Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind (Book Review)
Dr. Louis Arnoux, Managing Director, Fourth Transition Ltd., October 2022.
I read Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind, edited by Marcel Kuijsten, great delight. It is such a great initiative to have put together all these interviews and structured them around Julian Jaynes’ four parts theorising. Although many still talk of hypotheses, I prefer to talk in terms of theory as I consider that, with the evidence material that has accumulated since the 1970s, we are way past mere hypotheses. The material in the Conversations is rich in detail and a great way to assist people still unfamiliar with Jaynes pioneering work to understand better each of his core elements of theorising. The interviewers show great patience and a depth of understanding of the issues in play, and the interviewees demonstrate the abundance of research that has taken place over the last four decades that corroborate and refine Jaynes’ early insights.
The interviews also highlight the intricate issues with epistemology in a domain that is inherently transdisciplinary, something where, in my experience, most researchers are ill prepared for. I find the interview with Edorado Casiglia re “free will” (e.g., page 214) a good example of the challenges. In my view, Casiglia does not seem to be aware of epistemological matters concerning this issue dating all the way back to Pyrrho (3rd century BCE Greece), Nagarjuna (around 2nd century CE) and many others all the way to people like my friend, Emeritus Prof of Economics, Serge Latouche, with his contribution to the epistemology of the social sciences (Latouche, S., 1984, Le Procès de la Science Sociale [Social Science Put on Trial as well as The Process of Social Science], Anthropos, Paris). As physicist, David Bohm used to stress, “In scientific enquiries a crucial step is to ask the right question. Indeed, each question contains presuppositions, largely implicit. If these presuppositions are wrong or confused, the question itself is wrong, in the sense that to try to answer it has no meaning. One has thus to inquire into the appropriateness of the question” (Bohm, David, 1980, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 28.). As physicist, Carlo Rovelli’s work on relational quantum mechanics highlights objects don’t exist independently of each other. That is, the emerging evidence is that we live in a world where all elements that we can possibly consider codependently arise with all the others and with the whole system. Unless this is considered matters of free will have no meaning.
The above example concerning free will illustrates the challenges in defining consciousness, that is, in coming to terms with the absence of an essential “I” that would be “conscious.” Another example of the challenges in coming to terms with consciousness is the interview with John F. Kihlstrom. Kihlstrom seems to have great difficulty with Jaynes’ “demand” for an account in terms of physiology. In turn he holds onto the need to ascribe “some level of consciousness to nonhuman animals”… Yet, even Freud saw the need for an anchoring in physiology. His comments illustrate well the epistemological difficulties in specifying rigorously what one talks about when one discusses consciousness.
Overall the series of interviews brings this core challenge to the fore. Jaynes’ pioneering work opened the way to come to consider consciousness as a technique, built on another technique, language, so a set of techniques learned socially by each infant, over many years, with many accidents that can possibly happen along the way and many possible variations that could and did evolve over millennia. This is a uniquely human, inherently fragile, set of cultural processes, repeated with each generation. It is a systemic dynamic that takes place without any essential, fixed and permanent “self.” Instead, there are persons, who learn the techniques and use them to live, make decisions and organize themselves socially. In other words, it seems that so many people, even researchers working on “consciousness” and the neurosciences, have difficulties understanding that humankind, Homo sapiens, evolved biologically/genetically to a point where it evolves primarily technologically/culturally (in the anthropological sense of culture as techné), and does so very rapidly in certain circumstances, in the span of a generation or two. Languages and tongues are technologies and so is consciousness.
We are greatly indebted to Julian Jaynes’ insights in these matters, and to Marcel Kuijsten for these interviews that demonstrate so well how alive, rich, and extensive is the field opened up by Jaynes. The book is also timely in that there are mounting indications that, after some 3,000 years, consciousness and the modern mind are under increasing pressure and very much likely to evolve rather rapidly in response to the huge energy, climate, ecological, and social challenges of our times. A solid and rigorous grounding in consciousness matters can only help us in facing and addressing those existential challenges.