nautil.us | The book sets its sights high from the very first words. “O, what a
world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country
of the mind!” Jaynes begins. “A secret theater of speechless monologue
and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and
mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries.”
To
explore the origins of this inner country, 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?
Consciousness,
Jaynes tells readers, in a passage that can be seen as a challenge to
future students of philosophy and cognitive 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.” 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.
The picture Jaynes paints is that consciousness is
only a very thin rime of ice atop a sea of habit, instinct, or some
other process that is capable of taking care of much more than we tend
to give it credit for. “If our reasonings have been correct,” he writes,
“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 were not conscious at all.”
Jaynes
believes that language needed to exist before what he has defined as
consciousness was possible. So he decides to read early texts, including
The Iliad and The 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 in The 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.
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.
The combination of instinct
and voices—that is, the bicameral mind—would have allowed humans to
manage for quite some time, as long as their societies were rigidly
hierarchical, Jaynes writes. But about 3,000 years ago, stress from
overpopulation, natural disasters, and wars overwhelmed the voices’
rather limited capabilities. At that point, in the breakdown of the
bicameral mind, bits and pieces of the conscious mind would have come to
awareness, as the voices mostly died away. That led to a more flexible,
though more existentially daunting, way of coping with the decisions of
everyday life—one better suited to the chaos that ensued when the gods
went silent. By The Odyssey, the characters are capable of
something like interior thought, he says. The modern mind, with its
internal narrative and longing for direction from a higher power,
appear.
