How did human beings who lived five thousand years ago view themselves? How did they make decisions and how did they reflect on their past?
Julian Jaynes gives a radical answer to these questions: until a few thousand years ago human beings did not 'view themselves'. They did not have the ability: they had no introspection and no concept of 'self' that they could think about. In other words: they had no subjective consciousness. Jaynes calls their mental life the bicameral mind. That is to say, the mind with two chambers, the mind that is divided in a god part and a human part. The human part heard voices and experienced these as coming from gods. These gods were no judging, moral or transcendent gods, but were more like each person's personal problem solvers. They were hallucinated voices that provided the answers when a person entered a stressful situation which couldn't be solved by routine.
To avoid misunderstandings: the people with a bicameral mind were not at all barbarians who waved their bludgeons and uttered monosyllabic sounds. They had a fully developed language. But language alone is not enough for consciousness, according to Jaynes. The pivotal question is which concepts are available in a language. Consciousness in Jaynes's definition is a box of conceptual tools that are not 'included with the hardware'. It is a package of 'software' that had to be invented, similar like tools such as the wheel. The most important transition phase towards this new mentality was between 1000 and 500 B.C., an era from which textual sources are available: the most telling ones are the Iliad, the Odyssey and of course the Bible.
Jaynes's definition of consciousness
It is important to notice how Jaynes defines consciousness. For him it is not related to perception or sensation. This means that many common connotations of the word are set aside. For example, the 'conscious experience' of a bright color red, or a sharp pain. These examples of subjective experience, that fascinating aspect of our mental life, is not what Jaynes wants to explain. However fascinated he may be by the question 'where the color red is' when we watch the setting sun – nothing but gray matter in our heads, after all – he is searching for a different holy grail: how is it possible that we can pose these kinds of questions at all? Our puzzlement about our experience of the setting sun presupposes an advanced way of looking at ourselves, an advanced, reflective theory of mind. How did that ability evolve?
So then what is consciousness in Jaynes's definition? As a first approximation: it is a process, not an immediate sensation. It is a narrative way of thinking which makes us capable of making judgments and decisions. It is a sort of self management. With consciousness, we do not need voices of gods or other superior beings. We have the capability of picturing ourselves as individuals with memories, a past, a future and a (more or less) free will. A conscious individual can view himself 'from above' and direct himself. He has tools, as it were, to isolate scenes from his life and to project these on an imaginary screen. To edit those at his own will, and combine them into different scenarios.
~ more... ~
Wikipedia article...
No comments:
Post a Comment