Consciousness and Time
Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2023 9:37 pm
Did Julian Jaynes ever relate his theory to the way different societies have perceived time (as either cyclical/closed or linear/open)?
It seems there are strong parallels, since the gradual change from a “closed” timeline to an “open” one overlaps with what Jaynes considered to be the bicameral era.
Biologically, humans (like most other animals) seem to be hardwired to view time as cyclical. We have circadian rhythms, daily and seasonal patterns of behavior, and the cross-generational cycle of birth, aging, procreation and death. The lives of the earliest humans would mainly have been governed by this “circle of life”, like in that Lion King song. In this world, there is no possibility of free will, social progress, or decline: everything has always happened, and will continue on, the same way. There is nothing new under the Sun.
The idea of a open (not necessarily cyclical) timeline could have been an adaptation to rapid social or environmental changes, which meant the world no longer seemed to follow predictable cycles anymore. Sound familiar? It seems like “open time” and Jaynesian consciousness go hand in hand.
Religious and secular meta-narratives could then be interpreted as an attempt to consciously “re-close” the timeline. This can be literal, as in the case of the Dharmic religions, which mostly hold that time is cyclical, just that the repeat interval is astronomically long so that it doesn’t seem that way to us. This view of time is usually pessimistic; the world is in a state of decay, but will be miraculously renewed and restored at the end of the current cycle (only for everything to start decaying once again). Friedrich Nietzsche advanced a similar view with his theory of eternal return.
Westerners have tended to prefer more metaphorical ways of “re-closing” the timeline: Christian eschatology, Whig historiography, Marxism, and transhumanism (aka the Singularity) all fall into this category. They all posit an “end” toward which history is inexorably being drawn. Typically, this “end” is portrayed optimistically, hence there is no need for another cycle to begin after the current one.
All of these meta-narratives fill a psychological void, in that they seem to be preferable to the idea of time and history being “aimless” and random, which is where one would arrive after taking the idea of the “open” timeline to its extreme.
It seems there are strong parallels, since the gradual change from a “closed” timeline to an “open” one overlaps with what Jaynes considered to be the bicameral era.
Biologically, humans (like most other animals) seem to be hardwired to view time as cyclical. We have circadian rhythms, daily and seasonal patterns of behavior, and the cross-generational cycle of birth, aging, procreation and death. The lives of the earliest humans would mainly have been governed by this “circle of life”, like in that Lion King song. In this world, there is no possibility of free will, social progress, or decline: everything has always happened, and will continue on, the same way. There is nothing new under the Sun.
The idea of a open (not necessarily cyclical) timeline could have been an adaptation to rapid social or environmental changes, which meant the world no longer seemed to follow predictable cycles anymore. Sound familiar? It seems like “open time” and Jaynesian consciousness go hand in hand.
Religious and secular meta-narratives could then be interpreted as an attempt to consciously “re-close” the timeline. This can be literal, as in the case of the Dharmic religions, which mostly hold that time is cyclical, just that the repeat interval is astronomically long so that it doesn’t seem that way to us. This view of time is usually pessimistic; the world is in a state of decay, but will be miraculously renewed and restored at the end of the current cycle (only for everything to start decaying once again). Friedrich Nietzsche advanced a similar view with his theory of eternal return.
Westerners have tended to prefer more metaphorical ways of “re-closing” the timeline: Christian eschatology, Whig historiography, Marxism, and transhumanism (aka the Singularity) all fall into this category. They all posit an “end” toward which history is inexorably being drawn. Typically, this “end” is portrayed optimistically, hence there is no need for another cycle to begin after the current one.
All of these meta-narratives fill a psychological void, in that they seem to be preferable to the idea of time and history being “aimless” and random, which is where one would arrive after taking the idea of the “open” timeline to its extreme.