Critique 1 – Consciousness and The Self
Critique: “… it does appear fairly certain that the self is not a particularized or localized brain module, but rather an emergent property of the system as a whole. It doesn’t arise in computers because their system complexity is still actually orders of magnitude below ours. Jaynes is nevertheless arguing that you could have our level of complex mental functioning without the emergent property of self. Yet that’s contradicted by the evidence of our own example, wherein the complexity does produce a self. Now, you might say a single example is weak evidence. However, it’s actually seven billion examples. Complexity of mental functioning obviously varies greatly among humans; many don’t read philosophy magazines, but even those people have a sense of self – virtually every single one, some of them dumb as boards. This is powerful evidence that mental complexity above a certain level must induce consciousness, and rebuts Jaynes’s thesis that earlier people could have had one without the other.”
Response: Here Robinson advocates the view that introspective consciousness and the self (which he uses more or less interchangeably) are biologically based – something that many people tacitly believe despite the fact that there is no evidence to support it. He seems to be under the impression that all humans have a more or less identical, biologically based self-concept. He appears to be unaware that there is a large range of differences in the concept of the self among different populations. Consciousness and the self differ widely in, for example, various pre-literate societies, young children prior to full language acquisition, children who don’t acquire language until a late age (i.e. Helen Keller, Genie, etc.), and autistic savants (i.e. Kim Peek), to name a few. It is not simply “system complexity” that produces consciousness, but language and culture. For a discussion of the relevant evidence for a cultural-linguistic basis for consciousness and the self, please see Brian McVeigh, “The Self As Interiorized Social Relations” and John Limber, “Language and Consciousness,” in Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness; my Introduction and Jaynes’s “Imagination and the Dance of the Self” in The Julian Jaynes Collection; David Foulkes, Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness, and Philip Zelazo, “The Development of Consciousness,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness.
Learn about about Julian Jaynes’s theory by reading our latest book, Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind: Interviews with Leading Thinkers on Julian Jaynes’s Theory.