Julian Jaynes’ book has made an impression on a lot of great minds of the modern era. Even if his facts are fudged somewhat, his speculations have inspired researchers to probe depths they may not have considered were it not for “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of The Bicameral Mind”. It’s a tough read, one that I may not ever finish, but after Richard Dawkins endorsement of it, I couldn’t resist.

If you liked it, I recommend you also try Carl Sagan’s “Dragons of Eden”. Classic

It seems to me that there are at least these possibilities:

-Human beings have always been self aware (requires and infinite past, which is self contradictory).
-Human beings are self aware from the beginning of their existence (contrary to observable evidence- babies don’t appear to be self-aware at birth, and there might be reason to propose that humanity became self-aware at some point in history).
-Human beings become self aware at some point in their history (this could be either their shared history, as in humanity becoming self-aware, or else their personal history, as in an individual becoming self-aware).

Of the three, it seems to me that only the last is possible, or possibly knowable at least. It does however give rise to two problems so far as I can see. At the outset one might consider who it was that was first self-conscious, and then how it is they came to be so, having not been so previously. Specifically, one is left to explain the mechanism of self-consciousness.

To provide a fine-grained account of the mechanism that produces human self-awareness might be a huge job. However, perhaps we can agree that (in no particular order):

-in order to be self-aware human beings must be capable of abstraction (which is possible via application of the Law of Contradiction)
-that self-awareness requires that the concept of ‘identity’ must be abstracted
-in order to be self aware human beings must have concepts (self-consciousness is conceptual, after all)
-that concepts are language dependent (not on a particular language, but at least dependent on an abstract relation of identities).

If there is anything to the posits above, then self awareness is in fact language dependent. It is a huge leap to get from there to print- especially because what will stand here as ‘language’ is for more rudimentary than anything one would normally envision when defining the term. However, having not read the book (which I thoroughly intend to once I can track down copy) I wonder if Jaynes isn’t attempting to work out how self-consciousness becomes a shared experience.

It is one thing to say that “this ‘ape’, at this point in time, at this place, by this process became self-aware” but is surely something entirely different from saying “humankind, at this point in time, at this place, by this process became self-aware.” The real difficulty, is that if you are going to say that human beings ‘became’ self-conscious, you can’t really get away with saying one without implicitly positing the other.

You should head up a reading group. I’m in if you do, could lead to some interesting discussion.

I’ve found myself recently fascinated by neuroscience and the effects of meditation on the brain – reading all sorts of books about it. Is this book worth putting on the list or will it just make me cringe? Your take on it makes me think it’s the latter.

Seriously? The voice of God???