Intermental <> Intramental

All references below are found in this publication edited for the 30^th anniversary of Jaynes theory: Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited, Marcel Kuijsten, 2006

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“Religion was born the day the gods retreated into the heavens.”

Marcel Kuijsten, “Consciousness, Hallucinations, and the Bicameral Mind: 3 Decades of New Research”

Found in Chapter 4, p114

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During this bicameral transition, we see an expansion of the role of consciousness in decision-making to avoid seeking authoritative sources to guide actions.

Marcel Kuijsten, “Consciousness, Hallucinations, and the Bicameral Mind: 3 Decades of New Research”

Found in Chapter 4, p132

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Julian Jaynes inferred that the sense of self awareness emerged about four millennia ago when the experiences from the right hemisphere attributed to external agents such as gods and deities, intercalated with the linguistic properties of left hemispheric function. Language, Consciousness, and the sense of self [the analog ‘I’] may have emerged as synergistic products of culture.

Michael A. Persinger, Foreward

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The bicameral world is a continual present (no memory).

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

Found on p191

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Brian McVeigh, “The Self as Interiorized Social Relations: Applying a Jaynesian Approach to Problems of Agency and Volition”

Found in Chapter 7

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The self is composed of two parts:

1. Active, in control, the spirit, self

2. Passive, under control, body, virtual self

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Consciousness as culturally informed authorization

p208

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Consciousness as Shortcut:

Consciousness permits an individual to navigate the environment, both social and natural, in a more efficient manner. For example, before actually executing a behavior, we can “see” ourselves “in our heads” carrying out an action, thereby allowing us to shortcut actual behavioral sequences that may be time consuming, difficult, or dangerous.

p210

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The self is a personal toolkit of command and control “inside a person’s head”.

p214

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Madness

Madness is “resistance in coping with impulses from the individual unconscious”.

Introduction, Jose Barchilon, M.D., pviii, author’s footnote

[This statement, in that it implies the individual unconscious requires coping, brings forth the related idea that the individual unconscious rose out of a preceding transpersonal/collective unconscious].

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Madness is manifestation of the “soul”, what became known after Freud as the unconscious.

Introduction, Jose Barchilon, M.D., pviii

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Madness was an “undifferentiated experience” for the person living prior to the Age of Reason.

Preface

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In the Middle Ages, the legions of animals symbolically bear values of humanity.

In the Renaissance, the beast is set free to acquire a fantastic nature of its own.

Animality has escaped domestication by human symbols and values; and it is animality that reveals the dark rage, the sterile madness that lie in man’s hearts.

Chapter 1: Stultefera Navis, p21

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…The forbidden limits of knowledge, so inaccessible, so formidable, the Fool in his innocent idiocy, already possesses. While the man of reason and wisdom perceives fragmentary and all the more unnerving images of it, the Fool bears it intact as an unbroken sphere.

Chapter 1: Stultefera Navis, p22

[There is a great parallel here between Jayne’s Bicameral Man and Foucault’s Fool in that they both have access to an ancient wisdom that becomes inaccessible in the era of matured concsciousness (The Age of Reason)].

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No doubt, madness has to do with strange paths of knowledge.

Chapter 1: Stultefera Navis, p25

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Madness is the punishment of a disorderly and useless science.

Chapter 1: Stultefera Navis, p25

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The tragic experience of madness in a critical consciousness [during the Medieval to Renaissance transition] is abolished.

Chapter 1: Stultefera Navis, p25

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“I can imagine a man without hands and feet, but not one without thought.”

Pascal, Pansees

Chapter 3: The Insane, p70

[Also resonant with Julian Jaynes, see his thoughts on the misinterpretation of ancient texts, http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2011/07/julian-jaynes-bicameral-breakdown-on_16.html].

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On the insane and physical stamina and disease:

Madness afforded man an invulnerability, similar to that which nature, in its foresight, had provided for animals. Curiously, the disturbance of his reason restored the madman to the immediate kindness of nature by a return to animality.

Chapter 3: The Insane, p75

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[Jesus was ‘mad’, and look at us now…]

Jesus crucified…was the scandal of the world and appeared as nothing but ignorance and madness to the eyes of his time. But the fact that the world has become Christian, and that the Order of God is revealed through the meanderings of history and the madness of man, now suffices to show that Christ has become the highest point of our wisdom.

Boussuet, Panegyrique de Saint Bernard, Preamble

Chapter 3: The Insane, p75

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Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

Michel Foucault, 1961.

English Translation Richard Howard, Random House, 1965

Nothing to See Here

When you think about life, when you used to see the buds of the acorn, and then the acorn – the little triangular pieces thrusting upwards, outwards, overlapping in a distinct pattern. And you could see the relationship; when you would think about the on-off switches, set by infinite variables, you would bask in the glory of it, the glory of life.

Then came the code, and it was like, oh, it’s just a code. Nothing to see here. That’s when we realized that life wasn’t about biology, but information. All of our concepts of life and its behaviors were now being conferred upon information, not matter, as its substrate.

The virtual palimpsest was a paradox at first. Copies upon copies of copies, pieces taken apart and put back together but having been exchanged with identical pieces of another. Put simply, though, it was just the concept of a thing – a thing as based in matter – becoming a non-physical thing, an idea. There were no more things, or at least not much that mattered. It was all ideas. And ideas don’t require a physical platform, they need only a mindspace.

How do you build a culture on that? There is no more ‘building’ in the sense we of timespace had known. And so our cultures as well dissolved and diluted, too meager an entity to compete in this world. Culture needs layers of age and decay; it mimics the biological even in that sense of growth-from-poverty. To the point, he who relies on his body to house his mind, his mind will always behave as a body and according to the rules of timespace.

Obscurity is the Refuge of Incompetence

-quote from Robert A. Heinlein's, Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961

Next Caller Please

"Someone's breathing into the phone. I'm not saying stop breathing, but maybe you could direct your mouth away from the phone."

-Emmanuel Goldstein, Off the Hook, WBAI 99.5FM, Apr 24, 2010

The Artificial Arena of Natural Selection

Society (with all its institutions and distinctions between class/race etc.) is the artificial arena of natural selection required for the continuing evolution of humankind.

Fresh and Clean

I wear black socks. Right now, I have two batches from two different brands. They look similar, but the thought of wearing two different ones makes me crazy, so I make sure to pair them correctly when folding my laundry.

It's hard to tell the difference between two of them, but I realized today, for the first time, that when you look at three together, it becomes very easy to tell the one that doesn't belong. I can basically do it at dusk with no lights on, using this method.

I feel like I've just made a personal discovery of one of the fundamental truths of logic.

Clean in the Front, Dirty in the Back

Companies Get New Tools for Calculating Emissions

LESLIE KAUFMAN, New York Times

October 3, 2011

article excerpts:

The creators of influential measures of greenhouse gas emissions plan to announce two new tools for corporations...to calculate the amount of climate-warming gases released through a company’s supply chain, as well as in the use and disposal of its products. A standardized way of calculating such emissions had eluded energy experts and statisticians for several years. The tool is known as Scope 3.

The second tool is for calculating the emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and four other gases linked to climate change across a consumer product’s entire life cycle. With a toaster, for example, a company would seek to count greenhouse gases released in the mining of elements for its metal shell and the coal burned to make the electricity to power it — and even the fuel burned when the toaster is carted away.

In 2004 the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental organization, and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development released a final standard for Scope 1 and Scope 2. Scope 1 covers emissions from direct operations like running a factory. Scope 2 covers emissions from energy-related, indirect sources of emissions like the coal or natural gas burned to make the electricity that powers the lights at headquarters.

In developing the new standards, the institute and the business council worked with more than 60 corporations to test the standards and solicit feedback. Dan Pettit, associate director of sustainability for Kraft Foods, said that his company learned while working with the new protocols that Scope 3 emissions — coming from activities like farming — accounted for 90 percent of the overall impact.

The company is now trying to work with a few high-emission areas for reductions, such as helping cocoa producers in Ghana increase crop yields while minimizing use of carbon-intensive fertilizer, he said.

Kraft has a financial incentive to make progress on that front, Mr. Pettit said. “Think of carbon as waste — somewhere there is inefficiency.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/business/corporations-getting-new-tools-for-calculating-emissions.html

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Make sure you know how this works: Corporations are clean in the front, dirty in the back.

In order to appease stakeholders and potential customers, private industry now realizes their responsibility to the environment. However, on the back end, they continue to manipulate and exploit global government regardless of either environmental or social impact.

Our system of governance has become too complex for the intelligence of its population (but not for private industry as a collective). One can easily compare carbon ratings when buying a sofa. Comparing political candidates and their policies is another matter, and one which fails to support the far-reaching goals of such an environmental standard as mentioned above.