Further:
I have just copied the below from an SIS CD. I'm sure they won't mind.
From: SIS Internet Digest 1998:1 (June 1998) Home | Issue Contents
Jaynes anyone?
From: Amy
Date:
Clark asks:
What about the "Mankind in Amnesia" idea that ancient disasters may still be motivating factors in the modern human psyche?
Amy adds:
I want to take this question one step further. First, I admit I haven't read Jaynes, so perhaps the answer is obvious to those who did. That said, I do know that a catastrophic viewpoint changes practically every aspect of human understanding. So the question I have to ask is whether Jaynes has taken catastrophics into account in his analysis of the human psyche.
In other words, Jaynes' theory of bicamerality is based on a body of evidence, plus his viewpoint/assumptions, which I would guess are uniformist. If the viewpoint is changed to catastrophic, how does this affect his conclusions?
In other words, when God said (poorly paraphrased) this is the land I have promised unto you--go into it and kill everything alive, I suspect that the bicameral interpretation and the catastophic interpretation will be different.
From: Clark
Date: Sun, 24 May 1998 12:26:42 -0400
Jaynes claims that catastrophes were a major causative factor in the emergence of consciousness. In "The Origin of Consciousness..." chapt. 3, he writes: "The loosening of the (bicameral) man-god partnership perhaps by (commercial) trade and certainly by writing was the background of what happened. But the immediate and precipitate cause of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, of the wedge of consciousness between god and man, between hallucinated voice and automaton action, was that in social chaos the gods could not tell you what to do...
"The historical context of all this was enormous. The second millennium B.C. was heavy laden with profound and irreversible changes. Vast geological catastrophes occurred. Civilizations perished. Half the world's population became refugees. And wars, previously sporadic, came with hastening and ferocious frequency as this important millennium hunched itself sickly into its dark and bloody close."
Amy:
In other words, Jaynes' theory of bicamerality is based on a body of evidence, plus his viewpoint/assumptions, which I would guess are uniformist. If the viewpoint is changed to catastrophic, how does this affect his conclusions?
Clark:
Jaynes was always nervous about being identified with Velikovskian interpretations of the catastrophes mentioned above. In my view, however, and in the view of many others, Jaynes was a catastrophist, and a brilliant one.
From: Henry Zecher
Date: Sun, 24 May 1998 14:27:21 -0400
Re: Mankind in Amnesia
Velikovsky's theory that ancient catastrophes were still driving factors in modern behavior was his collective amnesia theory. This collective amnesia, by which we forget the traumas of the past and are therefore driven by subconscious reactions, is based on his idea that there is -- throughout the human race -- a collective subconscious mind.
This concept he got from Carl Jung who, traveling around the world, saw common human characteristics and behavior modes from one culture to another. Rather than simply conclude that all humans are basically alike or similar, Jung -- heavily influenced by Hinduism -- postulated the collective subconscious mind. A psychologist friend of mine pointed out the link to Hinduism and told me that, if I read up on Hinduism, I would understand Carl Jung. He was right.
For my money, the entire concept of a collective subconsious mind, and collective amnesia, is nothing more than seeking complicated, exotic explanations for the purely simple.
From: Ted Holden
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 10:34:27 -0400
I'm beginning to get the impression that, if I had to find out as much as I possibly could about the origins and history of the human race by reading just two books, those two books would have to be Worlds in Collision, and Julian Jaynes' "Origins of Consciousness".
The term bicameral means two-chambered. The main center of the human brain for speech is called the Wernecke area, on the left side of the brain. There is a totally analogous area on the right side and a bridge crossover between them and, for the most part, this right-side analog to the Wernecke area appears to serve no purpose, sort of like the human appendix. Nonetheless, when this right-side Wernecke-analog area is stimulated with electric probes, as is sometimes done in experiments with epileptics, the people usually claim to be hearing voices, as real as if you or I were speaking to them.
Such "auditory hallucinations" are common amongst schizophrenics and you occasionally read about them in cases such as those of Joanne of Arc or David Berkowicz (Son of Sam), but they are rare, and such stories do not usually have happy endings (getting burned at the stake is not a happy ending...). Jaynes, however, claims that such auditory hallucinations were perfectly normal just three thousand years ago and that, in fact, the entire manner in which men used their brains and minds was then totally different from the way in which we use them now, and that the mechanism involved this right-side analog to the Wernecke area of the brain.
He uses terms like "bicameral mind", "bicameral societies", "bicameral paradigm" etc. He assumes a perfectly normal evolutionary model. He assumes that the human race evolved into this bicameral state, that the bicameral societies were reasonably functional, and that we then evolved out of that state, for complex reasons. He notes that vestiges of the bicameral paradigm, including things like prophecy, idolatry, hypnotism, and schizophrenia, still remain.
I view the bicameral societies as having been mostly if not entirely disfunctional, and the idea of evolving into the bicameral state as impossible for two reasons, one being the known impossibility of evolving ANY complex function, the other the illogic of requiring natural selection or anything like that to cause something to evolve INTO a disfunctional state.
Jaynes does not concern himself much with the antediluvian world, but rather concentrates on a period of time from some dawn of recorded history until the time of the old sections of the Illiad. My own take on all of this, as most are familiar with, is that the kind of capability Jaynes describes was part and parcel of the normal mode of antediluvian communications.
It is interesting to note that for all of the admonitions against idolatry in the OT, such admonitions pretty much begin with the books of Moses and there is no mention of idolatry at all prior to the flood, despite the Lord supposedly being sufficiently bent out of shape to wipe the entire planet at that time; merely a few vague references to "violence" and "corruption".
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