How Consciousness Began
So far, all our analysis has been about how and why the bicameral mind collapsed. It could indeed be asked at this point why man did not simply revert to his previous condition. Sometimes he did. But the inertia of the more complex cultures prevented the return to tribal life. Man was trapped in his own civilization. Huge cities simply are there, and their ponderous habits of working keep going even as their divine control lapses away. Language too is a brake upon social change. The bicameral mind was an offshoot of the acquisition of language, and language by this time had a vocabulary demanding such attention to a civilized environment as to make a reversion to something of at least 5000 years earlier almost impossible.
The facts of the transition from the bicameral mind to the subjective conscious mind are what I try to develop in the ensuing two chapters. But just how it happened is the consideration here, and this needs a great deal more research. What we need is a paleontology of consciousness, in which we can discern stratum by stratum how this metaphored world we call subjective consciousness was built up and under what particular social pressures. All that I can present here is a few suggestions.
I would also remind the reader of two things. First, I am not talking here of the metaphoric mechanisms by which consciousness was generated that I discussed in I.3. Here I am concerned with their origin in history, why those features were generated by metaphors at a particular time. Secondly, we are speaking only about the Near East. Once consciousness is established, there are quite different reasons why it is so successful, and why it spreads
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to the remaining bicameral peoples, problems which we shall take up in a later chapter.
The observation of difference may be the origin of the analog space of consciousness. After the breakdown of authority and of the gods, we can scarcely imagine the panic and the hesitancy that would feature human behavior during the disorder we have described. We should remember that in the bicameral age men belonging to the same city-god were more or less of similar opinion and action. But in the forced violent intermingling of peoples from different nations, different gods, the observation that strangers, even though looking like oneself, spoke differently, had opposite opinions, and behaved differently might lead to the supposition of something inside of them that was different. Indeed, this latter opinion has come down to us in the traditions of philosophy, namely, that thoughts, opinions, and delusions are subjective phenomena inside a person because there is no room for them in the ‘real,’ ‘objective’ world. It is thus a possibility that before an individual man had an interior self, he unconsciously first posited it in others, particularly contradictory strangers, as the thing that caused their different and bewildering behavior. In other words, 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 (sic) suppose other consciousnesses, and then infer our own by generalization.
The Origin of Narratization in Epics
It sounds strange to speak about gods learning. But occupying a good part of the right temporal-parietal region (if the model of I.5 is correct), they, too, like the left temporal-parietal region, or perhaps even more so, would learn new abilities, storing up new experience, reworking their admonitory function in new ways to meet new needs.
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Narratization is a single word for an extremely complex set of patterning abilities which have, I think, a multiple ancestry. But the thing in its larger patterning, such as lifetimes, histories, the past and future, may have been learned by dominantly left-hemisphered men from a new kind of functioning in the right hemisphere. The new kind of functioning was narratization, and it had previously been learned, I suggest, by the gods at a certain period of history.
When could this have been? It is doubtful if there can ever be a certain answer, partly because there is no sharp boundary between the relation of an event that has just happened and an epic. Also our search into the past is always confounded with the development of writing. But it is interesting that about the middle of the third millennium B.C., or just before, there seems to arise a new feature of civilization in southern Mesopotamia. Before what is known as the Early Dynastic II period, excavations show that towns or cities in this area were not fortified, had no defenses. But thereafter, in the principal regions of urban development, walled cities arose at a fairly constant distance from one another, the inhabitants farming the intervening fields and occasionally fighting each other for control of them. At about this same period came the first epics that we know of, such as the several about Emmerkar, the builder of Uruk, and his relations with the neighboring city-state of Aratta. And their topics are precisely this relationship between neighboring states.
My suggestion is that narratization arose as a codification of reports of past events. Writing up to this time — and it is only a few centuries since its invention —- had been primarily an inventory device, a way of recording the stores and exchanges of a god's estates. Now it becomes a way of recording god-commanded events, whose recitation after the fact becomes the narratization of epics. Since reading, as I have suggested in the previous chapter, may have been hallucinating from the cuneiform, it may, then, have been a right temporal lobe function.
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And since these were the recordings of the past, it is the right hemisphere that becomes at least the temporary seat of the reminiscence of gods.
We should note in passing how different the reading from stable cuneiform tablets in Mesopotamia was from the oral re-composing of the epics in Greece by a succession of aoidoi: It is possible that the oral tradition in Greece was an immense benefit in its demand that ‘Apollo’ or the ‘Muses’ in the right hemisphere become the sources of memory and learn how to narratize so as to keep the memories of Achilles together in the epic pattern.
And then, in the chaos of transilience to consciousness, man assimilates both this memory ability and the ability to narratize memories into patterns.
The Origin of the Analog ‘I’ in Deceit
Deceit may also be a cause of consciousness. But we must begin any discussion of the topic by making a distinction between instrumental or short-term deceit and long-term deceit, which might better be expressed as treachery. Several examples of the former have been described in chimpanzees. Female chimpanzees will ‘present5 in sexual posture to a male to whisk away his banana when his prandial interest is thus distracted. In another instance, a chimpanzee would fill his mouth with water, coax a disliked keeper over to the cage bars, and spit the water in his face. In both such instances, the deceit involved is a case of instrumental learning, a behavior pattern that is followed immediately by some rewarding state of affairs. And it needs no further explanation.
But the kind of deceit that is treachery is quite another matter.
It is impossible for an animal or for a bicameral man. Long-term deceit requires the invention of an analog self that can ‘do’ or ‘be’
something quite different from what the person actually does or is, as seen by his associates. It is an easy matter to imagine how
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important for survival during these centuries such an ability would be. Overrun by some invader, and seeing his wife raped, a man who obeyed his voices would, of course, immediately strike out, and thus probably be killed. But if a man could be one thing on the inside and another thing on the outside, could harbor his hatred and revenge behind a mask of acceptance of the inevitable, such a man would survive. Or, in the more usual situation of being commanded by invading strangers, perhaps in a strange language, the person who could obey superficially and have