Critique 13 – Consciousness As Biological
Critique: “Again, while Jaynes theorizes that it was triggered by a spate of unusual stresses 3000 years ago, it was always a terrible struggle for early humans to stay alive. Creatures either evolve traits to cope with their environments or die out. Intelligence and consciousness are useful adaptations, evolved to at least some degree in many creatures; a sense of self helps because it makes the animal care what happens to it, and act accordingly. Homo Sapiens is simply the most extreme example of these adaptations. It seems likely that we evolved our especially big and introspective brains to facilitate the complex social cooperation that figured so large in survival for our early forbears. The environmental pressures propelling this uniquely extreme fluke of evolution must have been correspondingly extreme, for us creatures bereft of other assets. In other words, we got our minds to cope with a terribly hostile, danger-filled, stressful environment – long, long before 1000 BC.”
Response: This again is just a statement of belief, unsupported by evidence. Robinson again is overemphasizing the role of consciousness, or confusing Jaynes’s definition of consciousness with more vague, broad definitions (i.e. sense perception, all learning, etc.). There is simply no evidence to support Robinson’s belief that introspection is tens or hundreds of thousands of years old. Regardless of survival pressures, language had to evolve to a certain level of complexity to allow for the creation of a mind-space – a metaphorically-based analog of the physical world. For the vast differences between consciousness as described by Jaynes, Dennett, Carruthers, Vygotsky, and others – which is linguistically based and uniquely human – vs. non-linguistic animal cognition, see Peter Carruthers, Language, Thought and Consciousness, Jose Luis Bermudez, Ch. 9, “The Limits of Thinking Without Words,” in Thinking without Words, Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language, Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds, etc.
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.