The Consciousness of Thunder

To refer to the bicameral man as having consciousness is to give an animal consciousness. It is the same as assigning to the lightning and the thunder a knowing of their own whereabouts and happenings. (Earlier I struck a tree in the forest, and then a house on Main St. …My thunder at around six o’clock this evening was tremendous). It’s not like that.

“It is very difficult to suspend the habit of projecting consciousness in thinking about ancient civilizations or even animals close to us or even in newborn infants.”

-Julian Jaynes. 1986. “Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind”, Canadian Psychology, 27, 128-148.

-found in Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness, Jaynes Revisited... . M. Kuijsten (ed.), 2006.

The Street Man

(A man in the corner of the Port Authority, relatively kempt above 35):

Voices? I hear all the voices. But they don’t tell me nothing I don’t already know. You see, I know everything. My thoughts are always ahead of everything. What voices do you want to know about? Cosmoligian, terrestrian, solarian, universalian…? You see, it’s the psychology. Yes, listen, when everything started the earth was made and god did it. I know all that. Jesus knows it. I already know everything even if they’re yelling. I know what’s wrong and what’s right. You see, I’m always trying to catch up with my reality. I don’t even try anymore. It’s always so far ahead of everything. I can’t keep up with it. …No one can ever know me or understand it.

---

-Interviewed homeless person in NYC on the subject of auditory hallucinations

-Conducted by Michael Rosenberg, student of Julian Jaynes

-Presented by Julian Jaynes at a conference of Harvard U. Dept. of Psych., Oct. 1989

-Published in Philosophy and Psychopathology, M. Spitzer and B.A. Maher (eds), 1990

-Found on p81 of Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited, Marcel Kuijsten (ed), Julian Jaynes Society, 2006

On Corporations as Super-Individuals in The Evolution of Civilization:

What is more intriguing, the consistency of the pattern of civilization, or the relative simultaneity of transition for factions along different locations of the trajectory?

At the outset of the 21^st century, the nations of Middle East/North Africa transition from the religious to the secular, as America, crown of the West, manifests the next stage after democracy, that of the corporate controlled populous.

-in reference to “corporation as person”, and Murray Hill Inc. running for Congress

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Hill_Incorporated

Subtle Suggestions

So I saw this printed on a wall in a cafe in Frenchtown, NJ:

"Children left unattended will be given espresso and a free kitten."

Also, I was crashing at a friend's apt along Old River Road in Frenchtown NJ, and his landlord, an old, single, retired man, had placed a tricycle on the very edge of the lightly trafficked dirt road alongside his house, in a deceptive attempt to get people to slow down while they drove past (it only worked sometimes).

Anyway, people tend to be jerks when seen in the greater social setting. I found both of these examples to be quite refreshing as a means for behavior modification. I wish I saw more things like this.

On the Self-Replicate

[Sunday February 13, 2011]

People no longer interact in the way they were designed to by their physical evolution. During the transition from physical evolution to mental, the human body ceased to evolve (by its naturally selective definition), experiencing instead a change in mental constructs and eventually in collective interaction. Having developed the self-replicate, people could experience omni-spatial presence. They work while, at the same time, playing. The total separation of self into multiple entities allowed for unimaginable developments in energy use, while at the same time encouraging interpersonal interaction to increase to the point of full integration. Everyone can interact with everyone else all the time, at the same time – in fact, outside time. Experience, in a way, is shared rather than lived, in the ancient sense of the word.

This great system of human life is managed by the Exogenerational Body. This limited group is responsible for the maintenance of our collective life form. They redesign the anthropic network and redistribute its nodes as necessary. They also create vast diversions for the spiritual health of the people. Collectively, these diversions are called The Illusion. While many self-replicates perform the work necessary to uphold our way of life, others can at the same time commune in the warmth of their own chosen groups of conscious entities. The composite of all one’s choices within and between these networks and throughout all of one’s self replicates, is called one’s life – the people you’ve met, the things you’ve done, all of those are offered to you and either acquired or non-preferred, attracted or repelled. Technically, there are no new experiences offered within this illusion, only shared experiences endlessly redistributed. People come and go, in unifying cycles called Generations, but their self-replicates will always be bound within the anthroposphere, sharing the Great Experience. The only difference is that choice is not available – there is no acquisition or non-preference – existence simply sways to and fro throughout the sphere, riding on the currents of the universe that have been focused by the collective purpose of humankind.

The Anthroposphere

[Sunday, February 20, 2011]

Around the year 2000, humans began their exploration into the use of a digital network of interaction. Within 10 years, all humans existed simultaneously in both the conventional world and the digital world. This was, as stated, mostly exploratory in its developments. Humans had never experienced the simultaneity that came from the digital network, but soon, the entire spacetime structure of their collective existence became surmounted by a mind-shattering theory of non-time, which was itself brought on by developments in energy use, distribution, and storage of the early 21^st century.

When, in 2040, humans, collectively, in a sense, formed the anthroposphere, non-time began, paving the way for the self-replicate. Human existence, from that point on, is categorized into two parts – before the anthroposphere, or in time; and after the anthroposphere, or outside time.

Once the anthroposphere was officially stabilized, all living humans were grouped, by age, among other less important variables, into Generations. These are the Generations proper, as the Proto-Generations refer to the population born in time. Shortly before the first of the protogenerational population was set to expire, it was discovered that they could continue to exist within the anthroposphere as virtual entities. Though the expired generations could no longer interact, their presence could be felt by others still living. Henceforth, all humans living and otherwise have gained access to the self replicate, a virtual entity that can exist simultaneously with the living human, while technically interacting at another geochronological position. The only difference between the self-replicate of the living and those of the expired, is that expired self-replicates are more like the phantoms, or ghosts recorded in the old stories of human memory.

By around the year 2040, all humans being born were done so into the anthrocentric world of the human network. Humans had come full circle by this time, so that, by the modified evolutionary product of human conjoinment, their offspring was designed to interact within the anthroposphere only. The social engineering apparatus was thus complete, and, by 2070, the whole of human existence, active and extinguished, could be safely controlled.

Relative Truth

"It’s a little unfair, I think, to criticize a person for not sharing the enlightenment of a later epoch, but it is also profoundly saddening that such prejudices were so extremely pervasive. The question raises nagging uncertainties about which of the conventional truths of our own age will be considered unforgivable bigotry by the next."

Broca’s Brain, Carl Sagan, 1974-1979, Ch. 1, “Broca’s Brain”, p11

The Phenomenon of Man

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Written in Rome 1948, published in Paris 1955, eng trans 1959

INTRO

By Sir Julian Huxley

Cosmic Evolution as an Infolding upon Itself

Self Complexification = Convergent Integration (p15)

Linking Evolution of Mind w Concept of Energy:

2 forms of manifestation of energy

--Physicists energy – measurable

--Psychic energy – increases w the complexity of the organized units (p16)

The brain alone is not responsible for the mind, though it is a necessary organ for its manifestation. (p16)

Definition of mind – receiving, synthesizing, processing and organizing data from both within and without and using it to direct action (p17)

Referencing Teilhard:

The earth’s roundness, the sphericity of man’s environment, was bound to cause the intensification of social activity, as opposed to outward diffusion/expansion, where idea encounters idea, organized by the web, increasing tension. (p17)

The evolution of life is an anti-entropic process (p26)

GEOGENESIS (Pre-Life)

All matter has pre-life within it.

Irreversibility and Indivisibility:

As the crystalline structures of the earth become indivisible from each other, so do the biospherical counterparts; they cannot exist apart from all other biospherical counterparts [next after biogenesis comes psychogenesis and eventually noogenesis]. (p74)

BIOGENESIS (Life)

--Tangential growth – ‘leading shoot’/external energy

--Radial growth – expansionist/spherical/tidal/internal energy

Insects and Consciousness:

It is undeniable that certain qualities [Cephalization] are only capable of being manifested above certain quantities [organ size relative to body structure]. (p154)

ANTHROPOGENESIS (Humans)

Instinct is not canalized but flexible in mammals – it plays…an aura of freedom begins. The mammal is no longer a slave to its phylum. (p156)

Primates – freedom re limbs (p159)

“The orthogenesis of primates coincides w the axial orthogenesis of organized matter (urging all living things towards a higher consciousness).” (p180)

“Man came silently into the world, already speaks, lives in groups, already make fire…as we know, each time a new living form rises up before us out of the depths of history, it is always complete and already legion.” (p184)

“…the first man is, and can only be, a crowd, and his infancy made up of thousands and thousands of years.” (p184)

NOOGENESIS (Thought)

The Individualization of our Planet (p72)

The Noosphere is the terrestrial threshold of the planet, a transformation affecting the state of the entire planet [in the same way that biogenesis affected earth, comprehensively and simultaneously]. (p180)

The brain meets its organic limit

The Birth of Thought:

We already know that everywhere the active phyletic lines grow warm with consciousness towards the summit. But in one well-marked region, at the heart of the mammals, where the most powerful brains ever made by nature are to be found, they become red hot. And right at the heart of that glow burns a point of incandescence.

We must not lose sight of that line crimsoned by the dawn. After thousands of years rising below the horizon, a flame bursts forth at a strictly localized point.

Thought is born. (p160)

Anti-Entropy:

Psychic Heating ß à Material Cooling

--Boiling point/phase change

--A tiny ‘tangential’ increase causes the ‘radial’ to turn back on itself and take an infinite leap forward

--Morphologically, nothing really changes [to the human body, as it has stopped evolving physically relative to the mind] (p168)

Agriculture and Animal Husbandry:

The diminishing availability of land concentrates humans, leading to civilization/socialization. The geographic/spherical limits of the earth are what cause this concentration. (p203)

Endomorphosis (a geological term) [anthrosynthesis?]:

--the assimilation of cultures

--”mutual permeation matched w significant interfecundity of psychisms”

--blending ethnic traditions and cerebral genes

America and Evolution:

“The principle axis of anthropogenesis has passed through the West.” [in the same way that no new species were ‘born’ after man, no ‘new land’ was found after America] (p210).

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

“…the wealth of a nation which has almost nothing in common with their frontiers” (p212)

“The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting.” (p220)

“The social phenomenon is the culmination and not the attenuation of the biological phenomenon.” (p222)

“The spirit of research and conquest is the permanent soul of evolution.” (p223)

“Indeed time and space become humanized as soon as a definite movement appears which gives them a physiognomy.” (p227)

“Mankind has stretched a single membrane over the surface of the earth without breaking it.” (p241)

“Thought artificially perfects the thinking instrument itself.” (p25)

“…the hyper organic nature of social bonds” (p252)

“The mind is essentially just the power of synthesis and organization.” (p259)

“The exaltation, not merely the conversation, of elements by convergence: what, after all, could be more simple and more thoroughly in keeping with all we know?” (p266)

The creative value of synthesis in the evolutionary sense: There is more in the molecule than the atom, more in the cell than the molecule, the individual, society… (p168)

Since man, there has been a slowing down of the passive and somatic transformations of the organism in favor of the conscious and active metamorphoses of the individual in society. We find the artificial carrying out the work of the natural; and the transmission of an oral or written culture being superimposed on genetic forms of heredity (chromosomes). (p276)

[In the Noosphere] …”we are confronted with human vibrations resounding by the millions – a whole layer of consciousness collected and hoarded produce a million years of thought. Have we ever tried to form an idea of what such magnitudes represent?” (p285)

“…to abandon the organo-planetary foothold, the end of the fulfillment of the spirit of the earth…” (p287)