By: Julian Jaynes

About: The origins of human consciousness, and the idea that it was socially created vs evolutionarily

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0618057072/

Overall review: ⭐️

Notes:

Really interesting premise - that the nature of human “consciousness” is not the result of a biological step-function unlock, but rather the gradual creation via social processes. Jaynes specifically points to consciousness emerging after the erosion of what he calls the “bicameral mind”, which is the idea of the mind existing as 2 entities - a “speaker” and a “listener”. Eventually humans went from bicameral to a singular, conscious mind.

“If an animal could modify its behavior on the basis of its experience, it must be having an experience; it must be conscious”.

Don’t know if I exactly believe this definition laid out by Jaynes, since sunflowers can modify their behavior based on external stimuli - that’s something that all life more or less does. Haven’t yet come across a great definition of what it means to be conscious.

“the characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections… in fact, the gods take the place of consciousness.”

“decision making is precisely what stress is”

Jaynes claims the bicameral mind began to erode in Mesopotamia, based on an increasing lack of visible god figures in Mesopotamia art circa 1200BC

“The absence of gods in [visual art] the emphasis on prayer, the introduction of new kinds of silent divinities…indicate that the hallucinated voices called gods are no longer the guiding companions of man. What then takes over their function? How is action initiated?

Eventually, as god disappeared from visual view, humans had to resort to divinations to ascertain the will of god, which began the path to consciousness. Through things like sortilege and augury, humans began to take agency into themselves to make decisions.