organelle | Julian Jaynes gives
us an inspiringly provocative model of the phases of the evolution
of the inward connectivity we experience as consciousness, and he
builds it around the changing spacialization of the inward stage,
the place we think, and how it might have evolved over even relatively
short amounts of time. Though I will refer to his ideas regularly
because they offer convenient and salient models, what I have to
offer differs and I hope may deepen the value we may retrieve from
his inspiration. His concepts orient themselves around gods, metaphor,
consciousness, and unique specializations in each of these domains
across time. He proposes a fascinating and enthusiastically crafted
speculative ladder of ascent and its histories in his book The
Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
In this work, he exchanges the idea of a long emergence for a model
of sudden emergence in relation to crisis — one that was devastating,
and unexpected — beginning perhaps 3500 years ago —
or ~63 generations ago. Whether or not his timelines are accurate,
many of his noticings about the relationship between metaphor and
consciouness are sublime. In his models to be bicameral is to be
in common or constant contact with a supersentience, and when one
refers to gods, angels, or messengers — it is this supersentience
which is being referred to.
Jaynes’ central
thesis is that consciousness we understand and experience was the
result of a variety of radical terrestrial and social upheavals
— over a period of several hundred years theoretically located
between 1800 to 1300 B.C. These resulted in significant general
changes in what it meant to be human, and our experience of consciousness,
community, self, and cognition. Prior to these changes, he posits
a ’bicameral’ consciousness, where the analog self
is still in its formative moments, and is largely ‘ruled’
over by a semi-hallucinatory relationship with gods — personal
and public — whose wills are intoned in an inward space that
will later become the analog self, and the place of ‘me’.
He is positing a ladder of ascension to complex representational
consciousness which is emergent from the genesis and elaboration
of inward stages or space. As each step on the ladder is achieved,
the previous steps are conserved in a position that is now (where
it was not before) observable from ‘outside’ —
in essence all of this occurs this happens in a single space, the
mind.
The gods were, in his theory, biocognitive products of emerging social and neuropsychic responses to larger scales of social connectivity which emanated primarily from synthesis of complexly evolved right-brain cognition in human groups of relatively stable and organized nature. They gods were ‘present’ because they were *heard/experienced as though present nearby, or within oneself. They were apparent in consensus and intimate contact with symbols of authority or sovereignty. Visually hallucinatory communication was less common, at least by the time in question in Jaynes’ work.
*[One interpretation is that this is a matter of the neurological precursor elements of the brain momentarily adopting control of the auditory system in order to re-assemble local authority. To do this, these features would act in concert, and mimetically adopt whatever general shape was equivalent to ‘the penultimate local authority’. This might be a person in a position of mastery, such as a ruler or parent — or it could be a god. It could also be a kind of simulated personage, a conglomerate from various sources.]
The gods were, in his theory, biocognitive products of emerging social and neuropsychic responses to larger scales of social connectivity which emanated primarily from synthesis of complexly evolved right-brain cognition in human groups of relatively stable and organized nature. They gods were ‘present’ because they were *heard/experienced as though present nearby, or within oneself. They were apparent in consensus and intimate contact with symbols of authority or sovereignty. Visually hallucinatory communication was less common, at least by the time in question in Jaynes’ work.
*[One interpretation is that this is a matter of the neurological precursor elements of the brain momentarily adopting control of the auditory system in order to re-assemble local authority. To do this, these features would act in concert, and mimetically adopt whatever general shape was equivalent to ‘the penultimate local authority’. This might be a person in a position of mastery, such as a ruler or parent — or it could be a god. It could also be a kind of simulated personage, a conglomerate from various sources.]
Jaynes portrays the
connective aspect of the bicameral mind as a psychoemotional communications
network which was uniquely implemented across a variety of cultures,
while sharing a general and obvious template of organization and
function. The connective nature of bicameral voices was a source
of unification, identity, authorization, and real communication.
People from a given community or place, under the authority of their
shared bicamerally experienced god(s) and messengers, could cognitively
sense what the relationship of another person, people, animal,
or experience was to their god. Thus the local god(s) functioned
as much as lexicons as they did as authorities — for it was
only in relation to the god-holophore-characters that experience
or information could be made sense of at all. I generally agree
with his thesis that before we were ourselves, we were like the
experiential agents of a god or gods still deeply enmeshed in learning
and establishing themselves and their collective sentience potentials.
When ripe, these would be exemplified in the human cogniscia of
specific locales and societies.
The social networks of the periods in Jaynes’ focus (and perhaps many of our own) were spiral-ring networks organized around a central hub. This hub, in general, led to god, god’s messenger, or the domain of gods. Near the hub, there were often ‘special servants’ of various sorts. Simultaneously, many individuals appear to have had personal gods, or something of a analgous nature, such as the guardian angel metaphor we are still familiar with in the modern moment.
The social networks of the periods in Jaynes’ focus (and perhaps many of our own) were spiral-ring networks organized around a central hub. This hub, in general, led to god, god’s messenger, or the domain of gods. Near the hub, there were often ‘special servants’ of various sorts. Simultaneously, many individuals appear to have had personal gods, or something of a analgous nature, such as the guardian angel metaphor we are still familiar with in the modern moment.
