Archive for the ‘Consciousness’ Category
Entry 1689 — Musings on Thought
Sunday, January 11th, 2015
I’ve been . . . discussing philosophy, you might say, with Karl Kempton the past day or two. He and I have been at it about his brand of Eastern spiritualism versus my brand of Western materialism for twenty or more years. Needless to say, neither of us has budged from his position. Right now we are at it about what the swami below said.
Entry 498 — Jaynes’s Theory of Consciousness
Saturday, September 10th, 2011
The other day I began reading one of the many books I have lying around the house which I haven’t read. This one is a history of psychology. It seems readable, but the author believes in Julian Jaynes’s theory that human beings did not have consciousnesses until some 2500 years or so ago. Jaynes was led to it by his finding that the characters of Homer and other authors back then seemed never to use “I,” instead claiming their ideas and commands were those of gods. Ditto, in fact, all their thoughts! I can’t say that I’m an expert on Jaynes. I tried to read his book on his theory long ago but tired quickly of it. I probably don’t have a great grasp of his theory, but I’m close enough to an accurate gist of it to know it’s hooey.
As far as I’m concerned, Homer and other early poets gave Big Ideas and Big Commandments to the gods because of their importance. Also because of the way sudden shimmering impulses (like an idea for a poem, or painting, or song) seem to come from nowhere–hence, from a muse. Also because leaders of the time, who were often priests, found it easier to get people to obey them (and reward them) if they said they were assistants to some extremely powerful god–as they may well have believed they were. In some cases, the great men of the time were psychotic, and truly heard vlices inside them that must have been goods since they knew that they were not themselves.
I can’t read Homer or anyone else not English-speaking in the language of their poems, and haven’t read too many works of the ancients that attempted extreme accuracy–or didn’t, for that matter. But I suspect that the ancients probably rarely quoted their characters making ordinary remarks, and maybe never quoted them saying something like, “I prefer roast lamb to roast pig.” I can’t believe they ever had a character say that the god of his belly preferred one to the other. I think they, like us, took it for granted that their ordinary words came from their ordinary selves. They may have called the source of their thoughts “nous,” of the like, but that was just another word for “soul,” or “something that allows us to be aware of existence and is not ordinary matter, but is us.” The me within.
A complicating factor would have been dreams. Where do they come from? But I think they thought dreams were simply an entrance into some land elsewhere than here. That goods lived there, gods sometimes no doubt appearing in the dreams. would have made sense to them. So gods could very well have communicated with them. Still, they would have had, it seems to me, have felt themselves as that with which the gods communicated.
There’s also the sense at times that an arm, say, is an arm, at other times, “me.” “My arm it the table” versus “I hurt myself.”
I know I’m fumbly here. Not saying much, and not being too coherent. But I’m trying to be daily with my blogs for a while. So I won’t delete what I’ve said, nor stop.
The main thing I want to say is that Jaynes could not have been right if he thought (as I think he did) that human beings evolved a few thousand years ago from beings with no sense of self (or “consciousness”) to self-conscious. Basically it just strikes me as ridiculous. Above the assertional level, I find it much more plausible to believe it took our early users of the written language to write about subtleties of psychology like self-consciousness a while than to believe in a sudden biological jump into what I would claim is an urceptual Self from–what?
Well, for one thing, an innate grammar without a first person singular or plural. If without any innate grammar, then a grammar painfully developed without and “I/we.” Plus, I just can’t conceive of any kind of awareness, and I think every living thing must have an awareness, that doesn’t identify itself with . . . well, itself.
This has been one of my goofier entries. I’m glad to be on record about Jaynes, though. Maybe someday my thoughts about his theory will come together better for me.
why read beyond stupid statement consciousness began 2500 years ago!? maybe he thinks the world is only 6000 years old.