Abstract

What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from men’s imagination.

Joseph Campbell, The Way of the Myth

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 11 December 2008

The Bicameral Mind

Modern consciousness is self centered and subjective. The world we experience is seen as our own personal one. We are ourselves different from others in our society, with our own ideas that need not be realistic, but can offer solutions to our own problems. For long the human perception of self was vague, and self was subsumed to the clan or tribe, its authoritative myths considered as real themselves. People thought in terms of an inner voice which was believed to be the word of the tribal god, and gods appeared in visions and dreams giving instructions. Members of religions today are chary of admitting that God has spoken to them for fear of inviting accusations of insanity. Yet belief in an invisible entity called God remains central to many, even modern, people. Why do they do it, and how did it begin? Julian Jaynes, a Princeton scholar, concluded humanity commonly experienced their thoughts as the voices of gods until well into the historic age.

Jaynes’ book The Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown Of the Bicameral Mind is his thesis that consciousness is not an ancient human trait but developed only a few thousand years ago. Jaynes suggests that human consciousness did not arise at the same time as humanity itself, but that consciousness came after language, and even after a multitude of ancient civilizations had risen and fallen. He contends that consciousness was not a natural evolution in the human species, but arose in the prolonged and chaotic aftermath of the breakdown of an earlier and utterly different form of social control called the bicameral mind.

Writings from the bicameral period lack modern motivations. Why is it that the characters in The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad and the Old Testament behave in a manner alien to modern readers? They are written with no reference to personality or emotions, then ego, subjectivity and humour suddenly appear, while authors remark on the silence and distance of the gods. But, by the time of The Odyssey, the New Testament and classical Greek drama, characters have the motivations and emotivations of modern man.

Jaynes argues that natural disasters and the growing complexity of civilized life forced consciousness upon humanity, but the big impact on that time was Persia. A changing and challenging world required individual critical judgement whereas previously people in a more static and conservative wortld had lived in clans and tribes the culture of which relieved people of most problems. Waking consciousness and personal self are still evolving explaining why many people find them hard to cope with.

Jaynes posits that lacking full consciousness yet having language, prehistoric man’s actions were often governed by voices, which are in many ways similar to certain forms of schizophrenia. The bicameral mind was characterized not by anything like the consciousness we experience today, but was divided into two parts:

1. The subservient and none conscious man who operated like an organic automaton,
2. the “voices of gods”, intuition hallucinated into apparent reality which guided them in their actions.

Human beings once had minds split in two, a god mind and a primitive human mind, man in the left hemisphere, and god—authority or will—in the right, the latter obeying the literal voice of the former. Jaynes acknowledges this is an incredible concept for us to accept, but he never imagined the voices were voices of objective gods as some believers see to think. They were hallucinations from an unconscious part of the mind. It suggests why people are too willing to accept authority figures. Preconscious humans heard “voices” telling them what to do. An increase in population and complexity of life gradually caused these voices to fail and provided for a growth of self consciousness.

It might explain how some people cannot distinguish voices from radios, TV and loudspeakers from reality, that schizophrenics suffer from vestiges of the old bicamerality, that religion, demagoguery and dictatorship might happen because people still yearn for the certainty of the lost voice. The differences between The Iliad and The Odyssey, and, in the old Babylonian texts—the popularity of the personal god might also be symptoms of it. Drawing on a wealth of solid archeological, literary, historical, geographical, medical, psychiatric, biological, and linguistic scientific evidence this book tries to locate the origin of human consciousness in changes of the brain or its usage which took place around 1000 BC.

Consciousness

Consciousness generally has evolved slowly, via intermediate stages, along with life, and must have some sort of survival value. In humans, it is a learned behaviour which comes with experience and example, so cannot just suddenly appear as a result of brain capacity or whatever. Bernard Baars (1997) says “consciousness is a supremely functional adaptation” responsible for such as prioritizing alternatives, solving problems, making decisions, controlling activities, detecting mistakes, planning, learning, adaptating, and finding out things.

Some experts say consciousness, literally “knowing together”, is sensing “qualia”, qualitative subjective states such as pain or color. It is not what Jaynes means by it. Consciousness is not just awareness of things around, but special awareness of other people with thoughts like our own, so it requires the distinguishing of self from other, and the acceptance that similar others are similarly conscious—that they too have an awareness of you and themselves. So, human consciousness is self consciousness, the “subjective conscious mind” or “analog ‘I’”, as Jaynes calls it, mentally sees the self experiencing whatever it has done in reality. Conscious people can examine, judge, and motivate their “analog ‘I’”, but, even so, most of what we do is not done consciously, and so does not require consciousness.

If a bird bursts up from a copse nearby and flies crying to the horizon, I may turn and watch it and hear it, and then turn back to this page without being conscious that I have done so.

J Jaynes

Our distant ancestors did not differ from apes in being virtually unconscious, and earlier apes did not differ from other animals in not being conscious, yet functioned and function perfectly well. Early human hunter gatherers might have needed, and used, little consciousness in their activities of hunting, gathering, watching for predators, and making wooden and then stone tools.

We do not think of keeping our heart beating, moving or even of breathing. Thinking about them makes us nervous. If we touch a hot object, we react by removing ourselves from it instantly, with no thought involved, and when a fragile object falls from a shelf or table we instinctively try to catch it, and often do so. We are not conscious of practiced tasks like cycling, swimming, driving a car, writing or typewriting, playing a piano or tennis, and so on. Consciously thinking about such things does not improve our performance. Consciousness is about choice. When we have constantly practiced the right thing to do in a situation, thinking about it again slows it down and makes it more error prone.

But, if our mental activities often do not involve consciousness, why do we feel consciousness is ubiquitous in what we do? It is obvious—we can only be conscious of that which we are conscious of. Most of our mind works unconsciously. We cannot be conscious of it! Jaynes drew a metaphor to illustrate the point. When we are reading, our focus is on one or a few words, and the rest of the page is indistinct, just as if only the focus was properly illuminated by consciousness. So, imagine a flashlight beam illuminating a scene in pitch darkness. Only what is illuminated is visible. The darkness is analogous to the totality of our mental activities and the flashlight is analogous to consciousness. Consciousness is that part of our mind that is metaphorically illuminated. Imagine now that the flashlight is also our eye. All we can see is what is illuminated, so we are unaware of all the space in the darkness. When we comprehend, we see! The Greeks used nous. Most of the workings of our mind are in the darkness.

Jaynes proposed that the intermediate phase between unconsciousness and modern self awareness, was the stage of the bicameral mind. Previously the light of personal consciousness had not shone, and rather than being visible, the conscious part of our mind was audible. People heard the conclusions of their thoughts. The bicameral metaphor was based on sound, not light. The bicameral mind was perceived audibly, not visibly. We do not refer to anyone clever as loud but as bright. Nous refers to seeing, its use emphasizing the change an auditory metaphor of mind to a visual one—consciousness.

The coming of consciousness was a shift from the auditory mind to the visual mind.

J Jaynes

Metaphors, Metaphiers and Metaphrands

Jaynes’ theory of consciousness required that:

1. consciousness is dependent on language, particularly on metaphors
2. certain religious experiences are the result of a pattern of activity in the brain called the bicameral mind
3. the breakdown of the bicameral mind was the origin of consciousness.

Mere sense data do not make consciousness. Consciousness has to explain what is new in terms of what it already knows. Consciousness must reflect the real world:

mind and world… have evolved together, and in consequence are something of a mutual fit.

William James

There is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.

J Jaynes

And consciousness needs language:

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics… Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or repository… If consciousness is this invention of an analog world even as the world of mathematics parallels the world of quantities of things, what then can we say about its origin? Consciousness comes after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

That language leads to consciousness is different from but similar to the Whorf Hypothesis that language is necessary to thought. Both thinking—or reasoning—and consciousness need language, but thinking does not need consciousness—gestalt! Nor does learning, but it helps considerably, for, even if consciousness does not not need language to exist, it depends on language to progress because language is the instrument of tuition. “Language is an organ of perception.” Language—and therefore concepts and consciousness—is built by experience from metaphor.

Because in our brief lives we catch so little of the vastness of history, we tend too much to think of language as being solid as a dictionary, with a granite like permanence, rather than as the rampant restless sea of metaphor which it is.

J Jaynes

George Lakoff and others have put metaphor at the very base of philosophy. Understanding something is finding a metaphor for it, an analogy with something we already understand. A metaphor is making a model of the unknown with the known. Using metaphors, which consist of two components, metaphiers and metaphrands—what is to be described and the metaphorical analogy—humans incorporate new experience into what they already know. The metaphor is the metaphier operating on the metaphrand.

The metaphier—known by previous experience, like the infant’s experience of the warmth of its mother—has characteristics, attributes or associations known by the previous experience, and termed “paraphiers”. These paraphiers project onto the metaphrand—something newly experienced, like someone speaking of affection, an unknown word to the child—and become “paraphrands” of the metaphrand. The metaphor explains the metaphrand by analogy with the metaphier, using its already familiar paraphiers—affection is warmth! The attributes of the thing understood, the metaphier, are associated with the thing we are trying to understand, the metaphrand, helping to explain it and expanding our comprehension. Metaphors are not artistic novelties in language. Many normal words are metaphors.

The proto language, ur Sanskrit, at the root of all IndoEuropean languages can be reconstructed with some confidence—but with no written texts to confirm it—as a language of four or five thousand years ago. Different words trace to the same archaic root, showing that metaphors were developing even then. “Brow” and “bridge” are both from a common root meaning an object in an arched shape. Both are therefore metaphors of this original word meaning some sort of arch. Brow is a metaphor for a bridge or a bridge a metaphor for a brow. Scientific models are a type of extended metaphor. The model is a metaphier for the underlying physical reality:

The terms theory and model, incidentally, are sometimes used interchangeably. But really they should not be. A theory is a relationship of the model to the things the model is supposed to represent… A model is neither true nor false; only the theory of its similarity to what it represents. A theory is thus a metaphor between a model and data. And understanding in science is the feeling of similarity between complicated data and a familiar model.

Metaphoric language is dynamic, and that is central to its role in consciousness. Consciousness expands rather as does the scope of a functional program like Forth, by expanding its vocabulary of metaphors to describe experience. A computer program that can build its own functions could simulate or model the reality of language in being able to evolve if it were subject to some constraint that forced optimization of the functions it used—a Darwinian program. So, the words used for concepts which model the world evolve from previous metaphors. Thus do vocabularies and concepts grow.

Thus, in ancient societies, life was associated with blood but particularly with breath and, and both became metaphors for life, and eventually words signifying something to do with life. Breath was a metaphier for the metaphrand of life and consciousness. The English word “spirit” means “breath” from the Latin word which also gives us “respiration” and “inspiration”. The same metaphor is widespread, notably being found in Hebrew—bearing in mind that the god of the Israelites was originally a storm god—“ruach”, then meaning “breath” and “wind”:

• In Genesis 1:2, the “‘Spirit’ of God moved upon the face of the waters”, is “breath”, and the “breath” of God is wind.
• In the New Testament the Greek equivalent is “pneuma” so all the “pneumas” translated as “spirit” might more simply have been translated “breath”. The word is metaphorical, but it is a metaphor for something imaginary drawn from a perfectly sensible use of a word signifying life originally.
• John 3:5 has “Except a man be born of water and of the ‘Spirit’, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God”. The Greek conjures up images of a baptism of water and wind—two elements of nature that are often described together in the acts of the storm god that Yehouah was originally.

Once a metaphier is established in a particular metaphor, it becomes synonymous with the metaphrand, and its original meaning might disappear. The metaphrand identified through the metaphier can become a metaphier for a new metaphrand. This is the dynamism that is among the movers of language, and certainly allows thought to be built from the simple metaphors of infants into the complex ones of clever adults, or in a parallel way from the simple metaphors of early human beings to those of sophisticated modern ones. We need a new metaphor to explain a concept, a universal, when the old metaphor is too particular—it no longer does the job. Frozen metaphors useless for explaining emerging concepts.

The Mind of Man

The book is in three parts:

• Part 1, The Mind of Man, introduces the psychology behind the hypothesis and the modern understanding of consciousness, then the concept of the bicameral mind, and neurological evidence of it.
• Part 2, The Witness of History, examines archaeological, historical and literary evidence of bicameral mind—particularly The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the Old Testament.
• Part 3, Vestiges off the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World, looks at different modern psychological phenomena like schizophrenia, possession, hypnosis, music, poetry and religion as neurological and social residues of bicamerality of mind.

Jaynes held that the brain was bicameral because it had twin language centers—it has two hemispheres connected such that generally the left hemisphere controls the right half of the body, is concrete, analytical and serial, while the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body, is numinous, intuitive and parallel. So, sight in the left eye is processed by the right hemisphere, and vice versa. Speech is controlled in the left hemisphere, in Wernicke’s Area, but the equivalent place in the right hemisphere is apparently not used for language, though, when Wernicke’s Area is damaged, it can take over and maintain function—speech is possible again. So, both hemispheres can understand language. The left hemisphere can describe in words what is visible in the right visual field, but the right hemisphere cannot say what is in the left visual field. It is mute but it can point. It has visual abilities.

Jaynes thinks this second language center ceased to be used for language because it became specialized to integrate long term information as a store of wisdom, based on experience and tribal culture, to unconsciously interpret novel situations. It was for verbalizing intuition. Intuition is making unconscious decisions based on a complex of—often inadequate—evidence, but once language was being used, intuitive choices could be formulated, albeit unconsciously, in this area.

Jaynes saw the two hemispheres working independently, as if they were different people. In bicameral people, the notionally unused language center of the right hemisphere verbalized intuitive experience, then issued the words to the left hemisphere, sounding in the head as if it were an external voice because the two hemispheres did not communicate internally via the corpus collosum as they now do. The left side seemed to hear the instructions as a voice speaking to it. In fact, the right, intuitive, hemisphere of the brain told the left what to do. It is like the relationship between Freud’s concepts of ego and superego.

It was an hallucination, manifested as an external source of original wisdom, a “language of the gods”. Michael Persinger has shown stimulation of the right temporal lobe causes the sensation of a presence, often taken to be God, and the right hemisphere plays a part in face recognition, assessing a set of features all at once, a degree of multitasking that Jaynes thought was god like. In more practical terms, it is important for a social and cooperating animal living with similar others to be able to separate self from other—the basis of this very view of consciousness itself. More curiously, LSD affects the right hemisphere. People who have had part of their right hemisphere removed do not experience any effects of LSD.

The brain’s division into an obedient left and an authoritarian right hemisphere is Jaynes’ bicameral mind. Jaynes posits that sophisticated early civilizations were built by people directed by such voices. He says the bicameral mind was a form of social control. The breakdown of the bicameral mind was the slow realization that the voice was simply one’s own mind thinking.

Research on brain damage has revealed the possibility of the symptoms of multiple personality, which is possibly akin to what Jaynes is proposing. Studies of Tourette’s syndrome and schizophrenia are also suggestive. Many people, often schizophrenics, hear voices that no one else hears. Sometimes they act on the commands these voices give them without reflexion, but these hallucinations were not experienced as modern subjective consciousness understands hallucination. There was no “I” or subjective consciousness to experience the hallucinations. It is the partial nature of modern illnesses like schizophrenia that make them so disorienting and scary. The victim is partly modern, and so understands self and I, but nevertheless experiences the bicameral hallucinations. Then was pre self—there was no self to feel peculiar or different, or even to relate the experiences to. The right side of the brain was speaking to the left, in any manner of speech ranging from suggestion to order, and the left side, which dominated bodily function, heard, understood and acted.

ANE civilizations before the first millennium BC—those of Eqypt, Crete, Sumeria, Assyria, Old Babylon, Greece and so on, and by inference rather than demonstration, elsewhere in the world, were built by unconscious human beings who thought with a bicameral not a fully conscious mind. In Jaynes’ view, the god hemisphere ordered the construction of the pyramids. Plainly they could not all have spontaneously had the same idea at once, so the idea came to a leader, a pharaoh. The men’s voices must have commanded assent to it. The laborers who built the pyramids were not slaves but peasants paying their dues to their lords, but they would not have felt sorry for themselves, and had no other plans of their own. Jaynes’ theory explains these immense schemes as the god hemispheres of the laborers voicing agreement that the projects were worth it.

It seems incredible, but much lower animals from wasps, bees, termites and ants to gophers and mole rats build remarkable communal structures without anything like the brains even of a bicameral human. So is it so implausible that unconscious people incapable of self reflection could do similar things? We saw that people do a lot of tasks automatically, and spend much of their life conforming with social norms without reflecting on them or their own habits. Even today most people do not change or even question their beliefs, and that suggests a lack of consciousness of what is happening in and around them.

Reflecting on the hypothesis from where we are, however, suggests that the social aspect of it is what was important, not any supposed individual obedience to hallucinated voices. People’s consciousness was much more social and acculturated than it now is.

Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else.

J Jaynes

For countless millennia humans had lived in small groups and thought of themselves, not individually, but in a group. That was why they had no personal consciousness, and why they obeyed external commands. Jaynes suggests hypnosis is a reversion to the primordial consciousness, in which people at the instigation of a commanding voice of an unusual compelling figure will do things their conscious minds would refuse to allow them to do. The only self they knew was a group self. The ancient tribalism of the original hunter gatherers was a personal utopia—few people thought for themselves, or needed to. There were few faces to remember, and the common features of clan members might have been sufficient to identify them. Individuality did not matter.

The hypothesis also explains the rise, development and persistence of religion. Idol worship and religious behavior are a longing for the lost certainty of a world in which decisions were made externally by idols, totems, ancestors and mummified chiefs, and the culture of the tribe meant agreement on what was required.

One who has no god, as he walks along the street, headache envelops him like a garment.

Old proverb, cited by Jaynes

Conscious analysis and personal autonomy are confused or weakened by modern relics of bicamerality—trance states, schizophrenia and hypnosis—but the need of conscious beings to be responsible for their own decisions gives many a headache. Maybe William James was persuasively describing from his own conscious experience how the bicameral thinkers faced reality, albeit without the “analog ‘I’”:

I did “lie down in the stream of life and let it flow over me”. I gave up all fear of any impending disease. I was perfectly willing and obedient. There was no intellectual effort, or train of thought. My dominant idea was: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me even as thou wilt”, and a perfect confidence that all would be well, that all was well. The creative life was flowing into me every instant, and I felt myself allied with the Infinite, in harmony, and full of the peace that passeth understanding. There was no place in my mind for a jarring body. I had no consciousness of time or space or persons, but only of love and happiness and faith.

W James, Varieties of Religious Experience

Jaynes shows convincingly what life under these circumstances was like and how, over many millennia, as speech became more complex, groups larger than the dozen or so of the roving bands which existed before the development of speech could form, settle, and eventually create cities, and indeed empires entirely guided by voices heard in their right hemispheres. Edifices erected in the center of the community were commonly used to localize the origin of the voices, but often each household had its own object. The objects located in the central edifice as well as the home were deified because of their importance, but the deity was much like another human being, though wise, gifted, and reliable.

It suggests the alternative explanation to bicamerality that these gods were other human beings, the equivalent of shamans, the prophets and oracles who were revered as the voice of God. What we now call prophets and oracles, once were considered “gods” themselves. God is from the IndoEuropean root, ghut, pertaining to calling, prophet is from the IndoEuropean root, bha (cf Persian, bhag, god) pertaining to speak, and oracle is from Latin orare meaning “speak”. Maybe, people were never really bicameral, but truly believed these prophets spoke for god or even were gods, and their word was utterly accepted, thus saving ordinary folk from having to think and worry. The gods or prophets were the clever, the conscious ones, who could reason and respond to requests, but many ordinary people could not, not because they lacked consciousness, but because, through lack of practice and education, it was too hard for them. The extension of writing from official transactions allowed these previously taboo subjects to be recorded, and suddenly we read the kings did not know what to do and were consulting oracles, diviners and astrologers who tell them what the gods wanted:

You cannot move out of your house for five days.

You must not eat this.

You should not wear clothes today.

All of these are given by Jaynes as examples of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, but perhaps what had been going on all along, and simply not recorded according to earlier scribal practices. He accepts, in what he calls the weak version of his hypothesis, that consciousness and bicamerality might have existed in parallel for long, but with bicamerality dominating.

The remarkable thing about the Jaynes hypothesis is that the evidence he adduces for it is from the middle of the first millennium BC, when Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey, and when the Old Testament was composed. In this quite narrow period of time Jaynes thinks humanity changed from being essentially unconscious to being conscious of the “analog ‘I’”, meaning awareness of person and self, and so personal will, self responsibility, morality, and thus of consciousness itself.

Does Jaynes say ancient people were not conscious? Or is he saying that bicamerality is a primitive consciousness, but not the one we have today? We must assume the latter. In the early stages, humans had a limited vocabulary. They gabbed as a form of social bonding, but imperatives meant quick responses. Warnings were shouted, and responded to immediately, especially when uttered by dominant animals. But, in small groups foraging or scavenging widely, all animals had to be able to make decisions. Perhaps an unusual root was found. The animal had to decide, but was relatively unconscious and unreflective. Even so, experience was at work, assessing the situation unconsciously in the right brain. The decision came as if a dominant animal had given an instruction. The primordial human heard a warning or guiding voice. When anyone hears voices, they tend to be imperative. The obligation to obey them is compelling so that the exertion of will is impossible. Jaynes supposes this mechanism, this pseudo consciousness operated from humans crossing the boundary from apes, through the hunter gatherer phase to the emergence of the first empires. In fact, the first empires were already heralding its immediate rejection as too primitive for such complex societies.

The Witness of History

The second book shows the breakdown of the bicameral mind. As civilizations became more complex and natural disasters rocked the ancient Mediterranean world, Jaynes believes the bicameral mind broke down. From the examples of the Inca and Mesopotamian empires, Jaynes shows that confusion arose, sparking a religious quest to regain the lost voice of authority. The adaptation that led to the bicameral mind, language, was what began to weaken it. Perhaps, as Jaynes noted, the invention of writing, the enabling of permanent records, eventually made the illusion of the voices of the gods redundant. The permanent record of wisdom meant it did not have to be repeated. People could wonder about what was being said, and whether it was different from what was recorded, or worth recording. The word of God could be assessed and discarded, if necessary!

Humanity was using its own consciousness, its critical faculties and its own judgement to decide. Conscious assessment became respectable as an effective way to cope with daily problems. After millennia of bicameral living, people had gradually realized the voice of their gods was inside their heads, the voice of the person themselves. The recognition of “self” had eroded bicamerality, and all that preserved it was a deeply conservative tradition, until a time came when society openly accepted it, and behaviour and the written word openly changed. In the ANE, Jaynes thinks it happened sometime after 1000 BC, yet there are people alive today who still resist it.

Subjective consciousness did not simply appear as a full blown mind state, but gradually emerged as human beings began to construct metaphorical understandings of the differences between others. Intelligent people today are fond of being conscious. It is what makes us human. And this fondness for consciousness and free will cannot have developed quickly. Humanity was fond of it a long time ago, to judge from recorded history and myth, and still gives conscious personalities to everything from toys to ships and whole countries. The understanding developed that if others were different from each another, held different beliefs and opinions, then maybe there was something inside them that made them different, and weren’t we ourselves just the same! As Jaynes says:

The tradition in philosophy that phrases the problem as the logic of inferring other minds from one’s own has it the wrong way around. We may first unconsciously suppose other consciousnesses, and then infer our own by generalization.

Jaynes demonstrates the emergence of consciousness from the bicameral way of thinking. What shows up in the written record is the revolution in writing which allowed the conscious mind, the self, to be expressed. But interpreting ancient texts is fraught. Old languages and literature are constantly reinterpreted.

Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the busy give and take of talk have worn away with use.

J Jaynes

Decoding the vocabulary and grammar of dead languages, especially ones with different alphabets and glyphs, is hard. How much harder it is to understand the nuances of the authors. The fashion for postmodern deconstruction of texts highlights that modern writing can be ambiguous, let alone ancient writing in unknown languages.

Before the colour “orange” was described as the colour of the citrus fruit, the orange, authors had to record the colour as “tan”! One might deduce from this that the authors commonly using the word “tan” when we might expect “orange” had no knowledge of oranges. On the other hand, there can be no certainty about it, because orange might just never have become popular as a substitute for the simple word “tan”. Similarly, authors who describe a king as having a good heart will today be considered to be saying he was brave, but in a time when the heart was considered the seat of learning, he was really saying he was a wise king. How much more difficult is must be interpreting texts in an early period of the art of writing, when it was highly specialized and conventional.

Though the change from bicameral to conscious thinking took a long time, it became socially acceptable in essentially conservative societies quite suddenly, perhaps triggered by the sudden expansion of the Persian empire. Thus Jaynes suggests that the birth of Judaism marked the arrival of consciousness in the ANE, and Judaism was founded by the Persian shah, Darius II in 417 BC. Besides that, previous humans, whether in a bicameral or a conscious state, were caught in nature’s cycles, particularly those of the sun and the moon that conditioned migratory and agricultural changes, and menstruation. The acceptability of recording a narrative of human inner experience seemed to be associated with the adoption of the concept of linear time in preference to cyclical time, and the Persians, though not responsible for it, by creating a universal empire, gave it the impetus for universal adoption. Modern history began at just this time with Herodotus.

Using the extant writings from this period, Jaynes shows how the older writings, like those by Hammurabi, are mere instructions, accounting devices, and without any references to emotions or even explanations to facilitate understanding. It is doubtless much more to do with the purpose of writing at the time than the consciousness of the author. Jaynes then finds evidence of a written revolution in the change of usage of words in Greek epics, with motivation changing from decisions and commands made by gods to reflective and emotive thinking. Again, the purpose of the writing changed from entirely official records or litanies to stories meant to entertain kings and courtiers. And later literature like the bible, shows signs of consciousness, with complaints that the God has departed, because they no longer heard the divine voice:

Why art thou silent, Lord? Lord, where art thou? Why hast thou deserted thy people?

My god has forsaken me and disappeared, My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance, The good angel who walked beside me has departed.

Old prayer, cited by Jaynes

Jews called for God to “rend the heavens and come down”, and to “not forsake us”, and scapegoats for the divine neglect were sought—sinners! But the personal voice is present in the bible, albeit often stiff and stilted. In the last millennium BC, some prophets still heard voices, but it was unusual, and regarded with awe because most people did not hear them. Bicameral and reflective writing are both contained in the Bible as in Amos and Ecclesiastes. Reading these books according to Jaynes demonstrates the difference between bicameral and modern man.

In Amos there are no words for mind or think or feel or understand or anything similar whatever; Amos never ponders anything in his heart; he can’t; he would not know what it meant… he does not consciously think before he speaks; in fact, he does not think as we do at all: his thought is done for him. He feels his bicameral voice about to speak and shushes those around him with a ’Thus spake the Lord!’ and follows with an angry forceful speech which he probably does not understand himself.

Ecclesiastes is the opposite on all these points… he thinks, considers, is constantly comparing one thing to another, and making brilliant metaphors as he does so… [he] would be an excellent fireside friend, mellow, kindly, concerned, hesitant, surveying all of life in a way that would have been impossible for Amos.

According to Jaynes, The Iliad and The Odyssey are qualitatively distinct, The Iliad being the voice of the gods—“there is no general consciousness in the Iliad”—and The Odyssey the voice of conscious men. These heroes of The Iliad all were bicameral. Their brains created and imparted messages read as divine, so they did what Athene or Apollo told them, often stupid and contradictory things. Free will was absent, and so too was evidence of an internal reality, an “analog ‘I’”. In The Odyssey, subjective experience appears, humans express their own destinies, pointing the way of conscious reportage, literature and poetry in the rest of history. Common to writing from The Odyssey on is a yearning for lost certainty, which gave rise to the great religions. By the time of Solon and Sappho, the “self” is always present.

According to this hypothesis, ancient achievements like the complex irrigation systems of Mesopotamia, the sphinx, and the pyramids, were done by human being who were not conscious in the sense that we are today. Jaynes says even poetry and song were hallucinations of the bicameral mind. If it is to be literally true, the emergence of self was amazingly quick, but Jaynes is unable to provide the mechanism of the transition. But there is no need to think self emerged that quickly. While self had emerged slowly several thousands of years previously, what emerged quickly was the recording of self in writing.

Bicameral Mind in the Modern World

The third book explores the lasting impressions the bicameral mind left on the modern world. Jaynes shakes the assumption that consciousness is unchanging over time and cultures—subjective consciousness is still developing—but doing things unconsciously remains valuable to us. To perform actions unconsciously, we need to gain experience at it, often consciously in practice—deliberate training.

People have not yet adapted to the conscious way of thinking. A child's imaginary playmate is a relic of our bicameral heritage. It occurs in over a third of children between the ages of 2 and 5 years, and involves verbal hallucinations. Rarely, the imaginary playmate lasts into adulthood and begins telling the person what to do in times of stress. In bicameral times, the imaginary playmate grew up with the person in a society which was not skeptical of the experience, but rather encouraged it as normal.

“Decisions! decisions!” Today, many feel it a strain constantly having to decide, to sort out problems, and wish things were easier. They are wishing for the lost bicameral system of thinking, Jaynes tells us. Mother Teresa is an example both of the adapting mind and the sense of loss it imparts. She reports that once she had a distinct calling, as if from God—she believed it was from God—then utterly lost it and lived most of her life feeling God’s absence or neglect of her. She began by accepting the urging of an inner voice, but the consequence was that she had to think consciously about the real problems her calling placed before her, and the remnants of bicameralism disappeared and the inner voice with it.

The loss of it is something many professed believers will not accept out of their “loyalty” to God, or the fear that they will lose their reservation in heaven. Jaynes explains why gods once seemed closer to us than they now are. But what Jaynes described as a breakdown of the bicameral mind was the slow melding together of the two distinct regions concerned with different aspects of language and learning in the brain to give us the beginnings of fully conscious thought.

Divination, oracles, omens, and prophets, are symptoms of the unease, the sense of loss, as the change happened. Loss of bicameralism created new jobs for those who still heard, or claimed to hear, the voice of God. The ubiquitous need for religion is a relic of the ancient mode of thought. Our search for absolutes—whether truth, justice, or God—is a hopeless yearning for the lost paradise when nothing troubled us. Then the gods spoke to us constantly, but suddenly, in literature, at any rate, stopped. The Yehouah with the thunderous voice suddenly became a still small voice, then began to speak only to madmen.

Schizophrenia is a throwback to the bicameral mind, misunderstood in our modern culture to be an aberration rather than an alternative organization of the human mind. Bicameralism—hearing voices—when it appears today is a debilitating mental illness, not an alternative way of thinking, because we know the alternative—today’s norm. Akin to the same thesis is that possession, religious, demonic and spirit, is the domination of the right hemisphere over the left so that the personality and even bodily responses change completely. Now it is madness, then it revealed important truths. Hypnosis, as a state of extreme suggestibility like that of the left side of the brain in relation to the right side may also be a evidence of the ancient bicameral mind.

Political and Social Implications

Jaynes has implications for modern political and sociological theory and practice, for his interpretation shows why so many people are easily led by madmen and opportunists. Authoritarian structures in the world today are perhaps reversions to the preconscious bicameral mind. We are not yet fully out of the bicameral phase, and still yearn for the authoritative voice. Personal consciousness is the source of much of the sense of alienation. Demagogues use the desire for certainty and authority, especially when times are hard, and decisions difficult, to dominate the gullible through trickery. The trick they use is to have the confidence and the certainty that people want in a god—what they need to relieve them of the trouble of thinking for themselves. The populace are easily led, and clever leaders and media barons realize it, and the reason people are easily led is that they have still not lost the inclination to follow the authoritative voice. Obedience makes life easier!

He explains why we seek heaven. Religion is a side effect of the brain’s evolution:

Religion is the nostalgic anguish for the lost bicamerality that the new subjective consciousness had to deal with.

J Jaynes

Many of us preferred the earlier stage when we were not consciously faced with problems. Answers came to us apparently from outside, so we were not troubled by them. Quite possibly famous historical people like the prophet Mohammad, Joseph Smith, and various cult leaders who claimed to be prophets, if they were sincere, were lapsing into bicamerality, or otherwise were using the popular yearning for bicameral certainty as opportunists.

God possessed men speak much truth but know nothing of what they say.

Plato

The purpose of modern cults seems to be to induce the bicameral state in their followers. It requires:

• a belief system that closely restricts everyone’s social roles
• ritual, trance, suggestion, prayer, hysteria or meditation to narrow consciousness
• obedience to an absolute authority, a person but usually acting in the place of or on behalf of a god or spirit.

Jaynes writes:

Those who through what theologians call the “gift of faith” can center and surround their lives in religious belief do indeed have different collective cognitive imperatives. They can indeed change themselves through prayer and its expectancies much as in post hypnotic suggestion. It is a fact that belief, political or religious, or simply belief in oneself through some earlier cognitive imperative, works in wondrous ways. Anyone who has experienced the sufferings of prisons or detention camps knows that both mental and physical survival is often held carefully in such untouchable hands.

But for the rest of us, who must scuttle along on conscious models and skeptical ethics, we have to accept our lessened control. We are learned in self doubt, scholars of our very failures, geniuses at excuse and tomorrowing our resolves. And so we become practiced in powerless resolution until hope gets undone and dies in the unattempted. At least that happens to some of us. And then to rise above this noise of knowings and really change ourselves, we need an authorization that ’we’ do not have.

We search for automatic systems that “save” us from having to think for ourselves—gods, religions, demagogues, political ideologies, divination, astrology, computer programs—and the need to believe in a Golden Age, when everything was easier.

Once conscious, we have to think for ourselves. We have will, we decide. Before we had to decide nothing consciously. We made our decisions all right, but unconsciously, and they came to us by revelation. If we want free will, then we have to accept that we decide, not any apparently external god, which is really our unconscious making decisions for us without the attendant worry. Demagogues have been using this yearning against us for a long time, manipulating religion and ideologies to use people. It is time we grew out of it. Unless we do, we shall be doomed to relive our unconscious dominated past.

Analysis and Criticism

Scientists are skeptical about what Jaynes says, some dismissing him as a crank, and indeed his use of supporting evidence is often subjective and dubious. Yet many influential and still highly regarded figures were actually wrong. They are highly regarded because they pointed the way, even though ultimately they were wrong. Freud is considered a pseudo scientist nowadays, but his influence on the rise of psychiatry was immense. Many of the Victorian sociologists and anthropologists like Frazer and Tylor are still respected and cited but used dubious evidence to come to dubious conclusions. Even Darwin and Copernicus were not completely right, and who can seriously expect any revolutionary hypothesis to be absolutely perfect. Science does not work like that. It refines and moulds until the bests hypothesis is found and perfected. We cannot see how the elephant got its trunk in real life, so evolution is tested indirectly. We shall have to test Jaynes’ ideas in the same way, looking for improvements when the evidence does not fit the theory.

Marcel Kuijsten notes that Jaynes’s theory is in four parts, all of which are under investigation to varying degrees, but none of which have been refuted:

1. consciousness is based on language
2. when modern consciousness appeared
3. earlier men did not reason but found answers to their problems intuitively by hearing voices
4. a neurological model that the mind of these people was bicameral.

Jaynes fails to convince us that human consciousness evolved recently from the unconscious or barely conscious stage of the bicameral mind, though he tries bravely to offer literary, medical, scientific and historical evidence for it. Consciousness certainly evolved, and there must be evidence of it, but culture is often an important unknown in the evidence.

Consider the references to Freudian terms like subconscious desire and so on, in twentieth century literature. One might easily think it was a reflexion of Freud’s work published around the turn of the century. But A S Gordon and Anish Nair have shown the tendency began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Freud was himself simply reflecting a cultural fashion, and used his authority to make the change respectable. Humans can adopt or reject adaptive solutions for cultural reasons, perhaps preferring to starve than eat pigs, say.

Before about 50,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals were using essentially the same tools, yet modern humans had been around, with their supposed superior brains, for 50,000 years or so before that. Either the early modern humans were not necessarily modern in their heads or advanced thinking is not necessarily reflected in behaviour. On the other hand, modern humans seem no different mentally from the ancient Greeks, yet a future archaeologist might conclude from the rubbish of our civilizations that we were vastly different. A change in the record cannot be assumed to signify some biological or neurological adaptation. Certainly we can hypothesize that it is so, but will have to find compelling evidence that it is so that is not more easily explained.

Marcel Kuijsten says none of it is a problem because Jaynes was not saying the shift from bicamerality to consciousness was a neurophysiological one. The changes were indeed cultural:

A child today raised in a bicameral society would be bicameral and a child from an ancient bicameral civilization raised in modern culture would be conscious. Consciousness in the Jaynesian sense is a learned process based on language.

Marcel Kuijsten

That some apes seem self aware in recognizing themselves in a mirror, and modern stone age tribes undoubtedly are, are clearer arguments against Jaynes’ ideas. Preliterate hunting and gathering tribal peoples seem not to have been bicameral. Accounts of native Americans before they were effectively wiped out, and studies of the !Kung of South Africa and other modern stone age people do not reveal bicamerality. All present humans are conscious, even ones who only met Europeans in the last few centuries and are still in the stone age technologically. They are not in a bicameral stage of consciousness, but are as conscious as we are, even if it is not very. Australian aborigines whose grandparents were hunter gatherers are conscious.

So Jaynes’ arguments are sometimes inconsistent, as in his claim that hypnosis is pretense and peer pressure in one place but elsewhere claiming it is a real example of conforming to an authority figure because sometimes they resist! Split brain research and localization of neural functions remain poorly understood to support Jaynes. In the first part of the book, he argues that people were not conscious, but when he looks at the ancient evidence from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece, the argument is undercut by a failure to understand the sources and ancient societies. Is it possible to believe that ancient people before the first millennium BC were not conscious? If great civilizations were built unconsciously, then how can say be sure we are conscious now? And could they have suddenly become conscious in only a few centuries?

Whatever Jaynes thought himself, the few centuries in question, in the first millennium BC, could have been the period when consciousness became respectable, not when it happened. Consciousness did not break out, but, as in any revolution, parameters that were no longer suitable were being maintained by deeply conservative societies, until a sudden turmoil allowed them to be changed as irrelevant to a new situation.

Jaynes cites the absence of certain types of written language from ancient texts, but writing was only in its infancy, and writing conventions might have inhibited the use of some written forms. Few people could write, writing was a profession requiring a lot of training, and in conservative societies, scribes stuck to conventions that they were taught, possibly the product of the bicameral period. A list of sheep and goats is not likely to be the place where one will find a declaration of love. An official scribe is not going to write down his innermost feelings in an official report. Bicameralism might have been a cultural convention of long standing rather than a biological one, or one with a slight biological basis that became a cultural convention. What Jaynes saw was not the breakdown of bicameralism but the breakdown of a scribal convention based on a disappearing way of thinking. The fact that all of the texts he cites contain parts that speak of gods and voices and others that show plain modern consciousness confirm other signs of multiple editing weakens his contentions, and seem better explained by writing and probably social conventions than different wasys of thinking.

Jaynes speculates about the easy collapse of the Inca civilizations to the Spaniards, but says nothing definitive as he does in the ANE. Nor does he have much to say about far eastern evidence. He briefly alludes to Japan, to Confucius as the signal of consciousness in China, and the Indian Vedas, considered to have been brought by the IndoEuropean invaders, as bicameral, then the Upanishads as conscious, but presents no extended evidence of the bicameral mind in India or China. Indeed, to judge by The Upanishads, the early civilizations of India seemed to understand human consciousness 3,000 year ago. He does not address the criticism that intuition was depicted with the metaphor of the voice of a god. Ancient far eastern literature treats as metaphorical the voice of law and the skills of civilization once heard by all. The myths and references to gods in ancient works were metaphors to explain something not easily explained by language.

The thesis suggests that the loss of the voices with the loss of bicameral thinking impelled kings and priests to make laws and written codes. If there is any truth in the bicameral idea, it is that the inventions and refinement of writing rendered the voices redundant. Once Moses had brought the tablets of stone down the mountain, God had no need to keep talking! No oracles, priests or prophets needed to keep hearing the voices of gods and repeating the same messages because they had been recorded in writing. Nor does Jaynes explain why the right brain once dominated, nor what the original function of the empty equivalent of Wernicke’s area in the right hemisphere once was or did. Jaynes just asks “what if the ancients’ stories of gods were their actual experience?”.

Science says nobody can prove him right, but equally he cannot be proven wrong. He is obviously right in thinking human consciousness evolved, but obvious faults are the selected historical evidence, the faulty time frame, the narrow Greek and biblical view. Even so, his theory is not necessarily wrong. The complaint that it is unfalsifiable, and therefore unscientific, ought to be a call for refining it into a better theory that is scientific. His timescale, in any case seems wrong, but the proposition that consciousness developed by stages rather than simply as a smooth gradation, might well be right. The point might be that the stages have not yet been completed, that some people are less conscious than others, even in faculties we normally consider as fully conscious. Wrong theories offer stepping stones to correct ones, so it would be bigotry to dismiss everything in Jaynes’ work because some of it seems fantastic. Other parts offer succinct explanations of what seemed intractable. What is true needs teasing out from what is false, what is useful from what is useless.

The idea could be relevant to psychology, history, philosophy and even theology—what Jaynes has to say about the bible—that humans found gods in their heads, and so faith is a primitive desire to lapse back into the world of bicamerality that preceded free will. The old bicamerality was fading away, but some still heard their unconscious conclusions as voices. Already, it was insane, but the stories of the voices from the past gave them an aura of divinity, that those yearning for the old certainties valued. So, the Old Testament was written by people who had lapsed into bicamerality in an age when most people had developed conscious ways of thinking. They might effectively have been schizophrenics and today would have been sectioned. Then they were considered prophets receiving God’s word directly, something which always sounded insane to a rational mind.

In Jaynes’ scheme, the bicameral mind began to change into modern consciousness in the second millennium BC. In the first millennium BC, those who still heard the voices were considered with awe as oracles and prophets, but they too were dying out. Texts replaced the voices in authority, and the great religions of the book arose. Now the book religions are losing their authority, but many people still seek the old certainties, and the world is ripe for plunder by unscrupulous politicians and demagogues.

Whatever Jaynes had wrong, his insights are valuable. We delight in our own hubris, but are mere tyros in using the analytical rational power of consciousness to understand ourselves and our environment. We are in a stage of consciousness equivalent to saying “ga ga” in speech, or spitting pigment over an outstretched hand against a wall in making records. We need more humility, and less pride. Pride will lead to a sudden fall, but humility might make us divine. Only the latter leaves us with any hope. Humanity has always flattered itself, especially under the influence of gods, but we are not as rational as we think. Historically, we must have been less so, and Jaynes points it out.

Annex—Speech Acquisition

Is language biologically determined? Criteria of biologically determined behavior in relation to language are:

1. The behavior appears before it is needed. Infants begin to acquire language when they are extremely dependent and have no immediate use for it.
2. It is not done consciously. Children begin it when they have still a long way to go to be conscious of what they are doing.
3. It appears spontaneously in a rich enough environment. Children need to hear others using language to begin attempting it, but otherwise need no prompting.
4. The process of language acquisition can be hurried along only marginally. Intensive coaching helps only in conventional areas of language acquisition, not in the process itself.
5. Progress is corerelated with age, different stages being reached at roughly similar ages irrespective of the conventions of the surroundings, such as the actual language being learnt.
6. If the environment is not rich enough for language acquisition to begin then after a certain age it will be permanently impaired. It is like the infant who is introduced to water swimming naturally, but losing the skill after a certain, young age, and having then to be taught it. Then, in language acquisition, it becomesd at best like an adult learning a second language, and in the worst cases language usage is severely impaired. It might even be essential that children should hear speech from birth, simply hearing it permanently affecting brain connexions.

The process is not derivative, or not entirely so. The child must develop a phonological grammar from the data that it is exposed to. So, hearing speech is essential to its acquisition, but the process is more than simple imitation. Children make errors which require them to be building words according to a perception of the grammar they are hearing, rather than simply imitating. They construct irregular verbs as if they were regular—“swimmed” instead of “swam” and “goed” instead of “went”. They are spontaneously applying a rule. They similarly make up their own sentences, putting words together in novel ways, something that is obviously more than imitation.

For similar reasons the acquisition is not being taught, even informally, because parents rarely know enough of their own formal grammar anyway and seem reluctant to interfere with the spontaneity of their children's linguistic attempts. In any case, children do not seem to be overly affected by the formal teaching, if it does occur. It is as if they have to realize for themselves that the word or syntax is not right. It is like the child trying to build a house of cards. The kind uncle does it for them, simply frustrating them, for it is not the house of cards they want, it is to build the house of cards! So what children are doing is building a language of their own from the elements their adults are using, that, like the house of cards, stands on its own, ie, serves its pupose—people can understand it.

It looks as if language is biologically determined, from these features of it, and, if ontogeny reflects phylogeny and language is biologically determined then humanity went through a similar sequence of acquiring language as children do as they grow up. We see human language acquisition being rerun in children—not absolutely, because the process in children is much speeded up, but the simile is “reflects”. It does not duplicate.

Did Human Speech Evolve Like This?

Babies make noises from the moment of birth, yelling, perhaps getting a slap from the midwife to make them do it! Then they take to burbling and cooing, making predominantly vowel sounds. At about six months of age, it becomes babble, making abstract strings of repeated syllables, consonant vowel pairs, while mother echoes them back to the child with full facial contact in a smiling sing song way called baby talk. The infant is practising skills requiring co-ordination of tongue, mouth and larynx. The infant seems not to be trying to give meaning. It corresponds to a prelinguistic stage of ape development, when the proto humans simply babbled to each other as social cement.

Bilabial sounds like “m”, “p” and “b” are early sounds made. The first words of a child are familiar things in their world, often “mama”, “papa” and “baba”! Here is the equivalent of an early stage when humans began to associate oddments of their babble with people or things. At a year old, most kids can make a few words and understand about 40. They are making words, or what parents think are words and are pleased anyway. By about 18 months, the infant realizes that the adults around seem pleased by it. Most can make about 40.

The actual meaning of adult words is acquired by trial and error. The child hears a word in a context, and guesses the meaning, perhaps using the word soon after and being praised if correct, or corrected if wrong. The commonest fault is to overgeneralize by attributing a word to more things than it really applies to, as in calling all men daddy, or all insects spiders.

Our long words seem too difficult. Children seem to hear more clearly the stressed syllables rather than the unstressed ones, so they ignore any unstressed syllable preceding a stressed one, rendering our words as shorter ones—“banana” is “nana”, and “potato”, “tato”. Many languages, especially older ones or ones from stone age tribes are syllabic, and early alphabets were syllabic too. Maybe the earliest vocabularies consisted of pairs of syllables, both stressed equally.

Children try to get meaning out of single words. They try to give the sense of a whole sentence in a word, like “mine”! Then they make two word sentences, linking single words into a semantic relationship like “teddy sleep”, “ball red”, “daddy chair”, “cookie mine”. Plainly it is not imitation. The children are making up their own valid grammar. By now they are about two years old.

Beyond this, the children discover the present continuous—mommy going shop. Questions begin with intonation, “mommy going shop?” Prepositions and plurals too, then, at about three years old, they start to use auxiliary verbs and constructs including negatives. Human language acquisition in history must have followed the same sort of stages as these.

Further Reading

• Marvin Minsky, Society of Mind
• Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief
• julianjaynes.org

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