Monthly Archives: June 2010

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of The Bicameral Mind

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I have never wanted to recommend so wholeheartedly a book that I’ve felt was so preposterous. And I mean that most un-ironically. Is there a book anywhere so deeply weird and fascinating as this one?

In short, The Origin of Consciousness suggests that until well after the invention of writing mankind was not conscious. This is crazy. A totally crazy idea. Instead of what we think of as conscious thought—that is, the you inside of you that’s aware of itself and aware of you thinking—man’s mind was bicameral, or made up of two distinct separate parts. Two non-conscious selves, one that accepted orders and one that gave orders.

Oh, and the order-giver spoke in the voice of god.

Or rather, a cacophony of gods. And that’s just the beginning. It gets crazier from there. I wish I could graph just how crazy it gets as the whole history of western civilization is completely reinterpreted based on this insane idea but when the vertical gets too high graphs stop making sense.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything so good. Like me, you’ll probably think it’s totally crazy—and fascinating. Check out the Julian Jaynes Society for an introduction.

I’m growing a soul patch

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I’m growing a soul patch. Somehow this has not stopped or reverted the aging process. Ironically, it may actually be accelerating it. My initial observations suggest that this is the result of a conflict with my graying hair. More data is required.

Check out Robert J. Sawyer’s Wake

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Have you read Robert J. Sawyer’s Wake yet? It’s one of those set-in-the-day-after-tomorrow idea-thrillers that I’m starting to wish I’d really read more of. The kind of book where blogging, open-source competitors to Google, and the infrastructure of the web are the laser beams and starships.

And because it’s shamelessly Canadian you get paragraphs name-checking Stephen Wolfram immediately followed (literally—in the next paragraph) by kids playing street hockey yelling “Car!”

I don’t normally recommend books in a series (Wake is the first volume in a WWW series—all the titles start with W) but Wake is a fun diversion that also points to some really, really, neat current ideas about consciousness, information, and what it means to be human. Check it out.