Well, he certainly does say that the modern mode of consciousness is only around 3000 years old, the previously prevailing one being of a bicameral nature, with a ‘listening’ and a ‘speaking’ part. I’m not sure I buy into this, but I’ve always liked the explanation of religion it gives – with the speaking part being ‘god’, and the listening (and obeying) part being ‘man’, neither of which are consciously aware in the way we would use the term today.
There’s a rather significant difference between saying that the modern mode of consciousness is 3000 years old and saying that the people who built the pyramids weren’t conscious. Wouldn’t you agree?
I’m sure it’s a load of hogwash.
Which sounds very pretty but every time someone tries to test it it either gets modified so as to be untestable or else it is falsified. That just seems so reminscent of Freudian psychology that I can’t really give it any credence.
Well, it’s certainly implied (in the title, even) that Jaynes doesn’t consider this bicameral state to be conscious, though I’m not really recalling whether it’s said outright (though I’m pretty sure it is). Others certainly have made that claim, based on his model.
Quite possible, but even if it is, it’s still an interesting speculation of how ‘pre-conscious’ modes of thought might have worked.
I’m not saying I consider this a scientifically valid model; I just said I liked it. 
It’s nice, and simple, which most often means that it misses the point and oversimplifies the phenomenon out of existence.
I smell naive materialism.
Your “modern” 19th century notions about the existence of physical matter are dying even as I write this. A new Age is dawning, the story cycle of the individualist, patriarchal Hero is coming to its bloody close, and what emerges from the other end will resemble us and our culture as much as we resemble Homo Habilis and his. We will crack open the quark and find the Buddha smiling back at us inside.
I suspect you’ll scoff and sneer at the language I’m using, so allow me to put it in terms not quite so lyrical. What’s going to happen when the new generation of quantum computers finishes the analysis of the sequences of human DNA? When we are handed the power to redesign the human body – and brain – from the ground up? What happens when we start up the first working time machine by bending light with electromagnets and messages and technology from future time frames start pouring through? What happens when we are capable of measuring and receiving the soliton – the standing probability wave – which represents human consciousness and it becomes possible to communicate with any complex system or to express our own consciousness through any complex medium?
All of these things are poised simultaneously to redefine what it means to be human. The fact that it’s all happening at once is not coincidental. We approach a crisis point, the Singularity, where the curve of technology goes vertical, Asgard burns, and the Hero’s bloody age of fire and steel is finally ended.
Which leaves us in the position of accepting that the pyramids, the parietal art of Australia and the Bablyonian epics were all created by people who were not conscious.
Which means that human apprehension, emotion, personality and inventiveness is completely unrelated to consciousness. At which point I have to ask what, within this conception, consciouness actually is and why it matters.
The idea that the pyramids were built by people with a different consciousness, while completely untestable, is credible. The idea that houses for the dead were built by entities who were not even conscious of their own existence is ludicrous. Certainly nobody in the real world would accept that the pyramids were created unconsciously/subconsciously, yet that is what such a claim requires.
“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
Your lack of imagination doesn’t make it untrue. Furthermore, is you do any reading on modern primitive anthropology, you’ll find some rather interesting phenomena – such as the fact that none of them have a first-person in their language. Ask them what they did yesterday and they’ll answer in the third person. Jaynes argues that we invented “I” as a means of differentiating between specialists in agrarian cities, where it was necessary to know the difference between the smith and the bowyer. In fact, to this very day, our family names tend to reflect the occupation held by our ancestors. In pre-agrarian society, there was no need for specialization and thus no need for individualism. The story cycle of the Hero, which is characterized by individualism, began out of a need for specialized skills.
Insults are not allowed in GQ.
What a load of ignorant crap All Aboriginal languages have a first person. The vast majority have more first person words than English, which has but two: I and Me.
Absolute tripe. I only speak a smattering of two Aboriginal languages and even I know that is a load of rubbish.
And now we’ll no doubt hear how Aboriginal languages aren’t primitive because no Scots language has a first person.
Which is astounding since Aboriginal languages all have perfect equivalents for “I” and these cultures had neither smiths nor bowyers at any stage in their history, being direct line descendants f pure hunter gatherers from the very origin of humanity to the present day.
Sure they do. Hill, Jackson, Jones, White, Drinkwater.:rolleyes:
Well, this whole thing is going too far into Woo-Woo Land (not to mention Off-Topic-Ville) too fast for me, but I’m not sure whether any of these acts actually require consciousness in any way – burial rites, for example, would appear to be sensible for purely biological reasons; who’d really want to have the corpses of the dead around, stinking up the place (and more seriously, possibly contaminating drinking water or food). Let that notion acquire a little overhead (superstition certainly doesn’t depend on consciousness – see Skinner’s pigeons), and bang! Pyramids!
However, I’m not really interested in discussing the merits (or lack thereof) of Jaynes’ hypothesis, seeing how I can’t really say I believe it either. I’m certainly not going to try and convince you, and besides, there’s no real reason to perpetuate the hijack.
- How could an entity be conscious of these facts if they had no consciousness?
- Why were these acts never performed by earlier hominids or indeed any other mammals?
- Why build houses for the dead if the sole reason for body removal was sanitary?
Bang, non sequitur more like.
Good you had me worried there for a minute.
No, surnames developed as a way to differentiate between similar names in an enlarged population …
Jan the farmer? he lives over there… no I mean Jan the Blacksmith … or maybe it is Jan the Shepherd … Hey, can we get a few more names around here please?!!
Just because you addressed these questions directly to me, and I feel it would be impolite not to answer them best as I can:
Why would they need to be conscious of those facts? Tons of behaviours don’t require any conscious input, even fairly complex ones – is the otter cracking the mussel on a stone he has brought up from the sea bed and put on his stomach conscious of the fact that there’s something tasty inside? Even if he is, does this imply that he’s conscious of himself as an entity?
Neanderthals certainly buried their dead, and Elephants are reported to have elaborate rituals involving their deceased, as well; I’m not sure that this means they must be conscious. Other than that, lots of animals don’t exactly have a sedentary life style; just leaving their dead behind doesn’t pose any problems.
As I said, superstition, which lies at the root of most ritual behaviour – even Elephants sometimes cover up their dead (and purportedly, dead humans as well) with leafs and twigs and things like that; it’s not hard to imagine humanity, according to their growing abilities, elaborating on that general theme because of some perceived reward or other, leading to a sort of ‘arms race’ of burial monuments.
But anyway, if you’re interested in discussing this further, I’d suggest we take this to GD rather than continuing the hijack here.
Are you seriously suggesting that this group of humans developed a pyramid building instinct?
Elephants don’t make any attempt to dispose of their dead, much less build houses for them.
As for Neanderthals, that is simply begging the question.
Very, very few animals are less sedentary than HG humans.
Really? Any evidence or this? Because given the amount of vegetation you’d need to cover an elephant that would be some pretty remarkable thought processes going on, and I’m sure I would have heard of it.
Elaborating? Some reward or other? How can an unconscious being elaborate? How can it plan for reward? You surely can’t be saying that this was instinctive pyramid building that only evolve don one tiny group of humans for a brief period of time. Yet I see no other mechanism that would allow an unconscious organism to plan and elaborate.
Here’s the cite for the elephants, and my computer can plan and elaborate perfectly well without being conscious. You seem to confuse consciousness with reasoning or intelligence, but there’s nothing that precludes an agent from acting intelligently without being, for instance, self-aware. This is encapsulated in the idea of the philosophical zombie, a being that exhibits the exact same actions and reactions as a conscious human, yet lacks internal conscious experience.
What’s with this stuff about amazing transformations taking place in 40 years?
Dammit, I want to be immortal now. 
Seriously, who in hell wants to be immortal? Think of all the crap you’d accumulate, and we haven’t even taken the first stop towards solving the problem of insufficient closet space.
Those cells may last forever, but they’re not genetically normal by any standard, so cloning would be impossible. At least, orders of magnitude more difficult than ordinary cloning. HeLa cells have 82 chromosomes instead of the usual 23 for humans. Most of those are duplications and rearrangements of the “normal” chromosomes. For comparison, an extra copy of chromosome 13 in humans causes down syndrome. The vast majority chromosomal duplications or rearrangements aren’t even viable. Plus, HeLa cells have HPV all over the place, integrated into the genome.
From a research perspective, they’re sort of regarded as Frankencells. Easy to work with, and good enough for many purposes, but they’re so abnormal that they really aren’t any good for a lot of researchers.
Remember what I said about Aubrey De Grey? By comparison, he is a model of reasoning and nitty-gritty acumen compared to Jaynes. Most criticisms of De Grey complain that what he says is not currently testable and so is not science. Jaynes was relegated to the category of pseudoscience 30 years ago. I can’t believe anyone is still citing him, especially since our knowledge of the modernness of humanity thousands of years older than Greeks has increased multiple times sine then.
The timing of the advent of agrarian societies has been pushed back since then to approximately 11,500 years ago, amazingly shortly after the lifting of the last ice age. Dense academic paper pdf. Quick reading news article. Converting wild grasses by selection into better yielding crops is not a matter of instinct, and neither are the permanent settlements and associated village societies that developed with them, nor for that matter the rise of domestication of animals, which also took place thousands of years before the Greeks. Jaynes knew nothing of this and it is impossible to square this development of a modern humanity with his maunderings.
As for the Singularity, c’mon, even Vernor Vinge has backed off the more extreme of his claims, and his 30 year prediction made in 1993 ain’t looking good now.
Quoth tgan3:
Maybe in 40 years, but don’t bet on it. In all of the history of human medicine, we’ve never yet been able to make any progress at all against death by old age. All we’ve done so far is made people more likely to live long enough to reach old age.
Quoth SmashTheState:
I’m not sure where to begin here, so I’ll just take things in order. First, the only task for which quantum computers are known to be well-suited is cracking current methods of cryptography, and even there, the best result so far has been a computer capable of factoring the number 15 (it’s 5*3, in case you were wondering). Second, the human genome has already been completely sequenced, many times over, without the use of quantum computers, and it hasn’t led to a complete overhaul of the field of medicine yet. Third, biological systems are sufficiently complicated that the only way to design anything from scratch would be trial-and-error, and it’d take us eons of that to come up with designs as good as the ones we already have. Fourth, you can’t bend light with electric fields unless they’re insanely strong, nor with magnetic fields unless they’re insanely stronger than that, yet (as in, to do it with electromagnets would require somewhere in the vicinity of the entire power output of the Sun), and even if you did so, you couldn’t do anything with it that you can’t do with a simple lens. You certainly couldn’t build a time machine or an ansible or whatever you’re planning on that way. Sixth, solitons and standing waves (which are completely different phenomena) are both already well-understood and can be produced in fifth-grade science labs, but have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with consciousness.
[pedantic nitpick]
It’s the 21st chromosome. Trisomy 21 is Down Syndrome.
[/pedantic nitpick]
:smack:
Whoops. I stand corrected. Trisomy 13 is a different (and more rare) disorder.
Aren’t chimpanzees and gorillas proven to be self aware? Haven’t a good number of them spoken in sign language and referred to themselves with signs?