The origin of consciousness has become quite the topic. How does "consciousness" evolve? In Mind and Cosmos Thomas Nagel gets positively mystical about it (and earned the enmity of many of his determinist friends). Julian Jaynes had a different view.
Julian Jaynes published only one book, in 1976, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which tells the story of how mankind learned to think. The American Journal of Psychiatry called Jaynes “as startling as Freud in the Interpretation of Dreams.” Drawing on evidence from neurology, archaeology, art history, theology, and Greek poetry, Jaynes captured the experience of modern consciousness—“a whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can”—as sensitively and tragically as any great novelist. The field of psychology, he wrote, was little more than “bad poetry disguised as science.” In 1988, when Life asked Jaynes and several other thinkers to comment on the meaning of life, he responded that he had no answer. “Words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself,” he said. “Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.” He concluded that consciousness had no location in the brain. Instead, it was a function of language. “There is no such thing as a complete consciousness,” he writes. “All about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past.”
He divides thinking up with the cutting edge the self-conscious mind studying itself. This was the tipping point. Everything earlier was a hallucination where problems and conflicts could not be resolved and defaulted into confusion like magic and religion.
Julian Jaynes published only one book, in 1976, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which tells the story of how mankind learned to think. The American Journal of Psychiatry called Jaynes “as startling as Freud in the Interpretation of Dreams.” Drawing on evidence from neurology, archaeology, art history, theology, and Greek poetry, Jaynes captured the experience of modern consciousness—“a whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can”—as sensitively and tragically as any great novelist. The field of psychology, he wrote, was little more than “bad poetry disguised as science.” In 1988, when Life asked Jaynes and several other thinkers to comment on the meaning of life, he responded that he had no answer. “Words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself,” he said. “Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.” He concluded that consciousness had no location in the brain. Instead, it was a function of language. “There is no such thing as a complete consciousness,” he writes. “All about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past.”
He divides thinking up with the cutting edge the self-conscious mind studying itself. This was the tipping point. Everything earlier was a hallucination where problems and conflicts could not be resolved and defaulted into confusion like magic and religion.
He has a cultist following, especially with the evolution of the computer. There are small societies devoted to him. But his insights, while interesting but vague, are somewhat sad. And it showed. He became an alcoholic. He held the same job, never gaining tenure, for the rest of his career. He lived alone in a single room on Princeton’s campus, a bachelor all his life. He gave lectures around the country but complained that there was “something wearing about them, as if I should have to try to interest anyone.”
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