150: Julian Jaynes, Part 1 - Hearing Voices

The Nietzsche Podcast

This episode explores Julian Jaynes' controversial hypothesis regarding the origins of human consciousness and its relationship to language.

Key takeaways

• Julian Jaynes proposed that consciousness is a product of language rather than an evolutionary precursor to it.
• The 'bicameral mind' era involved humans experiencing right-hemisphere communications as external voices or gods.

Main topics

• The Bicameral Mind hypothesis
• Nietzsche on consciousness and language

Notable quotes

Consciousness is properly only a connecting network between man and man.

Conclusion

The episode provides a profound look at how our very sense of 'self' m

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:08) This is the Nietzsche Podcast. In 1886, Nietzsche posed a hypothesis about the relation between consciousness and language, which he admits is only a conjecture. This is part of a section called On the Genius of the Species, which I have quoted from many times, but it's worth recalling this particular excerpt within that passage. Quote, Consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication. that from the first it has been necessary and useful only between man and man, especially between those commanding and those obeying, and has only developed in proportion to its utility. Consciousness is properly only a connecting network between man and man. It is only as such that it has had to develop. The recluse and wild beast species of men would not have needed it. The very fact that our actions, thoughts, feelings, and motions come within the range of our consciousness, at least a part of them, is the result of a terrible, prolonged must ruling man's destiny. As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection. He needed his fellows. He was obliged to express his distress. He had to know how to make himself understood. And for all this, he needed... consciousness first of all consequently to know himself what he lacked to know how he felt and to know what he thought for to repeat it once more man like every living creature thinks unceasingly but does not know it the thinking which is becoming conscious of itself is only the smallest part thereof we may say the most superficial part the worst part For this conscious thinking alone is done in words, that is to say, in the symbols for communication, by means of which the origin of consciousness is revealed. In short, the development of speech and the development of consciousness, not of reason, but of reason becoming self-conscious, go hand in hand. End quote. This bit of speculative anthropology on the part of Nietzsche is a remarkable prefiguration of the hypothesis of Julian Jaynes, as put forward in his highly controversial work, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It must be said that Jaynes' theory about the emergence of consciousness as we know it today, it does consist of many novel elements that were unknown to Nietzsche. not least of which is the theory that the earliest civilizations were what Jaynes called bicameral. That is to say that the everyday experience of human beings at this time, sometime before the first millennium BC, was not what we would call conscious. These people at the dawn of civilization lacked all interiority, according to Jaynes, and instead experienced communications from the right side of the brain, the right hemisphere of the brain, which is more involved in the spatial constructive tasks, to the left side, which is verbal and analytical. And they received these communications in the form of what we would call auditory hallucinations, but what they would call commands from the gods. But interestingly enough, Nietzsche does anticipate, Janes, on more than one point, namely that what we call consciousness, ought not be conflated with thinking or reasoning, and that man actually thinks ceaselessly, often without bringing these thought contents into consciousness. Jaynes would agree that consciousness is not necessary for reasoning or even for learning, and that it's not simply a copy of experience, but refers to something very specific. He also contends that it is by no means obvious. that consciousness would naturally be reached as a progression through degrees of so-called sentience. Perhaps more importantly, Nietzsche anticipates Jane's hypothesis that consciousness, in fact, is a product of language, and not the other way around. As Nietzsche says, our conscious world is made up of these signs, these word concepts. It is only in linguistic thought that we experience ourselves as conscious. It is not that we as animals have reached a certain apogee of sentience such that we gained the capacity for linguistic communication, but rather the use of linguistic communication eventually created what it is that we call consciousness. As Nietzsche said in the passage we looked at a moment ago, speech and the development of consciousness go hand in hand. That's certainly a shocking claim, and unlike Nietzsche, Julian Jaynes will therefore spend hundreds of pages attempting to justify this claim with historical evidence, neurological data, and philosophical argument. He writes that he originally approached this topic as part of his own search for the meaning and the origins of consciousness. He wanted to know exactly what consciousness is, that's not exactly obvious, and how it could possibly emerge, which is a related... Question. And this search took him in a direction that he didn't expect, and led him to the impossible-sounding proposition that the human beings of our earliest epics, kings such as Hammurabi, who ruled Babylon, the Greeks, whose deeds were recounted in the Iliad, were not themselves conscious. That is to say, not conscious in the way that we are now. They lived in a strange kind of bicameral reality. in the immanent presence of gods without interiority without the analog eye without internal narratization of reality and that if there is anything resembling such a state to-day we would behold it in the modern schizophrenic that ancient bicameral societies were effectively civilizations full of schizophrenics, who lived in a relatively stable structure and hierarchy owing to the fact that they all experienced and acknowledged the same gods. With the breakdown of the bicameral mind, mankind's gods would steadily vanish, and what we call consciousness would fully come into being. Before we take a dive into the hypothesis of Julian Jaynes regarding the human mind and the origins of consciousness in human civilization, we will take a brief look at the man's life. He was born in 1920 in the state of Massachusetts. His father was a Unitarian minister, and he was the oldest of three children. The Janes family would take their summer vacations on Prince Edward Island in Canada, and as such, the young Julian would form a lifelong connection to Canada. In fact, he would draw his last breath on Prince Edward Island. Janes achieved a bachelor's in psychology at McGill University in Montreal, but he was eager to learn more about the human brain and went to continue his studies in Toronto. However, in December of 1942, he returned to the United States to fulfill one of those obligations of citizenship and registered for the draft. World War II was happening, but Jaynes was a conscientious objector, which was consistent with the Unitarian principles under which he was raised. And in Jaynes' case, as is the case of many conscientious objectors, The government thought that his objections to military service were sincere and religious in nature, and he was exempted from military service. But this didn't mean that the government simply cut you loose. The norm at this time was that conscientious objectors, if drafted, would instead be ordered to report to a camp for civilian public service. Janes was ordered to a camp in New Hampshire, and he complied. But his conscience apparently did not sit right with him while at the camp. And shortly after his arrival, he wrote a letter to the Attorney General declaring his intentions to leave. Janes believed that the entire system was against his principles and that even if he served that system in some alternative manner, he was still ultimately contributing to its evil. In his letter, he said that he could not work within an evil system, even for its own destruction, and asserted that Jesus would have deserted the camp just the same. After this, Janes was arrested and sent to federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. There, he worked for three years in the prison hospital until he was released after the war in 1946. He returned to his studies. enrolling at Yale University. He received a master's degree by 1948, but he refused to accept a doctorate, again on principle. In his research, he would pursue the questions of consciousness further, including a number of experiments with plants, animals, and other life forms, in an attempt to establish levels of sentience. Later, he would describe this series of experiments in his book, Origins of Consciousness, and he would ultimately conclude there that they were based on a misguided premise. Jaynes writes, quote, My first experimental work was a youthful attempt to produce signal learning, or a conditional response, in an especially long-suffering mimosa plant. The signal was an intense light. The response was the drooping of a leaf to a carefully calibrated tactile stimulus, where it joined the stem. After over a thousand pairings of the light and the tactile stimulus, my patient plant was as green as ever. It was not conscious. That expected failure behind me, I moved on to protozoa, delicately running individual paramecia in a tea maze, engraved in wax on black bakelite, using direct current shock to punish the animal, and spin it around if it went to the incorrect side. Moreover, I was extremely interested in what would happen to the learning and the consciousness when the animal divided. A first suggestion of positive results was not borne out in later replications. after other failures to find learning in the lower phyla i moved on to species with synaptic nervous systems flatworms earthworms fish and reptiles which could indeed learn all on the naive assumption that i was chronicling the grand evolution of consciousness Ridiculous. It was, I fear, several years before I realized that this assumption makes no sense at all. When we introspect, it is not upon any bundle of learning processes, and particularly not the types of learning denoted by conditioning and tea mazes. Why, then, did so many worthies in the lists of science equate consciousness and learning, and why had I been so lame of mind as to follow them? End quote. Later, we'll pick up on the issue of what Jaynes thinks consciousness isn't when we get further into the book. But for now, it is enough to note that these are the kinds of experiments Jaynes was engaged in at this time, the kinds of questions driving his research. Jaynes would eventually take a position at Princeton, where he would spend the next decades of his life, and over the years, Jaynes finally began to develop his own novel theory of consciousness. the first public presentation of which was in address to the American Psychological Association in 1969. Eventually, his theories would be compiled into the book we are considering today, The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which was published in 1976. The book is in three parts. Two additional sections were set aside at the suggestion of Jane's publisher for a future book that he planned to call The Consequences of Consciousness, but unfortunately it was never published. In fact, Jane's never published any other books than this one, though some papers and notes that might have formed the basis of other publications do apparently survive. As mentioned before, this work was controversial, and Jaynes included an afterword in 1990 to address the many criticisms that the book had drawn. Nevertheless, he was invited to speak all over the world after the book's publication, and after his death in 1997, the Julian Jaynes Society was established to promote his theories. He was 77 years of age at the time of his death, and he felt that his work was not truly finished since his grand explanation of consciousness had not been widely accepted or, in his view, understood. And so today, we will do our small part in trying to spread awareness and understanding of Julian Jayne's fascinating ideas about the history of the human mind. To begin with, in Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes begins by listing off a number of theories as to what consciousness is, including consciousness as a property of matter, consciousness as emergent in evolution, behaviorism, which actually denies there's such a thing as consciousness, and so on, all of which Jaynes finds to be unsatisfactory explanations. Jaynes suggests that most, or even all, of these attempts at explaining consciousness have actually been a recapitulation to something like the spirit of the times, in which the explanation emerged. Quote, Each age has described consciousness in terms of its own theme and concerns. In the golden age of Greece, when men traveled about in freedom while slaves did the work, consciousness was as free as that. Heraclitus, in particular, called it an enormous space whose boundaries, even by traveling along every path, could never be found out. A millennium later, Augustine, among the caverned hills of Carthage, was astonished at the, quote, mountains and hills of high imaginations, quote, the plains and caves and caverns of my memory, with its recesses of, quote, manifold and spacious chambers, wonderfully furnished with innumerable stores. Note how the metaphors of mind are the world it perceives. The first half of the 19th 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 which recorded the past of the individual, there being deeper and deeper layers until the record could no longer be read. This emphasis on the unconscious grew until by 1875 most psychologists were insisting. that consciousness was but a small part of mental life, and that unconscious sensations, unconscious ideas, and unconscious judgments made up the majority of mental processes. In the middle of the 19th century, chemistry succeeded geology as the fashionable science, and consciousness, from James Will to Wundt and his students such as Titchener, was 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 19th 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 this is precisely what they are. End quote. The phrase that Jaynes uses at the end there, the consciousness of consciousness, will become important in the first chapter, in which he claims that the consciousness of consciousness is not itself consciousness. And that might seem like a difficult assertion to make sense of, But he explains that what he means by this is that when we consciously reflect on what consciousness is, we tend to roll together concepts, learning, reasoning, thinking, and so on, all into the fabric of consciousness. And the final aspect of this is that we then tend to locate the center of this consciousness in the head. But none of these elements are themselves the stuff of consciousness, so to speak. The very nature of consciousness is in fact to appropriate whatever it is conscious of as part of itself. But this can mislead us. Quote, Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say, how difficult to appreciate. Speaker 1 (17:53) And Jaynes provides some rather simple but compelling arguments as to why it does not. For one thing, there are plenty of instances in normal, everyday life in which we're not totally conscious of what we are doing, or in which we perhaps do not as rigorously, consciously attend to certain aspects of our environment while attending studiously to other aspects. I mean, many of you have probably had the experience while you're driving. Suddenly realizing that you're not consciously paying attention to everything that you're doing while driving. And perhaps you haven't even formed memories of the past number of minutes while driving. And, you know, I'm sure that this sudden realization that you've been driving unconsciously could be rather scary. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you're driving dangerously. It means that you've been doing so automatically. As another example, when I'm immersed in reading or writing, I'm not usually conscious of my surroundings in the same way that I normally am. Or at the very least, I'm not attentive to my surroundings in the same way that I would be if I were doing something different, like walking through an unfamiliar environment. In fact, when I'm reading or writing, the room I'm in disappears in some sense, and my consciousness is totally attenuated to the book or to the page. And these lapses in consciousness, they don't just occur in terms of spatiality, but also temporality. That is to say that in terms of the space around us, we're not always consciously attending to every object or every person or event going around in our environment. We tend to think that we're simply copying down our experience of what's going on around us into consciousness, but that's not always true. And Jaynes suggests that it may not. even be true regarding time. He raises the question, are we conscious the whole time that we are awake? Again, we pass much of the day within these activities in which consciousness is not required. In order to walk down the street, it's not necessary that I'm conscious of every muscle movement needed to pick up one leg and put it in front of the other. And in fact, being conscious of these movements could be a hindrance to making those movements. When I'm playing music in front of an audience, I can attest to the fact that the more conscious I am of what I'm doing and the individual placements that my fingers have to make on the fretboard and the way I have to grip the guitar pick and so on, the more conscious I were to be of any of that, the more hindered I would be in performing. In fact, the less conscious one is, or that one has to be, while performing such a task, whether it's playing a musical instrument, or doing gymnastics, or even something mundane like chopping vegetables, the less conscious you have to be, the better you generally are at fulfilling the task. Consciousness, it seems, is really only useful when we don't already know what to do. This dovetails into the issue of learning. One might say, surely then, when we are learning to do something, we require consciousness in order to absorb and retain the information. But we can see from the straightforward example of Pavlovian conditioning that consciousness does not have to enter into the picture for someone to learn. It has been demonstrated many times, in fact, that methods of associative learning are effective and that it occurs without any consciousness of the subject involved. This also applies to complex tasks, as we just talked about. Jaynes uses the example of typewriting, which he says has been extensively studied, and one experimenter noted that the adaptations of the ones learning how