http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a990611.html
Here’s a definition from a book on consciousness I have been reading… It is outragous and slanders the gods!
I will hold back my fury… but my inbred cousin on mt. sin admits to being a ‘jealous’ God. For thousands of years, I’ve been screaming that this third-rate sky deity ripped me off wholesale!
The whole fearsome, patriarchal, white-beard, thunderbolt thing?
I was doing that eons before this two-bit hustler started horning in on the action." anyway…
‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’ by Julian Jaynes
http://www.commonreader.com/5/5250.html
Defining both what consciousness is and what it is not. After speculating on its location, he demonstrates that consciousness itself has no physical location, but rather is a particular organization of the mind and a specific way of using the brain. Jaynes then demonstrates that consciousness is only a small part of mental activity and is not necessary for concept formation, learning, thinking, or even reasoning. He illustrates how all those mental functions can be performed automatically, intelligently, but unconsciously. Furthermore, consciousness does not contribute to and often hinders the execution of learned skills such as speaking, listening, writing, reading --as well as skills involving music, art, and athletics. Thus, if major human actions and skills can function automatically and without consciousness, those same actions and skills can be controlled or driven by external influences, “authorities”, or “voices.” Consciousness requires metaphors (i.e., referring to one thing in order to better understand or describe another thing – such as the head of an army, the head of a household, the head of a nail). Consciousness also requires analog models, (i.e., thinking of a map of California, for example, in order to visualize the entire, physical state of California). Thinking in metaphors and analog models creates the mind space and mental flexibility needed to bypass the automatic, bicameral processes. Metaphors of “me” and analog models of “I” allow consciousness to function through introspection and self-visualization. In turn, consciousness expands by creating more and more metaphors and analog models. That expanding consciousness allows a person to “see” and understand the relationship between himself and the world with increasing accuracy and clarity.
Consciousness is a conceptual, metaphor-generated analog world that parallels the actual world. Man, therefore, could not invent consciousness until he developed a language sophisticated enough to produce metaphors and analog models. With a conscious mind, man can introspect; he can debate with himself; he can become his own god, voice, and decision maker. But before the invention of consciousness, the mind functioned bicamerally: the right hemisphere (the poetic, god-brain) hallucinated audio instructions to the left hemisphere (the analytical, man-brain), especially in unusual or stressful situations. Essentially, man’s brain today is physically identical to the ancient bicameral brain.
The result is that consciousness is not a biological genetic giver, but a linguistic skill learned in human history. Previous to that transitional period, human volition consisted of hearing voices called gods, a relationship I am calling the bicameral mind.
Ancient civilizations seem to have been governed by such hallucinations called gods, a mentality known as the bicameral mind. It was concluded that the reason verbal hallucinations are found so extensively, in every modern culture, in normal students, schizophrenics, children, and vividly reported in the texts of antiquity is that such hallucinations are an innate propensity, genetically evolved as the basis of an ancient preconscious mentality. Julian Jaynes
There you have it. says I…Son of Kronos,Lord of Hera,Zeus of the thunderbolt and father of gods and men…
“Those who judge others will burn in Hell!” The Beast?