I finally had an opportunity to take a look at this text in more detail, as well as read Micahel's blog, which definitely sheds some light on the difference of opinion with regards to Jaynes's theory in general and this text in particular. And while I don't think we can hope to persuade Michael, for those interested in some of the reasons that go into the acceptance or rejection of Jaynes's theory, some analysis may be instructive, as Michael's blog demonstrates nearly all of the common themes seen in critiques of Jaynes's theory.
False Premises and BeliefsThe first barrier to understanding Jaynes's theory that can be seen in Michael's blog comes in the form of a false premise. Michael proposes that perhaps the proper interpretation of the bicameral auditory hallucinations may in fact be actual spiritual/divine communication. He writes:
Quote:
"But suppose there actually are paranormal or supernatural phenomena. Suppose there are spirits and what we might call gods - or God. Then the universality of such beliefs does not require complicated rationalistic explanations. If anything, it is the absence of such beliefs among the intelligentsia of the Western world today that raises questions. Rather than hunting for the gods in some forgotten corner of our nervous system, we might do better to seek out truths that "primitive" peoples knew – and which we have forgotten. ... What if the Muses did exist, and still do - and we have simply stopped listening?"
I call this a false premise based on mysticism. When we are exposed to a new idea, we inevitably look at it through the lens of our existing premises and beliefs, and if those premises are false (or likely false because they are unsupported by evidence), it interferes with our ability to properly evaluate new ideas that may in fact be valid.
We adopt many of our premises and beliefs at a young age, based not on evidence but on the authority of parents and teachers. This mixed bag of accurate and false beliefs becomes part of our worldview and we often fail to reevaluate these beliefs as adults. The only way to root out false beliefs is to methodically re-examine the evidence for all of our existing premises and beliefs. Beliefs not based on objective evidence must then be rejected.
The entire notion of gods and the speaking dead as auditory hallucinations is powerful evidence for Jaynes's theory. If one removes that evidence, by proposing
actual gods and spirits as an alternate explanation for the voices, of course that person is much less likely to be persuaded by Jaynes's theory. Instead of seeing Jaynes's theory as perhaps the best explanation for belief in the supernatural, they hold these pre-Enlightenment beliefs themselves, and would therefore likely feel hostility toward any theory that proposes a non-mystical explanation.
Put another way, one can't both objectively evaluate the evidence for bicameralism and fall prey to vestiges of bicameralism (in the form of mystical beliefs in gods and talking spirits) at the same time.
To underscore my point, Michael also states, "While I never embraced Jaynes' theory in its entirety, and in fact rejected a central part of it (the idea that the "voices of the gods" were hallucinations originating in the brain), I still found his idea about a shift in consciousness occurring in the second millennium BC to be compelling."
Like he says, this is a central part of the theory, and cannot be excised from it. For me, the evidence for bicameralism is overwhelming, and the evidence for talking spirits non-existent, but I won't expand on that here.
In some cases I have seen individuals with a belief in spirits persuaded by Jaynes, but they (unconsciously?) misread or misrepresent Jaynes’s views in this area, stating things like "the bicameral era was a time when people experienced actual spiritual communication," etc. In this way some enthusiasts of the theory also contribute to the myths and misconceptions about the theory. Which leads us to ...
Myths and MisconceptionsMichael writes, "Sinuhe's life story, which in no way fits Jaynes' depiction of a robotic, hypnotized, unconscious person..."
This is a misconception about Jaynes's theory, which I already addressed in a previous post. It likely stems from Jaynes's unfortunate use of the word "automaton." An explanation of this misconception has been posted the on the
Myths vs. Facts page for years, so I won't repeat it here.
The idea of bicameral people as "hypnotized zombies" is a science-fiction version of Jaynes's theory that won't be found in this or any other ancient text.
(Incidentally, I recently came into possession of an unpublished interview with Jaynes, and in it he also states that "... I exaggerate ... when I say that the Greeks … were automatons. That gives a wrong impression. All the things we do without consciousness they did. If you could step back into the bicameral world, it would be a while before you saw the difference. And you would very quickly, in conversation, but if you just stood off and watched, you would see people going around their daily lives, and children playing in the street, and you would say, ‘These people aren't different!’ Until you talked to them. And then it would be immediately apparent. ... I didn't want to give the impression that as you said awhile ago that suddenly woom! in comes consciousness, and everybody is conscious!" The full interview will be made available in the near future. In the meantime, I recommend reading the interviews and discussion in
The Julian Jaynes Collection.)
In addition to the false premise outlined above, the identification of this misconception goes a long way toward explaining the different viewpoints on the importance of this text with regard to Jaynes's theory.
Once we've dispelled the "hynotized zombie" misconception, what we're left with in this text of interest are some elements of introspection and the sense of a life on a timeline, or a sense of biographical memory. Viewed in isolation, it's easy to make more of the psychological similarities of a single text while ignoring the wide range of evidence that suggests the major differences. Why are there gods at all? Why is the pharaoh considered a god? Why is this person at times commanded by gods? What is his
ka if not a hallucinated voice? Moving to Mesopotamia, it is difficult to imagine a person psychologically similar to us living in a town where all of the leaders were gods, where the gods owned all the land, and the managers of the gods' estates relied on auditory hallucinations and visitation dreams to discern all of the major policy decisions. Where the ear rather than the brain was considered the seat of intelligence. ... This reflects a very different mentality.
It will only be through rigorous research (as outlined below), and not uninformed speculation, that we might elucidate and refine our understanding of when different features of consciousness emerge in this and other parts of the world.
With regards to Jaynes's dating of the development of a sense of history and biographical memory, my understanding is he based this primarily on the evidence from Greece. For this part of the world, I think the evidence holds up. For those interested I recommend Chester Starr's
The Awakening of the Greek Historical Spirit.
(My thoughts here are also supported by comments in the newly discovered interview. Jaynes: "I was trying to piece things together. And at the beginning I was overemphasizing … the Greek part of this story, which is the most accessible. Good reason to do that. By far the most accessible. ... But [the dating] could be much more complicated ... in many ways.")
The response section of Michael's blog also contains many myths and misconceptions. Examples include:
— "Anthropologists have found no trace of bicameral mind in any recorded, studied hunter-gatherer society." This is completely wrong ... see Lévy-Bruhl’s
Primitive Mentality, the specific references to Lévy-Bruhl and others in the Introduction to
The Julian Jaynes Collection, and the "The Mentality of Pre-Literate and Pre-Modern Peoples" section of this forum, for starters. Vestiges of bicameralism can be found in descriptions of nearly all pre-literate societies, but you have to look for it as obviously they have not been studied from the perspective of Jaynes’s theory.
— Bicameral man would have to be "without the capability of problem-solving intelligent responses to immediate situations. This would actually make him incapable of building the pyramids, creating sculpture and paintings, etc." This reflects a basic misunderstanding of Jaynes's definition of consciousness.
— Another post points to a settlement in England dating to 3180 BCE–2500 BCE called Skara Brae, but it's hard to see the point he's making with regard to Jaynes's theory, as Jaynes's discusses much older and much more sophisticated cultures in his book. I think this also reflects a basic misunderstanding of Jaynes’s theory.
These misconceptions suggest to me that the commenters likely have not read Jaynes's book, read it a very long time ago and have not read any of the follow up books and articles, or read it but nevertheless misunderstood Jaynes's definition of consciousness/overall theory.
Michael refers to these and other comments as "impressive arguments." All I can suggest would be to read or re-read all of the available material.
Binary or "Either/Or" ThinkingAnother post reflects what I call binary or "either/or" thinking: Jaynes's theory is either entirely correct or entirely incorrect. People often have a strong desire to have everything neatly settled one way or the other, and in the process they often rush to judgment and ignore complexities.
This is something often seen among skeptics of Jaynes's theory. They look for one piece of evidence that doesn't quite fit, or seems contradictory, and proclaim that based on this one piece of evidence, the entire theory must be wrong. As I mentioned in the previous post, they take a very narrow view and fail to see the pattern of the evidence.
In what I call comprehensive thinking, a theory can be entirely correct, partially correct, or entirely incorrect. Some of Jaynes’s hypotheses could be correct while others could be incorrect, or require modification (Jaynes’s neurological model for the bicameral mind, for example, has already been shown to be correct).
Using the subject of ancient texts as an example, a more appropriate response might be:
— Is dating and the translation accurate, or just speculation accepted as factual?
— How does this text fit into the pattern of evidence? For example, other texts from this culture, texts from different cultures from the same time period, as well as the larger pattern of evidence (see the
Summary of Evidence page).
— Does this evidence help refine the dates for the emergence of certain features of consciousness for this particular culture?
— Etc.
The Question of TranslationsWith regard to the very real problem of translations, Michael dismisses this out-of-hand, suggesting it is just a lame excuse used for any text that doesn’t support Jaynes’s theory. Here again he is ignoring the pattern of evidence — if a pattern of evidence strongly suggests a hypothesis, then evidence against it should be properly vetted, rather than throwing out the entire theory (i.e. binary thinking). As mentioned previously, even a cursory examination of the text suggests very different interpretations.
If one chooses to ignore this well documented problem because it would take a lot of time and effort to properly understand, of course there's nothing that can be done about it. Even translations of current languages are often controversial and problematic, and the issue becomes compounded the further back one goes.
With regard to ancient Egyptian texts, Simpson notes, "The problems of translation are considerable. ... The exact meaning of many words is still unknown and may remain so.
Frequently, a translation is little more than an informed guess. ... In journal articles or monographs it is not uncommon to find a sentence discussed at length, with an equal number of pages devoted to the same passage several years later by another scholar. The translator of a text of some length for the general reader cannot burden it with extensive notes and investigations" (emphasis mine).
This last point is important, as it gives readers a false sense of certainty in translations geared toward general audiences. Simpson continues "to opt consistently for smoother translation [as translators often do] results in a paraphrase and leads to an interpretive retelling. Yet to retain the artificiality of Egyptian phrasing in English makes for a clumsiness foreign to the Egyptian text itself.†(As a side note, the translation of this text in Simpson’s book is one of the more modernized/geared toward a general audience versions that I’ve read.)
These problems are only compounded when it comes to the translation of psychological words and themes. There is a strong bias toward the modernization of ancient texts, to impart modern psychology where none exists, and to view ancient cultures as psychologically identical to modern culture. Because of this bias, things that suggest a different mentality are ignored, minimized, or distorted (the presentist fallacy). This in part explains why other scholars didn't come to the ideas on bicameralism before Jaynes.
For those interested in understanding these issues further, I would suggest starting with James Cohn's
Minds of the Bible as an entry point, in which he discusses the problem of translation of mind-related words in ancient Hebrew.
I also recommend articles such as "Author, Audience, and Literary Purpose in Translating Ancient Texts" by Yoana Sirakova and “Persistent Problems Confronting Bible Translations†by Bruce Metzger, and books such as
And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning by Joel Hoffman,
Text and Translation: Theory and Methodology of Translation by C H. Gerzymisch-Arbogast,
Text Analysis in Translation by Christiane Nord,
Writings of Early Scholars in the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Rome,and Greece: Translating Ancient Scientific Texts edited by A. Imhausen and T. Pommerening and
Translation studies by Susan Bassnett, in addition to the references cited in my previous post.
With regards to this text, what is needed is real scholarship rather than a quick, off-the-cuff kind of superficial analysis. This is something few people take the time for. There is a strong tendency to over simplify complex subjects, make snap judgments about things we don't fully understand, and then move on to the next thing.
Real scholarship with regards to this text might include, but not be limited to:
1. A re-translation of the text by someone who understands the value of making as literal a translation as possible, with no overlaying of modern psychological concepts. (James Cohn has been doing a similar exercise for the translations of the Old Testament, and demonstrating the widespread problems of translation of the ancient Hebrew.)
2. This text as translated is put together from many different sources (see
http://carrington-arts.com/JJSinuhe/Dup ... exts2.html). These different sources need to be separated and translated and analyzed individually, rather than looking at synthesized translations intended for a general audience. Differences in the language of the different versions, dating from different times, could then be studied.
This type of thing takes a lot of work, but it's the kind of work that is ultimately necessary to determine how this text fits into the larger context of Jaynes's theory, and how it might contribute to our understanding of the timing of when different features of consciousness first appear in different cultures.
In summary:
1. False premises and beliefs often cloud an individual's ability to properly evaluate new ideas.
2. False premises and beliefs, such as the presentist fallacy and those stemming from mysticism, can often be identified in those skeptical of Jaynes's theory.
3. Critiques of Jaynes's theory often fall into three categories: 1. binary ("either/or") thinking, 2. a failure to view the pattern of evidence, and 3. myths and misconceptions based on misunderstandings of Jaynes's arguments.
4. The proper analysis of the psychological language of ancient texts is difficult and complex. Careful research of ancient texts, together with other lines of inquiry, will be necessary to further clarify of the transition from bicamerality and timing of the emergence of the different features of Jaynesian consciousness in different cultures.
With apologies in advance, I'm going to take a tip from Michael's blog and take the final word on this subject, at least for now. Michael and I will have to agree to disagree, others will come to their own conclusions, and hopefully some will benefit from this mini-tutorial on critical thinking about Jaynes's theory.
Just like evolution, the ideas are simply not going to resonate with everyone. Jaynes's theory relies on a very wide range of scholarship and for whatever reason connecting a large pattern of evidence is not always possible for everyone (e.g. why do so many people today hear voices? Why do many experience command hallucinations directing their behavior? Why do nearly half of children experience imaginary or hallucinated playmates? Why do auditory hallucinations as well as religious experience both involve the non-dominant temporal lobe? Etc., etc. Mainstream psychology as well as critics of Jaynes's theory have no answers).
Past experience has shown me that where major false premises exist that have no basis in empirical evidence (i.e. mysticism), people tend to dig in their heels, and the debate continues endlessly. Without any judgment on my part for those who feel otherwise, I personally can't engage in debate-for-debate's-sake, or endless-debate-as-a-form-of-social-interaction, at the expense of more important long term projects. Once mysticism/vestigial bicameralism enters into the conversation, for me it's a dead end.
At such time that real scholarship is done in this area, I look forward to continuing the discussion.