy in certain extant populations, for which you have claimed there is no evidence, and the problem of distinguishing that from personality disorders or psychosis.
PS
Sorry about the caps: that’s the way it literally comes up as a Google search.
PPS
SU squeaked by, so Saturday night is spoken for
Okay, so this is an impressive and detailed response. How about this. You work up your explanations and objections to my post into a separate, stand-alone post (i.e., make it not between you and me personally, but more general as if you were responding to my initial post and offering a substantive critique that were you posting somewhere else). Send that to me, and let’s do it as a guest post, which we will introduce as a rebuttal to my post.
Send it to crisorigins at gmail dot com. Give me some biographical info when you send it so I can introduce you to my readers.
Thank you for the invitation. I apologize if what I wrote seemed personal. Any use of the words “you” or “your” were only intended to refer to this blog post and nothing more.
As you must have guessed by now, this book is fresh in my mind because I am currently involved in a group discussion of it. We are approaching it as an exercise in critical reading, let the chips fall where they may. It could be several weeks to a month before that winds down, and I would like to take advantage of that sort of “peer review” to further refine my ideas on it before I post a public reply.
What you wrote didn’t seem personal but if you are going to write a post for a larger audience, it can’t be a conversation between you and me. It needs to be directed toward a wider audience, without the conversational aspects.
Origin of pondering and discussing…
——————————————-
Consciousness is a brainchild, and the brain is a progeny of mono-cells communities evolution:
Origin Of Brained-Nerved Organisms
From http://universe-life.com/2012/02/03/universe-energy-mass-life-compilation/
Evolution of life, of mass formats self-replication:
RNA nucleotides Genes (organisms) to RNA and DNA genomes (organisms) to mono-cellular to multicellular organisms.
Individual mono-cells to cooperative mono-cells communities, “cultures”.
Mono-cells cultures to neural systems, then to nerved multicellular organisms.
Dov Henis
(comments from 22nd century)
Julian Jaynes’ views are the only views which help explain my breakdown – I heard voices/ had one visualization/ I lost my witness – gratefully, it is back. I am endlessly grateful to him. I have no need to read any “scientific” studies. – Thank you.
Wasn’t Jaynes a scientist? He certainly considered himself to be one.
The very brief description you provided about your breakdown has a familiar sound or ring to it. Didn’t Jaynes in fact claim the modern atavism of bicameral consciousness could be seen in cases of schizophrenia?
Did anything ever come of the debate between paul and cris? I’ve been looking around for some good, thoughtful critique on Jaynes but I haven’t found much that doesn’t misinterpret or misunderstand.
Cris: Was there ever a response to Paul’s points? I couldn’t find it but yet you’ve written other things about Jaynes where he is “interesting but mostly wrong”, does this mean you’ve resolved these points?
I had forgotten all about this exchange until you just left a comment. I didn’t ever hear from Paul again, or receive an email, which is quite a shame because he obviously had some nice points and insights. I even issued him an invitation for a guest post, which I’ve never done before or since. Perhaps I should send him an email to see if we can push this further along. I did do a recent post (“Ghosts of Julian Jaynes”) but it certainly did not address Paul’s comments.
How about a try on top of this highly informative comment thread? No?
Hi all,
It’s as if I heard you calling my name.
The discussion went on longer than I had estimated, and by the time we wrapped it up I had forgotten about this blog. What brought it to mind is that I recently submitted a brief review on another site, and while looking at my notes I realized that I had nnot done anything to respond here.
A couple of notes. Sometimes when I read something for comprehension, I at first immerse myself in it, absob it, and then critique it. That accounts for why during my first several posts I was completely oblivious that I was banging on with Jaynes’s neologism as if it were a legitimate word. My apologies, and you have me on record as saying that was a mistake.
Having torn the book apart, I don’t differ substantialy from the above conclusions concerning the main thesis. What I find interesting is the method by which Jaynes debunks it himself, and the willingness to insist on a more scientific approach to the inquiry into the nature of consciousness.
I’ll elaborate on that soon.
My concern with criticisms against Jaynes so far is that while they may dismiss parts of his theory, they offer nothing in return and simply revert to fMRI studies to confuse the lot of humanity and deem the problem of consciousness: currently unsolvable. I think many critics forget Jaynes’ chapter on language and particularly metaphor, ignoring that he is looking for the right metaphor where so many others have failed. Meeting that challenge is surely a tough one, but saying simply “he’s just wrong for reason x, end of story” is quite unscientific, especially when Jaynes seems to be his own worst critic already.
I’m anxious to hear your thoughts paul.
I encouraged Paul to read my article on the “Human Brain,” which you can find in pdf format under my Bio tab. I have a section on consciousness, and my understanding of the phenomena does not square in any way with Jaynes.
I’ve also been corresponding with Paul, and have pointed out that if Jaynes was even partially correct, it would mean that hunter-gatherers who never underwent societal transformation (i.e., the pressures of the Neolithic transition) should display the signs of bicameral consciousness. Yet they don’t, and no one (other than Jaynes cranks) has ever claimed they have a different kind of consciousness. This seems fatal to me.
What about shamans?
Shamans are people who become schizophrenic by age 10 (at the latest), but then are able to heal themselves completely — but then they live as wanderers between two worlds…
Today, there are only adult schizophrenics — and they cannot heal themselves any more.
Intriguingly, most shamans run in hunter-gatherer societies………..
While there has some speculation that traditional shamans may have been what we today categorize as “mentally ill,” there is not much evidence of this and it would be quite difficult to confirm. This was a popular hypothesis during the 60s and 70s, but not so much today. I’ve read hundreds of hunter-gatherer ethnohistories, and shamans don’t usually strike me as schizoid, whether “healed” or not.
Nevertheless, they are the only ones who live between two (TWO) worlds…
This may already be a definition of “schizophrenic”, i.e., counting with more than one (materialistic) world… — hence, the beginning of all religions…
Hence, shamanism is the only “religion” (if it is a “religion” at all…) which is genetically determined, but CANNOT be learned — unlike judaism (and its followers up to Marxist Chinese), which ALWAYS has to be learned IN ADDITION.
Paul, Cris, folks …
I was hoping for a follow-up round here as well because I haven’t come across an exhaustive takedown of Jaynes, either. Most philosphers who tackle Jaynes seem upset that he’s deprived them of a favorite subject, so I turn to applied sciences for something substantive.
Corret me, but doesn’t the hunter-gatherer phase of human development *precede* the agricultural city-states that Jaynes examined in the archeological and literary record? Certainly some remain today, so what do you mean, Cris, you say you’ve read “hundreds of hunter-gatherer ethnohistories”? Dating from when? Unspoiled by written language? How do you “read” them and where do they come from? I hate to be so bone-headed about it (ha) but could you give an example or perhaps two examples of where the Jaynesian definition of consciousness appears in what you’ve discovered in the field?
Whether he’s examining the Illiad or the artifacts of Sumeria, Egypt and Greece, Jaynes searches for signs of autonomous decision-making, introspection, spatialized time and inner-conflict in pre-literate cultures and comes up empty. I say “pre-literate” because I’m not an anthropologist and it seems to me that even an illiterate person or group can learn consciousness, in the Jaynesian sense, from an oral language that has been transformed by the written form and then transcribed back into the oral channel.
In any case, I agree with Paul that the phrase “bicameral mind” is a distracting figure of speech. This earlier mentality only *appears* “bicameral” in retrospect, from the vantage of a contemporary mind that is far more fractured — into id, ego, superego, if you like (or left hemisphere and right hemisphere, frontal lobe and limbic system, etc). At a “bicameral” time, says Jaynes, the *experience* of this mentality would be “signal-bound” to the exacting grip of the auditory and therefore much more unified than the term “bicameral” suggests, certainly more unified than what we expereince today with our doubts, introspection, self-scrutiny, and resistence/appeals to authority, etc.
There is no hunter-gatherer “phase” of development. Some societies, which have become quite large over recent time, adopted agriculture and food production. They are derived from hunting and gathering.
In the long meantime, foragers continued doing their thing until the late 1800s in the Americas, until the early 1900s in Australia, until the 1970s in southern Africa, until the mid 1900s in the Congo and Andaman Islands, until recently in Oceania, and continue to do it in parts of Amazonia, the Arctic, and Africa (i.e., the Hadza).
The hunter-gatherer ethnohistoric and ethnographic records are truly enormous, and these records come in all shapes and sizes. A person could spend a lifetime reading them. I’ve spent 6 years reading the hunter-gatherer records (on an intensive basis) and have barely scratched the surface.
I also spend substantial amounts of time with the “traditionalist” descendants of some of these groups, and they display no apparent signs of bifurcated consciousness. There aren’t even any apparent residuals of it, which one might expect to find if Jaynes were correct.
Suffice it to say that this record completely devastates Jaynes’ argument. If what he hypothesized about consciousness were true, it would be evident in this record. It isn’t.
Yes, I know that differences in human groups don’t line up in snug chapters or “phases” in the denim-jacket sense of the word. I was just trying to esablish a general order of origins for the three general types under discussion here. Agricultural/settled developments came *after* the hunter-gatherer, yes? Of *course* hunter-gatherers persisted even after this development. But I thought Jaynes’s point was that the bicameral mind, with its god-persona governing the individual, was a feature of this later, settled development, not the roving and foraging hunter-gatherer mode that both preceded it and persisted in different corners of the globe through recent times. For them, the question is not whether they have a “bicameral mind” — I would imagine not — but whether they have the spatialized time, analog-I, introspection, guilt, anarchy, etc. that Jaynes defines as consciousness. And if so, how did they come by it without written language, trade, migration or interaction with other groups?
I’m afraid I’m not much wiser about what a “traditionalist” hunter-gatherer descendent does today, but if they have literacy, trade, migration and interaction with contemporary folk such as yourself then, per Jaynes, one would indeed expect them to be conscious in the way he described, not signal-bound to echoed commands of the dominant male and certainly not “bicameral”.
Again, “bifurcated consciousness” like “bicameral mind” confuses the phenomenon Jaynes is describing, I think. A “bifrucated/bicameral” mind is not, properly speaking, split, but rather focused and beholden to spoken command. It is the consicous mind that is split, that argues with itself, proffers complex motivations for itself and others, etc.
Jaynes offers a handful of causes for consciousness, the most potent among them being written language. His theory also has four main parts, of which the hallucinations of early theocratic city-states was but one, so a study of contemporary hunter-gatherers does not “completely devastate” it.
I was hoping for some details and specifics. Jaynes goes into great detail when it comes to the literary and archeological record in order to illustrate features of both consciousness and one of its proto-forms, all the while searching for an origin. One of the more provocative conclusions of his theory is that this origin occurred much later than the speciation of homo sapiens. Consciousness is a function of language, a “cultural construction” and therefore a much more recent phenomenon than either religious folk or evolutionary biologists would like to believe. Is this an unprovable (or merely mundane) possibility?
The bottom line is that no credible or reputable person has ever suggested that hunter-gatherers have brains, minds, cognition, or consciousness that differs from people living in post-Neolithic societies. In fact, all the lines of evidence show that there is no difference. All humans share the same brain neurology and cognitive architecture.
Hunter-gatherers were (and are) fully capable of cogitating any of the various things you have mentioned (“spatialized time, analog-I, introspection, guilt, anarchy”) which Jaynes confusingly calls and conflates with “consciousness.” These are learned (i.e., socially constructed) concepts and have nothing to do with brains, neurology, cognition, or consciousness.
I encourage you to spend time reading hunter-gatherer ethnohistories and ethnographies. You will learn far more from these than you will by reading Jaynes and trying to figure out whether he was right. He would not have written that book if he had done what I am suggesting for you. There is a reason why no scholars or academics or scientists accept his entertaining and ingenious arguments.
The details and specifics which you are seeking are there for the finding; it will require some diligence and effort on your part. My sense is that you won’t find details and specifics directly on point (i.e., refuting Jaynes) because most scholars and scientists have their own projects and refuting Jaynes (who is so clearly wrong) isn’t a high priority.
Yes, all homo sapiens share the same brain neurology, but as you’ve argued elsewhere on your blog and in your writings, natural selection only carries us partway to answering a question like the “origin” of consciousness, which was what Jaynes set out to do with his four-part theory. He repeatedly states that the neural substrates may vary (e.g. may have less to do with left/right differences and more to do with temporal/occiptal ones) and are undoubtedly as plastic as the brain itself. I can’t tell if you’re being fanciful with the phrase “cognitive architecture,” but I’ll take it to mean something more artful or abstract than a brain structure wrought by natural selection or cultural memes. In which case I couldn’t disagree more. We do not all have the same cognitive architecture. Some of us have rococo cognitions and some of us think under the open sky.
I have my own skepticism for Jaynes, but he has parcelled out the problem of the *origin* of consciousness in lucid and helpful terms. You say his terms are “confusingly called and conflated with consciousness” … Why? You agree that they are socially constructred, not primarily related to brain structure, which jives with Jaynes’s point that such a social construction is rooted in language, which itself underwent a profound transformation in the transition from orality to literacy. Profound enough to account for the “origin” of consciousness? Well, yes, if you accept the terms he sets up at the beginning of the book. So what is it about the analog-I, etc. that you find to be a confusing conflation of consciousness? You may not like the implications for hunter-gatherer groups, but his analysis of the early theocratic city-states is sound, if speculative.
Respectfully, pulling rank and parenthetical jabs aren’t nearly as persuasive as offering examples or sources or arguments to match arguments. I’m not taking either your or Jaynes’s word for it (that’s why I’m here) and as a layman I can only hope to connect the two by way of argument. So to ask a third time, could you please offer a suggestion for where to learn more about enthnohistories? You have a long list of links on your resource tab, what would you recommend?
I admire your persistence and willingness to explore these issues. My recommendation would be to approach all these issues from two different perspectives. The first is evolutionary and scientific, and the second is ethnohistoric and ethnographic.
First, I would read Merlin Donald’s superb books, Origins of the Modern Mind and A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. In addition to these two, I also recommend Steven Mithen’s The Prehistory of the Mind. These three books are essential background reading for evaluating Jaynes’ neurological and cognitive claims.
Before reading these books, you might also want to read my article, “The Human Brain,” which can be found under the blog’s bio tab; I have posted it there as a pdf file. My suspicion is that after reading these things, you’ll be a good position to critique Jaynes on your own.
There are indeed a number of scholars who recognize the differences between oral and literate cultures. Perhaps the best book on this is Jack Goody’s The Domestication of the Savage Mind. You should read this too. There are differences between animist-oral worldviews and post-Neolithic-literate worldviews, but talking about these differences within the frame of Jaynesian “consciousness” doesn’t seem very helpful. In fact, it confuses the issues.
As for reading in hunter-gatherer ethnohistory, it’s harder to make a recommendation because it requires deep and wide reading in the relevant materials. What is your culture area of interest? You could focus on African Bushmen, Australian Aborigines, North American Indians, Arctic Inuit, Amazonian tribes, etc. There is an enormous literature on each of these. If you indicate your preference, then I’ll give a list of books.
My main area of interest is Native Americans, but yours may differ. You won’t be able to ascertain the “mentality” or “worldview” or “consciousness” of any of these peoples by reading a single book, unfortunately. You’ll have to read many because the focus of each book will be different, and they will be of varying reliability and you will need to read them with an accordingly critical eye.
Excerpt from Q& A with Julian Jaynes, Tufts University, Oct. 14, 1982…as found in “The Julian Jaynes Collection” page 291. Edited by Marcel Kuijsten, published 2012 by the Julian Jaynes Society.
Q: If consciousness is learned from generation to generation, does this imply there are bicameral groups today- hunter gather societies for example?
Jaynes: The answer is no…
There were the Nok, back around 500 A.D. We are just digging up the idols that they used. This means to me they were almost by definition bicameral. What you find is that they had breakdowns. So what each Hunter-gatherer tribe has now is a whole history -as long as ourselves- & many of the practices they have came from a time when they were part of a bicameral kingdom…
There was much more to the passage than this excerpt after my added ellipsis, or “dot dot dots”, but i think the upshot was captured. Btw, the editor also added an extensive footnote to this passage on more recent activities & discoveries, which he sees as supporting Jaynes’ theories.