Critique 9 – Non-Conscious Decision Making
Critique: “How non-material thoughts translate into physical actions has also preoccupied philosophers. But when you decide to raise your arm, there’s at least a physical interconnection between your brain neurons and the nervous system transmitting signals to muscles. Notice that Jaynes’s bicameral model lacks that interconnection between the god voices, supposedly directing action, and the muscles carrying it out. There’d have to be an intermediary – brain neurons that hear the god voice and decide to obey it, transmitting the command to the muscles. But what’s really the difference between a god voice instantiating action, via a decision to obey it, and a thought doing essentially the same thing? Either way, there’s a decision. And who is the decider? It still has to be a self, even if a self that’s heeding god voices. Jaynes thus ultimately fails to banish the self after all. In his model, you’d still have had one, only you didn’t know it. That’s even more implausible than the idea of not having it at all. I think people would have been smart enough to figure it out pretty fast.”
Response: Here Robinson seems to fall prey to the fallacy that consciousness makes up all mentality. Jaynes uses the example of a flashlight in a dark room to illustrate this point: whereever the flashlight points, it sees light, so assumes the entire room is lit. Similarly, we have the illusion that consciousness is involved in everything, while in reality it is only a very small portion of our mentality. The majority of behavior, then and now, is habitual and driven by the unconscious. Jaynes explains that consciousness actually gets in the way of most physical actions. On this point see also Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size.
In bicameralism, there is a god-side (associated with the right hemisphere) and a man-side (associated with the left hemisphere), and neither part is conscious. A person can respond to a command hallucination without introspection in the same way that an animal can respond to stimuli without introspection, or a person today can respond to an unconsious impulse without introspection, or a hypnotized person can respond to a suggestion without introspection. The evidence from split-brain research suggests that much of our decision making is unconscious, with consciousness often rationalizing behavior after the fact.
The evidence Jaynes describes suggests that people did not attribute bicameral hallucinations to themselves, but to their chief, king, or the gods. Similarly, modern voice hearers, although they have learned consciousness and developed a self, also typically do not attribute their voices to themselves, but to external sources – often contemporary religious and political leaders. See Stevens and Graham When Self Consciousness Breaks: Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts and the literature on command hallucinations. On the complex subject of non-conscious decision making and action outside of awareness, I recommend reviewing the split-brain research by Gazzaniga and Bogen in Robert Ornstein, The Nature of Human Consciousness: A Book of Readings and Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size.
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.