Fact Checking Erik Hoel’s “The World behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science”
By Brian J. McVeigh
In the second chapter of The World behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science, Erik Hoel briefly treats the historical development of what he calls the “intrinsic perspective” (mental experiences). In doing so he brings up the contributions of Julian Jaynes but dismisses his theories. Whatever value the arguments of Hoel’s book might have, he greatly distorts and misrepresents the Jaynesian perspective.
Let’s begin with the most egregious example. Hoel writes that Jaynes believed that “consciousness itself came about via the thickening of the communication between the two hemispheres” (p. 9). Even a perfunctory perusal of Jaynes’s book demonstrates that he argued that the appearance of consciousness was not due to neuroanatomical changes but was instead a language-based, sociocultural construction (in the aforementioned sentence Jaynes was merely describing a neural correlative operation of consciousness, not explaining it). That Hoel greatly misinterprets Jaynes’s cultural-historical explanation of consciousness is evident in how he writes that the sudden emergence of consciousness is “certainly untrue, especially given everything we know about the biology of the brain and evolution” (p. 10). Moreover, Hoel writes that while there have been some minor changes to the “human genome in the past several thousand years” (p. 10), the rapid emergence of consciousness is not one of them. Obviously Hoel misses Jaynes’s key point: Consciousness resulted from culture, not bioevolutionary forces.
A second problem is that Hoel seems to think that Jaynes only based his arguments on “careful textual analysis” (p. 9). This is a serious misreading, as Jaynes grounded his case on a sophisticated theoretical integration of present-day hallucinations, hypnosis, spirit possession, and other anomalous psychological behavior (see McVeigh, Spirits, Selves, and Subjectivity in a Japanese New Religion: The Cultural Psychology of Belief in Sūkyō Mahikari, 1997).
A third problem is that Hoel misses the nuances of Jaynes’s arguments. The latter never denied that the ancients had complex social relations (“social self”) (pp. 15–16). And examples Hoel presents as evidence of consciousness are suspect, e.g., his discussion of Egyptian “autobiographies” stretches the definition of this term to the breaking point (pp. 15–16) (see McVeigh’s The Psychology of Egypt: Reconstructing a Lost Mentality, in press).
Hoel zeroes in on two criticisms shared by critics of Jaynes. The first is that Jaynes supposedly marshals no “actual evidence that people were not conscious prior to the Homeric age” (p. 10). If Hoel wrote how he himself defines “evidence of consciousness” it would be easier to counter this charge. But given the wealth of data that Jaynes presents, this is a striking claim. The second alleged failing is commonly heard and easily dismissed: Jaynes was highlighting descriptions of mental states, not their existence per se. In other words, Jaynes “conflated having a mind” with the “ability to describe minds” (p. 18) (note here how Hoel is conflating “mind” with consciousness, two very different phenomena). Hoel relies on Ned Block’s 1977 review, in which he contended that Jaynes confused the “nature of people’s thought processes” with the “nature of their theories of their thought processes” (https://philpapers.org/archive/BLOROJ-2.pdf). The key point here is that whether a culture possesses a term for “consciousness” is beside the point; the real issue is whether or not a culture has a lexicon dedicated to the expression of subjective experiences. Jaynes addresses the “use/mention error” in the 1990 Afterword of his book, pointing out that, in many instances, a concept and the thing itself are identical. The philosopher Daniel Dennett makes the same point in “Julian Jaynes’ Software Archeology” (Canadian Psychology, 1986, 27:149–154). Philosophy professor Jan Sleutels, in his “Greek Zombies: On the Alleged Absurdity of Substantially Unconscious Greek Minds” (Marcel Kuijsten, ed., Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes’s Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited, 2006), also counters this argument. (We should note that Sleutels also refutes Block’s other criticisms.)
Hoel does acknowledge that ancient peoples lacked sophisticated psychological terms; but he appears to view this as a deficit in vocabulary, not one of a different mentality: The ancients “just gave [conscious] interiority short thrift” (p. 9). As languages evolved, the “richness of access consciousness began to approach the richness of phenomenal consciousness” [“intrinsic perspective”] (p. 18). However, we need to ask why in so many geographic locations — and for 15 to 25 centuries in some places — the extant textual records do not evidence clear-cut mental words (see McVeigh, The Psychology of the Bible: Explaining Divine Voices and Visions, 2020; The “Other Psychology” of Julian Jaynes: Ancient Languages, Sacred Visions, and Forgotten Mentalities, 2017; How Religion Evolved: The Living Dead, Talking Idols, and Mesmerizing Monuments, 2016). Moreover, the issues under discussion are not just linguistic; Hoel neglects the odd absence of concepts that a conscious people would write about, i.e., philosophical inquiries about the nature of the soul, time, and free will, etc. He is also unphased by the remarkably intensive religiosity of archaic civilizations, in which the very existence of supernatural entities was not questioned.
A general weakness with Hoel’s writing is that he lacks a clear and consistent definition of consciousness. He uses this word loosely, so the reader is not always sure if he means Jaynesian consciousness or psychological processes in general — a vital point for any debate about a Jaynesian analysis. And though it might seem nitpicking, Hoel writes that “early consciousness had taken the form of essentially auditory hallucinations” (p. 9); here Hoel is describing bicameral mentality, not “early consciousness” — as Jaynes denied that the ancients were conscious (as Jaynes carefully defines the term).
A final problem is how Hoel neglects to at least acknowledge the accumulating research bolstering the Jaynesian perspective, beginning with the Julian Jaynes Society (the Society’s “Myths vs. Facts” is particularly useful). Relevant works include Marcel’s Kuijsten’s four edited volumes that present not only other material by Jaynes, but original research, as well as responses to Jaynes’s critics. See: Conversation on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind: Interviews with Leading Thinkers on Julian Jaynes’s Theory (2022), Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind: The Theories of Julian Jaynes (2016), The Julian Jaynes Collection (2012), Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes’s Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited (2006). Other works include the late Rabbi James Cohn’s The Minds of the Bible: Speculations on the Cultural Evolution of Human Consciousness (2013) and this writer’s The History of Japanese Psychology: Global Perspectives, 1875–1950 (2016); Discussions with Julian Jaynes: The Nature of Consciousness and the Vagaries of Psychology (2016); A Psychohistory of Metaphors: Envisioning Time, Space, and Self through the Centuries (2016); and The Self-Healing Mind: Harnessing the Active Ingredients of Psychotherapy (2022).
Learn more about Julian Jaynes’s theory by joining the Julian Jaynes Society and reading our books.
