All Mixed Up?

This past summer I came across a blog published by Cris Campbell, an aspiring anthropologist.  His blog gets a significant amount of traffic judging by the number of comments to his posts, and a critical post he wrote (though he does recommend OCBBM) on Jaynes' bicameral mind theory titled "All Mixed Up:  Julian Jaynes" has received over 40 comments from readers.  

Campbell does not really make much of an argument against any of the specifics in OCBBM.  However, I am creating this write up here, because many of the responses in the comments section are thoughtful and engaging and would be worthwhile I think for those interested in Jaynes' ideas.

So anyone who wants to explore the various ideas expressed on Campbell's blog regarding Jaynes and bicamerality can use the above link.  Here I am only going to reproduce the comments I made to Campbell.  Campbell sums up his opening remarks with:

“Here is how we know Jaynes is wrong: there is no evidence that historically recent hunter-gatherers were or are biologically-neurologically different or that their minds were metaphorically bifurcated.”

To which I replied:

"Jaynes did not claim there was anything biologically-neurologically different in bicameral people. Rather, his contention was that the neuroanatomy of bicameral people was the same as we all share, but it functioned differently in people living in bicameral societies due to culture.

Maybe I am missing something, but there is much evidence for at least vestiges of 'metaphorically bifurcated' minds in recent hunter-gatherers if by this term you mean what Jaynes meant which is cross hemisphere communication in the brain that was experienced by these people as hallucinations. Just one example would be the Piraha people’s experience of spirit visitations as documented by Daniel Everett."

Cambell's response:

"Over the past 10 years, I’ve probably read 1,000 or more ethnographies and ethnohistories of hunter-gatherer peoples. I have yet to encounter anything in this vast literature which would suggest some kind of bifurcation, whether metaphorical or otherwise.

In fact, everything I’ve read suggests otherwise. Sure, they have different worldviews but those (animist) worldviews are in no way similar to what Jaynes postulated for bicameral consciousness. I can’t think of a single source, ethnographer, or anthropologist who has ever thought, said, or written that hunter-gatherers have a different kind of consciousness or mind.

That aside, the single best explanation for Jaynes’ identification of a difference between early and later Greek epics/poems is quite simple: writing and literate society. Minds did not change, but external symbolic storage and literate technology did. Jack Goody, Eric Havelock, and Walter Ong have all assessed Jaynes’ work in this way. They are right."

My response, which starts off by addressing Campbell's statement that no anthropologist or ethnographer he is aware of has ever noted a different kind of consciousness in the people they write about:

"Yes, they don’t. I would attribute that to: 1) Since the age of writing and documentation, hunter gatherer societies have faced many of the same pressures Jaynes describes which brought about consciousness, so these people only show vestiges of the bicameral mind to a greater or lesser degree depending on the case. 2) It would be too politically incorrect to assign a different kind of conscious to the people they study for fear that the difference may be interpreted by those who read their work as racist. 3) They don’t know how to interpret the phenomenon they are seeing, being conscious creatures, they have difficulty conceptualizing what is going on.

For example in regards to my third point, I once read an account by a researcher who spent time with a group of aboriginal people in Australia. He insisted that there was a kind of mental telepathy going on between these people. He noted that there were times he would observe an individual drop what she was doing to respond to a command, summons, etc. she received when no one else was around. The only way this modern westerner could interpret this was to attribute it to telepathy, though it sounded much more to me like they were experiencing command auditory hallucinations ala Jaynes.

In my example I used in my original post re: the Piraha, Daniel Everett does not just describe the Piraha as having an animist worldview. He states that they report a direct experience of spirits speaking to them. I am not suggesting the Piraha are not conscious. But I am suggesting Everett’s description sounds like they do have vestiges of bicameral experience.

Jaynes stated that he believed there has not been any truly bicameral people on earth in a long time (which is another reason modern ethnographers and anthropologists don’t report hunter-gathers as having a different consciousness than anyone else). However, as you said, if Jaynes were right human history 'would be filled with fantastic and unbelievable tales'. To my mind, you don’t even have to go to any record of past hunter gatherer societies. Fantastic tales of people communicating with spirits of one sort or another reflecting remnants of bicamerality abound in just about every type of account left to us from the past. The Bible is one great example as James Cohn shows in his book Minds of the Bible. Modern scholars want to write off as something like a symbolic literary device references from past generations of their experiences of talking directly to their gods and ancestors. However, these reports are so constant and ubiquitous across all cultures that it makes more sense to attribute the explaining away of these experiences as a reaction of those who correctly cannot accept the idea of spirits and ghosts, but have no idea of how to account for these phenomena other than to simply insist that the people who report them are not telling us the truth about their experience.

Nor do we have to look to the past for vestiges of bicamerality. The auditory hallucinations of schizophrenics in our modern world, and what recent research has shown to be the very common experience of hearing voices in people not judged to be suffering from a mental illness, are phenomena that lack any good evolutionary explanation of how they came to be so common. That is, unless you understand Julian Jaynes."

I want to add one reference not directly related to the main arguments above, but rather to an issue I alluded to in passing.   That subject being that some anthropologists are blinded by leanings toward political correctness on certain topics--in this case the possibility that people in some cultures may inherently have a more primitive mentality than others.  In that regard, there is a new study out, where sociologists are the subjects, showing a strong bias against any explanations that would suggest certain sensitive differences among people could have evolutionary roots; thereby, under cutting a sacred cow of politically correct social science that all differences between people that appear to be a deficit of some sort for one group are due to oppression, politics, etc.  The idea that some differences between people's abilities are due to evolution would mean its a difference that you cannot fix through raising the consciousness of the oppressors, and is relatively permanent. 

Being a liberal myself and spending lots of time close to my fellow liberal academics, I am not surprised.  Sociologists are not anthropologists, but my experience with the field would make me confident in placing a large wager that if the same study were done on anthropologists, it would result in the same findings. The study itself is behind a pay wall, but the Washington Post has a good review of it: Liberals Deny Science, Too

Searching for Consciousness, Redux

I am following up on my last post, because a few days ago I happened to stumble onto a journal article that is certainly the best amalgamation I have come across of where our current scientific understanding of consciousness is taking us:  The Source of Consciousness by Ken A Paller and Satoru Suzuki.  And more to the point, the information the authors present reads practically like a point by point summary of the empirical findings that have emerged since Jaynes wrote OCBBM that support his contentions that I addressed in my last post about how introspective consciousness is not needed for so many of our cognitive functions.  

I would strongly encourage anyone interested in the topic to read the whole article, as it is brief and, uncharacteristically for an academic journal article, well written and easy to follow.  In it they summarize, with references to the research, how, for example:

• One can can closely examine an object or image and still be unaware of it.
• One can apprehend something, study it and make a judgement about it without using conscious introspection.
• There are certain blind people who actually do see moving objects and can respond to them--its just that the visual information they take in is not accessible to consciousness.  (The phenomenon is know as 'blindsight'.)
• Through brain damage or induced illusions a person can perceive her own conscious awareness being disassociated and separated from parts of her physical body or entire body.  (Think "out of body experiences".)
• Free will may be an illusion as there is mounting evidence that we make decisions unconsciously and then afterward consciously rationalize those decisions to ourselves.  (It's just that it is only obvious to us when we see it happening in uncle Harry and our teenagers.)

Apparently, I am not the only one that was impressed.  A group of seven leading researchers in the field of cognitive science published an equally short and well written piece in support of Paller and Suzuki's article titled Consciousness Science: Real Progress and Lingering Misconceptions.  The broader point of both pieces is to argue that scientific inquiry into consciousness is the only legitimate way to explain it (as opposed to metaphysical and philosophical accounts).  However, the response to Paller and Suzuki does site a variety of sources that support Paller and Suzuki's contentions about the limitations of consciousness and particularly empathizes, "We now know, contrary to many peoples intuitions, that attention and awareness are dissociable:  attention of various types can function in the absence of consciousness..."

In turn, Paller and Suzuki published a one page thank you (included in the previous link), and allude to a few different lines of research that could prove fruitful for further exploration.  They sum up their understanding as follows:

"Consciousness reflects a specific mode of information processing wherein information is explicitly available for intentional (goal-directed) control of attention, memory, and thoughts. By contrast, information can remain largely intangible to intentional control mechanisms via the unconscious mode of processing, but still automatically direct attention, evoke memory, and induce thoughts."

Even though most of these ideas would be shocking to the general public, the above conclusions of all these researchers indicate that the field of cognitive science has moved swiftly forward and has become quiet comfortable with much of what Jaynes was telling us 40 years ago!

Searching For Consciousness

Have you ever had to deal with someone close to you who is caught up in an addiction, or have you struggled with an addiction yourself?  If so, you have seen a particularly extreme example of how flawed introspective consciousness can be and how little influence it can have over behavior.  Remembering the experience of how broken consciousness mental processes can be under the influence of addiction may make it easier to digest Julian Jaynes' excellent summary of the limitations of consciousness in the first chapter of OCBBM.  Here he discusses all the cognitive functions that consciousness is not necessary for.  The list includes concept formation, learning, and even thinking and reason.

Certainly, most people when they first encounter this outrageous proposal are ready to reject it automatically.  One's own experience of directing one's own internal conscious process and in turn consciously directing one's own actions is all the evidence needed to see there is a major flaw somewhere in Jaynes' argument.  However, really understanding how limited consciousness actually is, is the bedrock of being able to understand the bicameral mind theory, because, as Jaynes states, “unless you are here convinced that a civilization without consciousness is possible, you will find [the bicameral mind theory] unconvincing and paradoxical.”  Therefore, it is important to note that since OCBBM, there has been a mountain of research from a variety of fields that has shown what a small roll our conscious awareness has in our various mental processes—even to the point that many researches and philosophers have adopted a deterministic perspective and doubt that free will exists.  

“We think our decisions are conscious, but these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg,” says John-Dylan Haynes in an article from the journal Nature.  Haynes and his colleges have published one example of the many studies that demonstrate how much of our decision making process is done unconsciously.  They show how decisions are made in a person’s brain up to 10 seconds before the person becomes conscious of the decision!  We think of our introspective consciousness as the command center for all the mental processes that control our actions.  However, this is largely an illusion.  

Some of the most profound examples of how unrelated introspective consciousness is to how we understand and judge experience has come to us from the study of split brain patients.  The cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga is famous for his work with these people.  He describes in an interview published as A Split Brain: A Tail of Two Halves how when only the patient's right hemisphere was given information, “The left hemisphere [which is where language and abstract reasoning are based] made up a post hoc answer that fit the situation.” 

Steven Pinker, in his book The Blank Slate, looks at several examples from Gazzaniga’s work.  He recounted the story of one subject who’s right hemisphere (but not the left) was shown the command “Walk”, but, when asked why he got up and started walking, replied he was going to get a drink.  That is, his left hemisphere, in charge of formulating a conscious response in words, made up a “rational” explanation rather than saying he did not know.  Pinker, after reviewing much of the evidence from all this research, labels the brain’s language and abstract reasoning left hemisphere the “baloney generator” and stated, “The conscious mind…is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief.” (p. 43)  

Going back to the issue of addiction I bought up at the beginning of this post, I have seen a plethora of poignant examples in my clinical work which illustrate how little control consciousness can have in our lives.  Much of the work I have done has been dedicated to helping those who suffer from addiction.  I have seen this curse from the perspective of an outreach worker frequenting the hang outs of addicted homeless people, to a crisis hotline counselor in the late hours of the night listening to addicts and their family members pleading for help, to a therapist creating a safe space for the addicted person sitting in front of me to confront the destruction drug dependency has rained down on his life.

There is much denial that goes on with people who are suffering from addiction.  However, for most of these people at some point, when the winds of the building storms that have been their lives eventually become strong enough to blow back the smoke screen of denial, they are forced to view the wasteland they have made of their health, relationships, finances and vocations.   This is a deeply traumatic experience characterized, many times literally, by much wailing and gnashing of teeth. 

For the addict, relatives and friends, reaching this point in the process, while painful, is also seen as a hopeful time now that the truth is finally staring the addict in the face.  Surely, this will lead to that person doing everything possible to move beyond the behaviors that have caused such devastation.  However, amazingly for those who are experiencing this cycle for the first time, rarely does the carnage end when the addicted person finally acknowledges she has a problem. 

The addict will swear to all that will listen that she has had her last drink, snort, injection, etc.  She will be convinced she has seen the light and will now be focused on being abstinent and cleaning up the mess she has made.  Then, she finds herself horrified the next morning to wake up and realize that, the evening before, as soon as she made her passionate declaration to her best friend, she went straight to the bar and got so smashed she does not remember what happened for the rest of the night.  And this roller coaster of sincere desire to be in recovery and inability to control the impulse to use goes back and forth for weeks, months and often times years. 

To put it a little differently, all the deliberations in consciousness dedicated to changing the behavior around the addiction are like charging at the Great Pyramid of Giza and trying to knock it over with the force of one’s shoulder.  Though they don’t understand it and cannot explain what is happening, these people are getting an abject lesson on how little consciousness has to do with living day to day life and how much our mental life and behavior are controlled by unconscious processes. 

And it’s not just because the chemicals these people are ingesting are inhibiting the executive functions in their brains.  I have also worked with people struggling with behavioral addictions that do not involve ingesting anything.  I have observed no difference in the behavioral and internal psychological digression of people addicted to their sexual impulses or their need to hoard every object they can possess as compared to people addicted to a drug of one kind or another. 

At this point I must mention that the information contained in the last few paragraphs based on my own professional experience should not be considered simply anecdotal evidence.  This is because of the voluminous written records from people’s diaries, memoirs, letters to the editor, popular books, thread posts in cyberspace, etc., that describe the exact process over and over again that I refer to above. 

In fact, the millions of people worldwide who participate in 12 step groups squarely acknowledge the lack of power conscious will has to change behavior.  Instead, they base the foundation of recovery on the individual’s acknowledgement that their life is “unmanageable”, and their only hope is to turn their recovery over to God.  That is, their behavior is beyond any hope that their conscious thoughts and commitments can rule their actions directly.  And its not just addicts who have this experience.  How many times have you and I said to ourselves we really are going to lose weight this time, or get our spending under control, or be nicer to our relatives, etc.

There has been much resistance to the central point of Jaynes' bicameral mind theory: Whole societies can exist without any of its members being capable of conscious introspection. We all experience our conscious awareness as the essence of who we are; therefore, we almost literally can't imagine civilization could be inhabited by people who lack this distinguishing feature. The problem is we are caught in the limitation of what we might term the "subjective paradox". That is, our subjective conscious minds can only be conscious of what we are conscious of. It could be that 99.999% of our mental processes that control our decisions and behavior are unconscious, but the conscious mind by definition would have no direct experience of that. However, recent research has done nothing but support Jaynes' arguments about how little conscious is needed to function, and looking at the example of addiction helps us see how limited our power of conscious will and reflection can be.

Neuro-computational Consciousness?

In the introduction to OCBBM, Jaynes chronicles the various paradigms that have arisen during the course of modern science to explain where consciousness comes from.    He takes us on a brief tour from the theory that consciousness is just a component of matter like gravity or magnetism, to the view that consciousness was grounded in the associative process we call learning, to the school of behaviorism which asserted conscious is an illusion and does not exist at all!  Jaynes finishes with the theory that consciousness is a product of the reticular activating system in the brain that regulates the sleep/wake cycle and aspects of how attention is focused.   

Back in the 70s when the OCBBM was published, identifying the reticular activating system as the cause of consciousness was an initial foray into trying to understand consciousness strictly in terms of neuroscience.  Since then, neuroscience has flourished and using its fMRI, PET, and CG scans is generating one discovery after another.  The rise of neuroscience has also accompanied the meteoric rise of computer science and the corresponding ubiquity of computer technology into the routine of every day life.   

During this ride into the information age of the 21st century, computer scientists and neuroscientists have been influencing the imaginations of each other and the public.  The result has been the information processing computer has become the dominant metaphor animating the public and scientific communities' conception of what cognition is.  The new field of "computational neuroscience", developing mathematical models of how information flows through the brain, and its associated fields of study are now held up as the best bet for finally being able to solve the question of consciousness once and for all.   And so the media and the researchers have developed the habit of thinking of sentient beings as information processing systems, and this has become the next paradigm to add to Jaynes' list.  We are computers made of organic matter with components like, for example, hard disks (regions in the brain where long term memory is stored), software (how our "plastic" brains become organized via genetics and development), and computer chips (neurons and their connections). 

Of course, people do not literally believe we are simply organic computers mechanically processing the data we take in through our senses.  Well, maybe the hardcore determinists and behaviorists among us do.  However, my point is we must be very cautious about letting today's zeitgeist sweep us up into models that only work at the level of metaphor as they relate to consciousness and ultimately limit our ability to understand the complex and enigmatic problems associated with understanding the amazing phenomenon of introspective self awareness. 

 Jaynes describes the phenomenon I am talking about perfectly:   

"Note how the metaphors of mind are the world it perceives.  The first half of the nineteenth century was the age of the great geological discoveries in which the record of the past was written in layers of the earth’s crust. And this led to the popularization of the idea of consciousness as being in layers until...unconscious sensations, unconscious ideas, and unconscious judgments made up the majority of mental processes.  In the middle of the nineteenth century chemistry succeeded geology as the fashionable science, and consciousness...[became] the compound structure that could be analyzed in the laboratory into precise elements of sensations and feelings.  And as steam locomotives chugged their way into the pattern of everyday life toward the end of the nineteenth century, so they too worked their way into the consciousness of consciousness, the subconscious becoming a boiler of straining energy which demanded manifest outlets and when repressed pushed up and out into neurotic behavior and the spinning camouflaged fulfillments of going-nowhere dreams.  There is not much we can do about such metaphors except to state that that is precisely what they are."

I am in no way claiming that research in cognitive science using the tools of computational neuroscience and the like are not legitimate fields of inquiry.  They are, and the worlds of neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence and others are making astounding contributions to the compendium of human knowledge.   

The problem appears to me to be, as it relates to consciousness per se, that we are changing the terms of the debate to fit the metaphor we are currently excited about.  Christof Koch is a neuroscientist who partnered early in his career with Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers on the structure of the DNA molecule, to try and understand where consciousness comes from and how it actually works.  He has worked on developing  a model for understanding consciousness called Integrated Information Theory, and has become one of the leading researchers and spokes persons for a computational approach to consciousness.  He defines consciousness in a Scientific American article as "the ability to feel something, anything -- whether it's the sensation of an azure-blue sky, a tooth ache, being sad, or worrying about the deadline two weeks from now. Indeed, it may be possible that all animals share some minimal amount of sentience with people, that all animals have some feelings, however primitive."    I would argue this is a definition, with the possible exception of the example of worrying about a deadline two weeks out, that actually is focused on perception and emotion-- not consciousness.    

To some degree, the issue is a matter of semantics.  That is, if the field of neuroscience insists on defining consciousness as encompassing the entire realm of the perceptions and reactions of sentient beings, that is their prerogative.  For a concept like consciousness, where the definition is hotly debated and is far from reaching any consensus, in order to do any serious inquiry into the matter you have to begin with your best approximation of a definition in order to have a starting point to work from and a standard to judge the analysis by.  However, I would say defining consciousness as boiling down to stimulus, response, and association, obscures more than it makes clear.    

When we ask questions about what it means to be ethical and moral, or how to live a productive and worthwhile life, or even "Who am I?", we are challenging our ability to introspect deeply.  This is what Jaynes is addressing as consciousness.  Ultimately, when we want to understand what it means to be a conscious being, I think most of us are talking about this uniquely human ability we have to make meaning through an intentionally directed narrative we "see" within ourselves; or again, a "hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do", as Jaynes puts it. I realize the above description is not an operationalized, scientific definition of consciousness.  In future posts I will address in more detail exactly what I understand to be Jaynes' specific formulation of consciousness.  For now, I am just trying to make clear that the essential nature of the "consciousness" that means the most to us personally and has given rise to a long history of inquiry by novelist, philosophers and saints, is not what 21st century high tech research is focusing on when they talk about consciousness. 

In the BBC's documentary "Human Consciousness", Koch describes how he and his team are searching for the "neural correlates of consciousness"; that is, specific groups of neurons that correspond to particular conscious experiences.  One of the examples he uses is an area of the brain in one of his research subject's who, when shown a series of pictures, had that area of the brain fire only when the subject saw the 6 pictures of Jennifer Aniston that were mixed into the series.   

I would argue this is not telling us anything about specifically human consciousness.  What this example does tell us is that the research subject has made a strong association with Jennifer Aniston's image, probably cemented in the part of the brain Koch is looking at by repeated, strong emotional reactions that are associated to her image.  That is what I would call learning, and, as Jaynes states, you don't need anything approaching a uniquely human consciousness to learn.  Pavlov taught his dogs to salivate when making an association with a metronome.  We all know the stereotypical process of a scientist in a lab teaching a rat to find its way through a maze.  We have evidence that even insects can learn, as shown in a study on moths where the researcher discovered moths can be taught to distinguish which odors mean food.  Stemming from this discovery, the intent it is to train moths to recognize biological and chemical weapons!   

If you are captivated by mapping the brain and discovering which areas correlate with which specific functions, great!  Many fascinating discoveries are being made that tell us about cognition in humans and other animals.  However, as Jaynes puts it regarding the desire to understand the essence of human consciousness through the study of neuro-anatomy: 

"...there is a delusion in such reasoning. It is one that is all too common and unspoken in our tendency to translate psychological phenomena into neuro-anatomy and chemistry. We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first. Even if we had a complete wiring diagram of the nervous system, we still would not be able to answer our basic question. Though we knew the connections of every tickling thread of every single axon and dendrite in every species that ever existed, together with all its neurotransmitters and how they varied in its billions of synapses of every brain that ever existed, we could still never — not ever — from a knowledge of the brain alone know if that brain contained a consciousness like our own."

David Chalmers, co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at NYU, in his TED talk, How  Do You Explain Consciousness?, echoes Jaynes by making the same distinction between the "easy problem" of how neural phenomenon are correlated to components of behavior and the "hard problem" of actual subjective, introspective consciousness: 

"The centerpiece of the science of consciousness in recent years has been the search for correlations, correlations between certain areas of the brain and certain states...But it doesn't address the real mystery at the core of this subject: why is it that all that physical processing in a brain should be accompanied by consciousness at all?...I banged my head against the wall looking for a theory of consciousness in purely physical terms that would work. But I eventually came to the conclusion that that just didn't work...the core idea is just that what you get from purely reductionist explanations in physical terms, in brain-based terms, is stories about the functioning of a system, its structure, its dynamics, the behavior it produces, great for solving the easy problems — how we behave, how we function — but when it comes to subjective experience...we're at a kind of impasse here. We've got this wonderful, great chain of explanation, we're used to it, where physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains parts of psychology. But consciousness doesn't seem to fit into this picture. On the one hand, it's a datum that we're conscious.  On the other hand, we don't know how to accommodate it into our scientific view of the world. So I think...radical ideas may be needed."

Chalmers, unlike many others wanting to understand consciousness, gets credit for being able to distinguish the objects of the current research in neuroscience from the phenomenon of introspective conscious experience.   

The current paradigm for investigating consciousness, fueled by metaphors of computers and information processing, indeed is producing astounding discoveries related to many areas of cognitive functioning.  However, I am afraid this paradigm is going to end up, like all the others covered in Jaynes' introduction to OCBBM, falling short as a framework for understanding the phenomenon of introspective consciousness.  It appears to me David Chalmers is correct that we still need radical ideas.  40 years after OCBBM, it is still radical, and it is still needed.

O, What A World...There Is Only Awe

I cannot imagine anyone wishing to talk in detail about the ideas and arguments in OCBBM without wanting initially to spend some time addressing the first paragraph in the book:

Before Jaynes embarked on his academic career at Princeton, he traveled to London and spent a number of years as a playwright and actor, and that side of him certainly shines through at the beginning of his tome.  Those of us reading this overture are immediately confronted with the strange paradox that our personal conscious musings seem like the true essence of what we mean when we refer to our own unique self, our inner most private place were we go to reflect on who we are and any other issue needing consideration, but at the same time, it defies definition or explanation of what it actually is or where it even comes from out of the history of human evolution.

I find Rene Descartes, of "I think; therefore, I am", so illustrative of the paradox we are considering. Descartes, the man who ushered into human history modern science and the primacy of epistemology as the key to understanding what a human being is, could state that our essence is grounded in our cognitive experience. At the same time, he located the source of that consciousness, this thing we call mind, in a different dimension from physical reality that becomes a part of us, because the pineal gland in the center of our brains acts as a cosmic antennae enabling us to tap into an otherworldly energy that animates our awareness!

We are baffled when we try to understand our own consciousness.

This morning while I was working out, I was listening to a lecture on consciousness by a neuroscientist who started off by stating that consciousness is ultimately undefinable (which, if we accept that premises, made the rest of her lecture meaningless).  Indeed, it is routine for authors writing about consciousness, be they scientists or philosophers, to begin by acknowledging that there is no agreed upon definition of what consciousness is.

Jaynes' passionate and poetic first paragraph reminds us that the question of the origin of consciousness is not just an interesting question for analytic philosophers or a technical question for cognitive scientists and neurologists to solved.  Rather, it goes to the essence of what it means to be a human being.  Jaynes puts directly in front of us the fact that this question of consciousness is about "an introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror."  It is a question for science and philosophy, but beyond that it is a question of identity for each and every conscious person.  It takes us back to the question humans have been asking themselves since the first glimmers of self awareness dawned upon our species, "Who am I?"   With his opening paragraph, Jaynes, in my estimation, sets the proper tone for what admittedly in the rest of the book will be a cerebral and intellectual journey--though the journey is so engaging it generates genuine excitement in the reader even while he struggles to comprehend Jaynes' vast and encompassing ideas.

I am passionate about Jaynes work and all the implications and insights that emerge from the tour de force that is OCBBM.  However, at some level it must be acknowledged that the attempt to understand the origins and essence of consciousness is ultimately running up against the limits of human understanding, and this opening paragraph foreshadows the trial.  There are plenty of scholars who publicly acknowledge they are skeptical that we will ever be able to describe how the brain produces conscious experience.  Hence, Jaynes resorts to poetic language in his opening words to describe the subject of consciousness he is about to try and corral into the confines of scientific inquiry as "everything, yet nothing at all" jarring the reader into realizing the precarious position she is in when attempting to objectively understand the most subjective aspect of the universe humans encounter. Ultimately, attempting to understand consciousness and its origins is the quest to understand how we evolved into meaning makers; that is, the only living beings in the universe, as far as we know, that have the capacity to assign endless layers of meaning, the build blocks of our truths, to everything our conscious experience can apprehend.

This process of making meaning sounds like a virtuous and worthwhile endeavor.  Indeed, everyone who ever had a thought about anything which they considered important enough to say out loud, in believing in the value of that thought, by default concurs with this sentiment.  I also, by writing these words and creating this blog, acknowledge my faith in the power of meaning making.  Jaynes himself dedicated his life to understanding this meaning making refuge of consciousness.

However, he was also able to recognize and help us all to face the paradoxes inherent in our quest to understand ourselves and our mental lives from which identity springs.  Jaynes recalls for us the soul of the words in the paragraph we are considering here in a statement he made when asked at a forum organized by Life magazine what he thought the meaning of life was.  Jaynes stated, "This question has no answer except in the history of how it came to be asked. There is no answer, because words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself.  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."  

No doubt a shocking statement to stand eye to eye with; just as OCBBM was shocking to so many people when they first read it.