X-Message-Number: 15930
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: Re: Is consciousness only 3000 years old?
Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2001 11:43:42 -0800

In Cryonet #15921, George Smith wrote,

>Message #15921
>From: "George Smith" <>
>References: <>
>Subject: Is consciousness only 3000 years old?
>Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2001 10:37:26 -0800
>
>I have been re reading Princeton psychology professor Julian Jaynes' 1976 
>book "The Origin of Consciousness In The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind".  
>I had forgotten what an amazing hypothesis he suggested and supported.  In 
>essence, Jaynes proposed the idea that up > until about 3000 years ago, 
>human being were not conscious at all.

[snip]

>Jaynes outlines how the "bicameral mind" of our ancestors was divided
>between the (usual) right hemisphere which would make decisions in unusual 
>situations (not habitual) and then cause voices and sometimes > visual 
>hallucinations to convey these decisions into the awareness of > the 
>(usual) left hemisphere.  Jaynes suggested that the human being would 
>unconsciously react to these hallucinated commands and identified these 
>commands as (in the case certainly of Homer's Illiad) "gods".

I read the same book years ago, only I have a problem with Jaynes's  Homeric 
example.  The "god" characters in _The Iliad_ are clearly self-conscious in 
an understandably modern sense, because they don't experience or hallucinate 
visitations from uber-gods to help them make decisions.  Homer seems to have 
understood how consciousness felt, and used his divine visitation technique 
more for literary effect than in an attempt to describe some hypothetical 
pre-conscious state.



Trans-millennially yours,

Mark Plus, Expansionary
"Working to make death obsolescent in the 21st Century."


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