Julian Jaynes, the Noosphere, Altered States and Consciousness Evolution

Paul Evans, paper presented at The Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies, Charleston, WV, June 2013.

Abstract: Some contemporary neurologists and philosophers have hypothesized that consciousness is an emergent phenomena related to underlying neurophysiology, biochemistry and perhaps even electromagnetic radiation. Other scientists and researchers have explored the origins of consciousness and have focused attention on its evolutionary unfolding from single cell organisms to non-human animals and finally to modern humans. This evolutionary account also suggests an emergence of consciousness but to different degrees among living things dependent perhaps upon natural selection, environmental, nutritional, and genetic or even epigenetic factors.

This presentation examines some of the more subtle epigenetic “extensions” of human consciousness. The first extension is that modern consciousness was developed and refined out of language (Jaynes, 1976). Here higher order consciousness is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. That modern consciousness is developed out of language means that critical biological/ neurophysiological scaffolding was necessary for language or higher order consciousness to occur and this platform combined with genetic or epigenetic factors hastened the process.

In this presentation it is further argued that humankind is currently undergoing the second major shift in consciousness evolution. This extension will come about as the result of escalating interaction with machines and developments in biotechnology and genetics that will create a new kind of mentality even more significant than that created through human use of language.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1955) was perhaps the first to discuss the acceleration of technological progress to a Singularity in which human intelligence will become super-intelligence with its spread into the universe and its amplification into a cosmic-like consciousness. In fact, it was Teilhard de Chardin who was first to provide us with the image of the noosphere — a bubble of human thought that envelopes the earth like a virtual atmosphere. His work advocated both biotechnologies (e.g., genetic engineering) and artificial intelligence technologies. He also envisioned the emergence of a global computation-communication system.