Critique 12 – Transition from Bicameral Mentality to Consciousness
Critique: “And even his discussion of historical upheavals in his own region of concern is cursory. He does cite some particulars, like the volcanic explosion of Thera (Santorini). Yes, that must have been devastating. Likewise wars and invasions. But life in ancient times was pervasively tumultuous, difficult, and much more violent than we are accustomed to. Jaynes fails to make a case that there was something so uniquely unsettling about the times around 1000 BC that it wrenched human minds into a whole new functionality. Jaynes asserts that introspective consciousness is something we learned at that juncture; thus it was not even biologically evolved. He’s probably forced into this position because it’s implausible that biological evolution could have happened so fast (even with a “punctuated equilibrium” scenario). But it makes far more sense to see our consciousness as a biological adaptation occurring far earlier.”
Response: Jaynes derived his timing for the transition from bicamerality to introspective consciousness not based primarily on the pressures that would have precipitated this transition but on the evidence that this is when introspective consciousness emerged. This evidence includes: the “cognitive explosion” of Greek philosophy; the first emergence of introspective words and language; the emergence of historical thought (see Chester Starr, The Awakening of the Greek Historical Spirit); the Axial Age and the merging of many gods into the concept of one god (see Bellah, The Axial Age and Its Consequences); visitation or bicameral dreams transitioning to modern, conscious dreams (see Ch. 20, The Julian Jaynes Collection; E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and The Irrational; and William Vernon Harris, Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity); the emergence of sexual fantasy (see Ch. 14 of The Julian Jaynes Collection); etc. If introspective consciousness is biologically based (as Robinson suggests), what can account for the major psychological transition between 1200 – 1000 BC? Things like dreams and sexual fantasy would have remained unchanged, and historical, philosophical, and scientific thought should have emerged tens of thousands of years ago.
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.