The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

"Yes. The book is famous for reasons that are not why I’ve chosen it. Jaynes’s argument is something like this: we all have different parts of our brains and we all sort of hear voices going on in our heads. But we, in the modern world, attribute those voices to things going on in our heads. When we hear our thoughts almost spoken to ourselves, we accept that those are our thoughts. Jaynes is an expert in ancient literature and argues that back in the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the mind was ‘bicameral’, meaning having two chambers or rooms. One side would be the self who is hearing the voice, and the other side would be the voices which would be attributed to the gods. When the idea would come ‘I must go to war’ or whatever it was, this would be the gods’ instructions rather than, as we’d think today, ‘I’ve got a good idea, let’s go to war.’ He famously says that there are no words corresponding to ‘consciousness’ in the Iliad. This argument is important for many reasons. For example, if you think about the problem of the evolution of consciousness, one question is when did it appear? Some people say it was there from the beginning of the universe – like panpsychics. But Jaynes thinks we humans only started talking and thinking about consciousness and creating the problem of consciousness within historical times and the times of literature. This is the most recent point that anyone has suggested. Further back than that, some people have suggested that you could only have consciousness if you had language. But that’s going way, way back from the written language that Jaynes talks about. So, of course, his book is going to be used as an example of the most recent origin of consciousness. But that’s not why I chose this book. “In the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the mind was ‘bicameral’ – meaning having two chambers or rooms” I chose this book because the first few chapters are the most wonderful description of the problem that I’ve come across. This is the bit I love and that I often quote. He starts off with “O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries!” and then says “This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all – what is it? And where did it come from? And why?”. Then he goes into a very easy to read overview of different ideas about consciousness, constantly coming back to ‘THIS!’ and ‘WHAT IS THIS?’. This is what I do, too. I can be easily lured into stupid things like the zombie problem and thinking why aren’t I an automaton just sitting here without there being any experience? But then I come back to THIS, this moment. Jaynes is very easy to read and very prescient. His determined analysis of the problem is great, even though it was published in 1976 and we’re still struggling with it now. Obviously, he doesn’t mention the phrase ‘Hard Problem’ or any of the modern terminology, and yet I don’t think there’s any better description of the problem than the way he starts that book. That’s a very good point. In a way, you could say that almost all of the books I’ve chosen are by people like that. I mentioned Descartes earlier and I should have mentioned Hume. I love how Hume looks for the self that is perceiving and finds nothing but the perceptions. That’s what one finds in meditation. I’m not a Buddhist but I’ve been practising Zen for more than 30 years. This is what you find when you look for the self. You go on and on asking, ‘who am I?’, and then you find there’s only the experiences. And even those experiences become very different when you really watch them. So, I love these people, like Descartes and Hume and Jaynes, who have really pushed their own minds and thought terribly hard about it."