Psychologists are sometimes justly accused of the habit of re-inventing the wheel and making it square and then calling it a first approximation. I would demur from agreement that that is true in the development that I have just outlined, but I would indeed like to call it a first approximation. Consciousness is not a simple 4 It would be interesting to see experimentally if training in accurate and fast attention resulted in better concentration in tasks when tested with distraction.
5 William Whewell, Theory of Scientific Method (1858), ed. R. E. Butts (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968).
6 For readers who would like an abstract of how this theory translates into dreams, I would suggest that they read my Bauer Symposium lecture in Canadian Psychology, 1986, 27:128-182, particularly pages 146 and 147.
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matter and it should not be spoken of as if it were. Nor have I mentioned the different modes of conscious narratization such as verbal (having imaginary conversations — certainly the most common mode in myself), perceptual (imagining scenes), behavioral (imagining ourselves doing something), physiological (monitoring our fatigue or discomfort or appetite), or musical (imagining music), all of which seem quite distinct, with properties of their own. Such modes have obviously different neural substrates, indicating the complexity of any possible neurology of consciousness.
2. The bicameral mind. The second main hypothesis is that preceding consciousness there was a different mentality based on verbal hallucinations. For this I think the evidence is overwhelming. Wherever we look in antiquity, there is some kind of evidence that supports it, either in literary texts or in archeological artifacts.
Apart from this theory, why are there gods? Why religions?
Why does all ancient literature seem to be about gods and usually heard from gods?
And why do we have verbal hallucinations at all? Before the publication of this book, verbal hallucinations were not paid much attention to, except as the primary indicator of schizophrenia. But since that time, a flurry of studies have shown that the incidence of verbal hallucinations is far more widespread than was thought previously. Roughly one third of normal people hear hallucinated voices at some time. Children hear voices from their imaginary or we should say hallucinated playmates. It has recently been discovered that congenital quadriplegics who have never in their lives spoken or moved, and are often regarded as “vegetables,“ not only understand language perfectly but also hear voices they regard as God.7 The importance I put on these studies taken together is that they clearly indicate to me that there is a genetic 7 John Hamilton, “Auditory Hallucinations in Nonverbal Quadriplegics,” Psychiatry, 1985, 48’.382-392. For other work on verbal hallucinations, see my “Verbal Hallucinations and Preconscious Mentality,” in Manfred Spitzer and Brendan H. Maher, eds., Philosophy and Psychofathology (New York: Springer Verlag, 1990), pp. 157-170.
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basis for such hallucinations in us all, and that it was probably evolved into the human genome back in the late Pleistocene, and then became the basis for the bicameral mind.
3. The dating. The third general hypothesis is that consciousness was learned only after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
I believe this is true, that the anguish of not knowing what to do in the chaos resulting from the loss of the gods provided the social conditions that could result in the invention of a new mentality to replace the old one.
But actually there are two possibilities here. A weak form of the theory would state that, yes, consciousness is based on language, but instead of its being so recent, it began back at the beginning of language, perhaps even before civilization, say, about 12,000 B.C., at about the time of the beginning of the bicameral mentality of hearing voices. Both systems of mind then could have gone on together until the bicameral mind became unwieldy and was sloughed off, leaving consciousness on its own as the medium of human decisions. This is an extremely weak position because it could then explain almost anything and is almost undisprovable.
The strong form is of greater interest and is as I have stated it in introducing the concept of the bicameral mind. It sets an astonishingly recent date for the introduction into the world of this remarkable privacy of covert events which we call consciousness. The date is slightly different in different parts of the world, but in the Middle East, where bicameral civilization began, the date is roughly 1000 B.C.
This dating I think can be seen in the evidence from Mesopotamia, where the breakdown of the bicameral mind, beginning about 1200 B.C., is quite clear. It was due to chaotic social disorganizations, to overpopulation, and probably to the success of writing in replacing the auditory mode of command. This breakdown resulted in many practices we would now call religious which were efforts to return to the lost voices of the gods, e.g., prayer,
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religious worship, and particularly the many types of divination I have described, which are new ways of making decisions by supposedly returning to the directions of gods by simple analogy.
I would not now make as much of the Thera explosion as I did in II.3. But that it did cause the disruption of theocracy in the Near East and hence the conditions for the learning of a non-hallucinatory mentality is I think valid. But in the general case, I would rather emphasize that the success of a theocratic agricultural civilization brings with it overpopulation and thus the seeds of its own breakdown. This is suggested at least among the civilizations of Mesoamerica, where the relative rapidity of the rise and fall of civilizations with the consequent desertion of temple complexes contrasts with the millennia-long civilizations in the older parts of the world.
But is this consciousness or the concept of consciousness? This is the well-known use-mention criticism which has been applied to Hobbes and others as well as to the present theory. Are we not confusing here the concept of consciousness with consciousness itself? My reply is that we are fusing them, that they are the same. As Dan Dennett has pointed out in a recent discussion of the theory,8 there are many instances of mention and use being identical. The concept of baseball and baseball are the same thing. Or of money, or law, or good and evil. Or the concept of this book.
4. The double brain. When in any discussion or even in our thinking we can use spatial terms, as in “locating” a problem or
“situating” a difficulty in an argument, as if everything in existence were spread out like land before us, we seem to get a feeling of clarity. This pseudo-clarity, as it should be called, is because of the spatial nature of consciousness. So in locating functions in different parts of the brain we seem to get an extra surge of clarity about them — justified or not.
At the time I was writing that part of the book in the 1960s, 8 Daniel Dennett, “Julian Jaynes” Software Archeology,” Canadian Psychology, 1986, 27:149-154.
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there was little interest in the right hemisphere. Even as late as 1964, some leading neuroscientists were saying that the right hemisphere did nothing, suggesting it was like a spare tire. But since then we have seen an explosion of findings about right hemisphere function, leading, I am afraid, to a popularization that verges on some of the shrill excesses of similar discussions of asymmetrical hemisphere function in the latter part of the nineteenth century9 and also in the twentieth century.10