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Hypothesis One: Consciousness Based on Language
Consciousness, as Jaynes carefully defined it, is a learned process based on metaphorical language; it is generated and configured (but not determined) by metaphorical, figurative expressions. Word changes lead to concept changes, and concept changes result in behavioral changes. Language is not merely a means of communication, but is an organ of perception. Language alone does not lead to introspective conscious mind. What is crucial is the concepts a certain language possesses that allow the generation of consciousness. Jaynes, of course, was not the first to see a vital link between figures of speech and how we think, but his argument is radical in how it postulates that metaphors generate conscious experience itself.
We speak of our minds as being “quick,” “slow,” “agitated,” “nimble-witted,” “strong-“ or “weak-minded.” The mind‒space in which these metaphorical activities transpire has its own collection of adjectives; we can be “broad-minded,” “deep,” “open,” or “narrow-minded”; we can be “occupied”; we can “get it,” let an idea “penetrate,” or “bear,” “have,” “keep,” or “hold” something in mind. As in physical space a thing can be at the “back” of our mind, in its “inner recesses,” or “beyond” our mind, or “out” of our mind.
Metaphrands, Metaphiers, Paraphrands, and Paraphiers
For Jaynes metaphor’s persuasive power comes from its four components working together: The unknown thing to be described (metaphrand) and the known thing doing the describing (metaphier). For example, in the expression “time flies like an arrow” time is the more abstract, difficult-to-conceive metaphrand while arrow is the more concrete, easier-to-grasp metaphier. Note, however, that it is not really the arrow itself that provides the descriptive impact, but something about the arrow—its unstoppable speed, linear preciseness, determined directionality—that imparts explanatory power. These secondary, ancillary meanings are called paraphiers. A metaphier, then, possesses associated paraphiers which become the paraphrands of the metaphrands.
It is the network of meanings in which a concept is embedded that grants expressive power to figures of speech (though not all metaphors are particularly generative). Consciousness is the metaphrand when generated by the paraphrands of verbal expressions, but the functioning of consciousness is, as it were, the return journey. Consciousness becomes the metaphier containing past experiences, incessantly and selectively operating on unknowns such as future plans, decisions, and partly remembered pasts, on how we define our selves and what we want to become.
Preconscious Hypostases: The Precursors of Mental Language
Jaynes submitted that we need a “paleontology of consciousness” in which we can discover stratum by stratum how this metaphorically-built introcosmos we call subjective introspectable self-awareness was built up over the centuries.
Jaynes refers to mind‒words that would later come to mean something like consciousness “preconscious hypostases” (what is caused to stand under something). These are the assumed causes of action when other causes are no longer apparent.
When the gods began to fade into the mists of mythology individuals had not yet attributed their behavior directly to themselves the way a subjectively self-aware person would. Instead preconscious hypostases, or what we would call internal body sensations, were believed to cause people to act. The individual became a container possessed of nonperson but agentive entities. These eventually developed into the unified mental space in which an analog “I” dwelled and moved about.
Preconscious hypostases are “seats of reaction and responsibility” that emerged during the transition from the bicamerality to subjective consciousness. This evolution can be roughly divided into four phases:
Phase 1: Objective. In the bicameral age terms referred to simple external observations.
Phase 2: Internal. Terms come to mean things inside the body, especially certain internal sensations. The transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2 occurred at the beginning of bicameral mentality’s breakdown.
Phase 3: Subjective. Terms refer to processes that we would call mental; they have changed from internal stimuli believed to cause behavior to interiorized spaces where metaphorized actions occur.
Phase 4: Synthetic. The various hypostases unite into one conscious self that can introspect and self-reflect.
In pre-Socratic times physicality and concreteness characterized what we would call psychological activity (metaphrands) which was located in bodily organs (metaphiers). As an example of hypostases, consider ancient Greek. Besides breath, blood, and the brain, cognition and emotion were identified with the spatial cavity of the chest: Phrenes may have originally meant “lungs” or “breathing” (localized in the midriff); thumos perhaps meant “internal sensations” (sometimes localized in the chest); etor designated heart; and kradie is from the beating “heart.” The metaphor of visibility is clear in the term nous (apparently from a verb meaning “to see”). A key term for intellectual activity was nous. It was not necessarily linked to psyche, but was a bodily entity located in the chest.