MY
EVOLVING PLAUSIBILITY ATTITUDES TOWARDS
JAYNES’ THEORY ON THE ORIGINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
F Richard Singer III edition date 11/07/07
website: www.conceptualstudy.org
email: richardsinger3@sbcglobal.net
Introduction: I am a
Altho I could conceptualize plausibility as an attribute of a claim, as somehow related to the extent to which it is reasonable to believe that it is true, this would not serve the purposes I have in mind for this paper. I need a concept that relates to how a personal reaction to a proposition is relevant. The concept that I am using is that of a plausibility attitude. This concept is developed in my paper Plausibility Concepts. For the purpose of this present paper, just think of a plausibility attitude as a relation between a person and a claim at a particular time. I am using the Descriptive Psychology concept of an attitude. An attitude IS a type of behavior that relates to some focus of attention. Different plausibility attitudes towards some claim indicate differences in the types of action that might be taken. For example, before my plausibility attitude towards Jaynes’ claim about the origins of consciousness evolved I did not join the Julian Jaynes Society.
A major barrier to a serious consideration of Jaynes’ work is the difficulty in imagining how people in ancient civilizations could act without being conscious. However, after extended daily contact with a close friend to suffering from hallucinations, I begin to partially realize how this is possible. This encouraged me to read OCBM again, and what emerged has been a growing sense about the plausibility of the bicameral mind thesis and a renewed interest in the emergence of consciousness. This has been reinforced by reflections on my own states of consciousness.
Altho fascinated by the bicameral mind thesis, the main contribution I received from Jaynes has been conceptual. He helped me focus on a feature of human experience so ubiquitous that I did not realize that I had never adequately conceptualized it. In spite of using the person concept and the concept of deliberate action formulated by Peter Ossorio, I had never focused on a person’s ability to utilize an internal mind-space occupied by an analog-I. My paper Jaynes & Comprehensive Paradigm Shifts uses his consciousness concept and his theory about its origins.
Before I realized the utility of his consciousness concept I thought of OCBM as very interesting, but I had a widely open plausibility attitude towards his theory about the origins of consciousness. It was this realization that that OCBM had formulated a concept that was both clear and significant that first altered this attitude. Others used the word consciousness in a way that seemed vague to me, and it was this vague usage that prevented me from focusing on what might have been involved in the origins of consciousness. Before turning to my evolving plausibility attitudes toward his theory. I will give the summary of this concept.
Subjective Consciousness: The difficulty in imagining how people could act without being conscious is complicated by the fact that what Jaynes means by consciousness may not be what the word means to the reader. In fact, this word has been used for concepts that Jaynes takes great pains to show are not necessary aspects of consciousness. Jaynes does an excellent job of laying the conceptual groundwork with his discussion on the nature of consciousness. However much of his discussion focuses first on what is wrong with prior accounts of consciousness, and he refers to his work as a theory of consciousness. Furthermore, in his criticism of previous views, Jaynes is implicitly using a concept that he has not yet presented. Thus I initially missed the purely conceptual aspect of OCBM, and so I want to stress that this part of his work is entirely independent of any theory about how the human mind works or the origins of consciousness. Altho I prefer using the word ‘consciousness’ for his concept, to avoid any possible semantic confusion, I will use the phrase ‘subjective consciousness’ for the concept of consciousness used by Jaynes.
I do not know how to stress strongly enough that the first two chapters of OCBM present a concept rather than a theory. I wish Jaynes would have focused on this distinction, but since this distinction is often ignored, perhaps he had not thought about it. The essence of this distinction is that theories make claims but concepts do not. Concept may be criticizes in relation to clarity or utility. This is what I would say Jaynes is doing in Chapter 1. He is showing how concepts associated with the word ‘consciousness’ are either vague or are unsuitable for thinking about a significant features of our experience. Of course claims using concepts may be criticized as correct or incorrect. For this to make much sense the concepts used must be clear enough for the purposes at hand. Jaynes says that consciousness is not necessary for reasoning. Using the concept of subjective consciousness and a fairly standard concept of reasoning, I find this claim clear and highly plausible. If this claim were wrong, this would cast doubt on his theory about the origins of subjective consciousness, but it would not indicate that the concept of subjective consciousness was unclear.
Subjective consciousness is a concept and is thus neither true nor false. Instead, it is more or less useful for some purposes, and for me it has great personal utility. Jaynes gives six features for the concept of subjective consciousness: {spatialization, excerption, an analog-I, metaphor-me, narratization, conciliation}. I will only briefly sketch them. For more detail, see OCBM pages 59-65.
Spatialization refers to our assumption of a metaphorical mind-space in which we separate the things we consider as if they were individual objects. Spatialization applies not only to things that have spatial qualities in the physical world. It applies to whatever we think about. We use the metaphor of seeing for abstract entities, which we separate so that we can see how they are related. We spatialize time, viewing years as laid out in succession, usually from left to right.
Since we can only pay attention to part of a thing at any one moment, we never see anything in its entirety. Excerption involves thinking of an object or event or state of affairs in terms of some of its very limited aspects. Just now thinking of my garden, I see leaves covering part of it, weeds among the onions and garlic, some pepper plants. At another time, I might see other features. Of course, this seeing is in my mind-space, for I am not currently looking at my garden.
The central feature of subjective consciousness is the analog-I, which is the metaphor we have of ourselves. The analog-I moves about in our imagination doing things we are not actually doing. It also forms excerptions of things we have done. Without this analog-I, we might have live options, but we could not select among them on the basis of what we might imagine as alternative outcomes. Deliberating about what to do in terms of future consequences would not be possible. Shall I weed the garlic early this afternoon? It will be in the sun at that time, but if I only do one patch, I can go cool off in the creek before I get too uncomfortable. On the other hand I can go to the creek first and get gravel to repair the road.
The analog-I looks out at some state of affairs and imagines acting within or upon it. I can also step back, observe myself as acting and think about what would be happening to me. The metaphor-me is the version of me that I observe in my mind-space. The analog-I is imagined as weeding the garlic and going to the creek. It is the metaphor-me that gets too hot and that becomes cool in the creek.
Our analog-I sees itself as the main figure in a story that takes place in our spatialized time. Narratization is the process of telling ourselves this story about what we are doing and about how the facts we notice fit in with this. Narratization explains why we did what we did or why we might select alternatives. It provides a rationale for how I might act in novel situations as they arise.
Conciliation is the process of bringing perceptions together as conscious recognizable objects. It does so in a way that makes excerpts from these stimuli compatible with each other and our ongoing narratization. Conciliation does in the mind space what narratization does in mind-time.
Subjective Consciousness and Deliberate Action: It was the purely conceptual presentation of the behavior description concept from Descriptive Psychology that focused my attention on a purely conceptual aspect of what Jaynes had said about the nature of consciousness. A deliberate action description is one in which the know-parameter involves knowing alternative actions and the ability to imagine their outcomes. I find it helpful to relate the concepts of subjective consciousness and deliberate action.
The concept of subjective
consciousness could be briefly characterized as
the ability to routinely engage in deliberate action.
In saying that deliberate action as a ubiquitous feature of my experience, I only mean that when I reflect on what I am doing, I usually imagine alternatives. It is easy to realize that a large amount of what I do doesn’t directly involve deliberate action. I put on my walking shoes, walk east on my road until I come to a side trail, turn on this trail and avoid stepping in a large puddle a short distance down this trail, etc. I do most of my walk without considering alternatives. What I find hard to imagine is that I might do all of this and not even be able to imagine alternatives and to consider what it might be like to select from them. However after extended contact with a friend suffering from hallucinations, I begin to partially realize how this is possible. This encouraged me to read OCBM again, and what emerged has been a more positive plausibility attitude towards his bicameral mind thesis and a renewed interest in the emergence of consciousness.
Syntactic Language: Syntactic language involves more than signs and signals. It uses nouns and verbs and their modifier. Syntactic language IS necessary for narratization, and hence subjective consciousness IS conceptually impossible without syntactic language. Thus, there must have been a time in which people lived without subjective consciousness. It was this realization that draws me back to Julian Jaynes and the central concern OCBM and again made a positive shift in my plausibility attitude.
How and why did subjective
consciousness emerge?
It must have emerged after language became complex enough to be syntactic. Perhaps it emerged gradually as language evolved. This is not what Jaynes believed. He believed that for millennium, language provided a radically different way of dealing with what-to-do problems. He calls the mentality involved the bicameral mind and claims that subjective consciousness emerged due to the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Jaynes proposes that language evolved as a means of social control, and that a major mechanism involved was auditory hallucinations. Imagine a man from a prehistoric small group culture. Suppose he is sent to do some task that is not routine or habitual, say to set up a fish weir far upstream from the group. How does he keep at this time-consuming task all afternoon? Without language, he would forget what he was doing and why it needed to be done. But a lingual man could use language for this purpose. If he is not subjectively conscious, he cannot deliberately remind his analog-I of what he is to do. Instead, he can be kept at the task by a frequent verbal hallucination telling him what to do. Jaynes claims that this is the origin of auditory hallucinations, and these were at first casually anonymous and not very significant.
The main reason that I find it somewhat plausible that people living in ancient hunter-gather societies lacked subjective consciousness is that these culture types were wide spread for many centuries, from 30000 BC to 9000 BC. Subjective consciousness is necessarily innovative, giving rise to new practices that tend to replace traditional ways of doing many things. Perhaps these societies changed more than I have imagined, but unless this is so; I find it highly implausible that that subjective consciousness played a role in their lives. Jaynes’ theory about the origins of consciousness claims that it originated thousands of years after the emergence of ancient agricultural civilizations and it much harder to imagine such civilizations functioning in the way he claims. However if the people were not in some ways radically different from us, it is hard for me to understand why these civilizations also seemed to change so much more slowly than I would have expected. As I reflected more on the extent effective action occurs in recurring types of situations, the claim that human life could be routine enough to act totally without subjective consciousness finally seems fairly plausible. After all most living things act effectively and without syntactic language it is conceptually impossible that this involves subjective consciousness.
There is one feature of ancient civilizations has always puzzled me, namely the role of idols. Altho the explanation that they were only symbols of a divinity seemed applicable to the later polytheism in the Roman world, it did not mesh with my understanding of the Old Testament concern with idols. OCBM helped me conceptualize two types of polytheism, and this was another step in the evolution of my plausibility attitude. The remote type of polytheism of the Roman world seemed implausible to me, but it did not seem to involve an alien mentality. The earlier manifest type of polytheism involved a worship of idol in ways that suggest a mentality so radically different from mine that I could almost regard these people as aliens. This does not mean that their mentality was bicameral, but it at least increased my plausibility attitude towards his bicameral mind thesis. Using Jaynes’ theory, the disappearance of manifest polytheism as cultural force is easily explained, and it is this explanation that I find most plausible. Jaynes indicates some of the reasons for the breakdown of the bicameral mind. I take these to be equivalent to the reasons for the breakdown of Manifest Polytheism. I do not have enough information to find any account of the emergence of subjective consciousness highly plausible. However, I find Jaynes’ account more plausible than any proposed alternatives.
Key Factors in the Evolution of my
Attitude: The factors below were key to my evolving plausibility
attitude toward Jaynes’ theory about the origins of consciousness, but all of
them together and the preceding discussion of them, cannot account for it. They
merely helped me read all of OCBM again with a new perspective, and it was this
third reading and my use of his ideas that made the most significant increase
in my plausibility attitude. As I mentioned earlier, initially but I had a
widely open plausibility attitude of [5,95] towards his theory about the
origins of consciousness. This means that I considered it at worst highly
implausible and at best highly plausible. Currently my attitude is still fairly
open, say [45,99]. This means that I find it at worst somewhat implausible and
at best highly plausible. The concept of a plausibility attitude and how
plausibility intervals are used to indicate them is developed in my paper Plausibility
Concept.
- Having a clear concept of subjective consciousness.
- Noting how much can be done without subjective consciousness.
- Realizing the necessity of syntactic language for subjective consciousness.
- Contrasting the rate of Change in ancient and prehistoric culture to later rates of change
- The strong sense that mentality of manifest polytheism is almost alien
Barriers to Finding OCBM Plausible: So far I have commented only on the evolution of my own plausibility attitudes. I am also interested in the plausibility attitudes of others, and specifically on the barriers to finding Jaynes theory at least somewhat plausible. I can think of at least two major types of barriers. First it is essential to understand the concepts he is using and it is also necessary to use them as correctly to understand what is the theory actually claims. It is also essential to look at the support he presents with an open attitude.
As was my case I think that the ordinarily vague use of the word consciousness is one of the first major barriers that most people would encounter. Anyone not using Jaynes’ consciousness concept will not even understand what he is proposing. Unfortunately OCBM does not formulate the concept prior to discussing what consciousness is not in a way that suggests that we at least know implicitly understand the concept. It is for this reason that I refer to the concept as subjective consciousness and before introducing Jaynes’ ideas I would begin with a discussion of this concept.
Another barrier is the inability to imagine acting without something so ubiquitous to our own experience. Closely related is the inability to feel that other people may be able to function using a mentality that seems totally alien to us. Reservations of this type are probably more emotional than rational. As with Jaynes, I would suggest that these barriers in proper perspective by using the imagination. However I found them so strong that I had to do this repeatedly before they are became reservations rather than barriers. One strategy I used was to examine my dreams to see to what extent I could think in terms of deliberate action while dreaming. Except for the occasions when I could spot that I was dreaming, I found myself dreaming of a vast amount of activity that was totally devoid of deliberate action.
Closely related to the barrier involving the difficulties of imagining the lack of subjective consciousness is the tendency to read OCBM with the expectation that the case Jaynes presents must be conclusive. Since his presentation includes interpretations of a wide variety of information, it would be surprising if none of his presentation could be reasonably challenged. To find his theory even somewhat plausible, one must realizes that his theory does not rest on any specific interpretations that he makes. For example suppose further study of the human brain did not fit his account of its functioning. This might decrease my plausibility attitude somewhat, but it would not be crucial. The bicameral mind hypothesis is about a way of thinking rather than about the brain works. An understanding of its physiological basis for this way of thinking could be useful, but lack of such understanding does not mean that it could not exist. Likewise a misinterpretation of one passage in the Iliad does not mean that Achilles did not have a bicameral mentality.
Evidential Plausibility: Suppose that everyone found Jaynes’ theory about the origins of consciousness highly plausible. This would not mean that the theory is correct. It would not even mean that the evidence warranted these attitudes. Nor would the opposite plausibility attitudes mean that the evidence warranted them. A plausibility attitude IS evidential to the extent that the major factor contributing to it is an adequate consideration of the available evidence. This concept is developed in my paper Plausibility Concepts. My account of plausibility attitudes has so far ignored consideration of the extent to which they are evidential. I have tried to adopt a plausibility towards OCBM that is evidential, and this is one of the reasons that the interval for this attitude is still fairly wide. I think that this is what is currently warranted and I wish more people had open plausibility attitudes towards Jaynes’ theory about the origins of consciousness. Plausibility attitudes can be based many factors other than evidence, and these attitudes can influence both the search for evidence and its interpretation. Narrow attitudes on both sides lead to little conflict rather than cooperation. More open attitudes could lead to a less biased search for evidence, and this is what I would like to see happen. Understanding the origins of subjective consciousness could be one of the most significant factors in understanding our past. I would hate to see explorations about this ignored or distorted by narrow plausibility attitudes. It will be a difficult search even with more open ones.