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Showing 21 similar quotes for quote #1054 from The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)

140

In speaking of amnesia and autism as pathologies, I want to get at the psychological rather than the neurological dimension of these phenomena, the strange absence or loss of affect in such individuals that in case after case makes so deep an impression on the clinicians who study them. This sense of something missing, an inner chill or deadness, seems to be associated with a 'dysnarrativia' that bespeaks a damaged identity. Who can say for sure, however, that the identities in question are truly damaged? It is the fact that those who observe such individuals should think so that interests me, suggesting that we live in a culture in which narrative functions as the signature of the real, of the normal. (I should add that, given the opportunity for first-hand observation, I suspect that I would agree that identity has been damanged in these cases.) In a remarkable essay that I keep going back to, 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,' Hayden White makes this point in connection with history, whereas I want to apply it here in connection with identity. Social accountability requires identity narrative; in The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston gives a nice rendering of a child's perception of this requirement: 'I thought talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn't explain themselves' (216).

108-109

Since it has been established that very young children do in fact have episodic memories¹ , it becomes reasonable to ask why they don't retain them. Rejecting any Freudian notion of repression, Nelson embraces instead an evolutionary perspective which prompts her to focus on the function of event-memories: 'As an adaptive system, the general function of memory is to predict and prepare for future encounters, actions, and experiences. That is, memory as such has no value in and of itself, but takes on value only as it contributes to the individual's ability to behave adaptively' ² . In early childhood, accordingly, memory work is dedicated to the generation of general event-memories or scripts that help to organize the child's knowledge of daily routines - bathing, eating, going to bed, and so forth. In this early developmental context, Nelson reasons, memory for novel experience (the one-time event that at a later stage will be valued and stored as autobiographical memory) 'does not have the same functional value, unless it is repeated' ³ , and so, if it is not incorporated into a general event-memory, it is not retained.\r\n\r\n\r\n¹ Katherine Nelson, Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind, pg 162\r\n² Katherine Nelson, 'The Ontogeny of Memory for Real Events.' In Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory, pg 265\r\n³ Katherine Nelson, Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind, pg 158

Models of identity are centrally implicated in the way we live and write about our lives. As Paul Smith puts it, 'None of us lives without reference to an imaginative singularity which we call our self' (6).¹ ... In forming our sustaining sense of self, we draw on models of identity provided by the cultures we inhabit. Some of these models are life enhancing, some not. \r\n\r\n¹ /publication/66

[Gerald] Edelman's approach to the brain and to the emergence of consciousness in [his books] is resolutely Darwinian - 'spirits and ghosts are out' (113). His Theory of Neural Group Selection (TNGS) or 'neural Darwinism' articulates his sense of the way in which the brains neural organization is constantly modified - both phylogenetically and ontogenetically - to adapt to the ever-changing demands of experience.

In 1905, two French neurologists, G. Deny and P. Camus, reported the strange case of 'Madame I,' a young woman who lost 'body awareness' and lost herself in the process: \r\n\r\n> I'm no longer aware of myself as I used to be. I can no longer feel my arms, my legs, my head, and my hair. I have to touch myself constantly in order to know how I am...I cannot find myself.¹ \r\n\r\nMadame I's pathetic touching of her limbs stages a startling inversion of Descarte's thought experiment: 'I feel by body,' she seems to say, 'therefore I am.' Her troubled condition reminds us that it is possession of a body image that anchors and sustains our sense of identity.\r\n\r\n¹ /publication/62\r\n\r\n \r\n

Neural Darwinism has the potential to transform not only traditional conceptions of self but of memory as well, as the work or Israel Rosenfield, formerly Edelman's colleague and collaborator, suggests. Rosenfield believes, first of all, that memories are perceptions newly occurring in the present rather than images fixed and stored in the past and somehow mysteriously recalled to present consciousness. As perceptions, memories share the constructed nature of all brain events that TNGS posits: 'Recollection is a kind of perception...and every context will alter the nature of what is recalled' (Invention 89, emphasis added). Rosenfield's second point about memory, a corollary of his view of memory as embedded in present consciousness, is that all memories are self-referential: 'Every recollection refers not only to the remembered event or person or object but to the person who is remembering' (Strange 42). The bond between self and memory can be traced back to Locke, but Rosenfield puts a new spin on this linkage by factoring in the body as a necessary third term in the equation.

In Narrative and the Self (1991) [Anthony Paul] Kerby stakes out a position on the self's ontology that is much like Edelman's no 'spirits' or 'ethereal beings.' Ruling out any notion of the self as some kind of transcendental (Cartesian or other) entity preexisting our lives as language speakers, Kerby defines the self as the product of 'signifying practices,' especially 'narrative constructions or stories' (1).

Food of the Gods

Author: Terence McKenna

Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)

451

No one before 1000 B.C. ever felt guilt, even while shame was the way groups and societies were held together. To indicate the evidence that guilt as opposed to shame is a new emotion at this time, I would cite a single bit of evidence, and one that is well known^1. This is the story of Oedipus. It is referred to in two lines of the Iliad and two lines in the Odyssey which I think we can take as indicating the true story, as it came down from bicameral times. The story seems to be about a man who killed his father and then unwittingly married his mother and so became King of Thebes, proceeding to have several children - siblings by his mother, then discovering what he had done, certainly feeling shame since incest had always been a taboo, but evidently recovering from that shame, living a happy life thereafter with his wife-mother, and dying with royal honors sometime later. This was written down around 800 B.C., but the story comes from several centuries before that. And then, only four hundred years later, we have the great trilogy of Sophocles on the subject, a play about unknown guilt, guilt so extreme that a whole city is in famine because of it, so convulsive that the culprit when he discovers his guilt is not worthy to look upon the world again and stabs his eyes into darkness with the brooches clutched from his mother-wife’s breasts, and is led away by his sister-daughters into a mystical death at Colonus. And again, there is no biological mechanism for getting rid of guilt. How to get rid of guilt is a problem which a host of learned social rituals of reacceptance are now developed: scapegoat ceremonies among the Hebrews (the word for sending away translates now as “forgiveness”), the similar pharmakos among the Greeks (again the word aphesis for sending the pharmakos away becomes the Greek for “forgiveness”), “purification” ceremonies of many sorts, baptism, the taurobolium, the haj, confession, the tashlik, the mass, and of course the Christian cross, which takes away the sins of the world (note the metaphors and analogies in all this). Even changing the nature of God to a forgiving father. \r\n \r\n1 E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951).

373

If the subject is not able to narrow his consciousness in this fashion, if he cannot forget the situation as a whole, if he remains in a state of consciousness of other considerations, such as the room and his relationship to the operator, if he is still narratizing with his analog ‘I’ or 'seeing' his metaphor 'me' being hypnotized, hypnosis will be unsuccessful*. But repeated attempts with such subjects often succeed, showing that the 'narrowing' of consciousness in hypnotic induction is partly a learned ability, learned, I should add, on the basis of the aptic structure I have called the general bicameral paradigm. \r\n \r\n\r\n*The best discussion of induction procedures is that of Perry London, 'The Induction of Hypnosis,' in J. E. Gordon, pp. 44-79. And for discussions of hypnosis in general that I have found helpful, see the papers of Ronald Shor, particularly his 'Hypnosis and the Concept of the Generalized Reality-Orientation,' American Journal of Psychotherapy, 1959, 13: 582-602, and 'Three Dimensions of Hypnotic Depth,' International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 1962, 10: 23-38.

366

Hypnosis, like consciousness, begins at a particular point in history in the paraphrands of a few new metaphors. The first of these metaphors followed Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of the laws of universal gravitation and his use of them to explain the ocean tides under the attraction of the moon. The mysterious attractions and influences and controls between people were then compared to Newtonian gravitational influences. And the comparison resulted in a new (and ridiculous) hypothesis, that there are tides of attraction between all bodies, living and material, that can be called animal gravitation, of which Newton’s gravitation is a special case^1. This is all very explicit in the romantic and turbid writings of a wanton admirer of Newton‘s called Anton Mesmer, who began it all. And then came another metaphor, or rather two. Gravitational attraction is similar to magnetic attraction. Therefore, since (in Mesmer‘s rhetorical thought) two things similar to a third thing are similar to each other, animal gravitation is like magnetic attraction, and so changes its name to animal magnetism. Now at last the theory was testable in a scientific way. To demonstrate the existence of these vibrant magnetic tides in and through living things similar to celestial gravitation, Mesmer applied magnets to various hysterical patients, even prefeeding the patients with medicines containing iron so that the magnetism might work better. And it did! The result could not be doubted with the knowledge of his day. Convulsive attacks were produced by the magnets, creating in Mesmer‘s words “an artificial ebb and flow” in the body and correcting with its magnetic attraction “the unequal distribution of the nervous fluids confused movement,” thus producing a “harmony of the nerves.” He had ‘proved’ that there are flows of forces between persons as mighty as those that hold the planets in their orbits. Of course he hadn‘t proved anything about any kind of magnetism whatever. He had discovered what Sir James Braid on the metaphier of sleep later called hypnosis. The cures were effective because he had explained his exotic theory to his patients with vigorous conviction. The violent seizures and peculiar twists of sensations at the application of magnets were all due to a cognitive imperative that these things would happen, which they did, constituting a kind of self-perpetuating escalating ‘proof’ that the magnets were working and could effect a cure.\r\n \r\n¹ A full history of hypnosis is yet to be written. But see F. A. Pattie, “Brief History of Hypnotism,” in J. E. Gordon, ed., Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (New York: Macmillan, 1967).

290

The Hebrew word nabi^7, which has been misleadingly translated by the Greek designation of 'prophet', presents an extremely interesting difficulty. To prophesy in its modern connotations is to foretell the future, but this is not what is indicated by the verb naba, whose practitioners were the nabiim (plural of nabi). These terms come from a group of cognate words which have nothing to do with time, but rather with flowing and becoming bright. Thus we may think of a nabi as one who metaphorically was flowing forth or welling up with speech and visions. They were transitional men, partly subjective and partly bicameral. And once the bright torrent was released and the call came, the nabi must deliver his bicameral message, however unsuspecting (Amos 7:14-15), however un-worthy the nabi felt (Exodus 3:113 Isaiah 6; Jeremiah 1:6), however distrustful at times of his own hearing (Jeremiah 20:7-10). What does it feel like to be a nabi at the beginning of one of his bicameral periods? Like a red hot coal in one's mouth (Isaiah 6:7) or a raging fire shut up in one's bones that cannot be contained (Jeremiah 20:9) and that only the flowing forth of divine speech can quench.\r\n\r\n⁷ Transliteration from Hebrew into English is always misleading. Perhaps a better case here might be made for nbi or nvi. That its meaning was ambiguous even at the time seems to be indicated in I Samuel 9:9. See also John L. McKenzie, A Theology of the Old Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1974), p. 85.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Author: Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Publisher: Fine Communications (1998)

786

Flaxscrip was first introduced into Discordian groups by the mysterious Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C., in 1968. Hempscrip followed the year after, issued by Dr. Mordecai Malignatus, K.N.S. (In the novel, taking one of our few liberties with historical truth, we move these coinages backward in time and attribute hempscrip to the Justified Ancients of Mummu.) The idea behind flaxscrip, of course, is as old as history; there was private money long before there was government money. The first revolutionary (or reformist) use of this idea, as a check against galloping usury and high interest rates, was the foundation of 'Banks of Piety' by the Dominican order of the Catholic Church in the late middle ages. (See Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.) The Dominicans, having discovered that preaching against usury did not deter the usurer, founded their own banks and provided loans without interest; this 'ethical competition' (as Josiah Warren later called it) drove the commercial banks out of the areas where the Dominicans practiced it. Similar private currency, loaned at a low rate of interest (but not at no interest), was provided by Scots banks until the British government, acting on behalf of the monopoly of the Bank of England, stopped this exercise of free enterprise. (See Muellen, Free Banking.) The same idea was tried successfully in the American colonies before the Revolution, and again was suppressed by the British government, which some heretical historians regard as a more direct cause of the American Revolution than the taxes mentioned in most schoolbooks. (See Ezra Pound, Impact, and additional sources cited therein.) During the nineteenth century many anarchists and individualists attempted to issue low-interest or no-interest private currencies. Mutual Banking, by Colonel William Greene, and True Civilization, by Josiah Warren, are records of two such attempts, by their instigators. Lysander Spooner, an anarchist who was also a constitutional lawyer, argued at length that Congress had no authority to suppress such private currencies (see his Our Financiers: Their Ignorance, Usurpations and Frauds). A general overview of such efforts at free enterprise, soon crushed by the Capitalist State, is given by James M. Martin in his Men Against the State, and by Rudolph Rocker in Pioneers of American Freedom (an ironic title, since his pioneers all lost their major battles). Lawrence Labadie, of Suffern, N.Y., has collected (but not yet published) records of 1,000 such experiments; one of the present authors, Robert Anton Wilson, unearthed in 1962 the tale of a no-interest currency, privately issued, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the 1930s depression. (This was an emergency measure by certain local businessmen, who did not fully appreciate the principle involved, and was abandoned as soon as the 'tight-money' squeeze ended and Roosevelt began flooding us all with Federal Reserve notes.) It is traditional among liberal historians to dismiss such endeavors as 'funny-money schemes.' They have never explained why government money is any less hilarious. (That used in the U.S. now, for instance, is actually worth 47 percent of its 'declared' face value). All money is funny, if you stop to think about it, but no private currency, competing on a free market, could ever be quite so comical (and tragic) as the notes now bearing the magic imprint of Uncle Sam—and backed only by his promise (or threat) that, come hell or high water, by God he'll make it good by taxing our descendants unto the infinite generation to pay the interest on it. The National Debt, so called, is of course, nothing else but the debt we owe the bankers who 'loaned' this money to Uncle after he kindly gave them the credit which enabled them to make this loan. Hempscrip or even acidscrip or peyotescrip could never be quite so clownish as this system, which only the Illuminati (if they really exist) could have dreamed up. The system has but one advantage: It makes bankers richer every year. Nobody else, from the industrial capitalist or 'captain of industry' to the coal-miner, profits from it in any way, and all pay the taxes, which become the interest payments, which make the bankers richer. If the Illuminati did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them—such a system can be explained in no other way, except by those cynics who hold that human stupidity is infinite. The idea behind hempscrip is more radical than the notion of private-enterprise currency per se. Hempscrip, as employed in the novel, depreciates; it is, thus, not merely a no-interest currency, but a negative-interest currency. The lender literally pays the borrower to take it away for a while. It was invented by German business-economist Silvio Gesell, and is described in his Natural Economic Order and in professor Irving Fisher's Stamp Script. Gresham's Law, like most of the 'laws' taught in State-supported public schools, is not quite true (at least, not in the form in which it is usually taught). 'Bad money drives out good' holds only in authoritarian societies, not in libertarian societies. (Gresham was clear-minded enough to state explicitly that he was only describing authoritarian societies; his formulation of his own 'Law' begins with the words 'If the king issueth two moneys . . . ,' thereby implying that the State must exist if the 'Law' is to operate.) In a libertarian society, good money will drive out the bad. This Utopian proposition—which the sane reader will regard with acute skepticism—has been seen to be sound by a rigorously logical demonstration, based on the axioms of economics, in The Cause of Business Depressions by Hugo Bilgrim and Edward Levy.* * Economists can 'prove' all sorts of things from axioms and few of them turn out to be true. Yes. We saved for a footnote the information that at least four empirical demonstrations of the reverse of Gresham's Law are on record. Three of them, employing small volunteer communities in frontier U.S.A. circa 1830-1860, are recorded in Josiah Warren's True Civilization. The fourth, employing contemporary college students in a psychology laboratory, is the subject of a recent Master's thesis by associate professor Don Werkheiser of Central State College, Wilberforce, Ohio.

317

Not only were Marsh's theories now beyond all scientific credibility, but his methods— such as quoting Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross or Graves' The White Goddess as if they were as reputable as Boas, Mead, or Frazer— seemed to indicate senility. This impression was increased by the eccentric dedication 'To Ezra Pound, Jacques De Molay and Emperor Norton I.

Lovecraft's Fiction Volume II, 1926-1928

Author: Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Publisher: Fan Published eBook (2012)

Occult Medicine and Practical Magic

Author: Samael Aun Weor

Publisher: Glorian Publishing (2008)

The Denial of Death

Author: Ernest Becker

Publisher: Free Press (1975)

The Mind's I

Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

Publisher: Bantam Books (1982)

Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of the new physics, became deeply involved in the issues of philosophy and humanism. In Philosophical Problems of Quantum Physics, he wrote of physicists having to renounce thoughts of an objective time scale common to all observers, and of events in time and space that are independent of our ability to observe them. Heisenberg stressed that the laws of nature are no longer dealt with elementary particles, but with our knowledge of these particles – that is, with the contents of our minds. Erwin Schrödinger, the man who formulated the fundamental equation of quantum mathematics, wrote an extraordinary little book in 1958 called Mind and Matter. In this series of essays, he moved from the results of the new physics to a rather mystical view of the universe that he identified with the “perennial philosophy” of Aldous Huxley. Schrödinger was the first of the quantum theoreticians to express sympathy with the Upanishads and eastern philosophical thought. A growing body of literature now embodies this perspective, including two popular works, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and the Dancing Wu Li masters by Gary

Consider, for example, the striking discovery by the psycholinguists James Lackner and Merril Garrett of what might be called an unconscious channel of sentence comprehension. In dichotic listening tests, subjects listen through earphones to two different channels and are instructed to attend to just one channel. Typically they can paraphrase or report with accuracy what they have heard through the attended channel but usually they can say little about what was going on concomitantly in the unattended channel. Thus, if the unattended channel carries a spoken sentence, the subjects typically can report they heard a voice, or even a male or female voice. Perhaps they even have a conviction about whether the voice was speaking in their native tongue, but they cannot report what was said. In Lackney and Garrett’s experiments subjects heard ambiguous sentences in the attended channel, such as “He put out the lantern to signal the attack.” Simultaneously, in the unattended channel one group of subjects received a sentence that suggested the interpretation of the sentence in the attended channel (e.g. “He extinguished the lantern), while another group had a neutral or irrelevant sentence as input. The former group could not report what was presented through the unattended channel, but they favoured the suggested reading of the ambiguous sentences significantly more than the control group did.

130

The Tale of the Three Story Telling Machines, from The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, translated by Michael Kandel.

Just in Case

Author: Kathy Harrison

Publisher: Storey Publishing (2008)