Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking

John Updike wrote in The New Yorker that when Jaynes “speculates that until late in the second millennium B.C. men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of gods The idea that the ancient Greeks (2500 years ago)  were not self-aware raises quite a few eyebrows. The Iliad andThe Odyssey, to look for signs of people who aren’t capable of introspection—people who are all sea, no rime. And he believes he sees that in The Iliad. He writes that the characters inThe Iliad do not look inward, and they take no independent initiative. They only do what is suggested by the gods. When something needs to happen, a god appears and speaks. Without these voices, the heroes would stand frozen on the beaches of Troy, like puppets.

There are many to grandiosly claim that Jaynes books will carry his name into eternity. 

 Jaynes first presents a masterful precis of what consciousness is not. It is not an innate property of matter. It is not merely the process of learning. It is not, strangely enough, required for a number of rather complex processes. Conscious focus is required to learn to put together puzzles or execute a tennis serve or even play the piano. But after a skill is mastered, it recedes below the horizon into the fuzzy world of the unconscious. Thinking about it makes it harder to do. As Jaynes saw it, a great deal of what is happening to you right now does not seem to be part of your consciousness until your attention is drawn to it. Could you feel the chair pressing against your back a moment ago? Or do you only feel it now, now that you have asked yourself that question?

science, “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

True mindfulness is not the experience of naming experiences, it is more aptly described from a Heiddeger-esque POV as an immersion in the state of awareness.

Ultimately, the broader questions that Jaynes’(an inveterate contrarian) book raised are the same ones that continue to vex neuroscientists and lay people. When and why did we start having this internal narrative? How much of our day-to-day experience occurs unconsciously? What is the line between a conscious and unconscious process? These questions are still open. 

What goes on in the minds of animals and the minds of humans, and the idea that the difference has its origins in language, is deeply compelling.

The study of consciousness is on the rise in neuroscience labs around the world, but the science isn’t yet close to capturing subjective experience

His illustration of his point is quite wonderful. “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 is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.”

Perhaps most striking to Jaynes, though, is that knowledge and even creative epiphanies appear to us without our control. You can tell which water glass is the heavier of a pair without any conscious thought—you just know, once you pick them up. And in the case of problem-solving, creative or otherwise, we give our minds the information we need to work through, but we are helpless to force an answer. Instead it comes to us later, in the shower or on a walk. 

Jaynes told a neighbor that his theory finally gelled while he was watching ice moving on the St. John River. Something that we are not aware of does the work.

Speech was already known to be localized in the left hemisphere, instead of spread out over both hemispheres. Jaynes suggests that the right hemisphere’s lack of language capacity is because it used to be used for something else—specifically, it was the source of admonitory messages funneled to the speech centers on the left side of the brain. 

These manifested themselves as hallucinations that helped guide humans through situations that required complex responses—decisions of statecraft, for instance, or whether to go on a risky journey.

And all about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past,” he writes, in awe of the reach of this idea, and seized with the pathos of the situation. “Our kings, presidents, judges, and officers begin their tenures with oaths to the now-silent deities, taken upon the writings of those who have last heard them.”

Perhaps this was the first time many people reached out, touched their certainty of self, and found it was not what they expected.

http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/consciousness-began-when-the-gods-stopped-speaking