Julian Jaynes Society Discussion Forum: Exploring Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind Theory since 1997

Page 85 in the book: "[The bicameral man facing a brand-new situation] would have to wait for his bicameral voice which with the stored-up admonitory wisdom of his life would tell him non-consciously what to do."

Is the right hemisphere wise? How can it judge more complex situations than the left?

The basic idea here is that the right hemisphere is specialized for seeing the "big picture" while the left is specialized to focus on details. Jaynes talks about things like Kohs's block test but there is a great deal of more evidence to support this idea that has emerged since Jaynes's book. So the right hemisphere would have been better at directing behavior and action while the left obediently followed.

I see. Maybe the right brain was/is more holistic while the left was/is more analytic-reductionistic. It could explain the corresponding modern dialectics. But I still wonder: how could the right brain have been so wise as described? How could the adolescent uneducated priestesses of Delphi have had right brain hemispheres that out-classed the left brain of Socrates himself? And how cuold the sibyllas, shamans and prophets possess information that the conscious minds of those whom the questions concerned didn't have access to?
Jaynes exemplifies the voices of the muses with a voice of his own hearing: "put the self in the experienced" or something like that. Was it the right brain that unconsciously had done some very insightful thinking for Julian and then, at the right moment, tells him this key phrase?
Jaynes performed the Herculean task of bringing life to the oracles but he didn't totally demystify them, or what do you think?

I think in the meantime that our subconscious mind is indeed "wiser" than our conscious mind.
All inventions, all works of art are developed in our subconscious mind. Without those "gods" there would be no creative process.

The more I read and ponder, the more I suspect that the Right Brain (RB) is processing--receiving and transmitting as well--on a faster (but resonant, i.e., harmonically related) frequency in relation to the Left Brain (LB). This finer RB frequency could actually have access to information that treats TIMESPACE NONLINEARLY--thus the information from biological ancestors and from other individuals in geographically remote timespace locations (the Maori Dreamtime, the assisting or hampering gods, spirits and angels, the "channeling" sources, the "Astral Plane" communication, the Jungian Archetypal Mind, the energetic auras around matter). I suspect that this bandwidth of frequency is an older form of consciousness that became "veiled" once we discovered our INTELLECTS and began to opt for "figuring things out" using linear reason and causality--i.e., timespace. This becomes the "fall from grace" in Judaeo-Christian-Muslim tradition (I've been re-reading Milton's Paradise Lost among other things, as well as Blake and Giordano Bruno), and also, in Jungian terms, embodies the "separation from the Mother", especially in that this era of J-consciousness embodies (most notably in the beginnings of Greek philosophy) an embarkation of discovery and exploration of INDIVIDUALITY--something that the Western cultures specialize in, to the amusement and exasperation of traditional Easterners and especially indigenous societies (who still maintain tenuous but very real hold on, and practice of, ancestral supratemporal communication). I live in New Mexico where the juxtaposition of societies and cultures in various stages of separation from the RB is clearer and easier to see--for those who are looking--than in most other places, being less densely populated and so distinctly defined (Anglo-European, Hispanic, Pueblo).

The more I read and ponder, the more I suspect that the Right Brain (RB) is processing--receiving and transmitting as well--on a faster (but resonant, i.e., harmonically related) frequency in relation to the Left Brain (LB). This finer RB frequency could actually have access to information that treats TIMESPACE NONLINEARLY--thus the information from biological ancestors and from other individuals in geographically remote timespace locations (the Maori Dreamtime, the assisting or hampering gods, spirits and angels, the "channeling" sources, the "Astral Plane" communication, the Jungian Archetypal Mind, the energetic auras around matter). I suspect that this bandwidth of frequency is an older form of consciousness that became "veiled" once we discovered our INTELLECTS and began to opt for "figuring things out" using linear reason and causality--i.e., timespace. This becomes the "fall from grace" in Judaeo-Christian-Muslim tradition (I've been re-reading Milton's Paradise Lost among other things, as well as Blake and Giordano Bruno), and also, in Jungian terms, embodies the "separation from the Mother", especially in that this era of J-consciousness embodies (most notably in the beginnings of Greek philosophy) an embarkation of discovery and exploration of INDIVIDUALITY--something that the Western cultures specialize in, to the amusement and exasperation of traditional Easterners and especially indigenous societies (who still maintain tenuous but very real hold on, and practice of, ancestral supratemporal communication). I live in New Mexico where the juxtaposition of societies and cultures in various stages of separation from the RB is clearer and easier to see--for those who are looking--than most other places, being less densely populated and so distinctly defined (Anglo-European, Hispanic, Pueblo).

But how could the oracles help with difficult decisions when they didn't have all the facts?

Aesthetician: I think you confuse radiotechnology with neurophysiology, among other things.

There are ways things can be true even when they are not measurable in the Left-Brain sense (see Gregory Bateson--originally a rigorously-trained natural scientist and logician--on the definitions of Mind). Since the LB can only deal with linear "reasoning" forms of knowledge it cannot access those other, older RB forms of knowing directly, but must seek to know them through nonjudgmental observation. EMOTION is the key to them which is still accessible to LB-oriented "modern" people with some J-consciousness (and most LB-based modern humans, especially males, dismiss emotional information as irrelevant and/or untrue because it lacks linear logic, yes?). But emotional energy has its own logic which is NONlinear but logical--on its own terms, i.e., in its own bandwidth of operation--nonetheless. The LB can come to understand and actually be helped by RB stuff ONLY if it rids itself of the illusion of having access to the "only" kind of "real truth". Anybody who has taken psychedelics knows this very well, although many choose to forget or dismiss it as soon as they "come down", since they can attribute this kind of knowing to the chemical rather than to their own much fuller awareness having been briefly revealed to LB consciousness.

Aesthetician: As you understand I share your interest in the hidden potential of our minds, and am longing to discuss how one can explore them. Allthough I would like to converse on these matters without having to use notions such as "measurable" (This goes back to the old distinction between quality and quantity. Once color, smell and taste were considered non-measurable. A refurbished notion along this twofoldedness is the term "qualia". All the dualisms presupposes some immaterial substance, which is in itself a contradiction. Hence dualism is a meaningless assumption.). I also don't want to have to deal with a vaguely defined "linear" (Is this supposed to be in contrast to non-linear, as in chaos theory or what?) Furthermore the idea of "direct knowledge" seems to me to contradict causality and I don't think I'm "nonjudgemental" enough to consume this. Emotional information is interesting but "emotional energy", is that another insubstantial immeasurable substance? Radio terms such as "bandwidth" in this discussion I also consider, as I mentioned earlier, misplaced. I would also prefer to lead the discourse without alienating with groups ("those who choose to forget or dismiss").
It is partly the absence of all these common misunderstandings, dualisms and defensive behaviour that makes Jaynes' book so attractive to me.