Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown: Writing and the Erosion of the Bicameral Mind

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown Series, 3 of 8

Writing eroded the auditory authority of the bicameral mind [god’s orders were transmitted via ‘auditory hallucinations’ within mind of the bicameral man]. The input to the divine hallucinatory aspect of the bicameral mind was auditory. Once the word of god was silent, written on dumb clay tablets or incised into speechless stone, the god’s commands or the king’s directives could be turned to or avoided by one’s own efforts in a way that auditory hallucinations never could be. The word of god had a controllable location rather than an ubiquitous power with immediate obedience (p208).

“What had to be spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to be taken in visually” (p302).

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976.

ISBN 0-395-20729-0

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

http://www.julianjaynes.org/

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown: The Disappearance of God

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown Series, 2 of 8

As the complexity of society increases, the bicameral mind becomes stressed, requiring elaborate rituals to maintain the voice within.

[end of 3^rd millennium B.C.] the tempo and complexity of social organization demand a far greater number of decisions in a far greater number of contexts, resulting in a proliferation of deities for any potential situation (p196).

As gods increased in complexity (in the Near East, 2^nd millennium B.C.) unsureness creates personal gods to intercede and reach the higher gods – “Who seem to be receding into the heavens where in one brief millennium they will have disappeared” (p202).

Inconsistency between people:

As people migrate, quickly due to major geological/climatological stressors, as refugees, they are thrust into ever-increasing new situations not dealt with before, either by themselves or their ancestors. The voices then say different things to different people. Hierarchical authority deconstructs and loses its validity.

– Social Disorganization and Bicameral Breakdown

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976.

ISBN 0-395-20729-0

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

http://www.julianjaynes.org/

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown: General Notes

Julian Jaynes Bicameral Breakdown Series, 1 of 8

[The Iliad] There is no evidence of consciousness; instead, the gods take place of consciousness. Man doesn’t know he is conscious; he is not aware; his feelings and decisions come from god (p72).

[The Bible] Amos does not consciously think before he speaks, in fact, he does not think as we do at all; his thinking is done for him (p296).

The function of the gods was chiefly the guiding and planning of action in novel situations. The gods size up problems and organize action according to an ongoing pattern or purpose resulting in intricate bicameral civilizations, fitting all the disparate part together, planting times, harvest times, the sorting out of commodities, all the vast putting together of things in a grand design, and the giving of directions to the neurological man in his verbal and analytical sanctuary in the left hemisphere. We might thus predict that one residual function of the right hemisphere today would be an organizational one (p117-118)

Individuals do not respond to even basic physiological needs except within the whole pattern of the group’s activity. A thirsty baboon, for example, does not leave the group and go seeking water; it is the whole group that moves, or none. Thirst is satiated only within the patterned activity of the group (p127).

The gods were in no sense a ‘figment of the imagination’ of anyone. They were man’s volition. They occupied his nervous system and transmitted experience into articulated speech which then ‘told’ the man what to do (p202).

Bicameral Timeline

2000-1000 BC: man stops hearing voices

1000-0 BC: oracle and prophets die away

0-1000 AD: sayings and hearings preserved in sacred text

1000-2000 AD: sacred text loses its authority

Literary examples of Bicameralism Theory (vs. Subjective Consciousness)

Chinese-Confucious (SC)

India-Veda (bicam) / Upanishads (SC)

Hebrew-Bible: Amos (bicam) / Ecclesiastes (SC)

Greek-The Iliad (bicam) / The Odyssey (SC)

By 400 B.C. bicameral prophecy is dead (p312)

As the stag pants after the waterbrooks,

So pants my mind after you, O gods!

My mind thirsts for gods! Living Gods!

When shall I come face to face with gods?

-Psalm 42

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, 1976.

ISBN 0-395-20729-0

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

http://www.julianjaynes.org/

The Social Network, Sharing, Privacy and Strategy

According to Carl Sagan, in his essay “The Quest for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence”, in 1974 the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, run by Cornell University for the National Science Foundation, in a ceremony marking the resurfacing of the largest radio/radar telescope on Earth, sent a message to the globular cluster M13; it is 24,000 light-years away. The message, Sagan goes on to say, wasn’t intended for interstellar communication, but as an indication of advances in terrestrial radio technology. Regardless, the decoded message goes something like this (in Sagan’s words):

Here is how we count to ten. Here are the atomic numbers of fine chemical elements – hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus – that we think are interesting or important. Here are some ways to put these atoms together: the molecules adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine, and a chain composed of alternating sugars and phosphates. These molecular building blocks are in turn put together to form a long molecule of DNA comprising about four billion links in the chain. The molecule is a double helix. In some way the molecule is important from the clumsy-looking creature at the center of the message. That creature is about 14 radio wavelengths, or about 176n centimeters, high. There are about 4 billion of these creatures on the third planet from our star. There are 9 planets altogether – four little ones on the inside, four big ones toward the outside, and one little one at the extremity. This message is brought to you from a radio telescope 2,430 wavelengths, or 306 meters, in diameter. Yours truly.

Broca’s Brain, Carl Sagan, 1974-1979, Ch.22, “The Quest for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence”, pp320-321

Years, perhaps centuries or millennia from now, these scientists may be considered traitors of Earth, communicating such information so freely.

In this current era where the very notion of privacy is eroding within a single generation, there should be no surprise. As the scientific body of Earth decided to transmit – to a far away somewhere out in the universe, with no intention of actual communication – crucial information regarding life on our planet, so we too, given the appropriate technology, would do the same. It is a natural human tendency to share information. How much? As much as possible, that’s how much. With whom? Whoever is listening.

Looking Back

written sometime in the future

I have always been interested in that wave of people washed over the earth prior to the advent of agriculture. They were propelled by their own revolution, a new capacity for the brain, for co-development with a changing environment. In fact, life by our definition is only that which starts with cells and organisms able to respond to their environment. But in the greater sense it is evidenced by the gathering of mass, or the creation of mass, as this is the farthest reach of the origin of our phase of universal expression to which we can make contact.

Life is like the fisherman’s net, casting open into the sea and bringing back only the good things the water offers, less the water. But as stalagmites seem to grow from the ground, so did our existence, a deposit left by the nebulousness after its evaporation in cycles of on/off, building upwards, pointing away from the two-dimensional earth into its own dimension.

And so agriculture collects humans and concentrates their energy. And industry further refines our purpose. The digital era, the ability to turn electricity into a language, to codify and communicate that human construction: reality. Further, the human ability to monitor and predict their world outpaced the human capacity for discriminating between universal expression, and expression anthrogenic. This, of course, marked the limits of our interaction with that universal expression. Until that point, our life exists dimensionally. That is to say, as matter, as organisms, as humans. Forces such as gravity dominate, but more importantly, concepts, such as concentration and dispersal. Information does not require transmission, as it is already in all places at all times. It is extra-dimensional, or non-dimensional.

Human existence is bound by the physical, the phase in which it developed this specific experiencing/connecting/mirroring apparatus. In order to advance beyond this point, it is not us, obviously, but our self replicate, our essence, that must separate and travel alone into that unknown. We will be left behind. And what to do? Will have not our purpose been then fulfilled? Not to worry, we will always be in control of our interpretation of the universe. And after all, in a world without space-time, we are always there, and we will always be together.

Belief is Submission

The true scientist never finds truth. He seeks it endlessly, as an exercise in thought, an exercise the benefits of which are utilized to the enhanced interaction of the human (both individual and collective) with the surrounding.

And only those wishing to collect power call certain benefits of these exercises ‘truth’. To believe in someone else’s truth is to submit one’s own personal power, and consequently to diminish the power of the collective.

Belief is submission.

There is only one truth, and for every human, there is a mirror of that truth, and it is different for every human, yet necessarily complementary for their reliance upon and utilization of the One Truth that is shared by all.

To believe the artificial truth of another man is to submit one’s own access to and control of the only practicable One Truth. We give up our freedom to believe the real truth, the truth that, albeit dangerous and unpredictable, provides the only solid foundation upon which we can base our personal existence.

To exist in another man’s world is to offer your dreams to the altar of progress.

Belief is submission.

Einstein and Individuation as Isolation

“My passionate interest in social justice and social responsibility has always stood in curious contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women. I am a horse for a single harness, not cut out for tandem or teamwork. I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or state, to my circle of friends or even to my own family. These ties have always been accompanied by a vague aloofness, and the wish to withdraw into myself increases with the years. Such isolation is sometimes bitter, but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men. I lose something by it, to be sure, but I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions, and prejudices of others and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shifting foundations”.

-Einstein, in Broca’s Brain, Carl Sagan, 1974-1979, Ch. 3, “The World which Beckons like a Liberation”, p27 (possible references for this quote are found on p369, sorry for the ambiguity but the quote isn’t specifically referenced)

Einstein was obviously a “man who had learned to distinguish between what had been drummed into him and what he had acquired by his own experience and knowledge” .

The individual is a mountain whose peak becomes more isolated the higher it reaches.

-Jolande Jacobi, The Way of Individuation, 1965