The best and most mind-opening book I read in 2023. By far.
This entire book is a kind of mind virus: once you read it, once you know the central idea, you can't unread it and you can't unknow it. It becomes a lens through which you'll look at much of our historical and religious tradition, seeing everything in a new way. It was quite a striking experience intellectually to read this book and it is vanishingly rare to find a book that can do this. (I might be able to count on two hands the number of books that have done this to me, and I have read a lot of books.)
This book's shocking central hypothesis is that humanity developed consciousness much, much more recently than consensus experts assume. Consciousness didn't come about millions of years ago, not hundreds of thousands of years ago, but somewhere around 1,000 B.C.
This idea is so out there, so "preposterous" (as we'll soon see, this is the author's own word for his theory), and yet the author rigorously builds a wide-ranging argument, taking readers along with him so persuasively that we enjoy the ride! It takes a brilliant yet humble writer to write things like "The preposterous hypothesis we have come to in the previous chapter..." or "I think it is apparent now, at least dimly, what is emerging from the debris of the previous chapter." At one point he self-effacedly discusses how he used to think about something, calling it "ridiculous!" once realizing he was looking at it all wrong. The author generously takes us along on his journey, reminds us what we've covered, where he's brought us, and precisely where he will take us next.
The bicameral mind hypothesis (as ridiculous as it may at first sound), helps explain why, even though we are (allegedly) modern, advanced and self-aware humans, we can be slavishly obedient, shockingly unquestioning and have astoundingly little volition. It helps explain quite a number of idiosyncrasies of human psychology (e.g.: schizophrenia, hypnosis, and the unusual results from perception experiments with so-called "split-brain" patients). It helps explain much of the mass formation hypnosis that happened to so many during the recent pandemic.
It's simply fascinating to climb into an interesting mind and see what's going on in there. And not just to see how it grapples with ideas, but also how it explains and unravels those grapplings to others. Of course, there is also the genuine pleasure of reading a brilliant and polymathic book, where an author beautifully and engagingly integrates many widely different domains from so many sources, all the while dispensing reading recommendations, rabbit holes to fall into, and other ideas and intellectual avenues to pursue. It's an absolute joy to read a writer who writes so eclectically, so knowledgeably and so engagingly.
Two final thoughts. Have you ever read a book that you thought was highly original, but later you learned just repackaged ideas from someone else? The Bicameral Mind showed me two separate examples--both books that I'd read in the past year or so: Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality cribs plenty of ideas far better articulated in The Bicameral Mind, and likewise I suspect George Lackoff in his book Metaphors We Live By "borrowed" much from Julian Jaynes as well. There's very little new in the world, sadly. Most of it is just theft and marketing.
Finally (and I thank anyone who's read this far for indulging me through a longer-than-normal review), now that I'm rethinking everything I thought I knew about antiquity, I can't help but share the famous lines from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, which perfectly encapsulates the mental and emotional journey I experienced reading this wonderful book:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Notes:
Introduction: The Problem of Consciousness
1-18 The author looks at the problem of consciousness and walks through eight of the most important proposed origin/explanatory hypotheses:
1) Consciousness as a property of matter
Attractive mostly to physicists, a theory that answers the wrong question. "We are not trying to explain how we interact with our environment, but rather the particular experience that we have in introspecting."
2) Consciousness as a property of protoplasm
A fundamental property of all living things, not of matter per se. See Darwin, Titchener; note the problem that we read consciousness into the behavior of a living thing, we basically project feelings and emotions and introspection onto what may be only "mechanical release" phenomena; interesting discussion here about when a worm gets cut in half you would think it would "suffer" with the brain part of the worm but it's actually the tail that "writhes in agony", which is merely a mechanical release phenomenon--motor neurons are firing because they're disconnected from their normal inhibition by the cephalic ganglion; also in a footnote the author says the "squeamish may suppress their anguish with the consciousness that they are helping the worm population (and therefore the robin population) since both ends regenerate."
3) Consciousness as learning
Can we assume consciousness because an animal can "learn"? Actually learning and consciousness are confused with the vaguest of terms: experience. "...in evolution the origin of learning and the origin of consciousness are two utterly separate problems."
4) Consciousness as a metaphysical imposition
This position denies that consciousness evolved biologically; questioning the continuity hypothesis of Darwin; the chasm is too great between man and other animals; this leads people to a metaphysical view, e.g., something added from the outside. Darwin was naive seeing only continuity in evolution but Alfred Russel Wallace (the co-discover of the theory of natural selection) "could not do so." The discontinuity was so great that he thought there was some metaphysical or external force at play.
5) The helpless spectator theory
Basically consciousness does nothing at all and it can do nothing, it's an emergent property of complexity; at some unspecified point consciousness appears "and so begins its futile course as a helpless spectator of cosmic events." A mere epiphenomenon (disturbingly depressing implications for free will here: basically we're just automata).
6) Emergent evolution
The main idea is a metaphor: the property of wetness cannot be derived from hydrogen and oxygen alone, likewise consciousness emerged in some way underivable from its parts. This author initially believed this was the right hypothesis/model.
7) Behaviorism
Basically claiming that consciousness does not exist, it's just behaviors. A glorious quote here that kind of murders this hypothesis with one sentence: "It is an interesting exercise to sit down and try to be conscious of what it means to say that consciousness does not exist." Also this is a secondary effect of psychology trying to wriggle out of philosophy and perform its own discipline using behaviorism to do so. Reducing all conduct to a handful of reflexes and condition to responses. See also the bizarre "Little Albert" experiments.
8) Consciousness as the reticular activating system
Now that we have the techniques to explore the nervous system directly, we just have to find those parts of the brain that are responsible for consciousness, then trace out their anatomical evolution. The RAS is where anesthesia produces its effect, but even this is falsified by looking at the evolution of the reticular system: it's one of the oldest parts of the nervous system. Also this hypothesis is based on the fallacy of translating psychological phenomena into neuroanatomy and chemistry.
Book One: The Mind of Man
Chapter 1: The Consciousness of Consciousness
21 "When asked the question, what is consciousness? we become conscious of consciousness. And most of us take this consciousness of consciousness to be what consciousness is. This is not true." [This guy is a good writer.]
22 What the author calls "reactivity" versus consciousness: when you're totally knocked out that's having no reactivity, but you can have reactivity to things without being conscious of them. Your eyes react to light without you being conscious of it, you see a stable image.
23 "Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there was light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not."
24 The seeming continuity of consciousness is an illusion, just as are most of the other metaphors about consciousness.
27 Note that if you make yourself conscious of doing certain things you can't do them! Like serving in tennis (or worse, thinking about not double-faulting), or trying to speak with full consciousness of your articulation/enunciation as you do it; with many things when we are doing them we're not actually conscious of what we're doing at the time.
28 On the difference between recognition and recall. "What you can consciously recall is a thimbleful to the huge oceans of your actual knowledge."
29 On retrospection as a re-creation of images, not what actually happened as we experienced it; if you think back to yourself swimming, you see yourself swim, something you never observed at all! "Memory is a medium of the must-have-been..." We actually reason and arrange/rearrange elements into plausible patterns when we retrospect, we don't play back a movie of what happened literally.
30ff Note also that consciousness is not necessary for forming concepts--and it's not even always necessary for learning (see examples of signal or conditioned learning, practicing motor skills); it's not even necessary for thinking or reasoning.
31 Aptic structures [see vocab section below ...way below]: organizations of the brain that make an organism act or behave in a certain way under certain conditions; we're not conscious of a tree per se, we're conscious of an example of a tree or a particular tree; the aptic structure "stands for" the concept just as we can let a word stand for it as well; the concept is not in consciousness at all typically. [Interesting to see parallels here with the book Metaphors We Live By, those authors would likely use the term "metaphor" to describe the combination and integration of concepts like this.]
32-33 Fascinating to see examples of conditioned learning where the learning actually does not occur when we become conscious of it, consciousness actually reduces our learning abilities in this specific domain of learning. See also in the performance of skills and the learning of skills "consciousness is like a helpless spectator, having little to do." Learning is better described as organic rather than conscious because consciousness takes you into the task, the learning happens better without you being too conscious of it. See Zen archery, motor skills, etc.
34 Negative practice, an example in typing: deliberately typing "hte" in place of "the" in order to eliminate the mistake. Practicing it makes the mistake drop away. (!)
36 "...we have simply established that the older doctrine that conscious experience is the substrate of all learning is clearly and absolutely false."
37 Thinking-of or thinking-about always seems to be using consciousness, or does it? Many processes of judgment are not conscious; judging "which thing is heavier" for example is neurological, see Karl Marbe's experiments in 1901.
38 Another rabbit hole: the Michelson–Morley experiment, which basically proved "ether" wasn't the correct model for a carrier of light waves. Per Wikipedia: "Of this experiment, Albert Einstein wrote, 'If the Michelson–Morley experiment had not brought us into serious embarrassment, no one would have regarded the relativity theory as a (halfway) redemption.'"
41ff Consciousness not necessary for reason; note also the vagueness of the term reason itself; "Our minds work much faster than consciousness can keep up with." See examples like common sense or automatic inference; various examples of great scientists arriving at tremendous insights through means they themselves couldn't understand; flashes of insight: see Gauss, Poincaré, Einstein, etc. "Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved."
45 Interesting footnote here on page 45 where the author says "It is so obvious that the writings ascribed to Aristotle were not written by the same hand that I prefer this designation [Aristotelian writings]."
46 On where consciousness is: exosomatic/out-of-body experiences show that locating consciousness is largely arbitrary, it has no specific location. (!)
47 "If our reasonings have been correct, it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things that we do, but who were not conscious at all. This is the important and in some ways upsetting notion that we are forced to conclude at this point." [The author takes us along on his journey, then reminds us that what we've covered and where it is brought us, and then tells us where he will take us next. Wonderful logic, wonderful rhetoric, great writing!]
Chapter 2: Consciousness
49 In a paragraph (actually a sentence) he describes Lackoff's book Metaphors We Live By. "The grand and vigorous function of metaphor is the generation of new language as it is needed, as human culture becomes more and more complex."
50 "Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication."
51 "Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb 'to be' was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, "to grow, or make grow," while the English forms 'am' and 'is' have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmi, 'to breathe.' It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for 'existence' and could only say that something 'grows' or that it 'breathes.' Of course we are not conscious that the concept of being is thus generated from a metaphor about growing and breathing. Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the busy give-and-take of talk have worn away with use." [This is one of many, many well-written passages in this book.]
52 On language not being solid or static, but rather being a "rampant restless sea of metaphor."
52ff "We are trying to understand consciousness, but what are we really trying to do when we try to understand anything?" "We are trying to find a metaphor for that thing ...and the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding." "If understanding a thing is arriving at a familiarizing metaphor for it, then we can see that there always will be a difficulty in understanding consciousness."
54 "I think it is apparent now, at least dimly, what is emerging from the debris of the previous chapter." [hehe]
55 Consciousness as an operator rather than a thing or a repository; more like mathematics, which offers an analog [or perhaps a type of map or model] of the real world.
56ff Attributes or associations of the metaphier [the thing or relation used to elucidate the metaphrand] that the author calls paraphiers which project back into the metaphrand ["paraphrands" of the metaphrand]; see for example the metaphor "snow blankets the ground": the metaphrand has to do with a completeness and thickness with which the ground is covered, while the metaphier is a blanket on a bed; but then there are paraphiers of the metaphor "blanket" that include associations we make about warmth, protection and slumber until awakening. "These associations of blanket then automatically become the associations or paraphrands of the original metaphrand, the way the snow covers the ground. And we thus have created by this metaphor the idea of the earth sleeping and protected by the snow cover until its awakening in spring. All this is packed into the simple use of the word 'blanket' to pertain to the way snow covers the ground."
58 Another example: if we "see" a solution to a problem, the metaphrand is "obtaining the solution" while the metaphier is "sight with the eyes"; the paraphiers are "things associated with vision" that then create paraphrands such as "the mind's eye seeing the solution clearly." And so on.
59 Another example, using maps and also describing what an analog is. "For the map-maker, the metaphrand is the blank piece of paper on which he operates with the metaphier of the land he knows and has surveyed. But for the map-user, it is just the other way around. The land is unknown; it is the land that is the metaphrand, while the metaphier is the map which he is using, by which he understands the land."
59 "And so with consciousness. Consciousness is the metaphrand when it is being generated by the paraphrands of our verbal expressions. But the functioning of consciousness is, as it were, the return journey. Consciousness becomes the metaphier full of our past experience, constantly and selectively operating on such unknowns as future actions, decisions, and partly remembered pasts, on what we are and yet may be. And it is by the generated structure of consciousness that we then understand the world."
59ff The Features of Consciousness
1) Spatialization: the mental space which is the very habitat of it all; a type of space that is different from the physical world but yet some special quality that things are made to have in consciousness; think of time as an example, you can only think of time by spatializing it; also we can fit and arrange things in mental space.
2) Excerption: we don't see things in their entirety, we see excerpts or we make excerpts; see for example if you think of a circus, you'll see certain features like trapeze artists or a clown in the center ring; or if you think of yourself you'll see some sort of excerpt of your recent past for example. "Actually we are never conscious of things in their true nature, only of the excerpts we make of them." "Your excerptions of someone you know well are heavily associated with your affect toward him." Note also that this is distinct from memory, actually what we do is we find an excerption and then associate around it and retrieve memories from that excerption, this is what we call reminiscence.
3) The Analog "I": the metaphor we have about ourselves, which can move about in our imagination doing things that we are not actually doing, imagining outcomes, etc.
4) The Metaphor "Me": the analog "I" is also the metaphor "me": when we imagine ourselves, we see glimpses of ourselves, autoscopic images. Note also the profound problems in the relationship of the I to the me... "But that is another treatise." [Love this guy!]
5) Narratization: we see our vicarial selves as the main figures in the stories of our lives; we assign causes to our behavior, we narrate with congruity so the things that we do, and the things that happen to us have an explanation that makes sense. Note also we don't just narrate our own analog 'I' we narrate everything.
6) Conciliation: this is the conscious assimilating of our experience (as it is going on) into our consciousness, organizing things together and fitting them together according to rules, experience ("schema"), so these things are compatible with each other, so that we can extract meaning.
66 In the next chapter we will "return now to our major inquiry of the origin of [consciousness]... For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of a much more recent origin than has heretofore been supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious."
Chapter 3: The Mind of Iliad
67 "There is an awkward moment at the top of a Ferris wheel when, having come up the inside curvature, where we are facing into a firm structure of confident girders, suddenly that structure disappears, and we are thrust out into the sky for the outward curve down.
"Such perhaps is the present moment. For all the scientific alternatives that we faced into in the Introduction, including my own prejudgments about the matter, all assured us that consciousness was evolved by natural selection back somewhere in mammalian evolution or before. We felt assured that at least some animals were conscious, assured that consciousness was related in some important way to the evolution of the brain and probably its cortex, assured certainly that early man was conscious as he was learning language.
"These assurances have now disappeared..."
68 Human evolution is not a simple continuity; around 3,000 BC suddenly "a curious and very remarkable practice" of writing appeared; then asking the question "what is the mentality of the earliest writings of mankind?" Note the Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures whose writings are difficult; the Iliad becomes the first writing with enough certainty of translation to consider the author's hypothesis; the Iliad dates in its oral/bardic form from around 1230 BC; then in written form in approximately 900 or 850 BC; "a psychological document of immense importance."
69ff The author asks what is mind in the Iliad? There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad, with some exceptions. No words for consciousness, no mental acts; there are certain words in the Iliad that only much later come to mean mental things, but they have literal meaning in the work itself: see for example psyche, thumos, noos, etc. "There is also no concept of will or word for it, the concept developing curiously late in Greek thought." "Now this is all very peculiar. If there is no subjective consciousness, no mind, soul, or will, in Iliadic men, what then initiates behavior?"
72ff "In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness" in the Iliad: see the discussions between Achilles and Agamemnon when Agamemnon steals Achilles' mistress: "not I was the cause of this act, but Zeus"; basically the gods made me do it; the author also argues that the hexameter meter and the epic itself was gradually improvised over time with no more awareness than a pianist has of his improvisation; the voices the people heard in that era are also the same as heard by epileptics and schizophrenics or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices (!); "The gods were organizations of the central nervous system and can be regarded as personae in the sense of poignant consistencies through time, amalgams of parental or admonitory images."
74ff "I suggest that the god-hero relationship was--by being its progenitor--similar to the referent of the ego-superego relationship of Freud or the self-generalized other relationship of Mead... The gods are what we now call hallucinations." The author describes Iliadic man as automaton, as having no subjectivity or subjective/meta-awareness conception as we have today, "he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon." We call this mentality the bicameral mind. "Volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness whatever and then 'told' to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or 'god', or sometimes a voice alone. The individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not 'see' what to do by himself."
75: "The evidence for the existence of such a mentality as I have just proposed is not meant to rest solely on the Iliad. It is rather that the Iliad suggests the hypothesis that in later chapters I shall attempt to prove or refute by examining the remains of other civilizations of antiquity."
75ff The author states objections:
Objection: Isn't it true that the poem the Iliad was the invention of one man with no historical basis? No, the Hittite tablets of course contradict this; it's an iterated work of verbal transmission not written by one man, even though Homer if he existed might have been the first bard to be transcribed.
Objection: How can this work be indicative of what people of the 13th century BC were like? This is a very serious objection made stronger by implausible things in the poem itself; but psychological aspects of the document still stand: where do these gods come from, and what is their relationship to the individuals? Why is there no mental language and why is all of the action initiated by the gods?
Objection: Are we not making a great deal out of what might be merely literary style? We moderns solve for it by saying the gods are "a poetic device"; but it is not that psychological causation appears first and then the poetic device giving them concrete form by inventing gods? The author is arguing the opposite: "...the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods." [!!]
Objection: If the bicameral mind existed there would be chaos: everyone following his own private hallucinations, you'd have to have a society with a totally rigid hierarchy in order to control such a mind among your people topped off with a king hallucinating gods in total control. The author was puzzled by this objection for a long time as he studied the history of other bicameral civilizations that lacked the freedom for individual action that was in the social world of the Iliad. But then he cites as a missing piece in the puzzle: the Linear B tablets which "were written directly in what I am calling the bicameral period." These tablets do show a bicameral mind and a hierarchy of this sort; likewise the Mycenaean State and the kingdoms of Mesopotamia also show the same bicameral characteristics; see also certain non-self-aware errors in a poem itself that indicate the poet was not even visualizing what he was saying.
[It's fascinating also that this era, circa ~1200 BC, is also thought of as the Bronze Age Collapse era.]
81 Note also that there are incursions of self-consciousness in the parts of the Iliad that were discovered to be later additions.
82-3 The main point of this chapter is that the mentality of the Iliadic-era men is quite different from our own: without narratization or mindspace, except for the parts that are regarded to have been written later. "Since we know that Greek culture very quickly became a literature of consciousness, we may regard the Iliad as standing at the great turning of the times, and a window back into those unsubjective times when every kingdom was in essence a theocracy and every man the slave of voices heard whenever novel situations occurred."
Chapter 4: The Bicameral Mind
84 "The preposterous hypothesis we have come to in the previous chapter is that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was conscious. This is almost incomprehensible to us. And since we are conscious, and wish to understand, we wish to reduce this to something familiar in our experience, as we saw was the nature of understanding in Chapter 2. And this is what I shall attempt in the present chapter."
84-5 The bicameral man: An example here of imagining driving a car while talking to one of the passengers, so your hand, foot and head--all of your driving activities, basically--are "unconscious"; you're not conscious of it; imagine this and "simply subtract that consciousness and you have what a bicameral man would be like." Now if some brand new situation occurred, like a stalled engine or flat tire, "our bicameral man would not do what you and I would do, that is, quickly and efficiently swivel our consciousness over to the matter and narratize out what to do. He would have to wait for his bicameral voice which with the stored-up admonitory wisdom of his life would tell him non-consciously what to do."
85ff The bicameral God: basically the author describes this as a hallucinatory voice in your mind that can also happen in the modern era in normal people, but a more textbook example would be something that would happen to a schizophrenic. [Geez, you can't help but think about all of the pharmacology (especially psych meds) used today and whether we're making our civilization bicameral all over again.]
93ff A "stress threshold for the release of hallucinations"; on the "special modality" of sound, voices have so much authority on us, why? On sound as "the least controllable of all sense modalities"; on the nature of obedience, how when we listen and understand someone speaking to us we become that person, briefly suspending our identity and then accept or reject what he has said. "To hear is actually a kind of obedience." Also, the power and authority of a voice is a function of distance from you, a voice from inside your head has ultimate power, No escape is possible, there is no boundary. "...flee and it flees with you--a voice unhindered by walls or distances, undiminished by muffling one's ears, nor drowned out with anything, not even one's own screaming--how helpless the hearer!"
98 "The explanation of volition in subjective conscious [i.e., modern] men is still a profound problem that has not reached any satisfactory solution. But in bicameral man, this [hearing the internal voice] was volition. Another way to say it is that volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological command, in which the command and the action were not separated, in which to hear was to obey."
Chapter 5: The Double Brain
100 What happens in the brain of a bicameral man, what is going on psychologically in his mind?
101 The bicameral mind is mediated by speech; three speech areas in the brain: supplementary motor area (articulation), Broca's area (articulation, vocabulary, inflection, grammar), Wernicke's area (vocabulary, syntax, meaning, understanding speech); Wernicke's area is the most indispensable to speech.
102ff Why are the speech areas on the left side of the brain, why in only one hemisphere, when physically the neurological structure necessary for language exists in both hemispheres? Note that large amounts of Wernicke's area (in the non-dominant hemisphere) can be cut out in humans with surprisingly little deficit in mental function. Why would evolution create so much wasted neurological tissue? "The answer is clear if tentative. The selective pressures of evolution which could have brought about some mighty result are those of the bicameral civilizations. The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to believe the other free for the language of gods." [Whoa.]
104 The corpus callosum: interconnects brain hemispheres, but see also the anterior commisures that connect the hallucinatory area of the right brain with Wernicke's area in the left brain. In rats and dogs the anterior commissures connect the olfactory parts of the brain.
106 That both hemispheres understand language: see the Wada test; people with lesions on the left side of the cortex cannot speak but can still understand, etc.
107 That there exists vestigial Godlike function in the right hemisphere: likely in Wernicke's area on the non-dominant side; see the experiments of Wilder Penfield on epilepsy patients, where slight current applied to Wernicke's area on the non-dominant side produced hallucinations of all sorts; these hallucinations had characteristics of otherness, non-self actions or words, the subject was passive and being acted upon; the author believes these are admonition experiences rationalized into actual experiences.
112ff That the two hemispheres can behave independently: see split brain patients, the two hemispheres stitch together information, information cannot be told to the left hemisphere when the connections between the two hemispheres are cut, the hemispheres don't know what the other hemisphere is doing. Also the right hemisphere can respond emotionally without the left talking hemisphere knowing what it is all about in these patients; also olfaction experiments (because the olfactory perception systems do not cross hemispheres either);
117ff That hemispheric differences in cognitive function echo the differences of God and man: the god function was in the right side (usually the non-dominant side), guiding, and planning action, handling novel situations; "the right hemisphere is more involved in synthetic and spatial-constructive tasks while the left hemisphere is more analytic and verbal." The right hemisphere looks at wholes, the left hemisphere looks at parts themselves. Finally facial recognition and friend/threat recognition appears to be in the non-dominant (typically right) hemisphere. "And to tell friend from non-friend in novel situations was one of the functions of a god."
122 A new look at the brain:
How can such a major function change happen so quickly, in just a thousand years or so? On the brain's plasticity, its redundancies and "re-representations" (where a brain function sits at both successively higher and phylogenetically younger levels of the nervous system); the brain is much more changeable than we realized.
Chapter 6: The Origin of Civilization
126 "...what could the selective pressures in human evolution have been to bring about so mighty a result?" "The bicameral mind is a form of social control and it is that form of social control which allowed mankind to move from small hunter-gatherer groups to large agricultural communities... And in this development lies the origin of civilization."
126ff The evolution of groups, the nature of social control; social groups as a genetic adaptation for protection against predators; "It is the group then that evolves."
128ff See apes for example and their dominance hierarchies and how much of the communication goes directly from the alpha male to everyone else. No reason to think early humans lived any differently.
129ff The evolution of language, note the consensus linguistic view that it's some 2 million years old, but this author totally disagrees. "If early man, through these two million years, had even a primordial speech, why is there so little evidence of even simple culture or technology? For there is precious little archaeologically up to 40,000 B.C., other than the crudest of stone tools." [Good point!] Note also the information content of language is far greater than any other previous communication system, so there must have been significant changes to accompany it, even biological changes; the author argues that "each new stage of words literally created new perceptions and attentions, and such new perceptions and attentions resulted in important cultural changes which are reflected in the archaeological record." Language development also happened during a period where from fossil evidence we know that the brain was increasing in size "with a rapidity that still astonishes the modern evolutionist."
134ff Here the author posits how one can show volition and remember a task that they were given by say a chief; they would have a repeated internal verbal hallucination or memory of being told what to do; note that instinctive behavior doesn't need temporal priming but "learned activities with no consummatory closure" do need to be maintained during the doing by something outside of the person: concepts like "sharper" for making a stone tool, or "finer" for someone working at grinding seeds or flour. "It was indeed at this point in human history that I believe articulate speech, under the selective pressures of enduring tasks, began to become unilateral in the brain, to leave the other side free for these hallucinated voices that could maintain such behavior."
135 The development of names: "...once a tribe member has a proper name, he can in a sense be recreated in his absence. 'He' can be thought about..." This is the age when we find ceremonial graves as a common practice, although graves existed before this.
137ff Advent of agriculture and the threshold of the bicameral period; the first god; 9000 BC: the settlement of the Natufian people clearly with supplementary agriculture; towns of 200 people or more; chiefs-->kings-->statues and succession-->myths/gods.
Book Two: The Witness of History
Chapter 1: Gods, Graves, and Idols
149 "In this and the ensuing chapter, I am attempting to integrate without excessive particularization the worldwide evidence that such a mentality [bicameral mind] did in fact exist wherever and whenever civilization first began."
150ff Contemporary religious and city architecture as the residue of our bicameral past; a god-house surrounded by man-houses; examples in Hittite culture in central Turkey as well as Olmec and Mayan examples; there's an actual depiction of bicamerality in a Mayan site in Guatemala where a man is shown prostrate on the grass being spoken to by two divine figures, one half-human, half-deer, and the other a death figure; note also modern-day chilans or prophets of that region "hallucinate voices while face down in this identical posture," aided by eating peyote.
158ff Inca civilization could have been bicameral or proto-subjective; the author suggests that the meeting between the Spanish and the Inca Empire was the closest thing to a clash between the two mentalities; note that there are so many parallels between the god-kings of Europe and the Near East and the god-kings of Mesoamerica that historians assume cultural diffusion; this author argues that on the contrary it is structural to the bicameral mind. Note also: "The unsuspicious meekness of the surrender [of the Incas] has long been the most fascinating problem of the European invasions of America" and even the conquistadors themselves didn't understand why with only 150 Spaniards they were able to conquer Incan civilization. "Not subjectively conscious, unable to deceive or to narratize out the deception of others, the Inca and his lords were captured like helpless automatons." [Gosh, this whole paradigm is super interesting and surprisingly explanatory]
160n [Footnote on the non-existence of deception in Incan culture]: "There were no thieves in Cuzco and no doors: a stick crosswise in front of the open doorway was a sign that the owner was not in and nobody would enter."
161ff The Living Dead; idols that speak; the author here is making the argument that important people, kings, etc., were buried as if they were still living across many ancient cultures, with no explanation other than "their voices were still being heard by the living"; the author hypothesizes that these kings whose voices were hallucinated by the living were the first gods. "Even the ordinary dead man in many cultures is treated as still living. The very oldest inscriptions on funerary themes are Mesopotamian lists of the monthly rations of bread and beer to be given to the common dead." See in Olmec and Andean cultures "when it was reported by the Conquistadors that these people declared that it is only a long time after death that the individual 'dies,' I suggest that the proper interpretation is that it takes this time for the hallucinated voice to finally fade away."
163ff The dead became gods in many cultures around the world; this is found in writings of bicameral civilizations that became literate; both Assyria as well as the Aztecs are two examples on opposite sides of the world; see also Hesiod speaking of a golden race of men that predated his own generation and became holy demons, see also Plato, centuries later, referring to heroes who after death become demons telling people what to do. [!]
165ff Idols that speak: see the tremendous frequency throughout primitive civilization of effigies, figurines, even small handheld figures with an unclear psychological reasons for being; perhaps they were mnemonic aids for producing hallucination-like conversations or to receive admonitory experience; "it is possible that they were semi hallucinatory mnemonic aids for a nonconscious people"; on the extreme importance of eye to eye contact in primates, indicating hierarchy; eyes are a prominent feature of most temple statuary throughout the bicameral period, often with oversized eyes; also in the Americas, the conquistador historians reported the Mayan people having tremendous numbers of idols in their homes believing "the idols spoke to them"; note also even in the first millennium BC cuneiform literature in Assyria refers to god-statues speaking; see also in the Old Testament an example of idols in Ezekiel where the king of Babylon consulted with them; the author even speculates that "unembodied bicameral voices" led Moses across the desert; see Incan-era Peru, where the statues spoke to people, according to contemporary historians from Spain.
Chapter 2: Literate Bicameral Theocracies
176 [Another example of this writer singing out with thought-provoking ideas] "What is writing? Writing proceeds from pictures of visual events to symbols of phonetic events. And that is an amazing transformation! Writing of the latter type, as on the present page, is meant to tell a reader something he does not know. But the closer writing is to the former, the more it is primarily a mnemonic device to release information which the reader already has. The protoliterate pictograms of Uruk, the iconography in the early depictions of gods, the glyphics of the Maya, the picture codices of the Aztecs, and, indeed, our own heraldry are all of this sort. The informations they are meant to release in those who look upon them may be forever lost and the writing therefore forever untranslatable."
176ff This chapter covers the two types of Egyptian hieroglyphics: hieratic and cuneiform; two forms of theocracy: steward-king theocracy (the most common where the chief or king is the first deputy of the gods) and god-king theocracy (where the king himself is a god, like in Egypt and probably the earliest kingdom of Japan);
178 Examples from Mesopotamia where the god was a statue but the statue was not of god, but the god himself; people washed, dressed and fed the statues; it was an instrument to perceive verbal hallucinated voices. "It is not the human beings who are the rulers, but the hallucinated voices of the gods Kadi, Ningirsu, and Enlil." See the many texts that show for example people "hearing" the words written on a stele out in a field; see other texts that describe specific ceremonies involved in "hearing" cuneiform instructions; see also "mouthwashing ceremonies" to open the statue's mouth so it can give instructions; these things date from the third millennium BC, ca. 2100 BC or thereabouts; note also this is not for the ordinary citizen but for the elites only; there were also personal gods for ordinary citizens as well; typically also there would be an intermediary god or goddess who was more of a minor God, these would serve as personal gods to different individuals. "These personal gods could be importuned to visit other gods higher up in the divine hierarchy for some particular boon. Or, in the other direction, strange as it seems to us: when the owner gods had chosen a prince to be a steward-king, the city-god informed the appointee's personal god of the decision first, and only then the individual himself." [Wild]
185ff Examples from Egypt; kings as gods; [note also still more interesting examples here of "translator solipsism": imposing our modern conceptions and definitions of words onto ancient texts, I never really thought about this as a problem until reading this book: both ancient Egyptian and Sumerian languages were fully concrete--they did not contain abstractioned ideas like modern languages typically do]; the creation myth of the "commanding" by "tongue" of Ptah the creator god; the Egyptian concept of the "ka"; a difficult-to-translate concept that might mean ghost, spirit, vital force, luck, destiny? "The evidence from hieratic texts is confusing. Each person has his ka and speaks of it as we might of our will power. Yet when one dies, one goes to one's ka." We have a new understanding and a new theory of what this concept means: the author considers this word to mean the bicameral voice: we might translate it as voice-persona. "It is obvious from the preceding chapters that the ka requires a
reinterpretation as a bicameral voice."
192 See the photo of the god Khnum forming the Future King along with the king's ka (one of the most arresting images in the book):
195ff The author suggests a built-in periodicity to bicameral theocracies where they reach a certain level of complexity due to population growth, and can't be sustained and then collapse; this may have happened many times in pre-Columbian civilizations in America as well. Note the Sumerian epic Atrahasis, which opens with:
"The people became numerous...
The God was depressed by their uproar
Enlil heard their noise,
He exclaimed to the great gods
The noise of mankind has become burdensome..."
196 Note also the collapse of the last century of the third millennium BC, where all authority in Egypt broke down; there are extremely important separated districts throughout the Nile region that could have been self-sustaining but it was all anarchy; there was no organized rebellion or striving of these sections for independence, which to the author indicates a very different mentality from our own. See also "periodic breakdowns of Mayan civilization when all authority suddenly collapsed, and the population melted back into tribal living in the jungles."
197ff Also the author notes that there weren't these types of collapses in Mesopotamia; he suggests that the steward-king theocracy was more resilient than the god-king forms of theocracy; also in Mesopotamian civilizations the judgments of gods through their steward mediums began to be written down and this is the beginning of the idea of law. "Such written judgments could be in several places and be continuous through time, thus allowing the cohesiveness of a larger society. We know of nothing similar in Egypt until almost a millennium later." This brings us to Hammurabi, "the greatest of all steward-kings."; Writing as "a method of social control" that "will soon supplant the bicameral mind."
199ff See photo of the image from the famous stele of Hammurabi "hallucinating" judgments from his god Marduk. He stands slightly under ("understands") Marduk:
201ff Excellent summary right here of everything the author has argued in the book up to this point: that man and early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality from our own; that they were not conscious as we are and were not "responsible" for their actions; each person had a two-part nervous system: one which was ordered about like any slave by voices which were what we call volition; that we see this with astonishing consistency in Egypt, Peru, Ur, Yucatan, wherever there were civilizations arising of divine government and hallucinated voices over the millennia with geologically a rapid tempo (but of course these things seems static from the human time perspective, or as the author puts it: "Millennia are its units of time."); civilizations and the system of the god-voice multiplied in complexity; the integration of personal gods to intercede with higher gods, who seem to be receding into the heavens; and then in one brief millennium everything disappears.
202ff: "The gods were in no sense 'figments of the imagination' of anyone. They were man's volition. They occupied his nervous system, probably his right hemisphere, and from stores of admonitory and preceptive experience, transmuted this experience into articulated speech which then 'told' the man what to do."
Chapter 3: The Causes of Consciousness
204 The second millennium BC: a period of instability, where we started with stable hierarchies "where the voices were always correct and essential parts of that hierarchy" but wars and catastrophes and large migrations cause these hierarchies to collapse, and there was an invention of an analog "I" concept, and then "the careful elaborate structures of the bicameral mind had been shaken into consciousness."
205 Don't confuse authoritarian governments of this past era with today's contemporary militarism, police repression and modern authoritarian states, these use control mechanisms different from those of the bicameral era: the bicameral mind was literally the social control itself "not fear or repression or even law." "There were no private ambitions, no private grudges, no private frustrations, no private anything, since bicameral man had no internal 'space' in which to be private and no analog 'I' to be private with. All initiative was in the voices of gods. And the gods needed to be assisted by their divinely dictated laws only in the late federations of states in the second millennium B.C."
205ff On instability of bicameral kingdoms: these societies would be internally peaceful, but it would be a different situation at the interface between different bicameral civilizations; there would be no middle ground, it would be either amicability or war; note also that both trade and writing loosened the god-man partnership; note also this was the era of the Bronze Age Collapse during the second millennium B.C.; the gods can't really tell you what to do in a time of chaos; the author postulates the development of proto-consciousness in some of the traders of the Assyrian Empire who were hundreds of miles away from home interacting with all sorts of different types of people and languages, bringing a weakened "bicamerality" back home; note also there was successful Syrian civilization that collapsed absolutely in 1700 BC followed by a dark age that lasted 200 years with no explanation whatsoever. This was followed by the rebuilding of the Assyrian Empire in 1380 BC, militaristic, brutal; see also the eruption of Thera (also called Santorini around this time), darkening the sky for days and affecting the atmosphere for years. The Bronze Age Collapse involved a huge procession of migrations and invasions, only Egypt seems to have remained civilized (note also the Exodus of Israel was also seen as part of this great era). What can the gods "say" at a time like this?
214ff On the Assyrian Empire, could they have had such military success, subjugating so many peoples while being strictly bicameral? Note that the most powerful king of this era in Assyria was Tiglath-Pileser I (1115-1077 B.C.) who, notably, did not join the name of his god to his name. A truly harsh empire with absolutely cruel punishments far beyond anything seen in the code of Hammurabi; why such cruelty for the first time in the history of civilization? "Unless the previous method of social control had absolutely broken down." "The very practice of cruelty as an attempt to rule by fear is, I suggest, at the brink of subjective consciousness."
215 Note during this time what happens to civilizations that don't fight off or prevent refugees from mass-migrating into their territory, they go away or collapse: I wonder if it will be analogous for the global mass immigration many countries are experiencing today.
216ff "What we need is a paleontology of consciousness"; the origin of narratization in epics, which might have been an iteration of how the gods would create admonitions; the mid-3rd century B.C.--the early dynastic period in Mesopotamia--is where towns went from being unfortified being fortified; during this era was the birth of the first epics, which may have been a way to increase the store of "god commands" with the recitation of these epic stories; also those who developed the ability to narratiz and recite these stories could have played a role in assimilating both memory ability and the ability to narratize memories into patterns. This could be a component of (proto-) consciousness; see also the role of deceit: deceit in the form of treachery, but also in a more general sense we can think of deceit as a form of the analog 'I' because you're doing or being something different from what you actually are, which would be impossible for a bicameral mind or for an animal; during a period of great instability it might be an important survival mechanism.
221 A summary here of the seven factors at work "in the great transilience from bicameral mind to consciousness:"
1) the weakening of the auditory by the advent of writing
2) the inherent fragility of hallucinatory control
3) the unworkableness of gods in the chaos of historical upheaval
4) the positing of internal cause in the observance of difference in others
5) the acquisition of narratization from epics
6) the survival value of deceit
7) a modicum of natural selection
Chapter 4: A Change of Mind in Mesopotamia
223ff 1230 BC: Tukulti-Ninurta I, tyrant of Assyria; see his altar showing him both standing and kneeling before an empty throne, an absent god:
223ff Contrast this with Hammurabi, always carved standing and listening intently to a very present god. See also the Epic of Tukulti-Ninurta which tells the story of Babylonian gods forsaking their human worshipers, a concept which is impossible in bicameral civilization. This conception is also found through all the other literature that remains of the last three centuries of the second millennium BC;
225ff See for example the first lines of the Wisdom tablets of Marduk, from the same era:
My god has forsaken me and disappeared,
My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance.
The good angel who walked beside me has departed.
Per the author, "This is de facto the breakdown of the bicameral mind." See also other writings from this period like The Babylonian Theodicy, which ends with:
May the gods who have thrown me off give help,
May the goddess who has abandoned me show mercy.
227ff: When the gods have thrown people off, then what is authority? "Rulers without gods to guide them are fitful and unsure. They turn to omens and divination" and "cruelty and oppression"; also rebellion becomes possible, which is exactly what happened to Tukulti-Ninurta (he's also known as Nimrod from Genesis and in Greek myths as King Ninos); such a premeditated parricide of a king would be impossible to imagine in the bicameral age.
228ff On other aspects of human history in response to the loss of bicamerality and divine authority:
* Prayer (there was no need for prayer when the hallucinated voice was right there), starting with "stylized imprecations", later revolving into prayer as we think about it in the first millennium BC;
* The origin of angels as well as demons (to explain evil or bad natural phenomena, or illnesses);
* The "celestialization" of the gods, the invention of heaven, or a conception of the gods being in the sky, see the Gilgamesh flood myth (which is the origin of the biblical flood myth as well) where the flood "is used as a rationalization for the departure of the gods from earth."
* The development of divination via omens and omen texts (this is the simplest and clumsiest example of just recording unusual events and experiences that happen after which is basically an animal behavior but expressed in language; note also the medical omens basically are the foundation of the science of medicine as we think of it today, interesting! Also omens based on what people look like or their facial and bodily characteristics),
* The development of "sortilege" (the casting of lots) this is active in the sense that it's to provoke the gods' answers to specific questions; keep in mind there was no conception of chance with the mentality of people in this era, when today we have a long history of games of chance (throwing dice, etc.) but these games are all vestiges of the ancient practice of divination by lots; note that because then there was no "chance" the result had to be caused by the gods whose intentions were being divined by the sortilege in the first place
* Development of augury (in a wide range of forms: oil in a bowl, smoke coming from an incense censor, hot wax dropped into water, shapes and patterns of ashes, and then sacrifice of animals for purposes of extispicy, which became most important during the first millennium BC, etc., Think of all of these as mechanisms for decisions to be made, these would be more primitive solutions than actual fully developed subjective consciousness. Think of these as "exopsychic methods of thought or decision-making, and that they are successively closer and closer proximations to the structure of consciousness" that became "important media of decision only after the breakdown of the bicameral mind."
246 The edge of subjectivity; it is more difficult to make the argument that consciousness is a response to the breakdown of bicamerality; we cannot translate cuneiform with the same exactness with which we can translate Greek or Hebrew "to proceed with the kind of analysis which I attempt in the next chapter."; Comparing the concreteness and objectivity of Hammurabi's letters and old Babylonian letters from the second millennium BC to 7th century BC letters from the Assyrian state which are sensitive, frightened, rich, grasping; much more complex with "a texture of deceit and divination."
250 The spatialization of time as another aspect of consciousness; starting around 1,300 BC with inscriptions on buildings, along with discussion of events immediately proceeding the building; also the development of annual annals of the Assyrian rulers--and not just statements of fact but it also of motives, appraisals of character etc., "all evidence, I insist, of the invention of consciousness. None of these characteristics is seen in the earlier inscriptions." "This is, of course, the invention of history as well... How strange it seems to think of the idea of history having to be invented!" "My essential point here, however, is that history is impossible without the spatialization of time that is characteristic of consciousness."
251 On Gilgamesh: comparing older tablets of the Gilgamesh epic with newer tablets and finding indications of consciousness in the most recent versions.
253 On how the author literally discusses where his arguments are strong and weak. "The evidence we have just examined is strong in some areas and weak in others." What is strong: the loss of the gods in the history of Mesopotamia, the flourishing of divination, that the nature of divinity was altered during these times and that there was deep in irreversible uncertainty as the age of bicamerality ended. "What is weak in our survey is indeed the evidence of consciousness itself... That is indeed what occurs in Greece a few centuries later, and it is to that analysis that we now turn." [This is an excellent turn of rhetoric right there: quite persuasive and well played!]
Chapter 5: The Intellectual Consciousness of Greece
255ff The Dorian invasions, 1,200 to 1,000 BC; huge migrations and displacements, the end of the Mycenaean world. "This ruin is the bitter soil for the growth of subjective consciousness in Greece." Great epics were perhaps a defiant response to the breakdown of Mycenae. "Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in inadequate minds."
256 "What I shall do in this chapter is to conduct you on a tour through all the early extant literature of Greece. It is unfortunately a short list of texts. Beginning with the Iliad, we shall travel consecutively up through the Odyssey and the Boeotian poems ascribed to Hesiod, and then to the fragments of the lyric and elegiac poets of the seventh century BC and a little beyond."
257ff On concrete words as used in the Iliad that now have more mental and consciousness-based meanings: thumos, phrenes, noos, psyche, translated as mind-spirit or soul, and kradie, ker and etor, often translated as hard or sometimes as mind or spirit. "The translation of any of these seven as mind or anything similar is entirely mistaken and without any warrant whatever in the Iliad." On preconscious hypostases: the assumed causes of action when other causes are no longer apparent. "In any novel situation, when there are no gods, it is not a man who acts, but one of the preconscious hypostases which causes him to act. They are thus seats of reaction and responsibility which occur in the transition from the bicameral mind to subjective consciousness." On how the frequency and meaning of these physical terms gradually change from 850 BC to 600 BC and "in the sixth century BC their referents join together in what we would call the subjective conscious mind."
260 Basically he's arguing four phases of gradually increasing consciousness, a first phase when these terms were simple external observations; a second phase when the terms have come to mean things inside the body, particularly certain internal sensations; a third phase where these terms refer to processes that we would call mental, and then a fourth phase when these various states unite into one conscious self capable of introspection. At phase four the subjective phase three meanings of words like thumos and phrenes become established and their original anatomical bases wither away, leaving them as metaphors.
261 The author then goes through these terms in specific detail, starting with thumos: this is the most common example and the word means "activity of life which is ended when someone is killed." Then the word evolves into the adrenaline-type sensations that happens to the body right before battle, and then it is seen as an unvoiced metaphor as someone's thumos has vigor put into it; also the thumos puts someone into into action and urges him or even speaks to him. This is now the forerunner of contemporary consciousness; [interesting to see this word used metaphorically as a type of "container" something right out of George Lackoff's book, but predating it by decades!]. Next, phrenes: the lungs or speech or respiratory changes; later to be more metaphorical as something that holds grief or anger, also where they are said to contain or retain information, thus a metaphor for inner mindspace; later we see how the phrenes of a man can be persuaded by another man or can even speak like a god when Agamemnon says "he obeyed his baneful phrenes."
265 Kradie: later "kardia" which is a root to our "cardiac"; on how we speak from our hearts not out of our consciousness. And we love with our hearts; phase two involves the sensation of the heartbeat in response to external situations and in the Iliad this is the sense in which this word is used. "No one believes anything in his heart as yet." "A coward in the Iliad is not someone who is afraid, but someone whose kradie beats loudly."
266 Etor: also translated as heart, but the author disagrees, thinking it is more belly or stomach. [See also still more references to the container metaphor, you sure do get the feeling that the book Metaphors We Live By ripped off ideas from this book.]
269 Noos: the author posits that this term is so uncommon in the Iliad that later bards added it in later generations: noos is to see, perception itself; "the great majority of the terms we use to describe our conscious lives are visual"; the Mycenaean objective view of noos is concrete statements about "seeing": (e.g.: Zeus keeps Hector in his noos); but the second phase of this word is located in the chest as it becomes melded with thumos.
270 Psyche: in the Iliad when a spear strikes the heart of a warrior, his psyche dissolves or leaves him or is coughed out through the mouth or bled out through a wound; it is thus simply a property that can be taken away like thumos.
271 "In trying to understand these terms, we must refrain from our conscious habit of building space into them before this has happened historically." [Again this is the problem of translator solipsism, at least this the phrase I use to describe moderns imposing "our" definitions of words on to words predating our concepts.]
272 The Wiles of the Odyssey: "After the Iliad, the Odyssey. And anyone reading these poems freshly and consecutively see what a gigantic vault in mentality it is! There are of course some scholars who still like to think of these two huge epics as being written down and even composed by one man named Homer, the first in his youth and the second in his maturity. The more reasonable view, I think, is that the Odyssey followed the Iliad by at least a century or more, and, like its predecessor, was the work of a succession of aoidoi [bards] rather than any one man." On the Odyssey representing a gigantic increase in self-awareness and consciousness compared to the Iliad, the author goes through the use of his favorite keywords as examples to demonstrate this.
275 "There are no secrets in the Iliad. But the Odyssey has many of them..." Also the use of phrenes in a new, moral context in the Odyssey when in the Iliad good and evil do not exist in that god-controlled world; also Odysseus deceives Athene: "unthinkable in the Iliad!" per the author. More examples: much deceit and guile in the Odyssey, also an increased spatialization of time, and many more frequent references to the future; in the Iliad "time is referred to sloppily and inaccurately, if at all." Odysseus refers to himself far more frequently and in a different way than the instances of self-reference in the Iliad. "All of this is relevant to the growth of a new mentality."
276 Interesting passage here where the author refers to the Odyssey itself is a metaphor, a voyage of the self created in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, and he asks why the muses "who are singing this epic through the aoidoi, should be narratizing their own downfall, their own fading away into subjective thought, and celebrating the rise of a new mentality that will overwhelm the very act of their song."
"I am saying--and finding it work to believe myself--that all this highly patterned legend, which so clearly can be taken as a metaphor of the huge transilience toward consciousness, was not composed, planned, and put together by poets conscious of what they were doing. It is as if the god-side of the bicameral man was approaching consciousness before the man-side, the right hemisphere before the left. And if belief does stick here, and we are inclined to ask scoffingly and rhetorically, how could an epic that may itself be a kind of drive toward consciousness be composed by nonconscious men? We can also ask with the same rhetorical fervor, how could it have been composed by conscious men? And have the same silence follow. We do not know the answer to either question."
278ff The text Works and Days, ascribed to Hesiod; on the surface a work of farm life and ways of work, which days are lucky, etc., a "medley of scruffy detail of farm life." The author submits the idea that it's not written by Hesiod but instead written by foolish Perses himself (one of the characters in the work): it is the admonitions of his divine bicameral voice advising him what to do. "If this jolts your sense of possibility, I would remind you of the schizophrenic patients who all day may hear similarly authoritative critical voices constantly admonishing them in a similar vein." Also on a concept of justice in this work which would be alien to the bicameral world and requires a spatial metaphor of time. Note also another concept that the author calls "the secularization of attention" meaning a shift in attention toward everyday problems of making a living, something totally foreign to the prior god-devised epics.
282ff Lyric and elegiac poetry of this era: Terpander, note that he does not invoke the gods, instead he invokes his own phrenes to compose a song (Of the Far-flinging Lord come sing to me, O Phrenes!) as if they were a god; the author thinks this might be a type of analog 'I' of consciousness. Also the secularization and personalization of the poetry of Archilochus, using poetry to embarrass people, engage in vendettas, or even provoke suicides with the power of his "iambic abuse", this is again something new and conscious; see also poets Alcman and Mimnermus, these authors "celebrate their own subjective feelings in a way that had never been done before." Then the poets Alcaeus and Sappho, words that indicate much more introspection, awareness of thoughts wishes intentions etc., much more subjective consciousness.
285ff Discussing Solon at the beginning of "the great 6th century BC, the century of Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras." "It is the century where, for the first time, we can feel mentally at home among persons who think in somewhat the way we do." Solon and his astonishing use of the word noos indicating phase four of the development of consciousness; on the growth of consciousness and morality required to set out a basis of law and lawful action; also the idea to know thyself, attributed to Solon but also perhaps from his contemporaries; the concept of knowing oneself is inconceivable in the bicameral era because it requires an analog 'I' and conceptualizing the traits of that analog "I"; one must see oneself in an imaginary space in order to do this. "Suddenly, then, we are in the modern subjective age."
288ff Another 6th century BC development: the adaptation of the old term psyche "in an unpredictably new way"; the invention of the soul; the evolution of the usage of the word psyche is confusing and defies a chronological ordering; its primary use is always for life; note also in the New Testament there's usage of the word psyche in the literal sense of life. But then in the Iliad the psyche of the dead Patroclus visits Achilles in a dream, so in this case study psyche is used to describe "that which exists after life has ceased." Basically a soul, or a ghost; "a concept that is otherwise unheard of in Greek literature until Pindar, around 500 BC." These are interpolations in the Iliad text according to the majority of scholars; note also there already was a belief in what survives after death because the bicameral man fed corpses after death and buried them with useful items, etc; the author thinks this concept arrived in Greek culture from contact with Egyptian ideas via Pythagoras;
291ff See also the dualistic view on the body with the words psyche and soma developing new definitions where psyche evolved from meaning "life" to meaning "soul," and the word soma evolved from meaning "corpse" or "deadness" to mean "the body separate from the soul." Then much curiosity in 500 BC and thereafter about the nature of this soul/body dualism: where is the soul? what is it made of? etc., so the concept and the problem of dualism begins at this time. "So dualism, that central difficulty in this problem of consciousness, begins its huge haunted career through history, to be firmly set in the firmament of thought by Plato, moving through Gnosticism into the great religions, up through the arrogant assurances of Descartes to become one of the great spurious quandaries of modern psychology."
291ff Summarizing this chapter in a metaphor: treating language across history just like archaeologists would treat broken shards of pottery to reveal continuities and changes in the mental history of man. Not just word changes but also concept changes and behavioral changes.
Chapter 6: The Moral Consciousness of the Khabiru [Hebrews]
294ff "The word for vagrants in Akkad, the language of Babylon, is khabiru, and so these desert refugees are referred to on cuneiform tablets. And khabiru, softened in the desert air, becomes hebrew. The Old Testament, which is the history of these people, is "the description of the loss of the bicameral mind, and its replacement by subjectivity over the first millennium BC."
295 Amos and Ecclesiastes Compared: "Let me first address such skeptics. As I have said, most of the
books of the Old Testament were woven together from various sources from various centuries. But some of the books are considered pure in the sense of not being compilations, but being pretty much all of one piece, mostly what they say they are, and to these a thoroughly accurate date can be attached. If we confine ourselves for the moment to these books, and compare the oldest of them with the most recent, we have a fairly authentic comparison which should give us evidence one way or another. Among these pure books, the oldest is Amos, dating from the eighth century B.C., and the most recent is Ecclesiastes, from the second century B.C. They are both short books, and I hope that you will turn to them before reading on, that you may for yourself sense authentically this difference between an almost bicameral man and a subjective conscious man." [It really would probably be a very interesting exercise to read these two books of the Bible back to back.] Note also the famous chapter from Ecclesiastes "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven" which involves spatialization of time, and "brilliant metaphors" of all types.
297ff On the Pentateuch: "Why were these books put together? The first thing to realize is that the very motive behind their composition around Deuteronomy at this time was the nostalgic anguish for the lost bicamerality of a subjectively conscious people. This is what religion is." On the word Elohim, which is a plural form of God (!!), The author thinks that it is "a general term referring to the voice-visions of the bicameral mind." The story of the Fall and how it is a myth of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, remember that the ability to deceive is "one of the hallmarks of consciousness." Then Adam and Eve "knew that they were naked": they thus had autoscopic vision: they were self-narratizing, seeing themselves as others see them (!!) "and they are cast out of the garden where He-who-is could be seen and talked with like another man." Also the nabiim (the prophets) who were "transitional men" per the author, partly subjective and partly bicameral, note also they were all massacred and suppressed around the 4th century BC;
300ff Further discussion on the gradual loss of the visual component of the hallucinated voice (God goes from literally walking and talking with Adam in the Garden, speaking face to face with Abraham, walking with Noah, etc., to being seen as a burning bush, a cloud or pillar of fire); "...we are approaching the greatest teaching of the entire Old Testament, that, as this last of the elohim loses his hallucinatory properties, and is no longer an inaccessible voice in the nervous system of a few semi-bicameral men, and becomes something written upon tablets, he becomes law, something unchanging, approachable by all, something relating to all men equally, king and shepherd, universal and transcendent."
303ff See also the inconsistency of the visions and voices between persons and within persons; different bicameral hallucinatory voices show up in an unclear hierarchy as bicamerality breaks down; thus the people look for "signs or magical proofs as to which voice is valid." See Jeremiah, how he argues with his bicameral voice, mistrusts it; note also the lack of justice in certain bicameral voices: God slays Cain, kills Er (the first born of Judah), orders Abraham to kill his own son Isaac; note also the non-Israelite prophets Balaam whose bicameral voice orders him and then reverses its orders, then gets furious with him (see Numbers, Chapter 22), this and other examples start to sound like the voices heard by schizophrenics; also note the increase in divination across the Old Testament: remember, there was no concept of chance until well into the subjective era;
306ff Fascinating discussion here of the book of 1 Samuel, which shows the entire spectrum of transition mentalities; on weird casual references to idols in this book--even an idol in David's house!--the evolution of subjectivity from Samuel through Eli through Dan, David, Jonathan and leading finally to "subjective Saul"; discussion of Saul's life and his suicide, "that most terrible subjective act, the first in history."
308 Idols of the Jews; various very specific words to describe all kinds of different idols; note bicameral man showed up in various random places; see for example Ahab in I Kings 22 summoning the Nabiim (bicameral prophets who heard voices); what happened to these people? See also I Kings 18 where Obadiah took 100 Nabiim and hid them in caves to protect them from a massacre organized by the Israelites; then they no longer exist as a people but exist as occasional individuals: see Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah (who is probably a representation of several different Prophets/Nabiim); after this we tend only to see subjective thought from moral teachers, see Ecclesiastes and Ezra who seek wisdom and study the law, they don't roam into the wilderness inquiring of Yahweh; By 400 BC bicameral prophecy is dead; see Zachariah 13:3-4 "If parents catch their children naba-ing or in dialogue with bicameral voices, they are to kill them on the spot. That is a severe injunction. If it was carried out, it is an evolutionary selection which helped move the gene pool of humanity toward subjectivity."
312ff "Once one has read through the Old Testament from this point of view [of the breakdown of the bicameral mind], the entire succession of works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective consciousness. No other literature has recorded this absolutely important event at such length or with such fullness. Chinese literature jumps into subjectivity in the teaching of Confucius with little before it. Indian hurtles from the bicameral Veda into the ultra subjective Upanishads, neither of which are as authentic to their times. Greek literature, like a series of stepping stones from the Iliad to the Odyssey and across the broken fragments of Sappho and Solon toward Plato, is the next best record, but it is still too incomplete. And Egypt is relatively silent. While the Old Testament, even as it is hedged with great historical problems of accuracy, still remains the richest source for our knowledge of what the transition period was like. It is essentially the story of the loss of the bicameral mind, the slow retreat into silence of the remaining elohim, the confusion and tragic violence which ensue, and the search for them again in vain among its prophets until a substitute is found in right action."
Book 3: Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World
Chapter 1: The Quest for Authorization
317 "We, at the end of the second millennium A.D., are still in a sense deep in this transition to a new mentality. And all about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past." Remnants which include "our religious heritage in all its labyrinthine beauty and variety of forms." A wish to connect with some "other," something indefinite, something be approached in awe and wonder; the development of the Christian Church returns again and again to "bicameral absolutes": see for example the inner idea of agape, miracles, the idea of heaven, etc.
320 On the idea that language, concepts and mentalities can change rapidly but the substrate--civilization, culture--change much more slowly, thus these new things have to live in the old context. [As always, the author sings out in his writing here!] "While the universal characteristics of the new consciousness, such as self-reference, mind-space, and narratization, can develop swiftly on the heels of new language construction, the larger contours of civilization, the huge landscape of culture against which this happens, can only change with geological slowness. The matter and technic of earlier ages of civilizations survive into the new eras uneroded, dragging with them the older outworn forms in which the new mentality must live."
320 On our search for "archaic authorization": "After the collapse of the bicameral mind, the world is still in a sense governed by gods, by statements and laws and prescriptions carved on stelae or written on papyrus or remembered by old men, and dating back to bicameral times." We seek some assurance that we are not alone, "that the gods are just silent, not dead" and we use a variety of techniques to make contact with this "lost ocean of authority" in prophets, poets, oracles, mediums, astrology, saints, tarot cards, Ouija boards, peyote, etc., "all are the residue of bicamerality."
321ff Oracles like the Oracle at Delphi; "Oracles were subjectivity's umbilical cord reaching back into the sustaining unsubjective past." On how the oracle actually was used: they would use daughters of poor farmers who would be possibly drugged, then asked questions to answer without reflection (!); Note the problems we have as modern rationalists grasping this, we would assume it was some sort of scam or fraud where people manipulated the oracle for an illiterate peasantry, but note there was no criticism of this mechanism of the oracle until the Roman period: even Plato reverently spoke of Delphi as "the interpreter of religion to all mankind."
323 [Note that hilarious footnote here on page 323 where the author chews and smokes laurel leaves to test out theories about the Oracle of Delphi, although he finds himself "more Jaynesian, alas, than Apollonian" and then cites in the footnote "I am grateful to EveLynn McGuinness for much in my life and here for acting as an observer, although her role was somewhat compromised both by her participation and a certain minimal reverence."] :))))
323ff The author's notion of the general bicameral paradigm, "an hypothesized structure behind a large class of phenomena of diminished consciousness which I am interpreting as partial holdovers from our earlier mentality." It has four aspects:
* the collective cognitive imperative or belief system (where society either believes in or is skeptical of the archaic authorization, depending on the era)
* an induction or ritualized procedure
* the trance itself, where you consciousness is lessened or lost, diminishing the analog 'I;
* the archaic authorization, either a god or some authority.
324ff Note that as a culture gets more and more skeptical about these, thus the trance needs to be more profound; involving right hemispheric function that's different from ordinary conscious life; the Delphic Oracle fits well with this paradigm, the whole Greek world believed in it. Note the reference to abnormal dancing in the tips of the toes in the era of Greek oracular beliefs may have influenced modern ballerina dancing; see also this beautiful quote: "Anything opposite to the everyday can serve as a cue for the engagement of the general bicameral paradigm."; on hearing and channeling the voices of dead kings, not just the voices of gods, etc.
329ff The process of the decline of oracular behavior, starting with a specific location open to anyone, then accessible only certain persons (priests or priestesses) who could hear the god there, then these priests tend to be trained extensively, and then the idea of "possession"--a priest or priestess needed much more training and elaborate inductions, then even those had to be interpreted, and then the Oracle became erratic and then ended.
331ff On sybils (amateur oracles), also gnosticism and neoplatonism; on the revival of idols/idolatry (note that the jealous gods always smashed and burned the idols of opposing gods, see in particular King Josiah, the Old Testament is full of the destruction of idols); there's a curious minor cult of hallucinating from severed heads: "Herodotus speaks of the practice in the obscure Issedones of gilding a head and sacrificing to it." See also Cleomenes of Sparta, also Etruria where severed oracular heads were consulted; see also in the beginning of a Christian era "a very true revival of idolatry"; Egypt "Hermetic literature"; a burst of public cult statues used as hallucinogenic idols throughout the first century AD in Greece and Rome, a "remarkable revival of idolatry." Even the Constantine destruction ordered in the 4th century "could not abolish idolatrous practice, so vital is it"; note that even in 1326 (!!) Pope John XXII denounced idolatry specifically, and "Even up to the Reformation, monasteries and churches vied with each other to attract pilgrims (and their offerings) by miracle-producing statuary." Finally note that idolatry still exists in a certain way today with statues and effigies of past leaders, shrines where people are carved painted and prayed to, figurines dangling from American car mirrors, etc.
Chapter 2: Of Prophets and Possession
339 [I absolutely love how the author calls out gaps in his own arguments] here saying "I am sure that the reader has seen the profound gap that I have jumped over in my argument" in his discussion on oracles yet not addressing "possession", something that happens throughout the Old and New Testament throughout history (and even today), where a divine message comes through a person without any cognition on his part, this technically "not the loss of consciousness so much as its replacement."
340 When was the origin of possession: in Greece we see no evidence of it until 400 BC, never any mention in the Iliad or Odyssey or in early poetry, but by 400 BC it becomes common: "The bicameral mind has vanished, and possession is in its traces." References from Plato about the streets of Athens having god-possessed men, also references to prophetesses at the Delphic Oracle, etc. This is not a hallucination, but something heard or spoken by a semi-conscious or non-conscious man; in contrast, the hallucinations of the bicameral man are when he is in a state of full consciousness; thus how is it justified to say that the two phenomena are related? The author does not have a truly robust answer other than they served the same social function, they yielded similar communications of authorization and there are instances in the early history of oracles of possession as an outgrowth of bicameral hallucinations, thus indicating it is a transformation of a sort.
344ff Inducing possession using mediums; note that the best mediums were young and simple persons just like the best oracles at Delphi.
346ff Note this striking passage here on Jesus and his divinity: see how Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, basically "made" Jesus into who we think of today!! "The Christian Messiah had heretofore been regarded as like Yahweh, a demigod perhaps, half human, half divine, reflecting his supposed parentage. But Athanasius persuaded Constantine, his Council of Nicaea, and most of Christianity thereafter, that Jesus participated in Yahweh, was the same substance, the Bicameral Word made Flesh. I think we can say then that the growing church, in danger of shattering into sects, exaggerated the subjective phenomenon of possession into an objective theological dogma. It did so to assert an even greater claim to an absolute authorization. For Athanasian Christians the actual gods had indeed returned to earth and would return again." [Wow]
347ff Regarding negatory possession (possession by demons, exorcism, etc): [The section definitely should be read alongside the chapter on demonic possession in M. Scott Peck's unusual book People of the Lie], on Tourette's, on modern examples of possession like the Umbanda religion in Brazil, practiced by over half the population in Brazil and heavy with induced possession.
357ff Glossolalia (speaking in tongues): see the Acts Chapter 2, which is the first instance in history of this phenomenon, the practice spread and "soon Christians were doing it everywhere. Paul even put it on a level with prophecy (I Corinthians 14:27, 29)." The author notes that it always happens in groups and he thinks there is a "strengthening of the collective cognitive imperative" which is somehow necessary. Note that there is a certain metric structure that is true across multiple languages, but this language is gibberish: it doesn't have any specific meaning; the metric structure brings us to the next topic which is that of poetry.
Chapter 3: Of Poetry and Music
361 Why is so much of the textural material in this book poetry and what is it about poetry? "And why does poetry flash with recognitions of thoughts we did not know we had...?"
361ff "I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind. The god-side of our ancient mentality, at least in a certain period of history, usually or perhaps always spoke in verse. This means that most men at one time, throughout the day, were hearing poetry (of a sort) composed and spoken within their own minds. The evidence is, of course, only inferential." On Greek verse being sung, not spoken (!?), and the rules/pitches involved; note that singing is a right hemisphere brain activity, speech is in the left hemisphere, thus fitting with the bicameral thesis.
367ff The nature of music; note that speech corresponds to the left hemisphere and music to the right, so with infant studies it captures baby's attention, they stop fidgeting when they hear music and it does indicate that it's possible that the brain is organized at birth to obey stimulation and what corresponds to Wernickes' area on the right hemisphere, "even as earlier I have said that bicameral men neurologically had to obey hallucinations from the same area." See also the power of lullabies in development; also the relationship between music and poetry; the very word music comes from the sacred goddesses called muses; many parallels that indicate a connection to hallucinations in the bicameral mind.
370ff On poetry as a divine possession; "katokoche" or possession by the Muses; similar to the relationship of the oracles to the greater gods. Note also in the Iliad itself the poet/narrator breaks off at times with difficulty and invokes the muses to help him along; note that this evolves much like in oracular behavior in that in the time of Solon in the 6th century BC poets were frenzied, out of their senses; gradually the muses became more abstracted, more "imaginary and invoked in their silence as part of man's nostalgia for the bicameral mind." "And conscious men now wrote and crossed out and careted and rewrote their compositions in laborious mimesis of the older divine utterances." Note Milton invoking a muse on his "unpremeditated Verse" as he, blind, dictated it to his daughters; see also Blake and his visions and hallucinations; also Rilke [interesting that the author doesn't cite Coleridge's and the drug-induced Kubla Khan]; thus now poetry is something we feel but then have to nourish and edit into being. [It is quite interesting to hear this author talk about the creative and editing process involved in poetry: clearly he's tried his hand at it, and you can feel his nostalgia for the lost bicameral spontaneous poetry!] "[Poetry] began as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. And even today, through its infinite mimeses, great poetry to the listener, however it is made, still retains that quality of the wholly other, of a diction and a message, a consolation and an inspiration, that was once our relationship to gods."
377 On Thamyris, a poet in the Iliad, who "boasted he would conquer and control the Muses in his poetry"; the Sacred Nine were enraged at his ambition and crippled him and deprived him forever of poetic expression. The author reads this as a type of metaphor for "the feeling of losing consciousness in our inspiration and then losing that inspiration in our consciousness of that loss." The author gives an example of his mind composing beautiful music but at the moment he became aware of it he lost everything out of his mind and could not call it back. On poets (per Shelley) as "the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration” that (per Jaynes) "flees in attempted apprehension."
378 [A beautiful partial quote from an unnamed, uncited poem (which turns out to be the first line of William Empson's poem "Doctrinal Point" followed by the last stanza of Empson's poem "This Last Pain") which together capture perfectly what it's like to have a thought, to have an idea... and then when you try to capture it, to gather it up in your conscious mind, it just slips away, slips from your grasp.]
The god approached dissolves into the air.
Imagine, then, by miracle, with me,
(Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)
What could not possibly be there,
And learn a style from a despair.
(Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)
What could not possibly be there,
And learn a style from a despair.
[Note: I've copy-pasted both poems in their entirety here as well]
Doctrinal Point
The god approached dissolves into the air.
Are right in doing anything they can think of;
Free by predestination in the blood,
Saved by their own sap, shed for themselves,
Their texture can impose their architecture;
Their sapient matter is always already informed.
Whether they burgeon, massed wax flames, or flare
Plump spaced-out saints, in their gross prime, at prayer,
Or leave the sooted branches bare
To sag at tip from a sole blossom there
They know no act that will not make them fair.
Professor Eddington with the same insolence
Called all physics one tautology;
If you describe things with the right tensors
All law becomes the fact that they can be described with them;
This is the Assumption of the description.
The duality of choice becomes the singularity of existence;
The effort of virtue the unconsciousness of foreknowledge.
That over-all that Solomon should wear
Gives these no cope who cannot know of care.
They have no gap to spare that they should share
The rare calyx we stare at in despair.
They have no other that they should compare.
Their arch of promise the wide Heaviside layer
They rise above a vault into the air.
This Last Pain
This last pain for the damned the Fathers found:
“They knew the bliss with which they were not crowned.”
Such, but on earth, let me foretell,
Is all, of heaven or of hell.
Man, as the prying housemaid of the soul,
May know her happinss by eye to hole;
He’s safe; the key is lost; he knows
Door will not open, nor hole close.
“What is conceivable can happen too,”
Said Wittgenstein, who had not dreamt of you;
But wisely; if we worked it long
We should forget where it was wrong.
Those thorns are crowns which, woven into knots,
Crackle under and soon boil fool’s pots;
And no man’s watching, wise and long,
Would ever stare them into song.
Thorns burn to a consistent ash, like man;
A splendid cleanser for the frying-pan:
And those who leap from pan to fire
Should this brave opposite admire.
All those large dreams by which men long live well
Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell;
This then is real, I have implied,
A painted, small, transparent slide.
These the inventive can hand-paint at leisure,
Or most emporia would stock our measure;
And feasting in their dappled shade
We should forget how they were made.
Feign then what’s by a decent tact believed,
And act that state is only so conceived,
And build an edifice of form
For house where phantoms may keep warm.
Imagine, then, by miracle, with me,
(Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)
What could not possibly be there,
And learn a style from a despair.
This last pain for the damned the Fathers found:
“They knew the bliss with which they were not crowned.”
Such, but on earth, let me foretell,
Is all, of heaven or of hell.
Man, as the prying housemaid of the soul,
May know her happinss by eye to hole;
He’s safe; the key is lost; he knows
Door will not open, nor hole close.
“What is conceivable can happen too,”
Said Wittgenstein, who had not dreamt of you;
But wisely; if we worked it long
We should forget where it was wrong.
Those thorns are crowns which, woven into knots,
Crackle under and soon boil fool’s pots;
And no man’s watching, wise and long,
Would ever stare them into song.
Thorns burn to a consistent ash, like man;
A splendid cleanser for the frying-pan:
And those who leap from pan to fire
Should this brave opposite admire.
All those large dreams by which men long live well
Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell;
This then is real, I have implied,
A painted, small, transparent slide.
These the inventive can hand-paint at leisure,
Or most emporia would stock our measure;
And feasting in their dappled shade
We should forget how they were made.
Feign then what’s by a decent tact believed,
And act that state is only so conceived,
And build an edifice of form
For house where phantoms may keep warm.
Imagine, then, by miracle, with me,
(Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)
What could not possibly be there,
And learn a style from a despair.
Chapter 4: Hypnosis
379 Hypnosis as an unwanted anomaly in psychology: something about it is bothersome, the idea that we could have a personality and an idea of consciousness but then have this strange type of behavioral control existing alongside it. "I think my answer to the opening question about hypnosis is obvious: hypnosis can cause this extra enabling because it engages the general bicameral paradigm which allows a more absolute control over behavior than is possible with consciousness." "It is only by rejecting the genetic hypothesis and treating consciousness as a learned cultural ability over the vestigial substrate of an earlier more authoritarian type of behavioral control that such alterations of mind can begin to seem orderly." [Elegant how this guy's bicameral model really does solve hypnosis on some level, also this is an elegant one-sentence articulation of the bicameral mind theory.]
380ff The history of explanations of hypnosis and how it works, starting with Anton Mesmer, later James Braid; the author talks about how he believes "Mesmer was clumsily stumbling into a new way of engaging that neurological patterning I have called the general bicameral paradigm with its four aspects: collective cognitive imperative, induction, trance, and archaic authorization." See the works of Mesmer, Charcot, Binet; a discussion of the power of suggestion, where "the hypnotized subject exhibits the phenomena which he thinks the hypnotist expects"; the so-called "demand characteristics" of hypnosis or what the author calls "the collective cognitive imperative"; [Really interesting how much Julian Jaynes sometimes almost seems like Jung in his broad and deep understanding of so many subjects--like Jung except far more readable!!];
385 The collective imperative: See also the behavior of crowds; how religious feeling and belief is enhanced by crowds; see also oracles and their behavior are stronger in groups; stage hypnosis works better in front of a crowd; all of this indicates a type of collective imperative.
386ff The induction: always involves a narrowing of consciousness, otherwise the subject will narratize his situation where his analog 'I' will see his metaphor 'me' being hypnotized, thus making the hypnosis unsuccessful.
387 The trance: the diminution of consciousness and the effacement of the analog 'I'; the subject will not introspect as he will not know he is hypnotized and is not constantly monitoring himself as we normally do; on the concept of "trance logic" which has certain idiosyncratic and illogical consistencies in the behavior of the hypnotized, a type of "paralogic" involving bland responses to absurd logical contradictions: like when you tell a hypnotic a chair is not there they will just simply walk around it rather than crash into it. "Like a bicameral man, the hypnotized subject does not recognize any peculiarities and inconsistencies in his behavior. He cannot 'see' contradictions because he cannot introspect in a completely conscious way."; Note also the treatment of time, it is de-spatialized in the hypnotic state just as it is in bicameral man.
393 The fourth aspect of hypnosis, archaic authorization: the hypnotist is obviously an authority figure to the subject; if not, the hypnotism won't work or will require a much greater belief to work (a stronger cognitive imperative), or a longer induction period. There's also a trust factor: there has to be a high degree of trust between the subject and the hypnotist.
395 Other evidence for the bicameral theory of hypnosis; right-brained people tend to be more easily hypnotized; more religious people tend to be more susceptible to hypnotization; people with imaginary companions in childhood are more easily hypnotized; children from more authoritarian homes are more easily hypnotized as well; all of these suggest aspects of bicamerality.
397ff [Quite compelling thinking here] "If one has a very definite biological notion of consciousness and that its origin is back in the evolution of the mammalian nervous systems, I cannot see how the phenomenon of hypnosis can be understood at all, not one speck of it. But if we fully realize that consciousness is a culturally learned event, balanced over the suppressed vestiges of an earlier mentality, then we can see that consciousness in part can be culturally unlearned or arrested. Learned features, such as analog 'I,' can under the proper cultural imperative be taken over by a different initiative, and one such instance is what we call hypnosis. The reason that that different initiative works in conjunction with the other factors of the diminishing consciousness of the induction and trance is that in some way it engages a paradigm of an older mentality than subjective consciousness."
398ff On the objection that hypnosis does not exist; various other theories of what hypnosis is; childlike regression to a parent, an ability to enact different roles, an active imagination, etc. ""Hypnosis cannot be a vestige of anything if it does not really exist." [Once again we have the author openly stating what would falsify his hypothesis, this is an extremely ethical writer!] Various possible alternative explanations follow: induced amnesia is no different from no one being able to remember what he was thinking five minutes ago, often we listen carefully to someone and yet not hear a word, we often show obedience to other people just like a traffic policeman or a teacher or the caller at a square dance; paralysis is no different from being in a deep conversation during a walk and you slow down and even stop totally as you become more absorbed; the hypnotic anesthesia is no different from a crying child being distracted by a toy; the hidden observer can be just one example of many of our brains doing parallel processing--just like in ordinary conversation we listen and plan what we're going to say at the same time; actors also constantly are their own hidden observers, able to criticize their performance; and so on. The author groups these objections as not explaining hypnosis so much as "explaining it away."
Chapter 5: Schizophrenia
404 The author considers schizophrenia to be "a vestige of bicamerality, a partial relapse to the bicameral mind."
405ff The author notes the lack of examples of insanity in bicameral literature like the Iliad; note also in the Phaedrus, Plato calls insanity "a divine gift, and the source of the chiefest blessings granted to men" and then beautiful passages follow describing four types of insanity: prophetic madness due to Apollo, ritual madness due to Dionysus, poetic madness of those possessed by the Muses, and erotic madness due to Eros and Aphrodite; also the Greek words for "prophetic" and "psychotically mad" were essentially homonyms from Plato's perspective. See also the Greek word for insanity, "paranoia" (para + nous), literally means having another mind alongside one's own; the author argues that what we now call schizophrenia began only around 400 BC in the sense of the incapacitating illness we now know today. "This development is difficult to understand apart from the theory of a change in mentality which this essay is about."
408 The author's thesis: "...some of the most fundamental, most characteristic, and most commonly observed symptoms of florid unmedicated schizophrenia are uniquely consistent with a description I have given on previous pages of the bicameral mind." The symptoms are auditory hallucinations, the deterioration of consciousness (specifically the loss of the analog 'I'), the erosion of mind space, and an inability to narratize. The author looks at these in turn.
408ff Hallucinations: these are outside the control of the schizophrenic, but they are heavily influenced by suggestions or social circumstances of that person, so there is a clear collective cognitive imperative just like with hypnosis. Also the hallucinations are dependent on teachings and expectations from childhood, something we postulate was true in bicameral times. Some schizophrenics "say they never get a chance to think for themselves; it is always done for them and the thought is given to them." "And why is hearing voices universal throughout all cultures, unless there is some universally suppressed structure of the brain which is activated in the stress of this illness?" "And why do these hallucinations have so much authority, particularly religious?" "I find that the only notion which provides even a working hypothesis about this matter is that of the bicameral mind, that the neurological structure responsible for these hallucinations is neurologically bound to substrates for religious feelings, and this is because the source of religion and of gods themselves is in the bicameral mind."
414ff Extended discussion of a famous case of schizophrenia, Schreber, a German lawyer/jurist in the late 19th century, who wrote an extensive and literate account about his own hallucinations while ill with schizophrenia; many parallels in his case with the author's overall thesis: he heard what he thought were gods; there was a hierarchy of upper and lower gods; he lost his analog 'I' when in this state, etc.
416ff The author argues that
1) there are "aptic structures" in the brain that enable hallucinations
2) "that these structures develop in civilized societies such that they determine the general religious quality and authority of such hallucinated voices, and perhaps organize them into hierarchies"
3) that the paradigms behind these optic structures were evolved into the brain by natural and human selection during the early civilizing of mankind, and
4) these structures "are released from their normal inhibition by abnormal biochemistry in many cases of schizophrenia and then particularized into experience."
417ff The erosion of the analog 'I': on schizophrenics losing the sense of where their 'I' is, they lose self-awareness. Bleuler, who coined the very term schizophrenia, meant to indicate the self breaking off until it ceases to exist.
420ff Dissolution of mindspace: schizophrenic patients lose their ability to think of themselves in the places they are in; they're unable to prepare in advance for things that may happen to them; their reaction times are terrible; they lose "as if"-type behaviors, like engaging in make-believe or hypothetical situations; also disorientation and respect of time is common in schizophrenia.
422ff The failure of narratization: with no analog 'I' and no mindspace, narratization is impossible; there's no unifying concept of purpose or goal in the individual. Logical reasons cannot be given for behaviors, a person cannot explain himself. Thus behavior is either responding to hallucinated directives or just continues on by habit. Schizophrenics often will say they have the feeling of being commanded in ways in which they must obey.
424 Also echolalia: "...the patient repeats back the speech, cries, or expressions of others. But when hallucinations are present, this becomes hallucinatory echolalia, where the patient must repeat out loud all that his voices say to him, rather than those of his environmental surroundings." Per the author, this is the same mental organization in Old Testament prophets as well as the aoidoi of the Homeric poems.
426ff Possible historical adaptive benefits of schizophrenia: tirelessness: schizophrenia patients have tremendous endurance (thus fatigue is a product of the subjective conscious mind and that bicameral man would have been better able to do things like build the pyramids of Egypt etc); that the bicameral mind of the prior period was selected for; that it's an atavistic or relapsed version of what was "fit" more than two millennia ago.
Chapter 6: The Auguries of Science
433 "In this final chapter, I wish to turn to science itself and point out that it too, and even my entire essay, can be read as a response to the breakdown of the bicameral mind."
434 On science and religion seeing each other as enemies but science and religion are rivals seeking to explain reality. See famous mathematicians (and physicists too by the way) hearing God "in the awesome rectitudes of mathematics."
434 "We sometimes think, and even like to think, that the two greatest exertions that have influenced mankind, religion and science, have always been historical enemies, intriguing us in opposite directions. But this effort at special identity is loudly false. It is not religion but the church and science that were hostile to each other. And it was rivalry, not contravention. Both were religious." (!!!) Science as "a direct descendant of the breakdown of the bicameral mind" because it is a "search for hidden divinity."
436ff "In the second millennium BC, we stopped hearing the voices of gods. In the first millennium BC, those of us who still heard the voices, our oracles and prophets, they too died away. In the first millennium AD, it is their sayings and hearings preserved in sacred texts through which we obeyed our lost divinities. And in the second millennium AD, these writings lose their authority. The Scientific Revolution turns us away from the older sayings to discover the lost authorization in Nature. What we have been through in these last four millennia is the slow and inexorable profaning of our species. And in the last part of the second millennium AD, that process is apparently becoming complete. It is the Great Human Irony of our noblest and greatest endeavor on this planet that in the quest for authorization, in our reading of the language of God in Nature, we should read there so clearly that we have been so mistaken." [Essentially here he's talking about the development of scientific materialism, moving away from seeing natural history as the joy of finding a benevolent Creator in nature, instead ending up with Darwin and no God at all--just "cold uncalculating chance"
437 On the continued "erosion of the religious view of man" which is "still a part of the breakdown of bicameral mind" and it is working serious changes in every field of life; Also on the arising of substitutes as we dissolve away religious authorization: pseudoreligious things like the possession religions, astrology, meditation, Scientology, psychotropic drugs, etc.
441ff On scientism: the author talks about how science has aspects of religion as well: charismatic leaders who are beyond criticism, canonical texts which are also beyond criticism, gestures and rituals of interpretation, requirement of total commitment, a worldview. [!!!] [See here the works of George Steiner and his "articulate" Massey Lectures in 1974, there were guys who were onto this problem of modern science long before the current era]; examples of scientisms: materialism (or worse, dialectical materialism, e.g.; Hegel, Marx, Engels--note that basically these are also religions too: everything is a class struggle with its own orthodoxy and identity markers; see also psychoanalysis, a domain of superstition demanding total commitment, with initiation procedures and a worship of canonical texts [!!!], Also behaviorism with "its central auguring place in a handful of rat and pigeon experiments." [OMG Ouch!!!] [Note also today we could also add medical materialism, vaxophilia, climate materialism, etc.] "Applied to the world as representative of all the world, facts become superstitions." [Wild to see the author (rightfully!) drop so many H-bombs right on top of all these disciplines. Just wild.]
443 "And this essay is no exception."
444ff On the fall of man: a lost innocence that marked precisely the breakdown of the bicameral mind, but is occurring again right now with this great conscious narratization of mankind as we use all these scientism-based materialist movements that are supposed to "fix" everything; see Plato's dialogues where everything new is a recalling of a lost better world; see "Rousseau's complaint of the corruption of natural man by the artificialities of civilization." See Marx raging of the corruption of society by money and interests and the "paradise to be regained." See the Freudian implied assumption of some previous innocence that was ruined by neurosis or some event in childhood. "They are attempts to return to what is no longer there, like poets to their inexistent Muses, and as such they are characteristic of these transitional millennia in which we are imbedded."
Afterword
447 Here the author goes over some of the "loose threads" of the book; also extra comments on each of the four main hypotheses of books 1 and 2. "But that the knitting of this book is such that a tug on such a bad stitch will unravel all the rest is more of a hope on the part of the orthodox than a fact and the scientific pursuit of truth. This book is not a single hypothesis."
447 Hypothesis #1: Consciousness is based on language. Consciousness is not the same as cognition; we have to distinguish between what is introspectable and other neural abilities that we have come to call cognition. See also the common error of confusing consciousness with perception. The author cites a well-known prestigious philosopher who made this precise error in front of the author at a meeting! Bertrand Russell also made this error, and Descartes "would never have agreed." [There are some hilarious quotes here, imaginary statements in the mind of Bertrand Russell contrasting "I see a table" with "How can I afford the alimony for another Lady Russell?" The former is not consciousness, the second is.] White blood cells perceive bacteria and respond, but they're not conscious; we can drive a car and do many things on an unconscious level; these things are perception, not consciousness. Also: "Consciousness is not all language, but it is generated by it and accessed by it." And the next question is: who does the seeing or the introspecting? the analog 'I' is the second most important feature of consciousness. It is not the self. This analog 'I' is constantly fitting things to a story with spatialized time; "The basic connotative definition of consciousness is thus an analog 'I' narratizing in a functional mind-space."
452 Hypothesis #2: The bicameral mind. Why are there verbal hallucinations? Why are they so widespread wherever we look in antiquity? There appears to be a genetic basis for such hallucinations in all of us.
453 Hypothesis #3: The dating. "The third general hypothesis is that consciousness was learned only after the breakdown of the bicameral mind. I believe this is true, that the anguish of not knowing what to do in the chaos resulting from the loss of the gods provided the social conditions that could result in the invention of a new mentality to replace the old one." The author also suggests a "weak form" of this theory where that consciousness based on language began at the beginning of language, circa 12,000 BC or so, around the same time as the bicameral mind came about; then he suggests a "strong form" is his actual theory of an astonishingly recent date for modern consciousness, around 1000 BC, based on evidence from Mesopotamia of the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
454 See here the "well-known" use-mention criticism: are we talking about actual consciousness or the concept of consciousness? The author argues that they are the same. "The concept of baseball and baseball are the same thing."
454 Hypothesis #4: The double brain. Problems of pseudoclarity because of the spatial nature of consciousness, where is "the mind" and where is each "part" of the mind, in both bicameral and modern consciousness; locating it in the right hemisphere, etc.; this is just the present neurological model as far as we know, and it could be mistaken as the author willingly admits.
456 On "the cognitive explosion" in Greece during the first half of the first millennium BC. Development of reminiscent memory or episodic memory (as opposed to just simple habit retention)--this is new to the world with consciousness; paired with the development of and the use of new words like phronesis which could be translated as understanding, consciousness, thinking or intellection; these words are new to the 6th and 7th centuries BC in Greece.
457 On the Self: with all these new narratives, from inferences from what others tell us, and from what we tell ourselves, we come to construct a self. "The advantage of an idea of your self is to help you know what you can or can't do or should or should not do." But also see the "treacherous terminology of mind" when we have layers and references and multi-referential words for the word self; one critic of his book said that because they were mirrors far back into antiquity therefore people were conscious (thus not bicameral); the author treats this objection, and goes through the behavior of most animals in front of mirrors where they either ignore or display aggression; but he notes humans and chimpanzees are different and "they like mirrors"; see also stages of behavior through human development around mirrors, at age two we recognize our own image, even chimpanzees can recognize their own image, but this does not mean self-awareness, we do not literally see our conscious selves in mirrors although the image may become an emblem on the self in some sense.
460ff The author then offers a two-tiered theory of emotions (affect/emotion) for modern human beings as distinguished from bicameral man and other animals. First, the basic affects of mammalian life, which humans share, based on a pre-existing neural substrate; then, modern human emotions which involve consciousness of such affects located inside an identity across a lifetime. Note the difference between fear (as in the limbic/emergency response of mammalian experience) and anxiety (which is reminiscence of previous fears or imagining future fears). We could call anxiety the knowledge of our fear.
462 The author imagines what it would be like for an individual to have these anxieties without their own built-in mechanism of cessation of thought; he tells the famous incident described by Herodotus at the first tragedy performed in Athens, The Fall of Miletus by Phrynicus. "The reaction of the audience was so extreme that all Athens could not function for several days. Phrynicus was banished, never to be heard of again, and his tragedy burnt." (!!!)
462 A second two-tiered emotion spectrum would be shame/humiliation, which has aspects of hierarchical relationships in social animals; submission response and then also physical expression like blushing or hiding; now compare this to the conscious reminiscence of this mental state and also in the context of a new view of ethical right and wrong... and we arrive at guilt. "No one before 1000 BC ever felt guilt, even while shame was the way groups and societies were held together." The evidence the author cites is the story of Oedipus as referred to in the Iliad and Odyssey, but with no context of guilt whatsoever. (!) Oedipus recovers from the shame of incest and lives a happy life thereafter with his wife/mother in this version, which was written around 800 BC. However, Sophocles gave us the trilogy on the subject and it treats this story much differently, with a guilt so extreme that a whole city goes into famine because of it; this ultimately leads to a whole set of cultural norms for getting rid of guilt, Hebrew scapegoats, purification rituals, etc., including the forgiveness and confession rituals of Christianity.
465ff See also from mating to sex: mating is simply a behavior set triggered by specific stimuli among animals that are not conscious; these behaviors can be quite complex; but when conscious humans introspect about mating behavior it becomes a whole different world. "Try to imagine what your 'sexual life' would be if you could not fantasize about sex." The author cites here the innocence and chasteness of murals and sculptures before 1000 BC compared to the unbelievable sexuality of art afterwards; the author believes this reflects "the new human ability to fantasize." The author gives these examples of mammalian/bicameral emotions and their introspective/self-conscious versions as a starting point for other researchers to think about this important period of human history.
468 Note also another researcher is making progress with ancient Chinese texts and finding similar dating for the breakdown of bicamerality. See the works of Michael Carr.
Vocab: [much respect to an author who can come up with this many words that are new to me]
Prevenient: preceding in time or order; antecedent
Laocoöns: see the sculpture Laocoön and his Sons, the author uses the phrase here as struggling with a serpentine problem, "struggling like Laocoöns"
Aptic: prone/inclined or appropriate, the latter meaning deriving from the Latin aptus ("fitted/suited").
Aptic structures: organizations of the brain that make an organism act to behave in a certain way under certain conditions
Gracile: of slender build
Metaphrand: in a metaphor, the thing to be described
Metaphier: in a metaphor, the thing or relation used to elucidate it (borrowed linguistically from the words multiplicand/multiplier)
Synchronically: coeval; coexistant; concerned with something, especially a language, as it exists at one point in time; "synchronic linguistics"
Diachronically: concerned with the way in which something, especially language, has developed and evolved through time
Monition: a warning of impending danger; a formal notice from a bishop or ecclesiastical court admonishing a person not to do something specified
Operative [linguistic mood/case]: relating to or denoting a mood of verbs in Greek and other languages, expressing a wish, equivalent to English expressions "if only..."
Hypostasized: To make into a distinct substance; to conceive or treat as an existing being; to epitomize or exemplify
Aryballos: An aryballos was a small spherical or globular flask with a narrow neck used in ancient Greece. It was used to contain perfume or oil, and is often depicted in vase paintings being used by athletes during bathing
Transilience: an abrupt change or variation; a transition; such a change or variation in a geological formation
Sortilege: the casting of lots or the tossing of sticks or stones or bones or beans on the ground to divine an answer from the gods
Extispicy: divination from sacrificed animals, typically from their entrails
Mantic: relating to divination or prophecy
Teratological: dealing with abnormal births or abnormal fetuses
Hemerology: the cultural practice of connecting the success or failure of actions with favourable or unfavourable days defined by the calendar
Menology: study of months
Cledonomancy: a kind of divination based on chance events or encounters, such as words occasionally uttered. Divination through interpreting chance remarks or events
Protasis/apodosis: the if/then parts of a conditional sentence
Laicization: To laicize a priest means to dismiss him from his clerical state and reduce him to the lay state or secularize him
Nystagmic: nystagmic eyes, eyes in a state of nystagmus; a condition in which your eyes make rapid, repetitive, uncontrolled movements--such as up and down (vertical nystagmus), side to side (horizontal nystagmus) or in a circle (rotary nystagmus)
Glossolalia: speaking in tongues
Heirophant: expounder of sacred mysteries; 1670s, from late Latin hierophantes; also from Greek hierophantes "one who teaches the rites of sacrifice and worship" literally "one who shows sacred things"
Supererogatory: supererogation is the performance of more than is asked for; the action of doing more than duty requires; In ethics, an act is supererogatory if it is good but not morally required to be done
Coprolalia: scatological or obscene language, also echolalia
Temporizing: to avoid making a decision or to avoid committing oneself in order to gain time
To Read:
H.S. Jennings: Behavior of the Lower Organisms
Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man
Alfred Russel Wallace: Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection
William James: Principles of Psychology
William McDougall: Body and Mind
Lloyd Morgan: Emergent Evolution
W.F. Book: The Psychology of Skill
Phillip Wheelwright: The Burning Fountain
Bruno Snell: The Discovery of Mind
E.R. Dodds: The Greeks and the Irrational
Michael Gazzaniga: The Bisected Brain
A.J.Toynbee: A Study of History
Alexander Heidel: The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels
***John Hemming: The Conquest of the Incas
Victor Wolfgang von Hagen: The Realm of the Incas: An Archaeological History
***H.W.F. Saggs: The Greatness That Was Babylon
***Walter Leaf: A Companion to the Iliad
Fragments of Solon
Fragments of Sappho
***Maimonides: Guide of the Perplexed
Iamblichus: De Mysteries (trans. Thomas Tyler, 1895)
T.B.L. Webster: From Mycenae to Homer
***Eric A. Havelock: Preface to Plato
William Empson: poems and essasy (see for example 7 Types of Ambiguity)
J.M. Bramwell: Hypnotism: Its History, Practice, and Theory
***Theta Wolf: Alfred Binet
Harvey Cox: The Secular City
***George Steiner: Nostalgia for the Absolute (lecture series, link is to a video on youtube, also there's a book version)
George Steiner: After Babel
George Steiner: Real Presences
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding