Julian Jaynes Society Wiki

Theoretical Claim

Jaynes dated the birth of consciousness to around the end of the second millennium BCE. Due to the timing of settlement patterns, the transition most likely occurred later in the Americas (North, Mesoamerica, South). To appreciate his reasons for making such a controversial claim, it is imperative to carefully examine the psychohistorical record. Only by investigating the beliefs, customs, and literary traditions of ancient civilizations in a detailed manner are we able to discern a lack of subjectivity as we define it and major changes in mentality. Much relevant research relates to this important facet of Jaynesian theorizing about dating a change in mentality.

Supporting Evidence

The Inherent Instability of Bicameral Kingdoms and Their Collapse

The success of bicamerality, clearly evident in population expansion that resulted in the invention of urbanization, ironically led to this mentality’s own demise. Jaynes noted that the impressive expansion of theocratic agricultural civilizations led to overpopulation. Such success planted the seeds of their own collapse since increased demographic scale layered the bicameral bureaucratic system with too many pressures. The gods were overburdened.

Once urbanized settlements reached a certain scale, bicameral governance became fragile. If for some reason the priestly hierarchy was destabilized, instability would, like an avalanche, thunder through the social structure leading to collapse in a way that in a society would not happen.

We associate authoritarian polities with militarism and police repression. But in preconscious civilizations, since bicameral mentality was social control, fear, repression, or even, at least early on, law as we understand it, was unnecessary. Preconscious individuals lacked an interiorized mental space in which private ambitions, grudges, frustrations could fester. It was only in the second millennium BCE that gods needed to be assisted by their revealed laws.

Increasingly crowded urbanized settlements and social complexity led to a confusion of voices, muddled authorization, and overall chaos. Into this disordered world came all sorts of go-betweens to sort out the mess: Angels, personal gods, and guardian spirits who acted as intermediaries between the individual and the higher gods. These go-betweens were parts of an individual’s preconscious mind communicating with each other. There was no analog “I” yet.

Also growing in importance were diviners and oracles who attempted to decipher the directives of the increasingly reticent deities who were retreating into the heavens. Other parts of what might be called an individual’s own psychosocial community of supernatural beings were demons who tormented and plagued people.

As an example of the transilience from bicamerality to the early stages of consciousness, Jaynes points to the resurgence of Assyrian power in the late second millennium BCE; the very quality of governance had changed. The Assyrians “fell like butchers upon harmless villagers, enslaved what refugees they could, and slaughtered others in thousands. Bas-reliefs show what appear to be whole cities whose populace have been stuck alive on stakes running up through the groin and out the shoulders” (Jaynes, 1976, p. 214). The administration of law was the cruelest and bloodiest the world had ever seen. Since the sureties of the bicameral mentality had been eroded, divine rulers now had to rely on terror, which is consciously interiorized fear, to rule.

Trade and Exchange Eventually Weakened the Bicameral Order

Interactions among individuals from various bicameral societies, assuming circumstances were stable and peaceful, were not in principle problematic. After all, in the same way no one questioned their own gods, no one doubted the deities of others; everywhere a sacred order reigned. Divine directives would be nonthreatening and friendly. Gifts may have been exchanged.

Could this be how trade started? The origin of trade was in food sharing within families and then presumably among clans. This led to exchanges within settlements and towns, and then between regions. Trade demands that an individual confront diversity, and this puts a pressure on one’s cognitive apparatus to adapt to and accommodate differences.

The extensive exchanging of goods among bicameral theocracies, whatever benefits it may have had, no doubt eroded the rigid bicameral worldview by overwhelming individuals with bewildering differences.

Migration, Chaos, Conquest

Jaynes never used the term “Late Bronze Age Collapse” of the 12th century BCE (whose causes are still debated). But he does describe the societal chaos—implosion of central authorities, mass migration, bloody conquest, dissolution of trade routes—of the period that undoubtedly played a role in bicamerality’s breakdown and the emergence of a new mentality.

Most of the time preconscious people relied on automatic habit and time-tested routine to navigate through life’s minor twists and turns. Anything disturbingly novel or out of the ordinary elicited a divine message. If one’s larger hierarchical group became shaky and stored-up admonitory experiences were not up to the task, the once-reliable voices and visions of gods became contradictory and confusing. Societies, like dominoes, fell as anarchy spread and civilizations collapsed during the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Though the smooth management of bicameral systems rested on their divinely-authorized hierarchy, the authority of the gods was inherently limited. Theocracies suddenly crumbled without any known external cause.

Positing Internal Differences as the Cause of Consciousness

Before individuals could have an interior self, they must first nonconsciously, posit it in others as a way to explain what caused their different and confounding behavior. This observation of differences may be the origin of the analog mental space of consciousness. We first suppose “other consciousnesses” and then infer our own by generalization. The unwelcome, forced, and violent intermixing of individuals from various backgrounds led people to assume that something inside them was different. But during times of heightened tensions, differences in language, customs, and god-sanctioned protocols could readily escalate hostilities. Thus no middle ground in intertheocractic relations existed. “Admonitory voices echoing kings, viziers, parents, etc., are unlikely to command individuals into acts of compromise” (Jaynes, 1976, p. 207).

Writing Undermined Divine Authority

Writing undoubtedly enhanced the power of the gods, as evidenced by the laws of Hammurabi. However, the written word gradually eroded divine authority in the second millennium BCE. Sound, unlike visual perception, is a special perceptual modality. We cannot turn away or easily escape from incoming auditory stimuli. But once verbalizations of the gods were made silent by inscribing them into speechless stone, their commands, as well as the king's directives, could be avoided or ignored by being moved around. With writing the “speech” of the gods had a controllable location rather than an omnipresent power that elicited unquestioning obedience.

Narratization in Epics

Jaynes makes the strange claim that the gods—i.e., parts of the right temporal-parietal region—learned to narratize by storing up new experiences in order to meet new needs (at first reading may have been hallucinating from the cuneiform and thus a right temporal lobe function). Such learning formed the basis of narratization, a key feature of consciousness that allows the cognizing of schedules, timelines, lifetimes, histories, distant pasts, and faraway futures.

Originally writing was primarily an inventory device to keep track of stores and exchanges on a god’s estate (which was the core of a city-state’s economic redistribution system). But it then became a technique for recording god-related occurrences, past events, and the basis of recounting what we call myths and epics. Narrartization may have been learned by individuals from a new kind of functioning in the right hemisphere.

The Origin of the Analog “I” in Deceit

Learning to deceive others in a more sophisticated manner may have led to consciousness. Certainly, being one thing on the inside and another on the outside has great survival value and it ends up cultivating two selves: A visible, bodily self behaving one way and an interiorized “I” making plans to act in another way. Jaynes distinguishes between instrumental deception (short-term deceit) and treachery (long-term deceit). The former is seen among chimpanzees while the latter is possible but difficult among preconscious individuals.

Natural Selection

Though Jaynes mentioned natural selection as playing a minimal role in the origins of consciousness, he was very clear that consciousness is primarily cultural, learned through language, and not an innate biological necessity.

Consciousness, then, must be learned anew by each generation. Individuals “most obdurately bicameral, most obedient to their familiar divinities, would perish, leaving the genes of the less impetuous, the less bicameral, to endow the ensuing generations” (Jaynes, 1976, p. 221). Those biologically most able to acquire it would most likely survive. There’s even biblical evidence that children who continued bicameral behaviors were simply killed off.

Jaynes discussed the massive, civilization crushing effects of an eruption (or series of eruptions) of the volcano on the island of Thera (Santorini) as an indirect cause of bicamerality’s breakdown. However, in the 1990 Afterward to The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, he de-emphasized its role, though he acknowledged it did play some part in the destabilizing of bicamerality.

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.