This weblog is an attempt at expressing the cosmogony that has formed in my mind, to date. As I approach my 50th year, I thought I’d humbly begin the experience of laying out, in written English, my grasp of what was, what is, and what I project will be.
But first, let’s address consciousness. If we’re giving of one another and attempting to communicate complex realities/ideas, then yeah—we’z gots to get on the same page about how we put things down and how we pick them up. Let’s get our code sets straight…
My first study of consciousness was formal. It was during a class I enrolled in at Glendale Community College in California during my senior year at high school. Psychology 101. Freud. Jung. Erickson. Skinner. Pavolov. Piaget. You know the crowd…
I recall the first moment I was engaged in the lectures. The professor was discussing objectivity and subjectivity and during the discussion, a fine young student posited some notion. I don’t remember what it was, but the response from the educator—dang! It was something to the effect of “What if I told you people living as early as the Bronze Age may not have had awareness of their awareness of the world?”
Hold it.
No awareness of awareness? No internal dialogue? No mind-space to introspect? How is that possible? How does thinking even work if you aren’t aware of your ability to be aware?
I learned then of bicameralism—the idea that 3,000 to 4,000 year ago, our cognitive functions were divvied up in the mind much more so then they are today. That inner dialogue that we modern humans experience between “me” and “I” was partially experienced as a dialogue between the person and a disembodied voice—an “I” / “thou” relationship.
That’s right. That voice inside that most of us recognize as our own was experienced then as the voice of another. It may read crazy but it was like the person would engage in organization or planning without being conscious of such planning or organization. Once that process was established (maybe in a second or two, maybe over a longer period), the part of the mind that was doing the organizing and planning would then let the person in on what was about to go down: and the person would then carry out those instructions. You would be standing there staring at a pile of bricks somewhere in Mycenaean Greece. Then, a voice would tell you to start placing the bricks flatly at first in a square formation some twenty steps from the trees, etc. You would pretend to consider the instructions critically at first but almost always will follow through because as far as you were concerned, it was the village god that was commanding you to construct the Great Temple or the spirits of your forefathers or the command of Tiamat or Anu or Shamash or, (getting closer to the god of Abraham), Ellil—the younger Mesopotamian god that transmogrified between civilizations, reformed as YHWH in the Levant, better known as Jehovah…but I digress.
Sometimes, these hallucinations would manifest with a visual aura or even as a deceased family member or powerful chieftain or something.
To put it in more physical terms, when one lobe of the brain is exchanging information with the other lobe, the receiving lobe, metaphorically, can’t quite tell if the message is coming from itself or from another brain. The lobes recognize each other. They understand what’s being exchanged. But the way the exchanged information manifests to the organism is perceived as a distant, other voice speaking in the organism’s preferred tongue.
What this discovery stirred in me so early in my life was the following line of reasoning:
Consciousness is a symptom of the data exchange between the hemispheres of the predominantly unicameral mind—the mind that more readily and smoothly experiences the exchanges across the hemispheres of the brain; it follows than that we should expect our experience of consciousness to drastically change as the mind forms and evolves.
The hypothesis, first formerly and famously introduced by Julian Jaynes in the mid 1970s, holds that as the mind because more predominantly unicameral or bicameral, its modality of perception changes entirely.
Consider fish. Fish have never been outside of water. Their existence must be perceived by the organism as one and the same with water. There is no other existence. But then, the fish gets plucked out of the bowl and suddenly, the very existence of the animal is re-conceived by the organism in a Planck Time.
This was my entree to consciousness. It established the veneer of much of my young adult life as a philosopher, student, artist, friend, etc. It tinted my exploration of local, national, and international politics; it colored my coffee house discussions and my worldview; it was the hue of my social engagements, my travels, and my taste. The sacred practice of thinking was now revealing its secrets to me and I wasn’t going to let that tiger get away.
So I come at consciousness from a religio-anthropologic point of view. Don’t get me wrong—the perspective has lead me down many rabbit holes like meditation, comparative religious studies, comparative historical studies, fine art studies, neurotheology, astrology, the Hermetic Tradition, psychology, chemistry not to mention the works of Jerome Bruner, David Chalmers, Noam Chomsky, Allan Combs, Francis Crick, Daniel Dennett, Rene Descartes, Timothy Leary, Stanislav Grof, Aldous Huxley, Ram Dass, Philip Kingdom Dick (that’s right, it’s Kingdom), etc. I done a ton of reading on the matter; pretty early in life too (late teens through late twenties) so that lust for figuring consciousness out stayed with me into my middle years.
The big picture, one of the things I hope to demonstrate by the end of this weblog is that…
…the modern conception of consciousness is no longer of any use in the pursuit of truth because it has reached the linguistic limits of its utility.
Yeah. I know. I’m sorry. It’s weird. And I know you’re wanting some scientific or historical rationale right now (which you’ll get in time, dear reader) but any such rationalization can be easily met and challenged by an equally measured counter-rationale so I’m not going go there right now. It’ll come. But I don’t want to start things out with citations and references and logical argumentation. That’s boring; Bush League stuff; ancient scholarship practices that will ultimately go the way of the Dodo bird.
Think of this blog as more a work of art than of science. I intend to be scholarly but, ummmmmm, not really.
DISCLAIMER: I’m an idiot.
DISCLAIMER: I’m also a college professor, a school administrator, and doctor.
So, back to consciousness…
There’s a contention out there that consciousness is simply our awareness of consciousness. It’s an amalgam of the functions we refer to in English as memories, thoughts, attention, will, the ability to learn, to reason, judge, to experience, etc.
It’s just not. At least not the whole story.
And here’s one example of why—somnambulism and somniloquy: a state of mind that permits physical responses despite being clearly unconscious. Think of sleepwalkers. It’s not a disorder. It’s a condition in about 2%-15% of us. It goes away for most of us as we approach puberty but not for all of us. So yeah, you don’t have to be conscious to react to your physical environment. There are documented cases of people driving to work while sleeping.
Of course, there’s also the matter of Dementia Praecox, now known as Schizophrenia wherein people hear voices. Alzheimer’s disease or Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB) can cause them too. A simple look through the clinical literature of neurosurgeons reveals how consistently, people undergoing neurosurgery report hearing distinct voices and disembodied singing when certain sections of the cerebral cortex are electrically stimulated. Of course, many of the major mental illnesses can cause voices to be heard as well such as Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, PTSD, Epilepsy, etc. That’s not an explanation so much as a point of fact that disembodied voices are not merely imagined or hallucinated. They are real as butter to the listener.
Then there’s hypnosis. What about demonic possessions that are witnessed throughout the world? Are all these conditions merely vestiges of an earlier mentality in our species?
Look, I’m not saying I don’t understand the position of those that use the language of gurus and psychologists and philosophers and meta-physicists, and counselors, and all sorts of legitimate, established arts and sciences. The notion of consciousness is a staple of just about every modern civilization. It’s spurred other ideas such as unconsciousness and subconsciousness which have influenced entire schools of art, literature, worldviews, scientific experiments, political stratagem, etc.
But I propose such terms like consciousness and subconsciousness have created a paradigm that is simply no longer tenable to carry the species into its next chapter. This now 350 some-odd year old modern conception of consciousness primarily established by John Locke that most civilizations now hold fast to, this modern construction of the self, who we really are, the deep down, the thinking thing, is now passed its initial metaphorical usefulness.
Maybe that’s why consciousness is such a mystery: we’re looking at it through a very thin slit and think we get it because, well, logic. But as we tangle with it, we get caught in linguistic traps that a) make the phenomenon seem more mysterious, almost holy, and b) lead us down unfalsifiable lines of reasoning concluding more often than not with statements like “I guess we’ll never really know”.
Further examination of the matter has reveled to me that the mental processes people engage are much smaller a part of our lives than believed. For example, most of us soundly hold that we are conscious when we are awake and unconscious when we are asleep. But are we always conscious while we’re awake? Are you conscious every hour of the day? What about every minute? Answer is probably yes, right? Okay. How about every second. Are you conscious every second? Every millisecond? Nanosecond? What happens when the flow of data around you exceeds the speed with which your neurons fire? Are you still aware of the data stream then?
How about the drive to and from work? Are you continually focused on moving the 2,000 pounds of aluminium and steel at 80 miles per hour down a highway or do you drift off and think about things that have nothing to do with driving. And next thing you know, you’re at work! How is it that our mind can have a main channel of aim-oriented associations and thousands of autonomic sub channels of information acquisitions without directing or controlling that flow of information?
I’ve recently started playing the piano again (horribly, but I pretend) and happily report that my wife is quite impressed by my talent (“Bah! ‘Talent’, he said…”). In 15 years of marriage, I never really showed her my piano playing. She bought me a very nice electric piano for my birthday many years ago but it sat in our living rooms (we moved several times), untinkered. But now, as I spend much more time in my house thanks to the pandemic sweeping the planet, playing some tunes on the device has offered me some respite and as such, my wife is like “dang, boi!” She is amazed by my ability to put each of the ten fingers so quickly on all those keys while scanning the sheet music and singing aloud (again, really bad, I’m telling you) and she’s like “how are you processing all that”? If I stopped and directed my attention/consciousness to accomplishing those tasks independently, I’d fumble all over myself and slow everything down. Like really slow.
Am I consciously processing all of the information I’m receiving and then consciously directing the flow of my attention to make my limbs and respiratory system work like that?
I know, I know: automaticity, implicit memory, neural adaptation, habituation, mechanical cognition, etc. But again, none of these terms provide the why of it all. They’re simply descriptions and labels which we then hold as rationalizations.
All of this is to say that I believe the bicameral mind never completely degraded or broke down into a unicameral state in large swaths of the modern human. The degradation isn’t a biophysical matter. It’s a cultural matter that accelerates or at least influences epi-evolutionary mechanics.
And I’m also not quite sure which is preferred. For example, the predominantly bicamerally minded person may go about their lives in a state of blissful glee, even during hardships because the individual would believe that he/she is innately at the mercy of the gods or their ancestors or any such entity: not by submission, mind you—innately. “That’s just how things are for everyone”, she thinks. There must have been a simple joy that the guided life held for people.
But as tough times emerged by way of an ever complexifying world (i.e. climate changes, war, famine, natural disasters), the contention is that the people needed to cooperate more to accomplish great works and in that process, the individual became more isolated, more lonely. This, in turn, reshaped the bicamerality of the person to be predominantly unicameral which birthed the notion of of “me” vs. “I”. As awareness of awareness became more an integrated part of the Bronze Age mentality, it accelerated certain technological discoveries such as kites, rope, locks, soap, the plow, chariots, etc. which in turn, advanced civilization all the way up to the condition we find ourselves in here in 2020.
Of course, central to this mystery I’m unfolding is language. The bicameral or unicameral dynamic can only be accessed by language. More on that later…
Now here’s the thing about all this. After I first got turned on to this idea of consciousnesses originating in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, I pursued it. I pursued it for many years. I pursued it by learning of the Vedic tradition’s understanding of mind; I looked into older expressions of the notion in the literature too. For example, William James wrote an article in 1904 that expressed the Subject-Object Paradox…
"Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome."
There was Decartes’ conception of dualism which held a similar perspective. He wrote in Discourse on the Method for Guiding One’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences (1637)…
".. I thence concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that " I," that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is.”
This idea that consciousness wasn’t innate and that it was in fact a learned behavior which emerged by way of language and thanks to the pressures of the ever complexifying world was so romantic for me. It meant that it could be studied, it could be captured. It wasn’t just a physio-chemical reaction of the organism—an instinct, if you will. If consciousness was a learned behavior, than one could reverse engineer the behaviors and the learning process to ascertain some fundamental truth about the human condition.
But how can you reverse engineer such an abstraction? LANGUAGE! I mean, that’s the conduit of consciousness, right? The theory held that consciousness is based on and accessed via language so BOOM! There it is. Figure out the language and by proxy, you’ll figure out the pith essence of consciousness.
Well, as things tend to, I quickly learned that there was more to the puzzle. Much more.
By the way, if you’re interested in this topic, pick up Julian Jaynes’ masterpiece on the subject.