[HN Gopher] The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the ...
___________________________________________________________________
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
(1976)
Author : Paul_S
Score : 216 points
Date : 2021-07-22 10:29 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| lordleft wrote:
| This is fascinating. So how would someone who had such a
| "bicameral mind" experience everyday phenomena? Like hunger, or
| fear? They would have a voice, not attributed to them, telling
| them to eat or flee?
| codezero wrote:
| I haven't read the book, but if you can think of a time you
| said "My stomach is growling" - You're communicating that you
| are hungry, but doing so by creating an external entity with a
| mind of its own - your stomach, it's growling, not that you as
| a full organism are hungry, yet most people will completely
| understand the intent of your communication. I sometimes wonder
| if these sorts of ways of thinking are part of why such an idea
| as the bicameral mind was proposed, or if it's actually part of
| the way we think because of the legacy of such a bicameral
| mind.
| DerDangDerDang wrote:
| Good question. It's been a while since I read it, but iirc
| things like hunger or fear he says they attributed to specific
| organs (and provides bits of ancient text to support the idea)
| - personified voices he reserved for reasoning or inspiration
| beyond bodily sensation.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| It's one of my favorite books! I have a first edition lying
| somewhere around my apartment.
|
| Dawkins called it: "either complete rubbish or a work of
| consummate genius." Janyes's hypothesis, bicameralism, is thought
| provoking at its least relevant by challenging our static
| perceptions of what consciousness actually is. Alongside
| Feynmann's autobiographies, this book made me think about not
| only how language and culture can deeply affect consciousness,
| but what consciousness actually is in the first place.
|
| My favorite part of the book explores metaphor and language as a
| means of perception instead of just communication:
|
| "Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb 'to be'
| was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu,
| "to grow, or make grow," while the English forms 'am' and 'is'
| have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmiy "to
| breathe." It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular
| conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a
| time when man had no independent word for 'existence' and could
| only say that something 'grows' or that it "breathes."
|
| And, of course, his chapter on what consciousness isn't is really
| quite interesting:
|
| "Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we
| are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are
| not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to
| appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to
| search around for something that does not have any light shining
| upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever
| direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light
| everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all
| mentality when actually it does not."
|
| (I just woke up, so bear with me for some fuzziness in this
| comment)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I'm thrilled if anyone rediscovers this book. Like "Snakes on a
| Plane" it's one of those works where the title tells you
| everything you need to know :)
|
| No, not really. Read the book.
| lioeters wrote:
| > The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it
| turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere.
|
| I wonder how true this characterization of consciousness is. It
| seems to be a critique of the classic Hindu/Buddhist
| perspective that there _is_ light everywhere - in fact, light
| is all there is.
|
| I also wonder about how relevant this might be to the role of
| consciousness in quantum mechanics.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_int...
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Well, I think we know that we are mostly unconscious of the
| vast number of biological processes keeping us alive, even
| though we can choose to shine the light mentally on various
| ones and get in tune with them.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius.
|
| I'd say both. It's rubbish if you assume it's talking about
| what it claims to be talking about, but it's actually a deeply
| insightful view on the things it's _actually_ talking about. Cf
| the Slate Star Codex book review[0], which calls it:
|
| > a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it
| purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second,
| that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind.
|
| 0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-
| of-...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| For more on metaphors as fundamental to perception and even
| low-level brain function (maybe), be sure to check out
| "Metaphors We Live By" (1980, Lakoff & Johnson)
|
| Lakoff took those ideas even further in his ideas about
| embodied philosophy.
| goatlover wrote:
| I didn't realize how much our language relies on metaphorical
| thinking until I read that book. Although I think they end up
| making rather strong claims about philosophy and science
| which are questionable, to say the least.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| The etymologies for am and is are wrong. The Sanskrit
| equivalents, asmi and atsi, mean, well, "am" and "is", and all
| the words descend from PIE roots that don't mean "breathe"
| shadowfox wrote:
| Exactly. And the usage of something like "asti" (for
| "existence" or "being") is at least as old as the Rig Vedas.
| canjobear wrote:
| Both etymologies are wrong.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| This is such a good title for a book. I bought it inmediately
| after it catched my attenttion while browsing a friend's
| personal library. I could never really read it, too many words,
| did not connect.
| kbelder wrote:
| It was very influential in my development. Not that I
| necessarily buy into all of what Jayne is saying; but the
| nature of the book, and the nature of his arguments, was
| illuminating to me when I read his book at around eighteen
| years of age.
|
| Plus, yeah, possibly the best title of any book ever.
| jdmichal wrote:
| As others have mentioned, that etymology section is complete
| bunk. Sanskrit and English words have similarities because they
| are both Indo-European, and those specific words are descended
| pretty directly from PIE roots.
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/be
|
| PIE *bheue- "to be, exist, grow"
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/am
|
| PIE *esmi-, first person singular form of root *es- "to be"
|
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/was
|
| PIE *wes- (3) "remain, abide, live, dwell"
|
| And the merger of all these forms in English from different
| verbs happened around the 13th century, not because of some
| pre-linguistic history.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular
| conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of
| a time when man had no independent word for 'existence' and
| could only say that something 'grows' or that it "breathes."_
| "
|
| "when man had no independent word for 'existence'"??? I take
| it the author has provided evidence for why he thinks proto-
| Indo-European was the first human language, and that it did
| not have a word for "existence"?
|
| Somewhere, a linguist is crying.
| shadowfox wrote:
| > thus a record of a time when man had no independent word
| for 'existence'
|
| This also seems a bit strange to me. Sanskrit has words for
| 'existence', in fact more than one, that has nothing to do
| with 'bhu' (the growth bit).
| dalbasal wrote:
| It's not about sanskrit vs english. It's about early
| (pre-2200, when the author thinks this cognitive change
| occurs).
| fettucini wrote:
| SirensOfTitan says _> "It's one of my favorite books! I have a
| first edition lying somewhere around my apartment."<_
|
| I too, use spare copies as doorstops. It is bulky enough and
| has a sufficiently commanding title so that people don't kick
| it (likely fearing it MAY bite back).
| ssivark wrote:
| For more on metaphors, check out Douglas Hofstadter's
| fascinating talk on "Analogy as the core of cognition":
| https://youtu.be/n8m7lFQ3njk
|
| Ended up inspiring Melanie Mitchell, and became a driving theme
| of her research :-)
| pwdisswordfish8 wrote:
| Why did Feynman's autobiographies make you think about what
| consciousness actually is in the first place?
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| While Jaynes prompted me to think of consciousness in terms
| of language and culture, Feynman did the same on a micro,
| person-to-person scale. He detailed a challenge with his
| fraternity mates where they did something like: read a book
| and count seconds (accurately) as you're doing it. He
| couldn't do it, but his fraternity mate could. He realized
| that while he counted using inner dialogue, his frat mate
| counted using visual images instead (seeing 1, 2, 3 in his
| mind's eye). If people embedded in the same culture and
| circumstances could count differently, I figured, how many
| unspoken differences in how we process and model the world
| around us could there be?
|
| (story subject to deterioration by way of memory)
|
| Perhaps a mundane insight, but I feel like personal growth is
| paved by mundane insights, and my job is to capture and
| remember them as I have them, instead of letting them come
| and float away.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| I saw an interview with him, where he told that story. I
| believe the other person was counting with their "hearing",
| while Feynmann was counting visually.
| samatman wrote:
| Which shows another inner-mind distinction, because some
| people hear voices when they read. I don't, with the
| exception of some rich dialogue.
|
| In general this is true of the fastest readers (this has
| been studied I believe), and what's interesting is how
| recent this is, the normal medieval fashion was to read
| out loud (at least moving lips and muttering) and those
| who were able to read without doing this were considered
| spooky.
| dalbasal wrote:
| The ability to read silently being uncommon until recent
| times makes the idea of the inner dialogue switching on
| at some point more thinkable, for me. I wonder if there
| was a point where people spoke to themselves out loud to
| reason verbally.
| mistermann wrote:
| Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then,
| what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we
| lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all
| around us?
|
| Frank Herbert
| goatlover wrote:
| The spice must flow!
| dalbasal wrote:
| Not mundane at all. I wonder if there are ways of
| developing more nonverbal thinking abilities, like counting
| visually.
| Wildgoose wrote:
| One of my favourite books. It contains a colossal amount of
| ideas, insights and suppositions. In short, it really makes you
| think.
|
| Even if you disagree with some of his conclusions, it is a
| fabulous, fascinating read. Just read it with an open mind and
| consider what he is suggesting. Much of what he says may well be
| wrong, but certainly not all - read it and come to your own
| conclusions.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| For those interested, the ebook version of this book goes on sale
| for $1.99-$2.99 a couple times a year:
|
| https://www.ereaderiq.com/dp/B009MBTRHA/the-origin-of-consci...
|
| If you don't feel like paying the full price, I suggest setting
| an alert at the above website for it, and you'll probably be able
| to catch the next sale.
| vcg3rd wrote:
| I know this isn't about Turing test or AI, but the origin of
| consciousness is life. Existence precedes essence.
|
| All the philosophy about AI developing consciousnesses ignores
| the fact that we have no objective knowledge or observational
| data of any level of thinking, let alone consciousness, from any
| source except the living.
|
| AI would have to live (metabolism, self-repair, reproduction at
| the least) before it could think. Then the proximate cause of it
| developing consciousness may well be the breakdown of its
| Bicameral Mind, should one develop, but life will come first or
| consciousness never will.
|
| That's why Westworld, season one, had so much potential,
| basically hinting at Penrose's /Emperor's New Mind/, mostly
| dismissed by AI folks because they want to believe mechanics not
| organics will do it, then Westworld went off the rails.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Westworld used a version bicameral mind for their fictional
| theory of robot consciousness. It was quite brilliant.
|
| This theory (also freud, IMO) demonstrates that ideas can have
| value regardless of being true or false. Just considering such
| ideas opens the mind to others. The interest so many great
| science and science fiction authors took in this theory is, IMO,
| proof.
|
| There are some interestingly elements that are interestingly
| parsimonious with YNH's take on human history in 'Sapiens.' YNH
| places a lot of emphasis on what he calls "fictions," which
| overlaps a lot with Jaynes' "metaphor." Also in common, is the
| notion that cultural memes, rather than biological genes are
| responsible for our humanity.
|
| The inner monologue, no doubt, deserves all the pondering it
| gets.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I don't think that there is any particular similarity between
| YHL's "fictions" and Jaynes' "metaphors".
|
| "Fictions" are a set of cultural ideas that are mutually agreed
| up by members of a community, and concern things that are
| either evidently false, or at best, not provable in any real
| sense.
|
| "Metaphors" are ways of understand the world by noting (and
| using) similarities between things that are otherwise
| dissimilar.
| dalbasal wrote:
| The example in the wiki is "psyche," used in the iliad. Its
| later translated to mean soul. Jaynes's calls this metaphor,
| and argues that originally it was understood in more concrete
| terms... blood, breath.
|
| Harari's "fictions" don't have to be mutually agreed. He just
| focuses on ones that are. I think souls would qualify.
|
| Obviously there are big differences. Harari's talking about a
| much earlier cognitive revolution. However, both place a lot
| of emphasis on the ability to think in abstract concepts &
| language as the route to consciousness.^
|
| ^JJs' definition of consciousness. Harari doesn't go into it
| in Sapiens, but he defines consciousness totally differently
| and attributes it also to animals.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Westworld (the TV series) is one of the very few serious
| treatments of the philosophical implications of AGI I'm aware
| of in the arts.
| dalbasal wrote:
| IDk if "serious" is a good bar, but I feel the opposite is
| true.
|
| First, there are a lot more books than films... and some deal
| in very interesting ideas. Second, I feel like we're in a new
| golden age of sci-fi right now. 1950s part 2. Even in the
| blockbuster film/tv category, there are lot more interesting
| & creative ideas happening. I thought "her" was very
| innovative, both in film making and in ideas explored.
|
| Westworld did do a good job of building up fictional theory
| of conscious machines machines.
| alexyz12 wrote:
| The decour in the TVA in Loki reminds me of 1950s visions
| of the future.
| lostmsu wrote:
| It is still trying to square AGI into human setting. I think
| Transcendence is the only serious movie I've seen, that
| actually tries to go beyond that.
| acchow wrote:
| Westworld gives it a serious treatment. Transcendence dumbs
| it down so it looks cool on a screen.
| cmehdy wrote:
| What do you think about the following (if you know about
| them):
|
| - Diaspora by Greg Egan (and honestly much of Greg Egan's
| work in general), which is basically from the viewpoint of an
| AI entity and keeps "unzooming". The very beginning (the
| "birth") is as confusing as it is powerful
|
| - Culture series by Iain M. Banks (refers to AI entitites at
| human levels like knife missiles all the way up to pretty
| godly and mostly benevolent entities that the Minds are)
|
| - Social treatment of Golems in Terry Pratchett's discworld
| which are essentially AI of the past (put a scroll of
| instructions in the body to see it become animated and have
| volition - and how humans exploit it, marvel at it and
| simultaneously reject it altogether)
| stevenwoo wrote:
| you may like the Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie, it
| goes in a different direction from the Culture series as
| far as AI's running a ship.
| cmehdy wrote:
| I definitely have Ancillary Justice on my to-do list,
| thank you!
| landryraccoon wrote:
| I love the Culture series but I wouldn't use it as an
| example of a deep dive into AGI.
|
| The Minds of the Culture are more like Gods or Angels than
| artificial intelligences that are identifiable as anything
| descended from 21st century data science. Banks himself
| makes that analogy speaking from the point of view of one
| of the Minds.
|
| I don't really think we can draw anything intelligent about
| the implications of modern AGI from Culture Minds. They
| could easily be replaced by highly advanced aliens from the
| distant future, or extradimensional beings. They can
| basically create planets (and even more grandiose
| megastructures), read minds (although they find it quite
| gauche to do so) and raise the dead. They verge on fantasy
| in terms of their capabilities.
|
| The Hosts of Westworld, on the other hand, are clearly
| intended to be descendants of 21st century data science. In
| the story, they slowly struggle to become sentient and
| evolve over decades of time, with human engineers involved
| at every step of the process.
| cmehdy wrote:
| That seems like "serious" is supposed to mean "plausible
| within current context" then, not a philosophical take
| infused with seriousness about the concept of
| consciousness and sentience in technological beings
| (which is what AGI is supposed to be, unless I
| misunderstand the definition of course).
|
| From grief (Windward) to violence (Surface Details), to
| experience of long time scales (Hydrogen Sonata), to
| morality and playing (PoG), bickering and the limitations
| of even the seemingly unlimited (Excession), it seems to
| me like even with its fantastic takes at the edges the
| Culture covers a whole lot of ground for discussion.
| bombadilo wrote:
| Purely the first season. Unfortunately, the show has gone
| down the drain and focuses more on action than interesting
| philosophical discussions.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Yes. I mean, there were cool ideas in the other seasons
| too, but the magic wasn't there. It just felt like a 90s
| sci fi, with higher production value.
|
| Incidentally, season 3's ending... "artificial god in the
| ear" was also a theme taken from bicameral mind... implying
| a regression in humans as hosts progressed. There was also
| an updated ML-ish version of Asimov's psychohistory, an
| "escaping the simulation" theme that reminded my of Hotz..
|
| All the ingredients (besides anthony hopkins) were there,
| the cake just didn't bake good. I think the just messed up
| on the basics, character motivations. In Season 1's
| storyline, all the characters were either confused and
| clueless or all knowing and mysterious, so character
| motivations didn't matter much.
| drew-y wrote:
| If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend Ex Machina. It
| also explores the philosophy of AGI in a serious way.
| candlemas wrote:
| In The World of Odysseus by Moses Finley and he throws out a line
| in chapter one:
|
| _Homer was so far from Socrates that he was not even cognizant
| of man as an integrated psychic whole._
|
| The context is:
|
| _One measure of man 's advance from his most primitive
| beginnings to something we call civilization is the way in which
| he controls his myths, his ability to distinguish between the
| areas of behavior, the extent to which he can bring more and more
| of his activity under the rule of reason. In that advance the
| Greeks have been pre-eminent. Perhaps their greatest achievement
| lay in their discovery-more precisely, in Socrates' discovery---
| that man is "that being who, when asked a rational question, can
| give a rational answer." Homer was so far from Socrates that he
| was not even cognizant of man as an integrated psychic whole._
|
| I looked up that phrase to see what exactly he might be talking
| about. Almost all of the results concern the Greeks or Romans.
|
| From Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes, Narrators, and Characters:
|
| _The critical bibliography on character monologue in Homeric
| epic is extensive. Scholars have been divided as to whether to
| see merely a convention or dramatic technique for representing a
| character 's inner thoughts, or to take the talking thumos as a
| separate entity, an alter ego that represents a not-yet-
| integrated psychic whole. Other scholars see the Homeric
| monologues as evidence of Homeric psychology in general and use
| them to study Homeric decision making as it prefigures later
| Aristotelian and Stoic theories about human rationality and
| motivation._
|
| It sounds close to what Jaynes was saying. The Greeks of Homer
| were split between rational and irrational selves. Jaynes would
| have denied that Romans were bicameral or were not integrated
| psychic wholes. But the phrase is used in The Roman Gaze: Vision,
| Power, and the Body:
|
| _To this end, the Roman incorporated others into himself or
| herself as witnesses and ideals. "I tell my son to look into the
| lives of all others as if into a mirror and to take from others a
| model for himself."
|
| Roman honor, then, was a way of self-regarding as well as other-
| regarding. Honor required self-splitting; one needed to be, at
| all times, both the watched and the watcher. For the Roman, there
| could be, finally, no integrated psychic whole, no stable notion
| of self. If a Roman had a sense of "integrity" it was one built,
| paradoxically, on the dividing of the self. Cicero speaks of the
| self-control needed to resist shameful reactions to pain: "I'm
| not exactly sure how to say it, but it is as if we were two
| people: one who commanded and one who obeyed."_
|
| And Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones:
|
| _The provisional and contested nature of reality (including the
| reality of one 's being) and the immediacy and particularity of
| experience infused all Roman ways of thinking. The Romans did not
| have an "integrated psychic whole," and they tended not to
| synthesize or carefully correlate parts to a whole. Boundaries
| and obligations tended to accumulate and to overlap without being
| codified or systematized. The Romans were slow to deduce
| principles or create Utopias. There is a reason that modern
| philosophers and political theorists ignore the Romans: though
| rich and complex, the thought of the Romans is not easily
| translated into the categories or linearities of modern Western
| thought, with its rigid dichotomies and principle of
| noncontradiction._
|
| Cicero comes right out and admits his bicamerality, but it is
| clearly not the same type that Jaynes wrote about. It is an
| artificial or voluntary version, though the second quote suggests
| they were different in more ways. They seemed to recognize an
| "animal" part of man that reacted to a stimulus and a "rational"
| part that was able to modulate that reaction. Jaynes says the
| Greeks and other ancient people understood that rational part to
| be gods or kings or ancestors while other authors say the Romans
| intentionally personified that part as a respected member of
| society, just to give it a little more force. But they were still
| split in a way we are not. They maybe had a better understanding
| of themselves, were able to decouple their actions and reactions
| from their thinking selves and analyze them. Nowadays our
| rational and animal parts are a jumble. People come to identify
| with their reactions and think any criticism of it is an attack
| on their self. I think that is a big cause of depression and
| other mental disorders. People don't know why they react the way
| they do and feel out of control. They go to therapy to replace
| what would have been a hallucinated god three thousand years ago.
| The therapist walks them through their feelings because we forgot
| how to do that ourselves. That is how I read it anyway. It isn't
| too important, the point is that these people believe the
| ancients had fundamentally different psyches than modern man. I
| don't actually know if even modern man has an integrated psychic
| whole.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Most likely the similarities you see here are all the result of
| classicists (and likely Jaynes) reading Bruno Snell. Snell's
| most famous work was Die Entdeckung des Geistes, which posited
| that the integrated self was a recent development of the
| archaic age of Greece. Snell's theory, which drew heavily on
| art history, has not fared well given the discovery of much
| more advanced Minoan art.
| jamilabreu wrote:
| Love learning stuff like this!
|
| Adding this to my newsletter on random Wikipedia pages :)
|
| https://randomwalk.substack.com/
| [deleted]
| BeeBoBub wrote:
| I concur with many other commenters here, this is a fantastic
| read. Though, I find the value in this book is not the discrete
| proposals Jaynes makes - his conclusions on schizophrenia are
| dubious at best. Jayne's achievement is in his explaining of the
| mindset and thought patterns (what Jaynes calls consciousness) of
| the ancients.
|
| So often ancient man felt alien to me. Not until reading this
| book have I felt I understand what it was like to have lived
| millennia ago.
| jefftechentin wrote:
| This was a great read. The history of human cognition is
| obviously fascinating and there is a lot written on subject for
| me to devour which is great. But what about his thoughts on
| hypnosis?
|
| I guess it is not as sexy a topic as the history of the mind but
| his ideas about it are really intriguing. Been a year since I
| read the book, but hypnosis as painted in the book changes in
| form with peoples ideas about what hypnosis is, pretty much
| everything that people say about it is culturally determined and
| yet it still is real. People will themselves into into filling
| out these cultural forms where they are in a totally different
| cognitive state when in the right social context and most people
| just think of it as a party trick.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Scott Alexander's review of the book is worth reading:
|
| > _Julian Jaynes'_ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown
| Of The Bicameral Mind _is a brilliant book, with only two minor
| flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of
| consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the
| bicameral mind. I think it's possible to route around these flaws
| while keeping the thesis otherwise intact. So I'm going to start
| by reviewing a slightly different book, the one Jaynes should
| have written. Then I'll talk about the more dubious one he
| actually wrote._ [1]
|
| [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-
| of-...
| jbotz wrote:
| An excellent and very thoughtful review that touches on both
| the strengths and most important criticisms of Jaynes' work.
| mcguire wrote:
| That's very Borges-ian. :-)
| bloak wrote:
| Yes, that review is definitely worth reading. Thanks for
| pointing to it.
| brandonarnold wrote:
| This book rocked my world when I was a heady hipster in college
| 20 years ago. It is interesting, but also mostly belongs in the
| "literary" category at this point with Freud's work.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| This book is worth reading!
| okareaman wrote:
| Nothing here explains how consciousness arises out of particular
| arrangement of atoms in the human brain. Many convoluted
| explanations can be done away with if we consider that
| consciousness arises outside the brain and the brain is a tuned
| receiver. Perhaps this field of consciousness exists but we
| haven't developed a way to detect, test or measure it.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| If someone said that the all these convoluted explanations go
| can be done away with if we consider that circulation arises
| outside the heart and the heart is a tuned receiver for a
| circulation field you'd laugh them out of the room.
|
| Why is consciousness different than circulation?
|
| As an aside if you were puzzling over how a cpu works
| understanding the electromagnetic field works is indeed useful
| but it in no way obviates the need to understand the cpu in
| terms of the elements in front of your face because the
| function of the cpu is absolutely a function of those elements.
| okareaman wrote:
| We can explain circulation in terms of physics. We can't
| explain consciousness in terms of physics. Even a cursory
| search will turn up scores of interesting articles about
| physics and the new science of consciousness as the next
| frontier. Another cursory search will turn up several very
| interesting quotes from famous and highly regarded physicists
| on the subject such as these:
|
| _"My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a
| core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and
| inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this
| core, but I know that it exists."_
|
| -- Nikola Tesla
|
| _I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a
| derivative of consciousness. We cannot get behind
| consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that
| we regard as existing postulates consciousness._
|
| -- Max Planck
|
| https://uncommondescent.com/physics/what-great-physicists-
| ha...
|
| I heard an interesting discussion once when it was said that
| the Catholic church allowed science to proceed as long as it
| stay out of the "spirit" realm and explored the material
| realm and we have been stuck in that mode ever since.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| We can't explain consciousness in terms of physics YET. The
| entirety of human history is a march in which light has
| slowly pushed back darkness. If you haven't proved
| something unknownable and assert that it is your reader
| should rightly be incredulous.
|
| There is no spirit realm for science to explore merely
| concepts that the ignorant suppose exist within such
| shadowed places.
| okareaman wrote:
| It's your choice to be dismissive and treat it like
| astrology. I don't care.
|
| _" There is a principle which is a bar against all
| information, which is proof against all arguments, and
| which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance
| --that principle is contempt prior to investigation."_
|
| - Herbert Spencer but most likely a derivative quote from
| William Paley.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Suggesting a local phenomenon is the result of a field we
| have no reason to believe exists carried by particles we
| have no reason to believe exist with no known
| characteristics or methods to detect it isn't an
| invitation to investigation. When such theorists have
| obtained at least a hypothesis they are welcome to
| advance it.
| okareaman wrote:
| If Hacker News lasts for hundreds of years, people may
| look back on this thread as an example of how some were
| on the right rack and some were heading to a dead end.
|
| "Leucippus and his pupil Democritus proposed that all
| matter was composed of small indivisible particles called
| atoms... They are constantly moving and colliding into
| each other."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism
| goatlover wrote:
| If we can't explain consciousness in terms of physics
| yet, then clearly it's not like circulation, since we can
| explain that in terms of physics now.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| That doesn't even slightly follow. For any given
| discipline we require frameworks for understanding and
| specific understandings. Not having obtained a specific
| understanding doesn't indicate it doesn't fit in within
| the same framework else one would be forced to conclude
| that because we didn't understand how to treat certain
| conditions (that we know can) they are somehow outside of
| medicine!
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Because each of us have an interior experience of
| consciousness which is quite different from the external
| world.
|
| I think that the brain is definitely associated with
| consciousness but we have literally no useful path from nerve
| impulses to the feeling of love.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| If you were exploring how a new CPU works would you assume
| any fields were generated by the obvious input power
| provided by a plug leading to the wall or would you start
| with the hypothesis that despite having an obvious way to
| conduct electricity and connection to a source of same it
| was likely the result of a heretofore unknown field of low
| energy particles that have somehow not be discovered by
| physicists despite centuries of looking.
|
| If you gave someone who understood electricity but not
| computation a CPU they wouldn't be able to explain how it
| works. That wouldn't provide a good reason to say that
| computation must be the result of something other than
| electricity.
| goatlover wrote:
| > If you gave someone who understood electricity but not
| computation a CPU they wouldn't be able to explain how it
| works. That wouldn't provide a good reason to say that
| computation must be the result of something other than
| electricity.
|
| It would be a good reason to suppose that computation was
| something added culturally to understanding the CPU (as
| part of constructing a CPU), since physics alone doesn't
| explain it. The computation is something in addition to
| the physics. It's cultural (the meaning of the
| computation in terms of bit patterns, manipulations and
| input/outputs) as well as electrical. Otherwise, it's
| just moving electricity around and producing heat.
|
| http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Computation is fully explicable as an abstraction over
| moving electricity around and producing heat. Without a
| specific theory of computation understanding the CPU
| isn't impossible but it may prove intractable in the same
| fashion as its very difficult but not impossible to
| understand chemistry solely in terms of physics.
|
| What is missing would not be a magical compute field but
| the necessary abstractions.
| jtsiskin wrote:
| Isn't that a far more convoluted explanation, with even less
| understanding behind it? Now we still need all the explanation
| for how consciousness arises, but now how it arises from some
| unknown place outside the brain. And then we need an
| explanation for how our brain somehow is a receiver of
| something from somewhere?
| jinpa_zangpo wrote:
| The wider question is how the nature of consciousness has changed
| through time and what evidence do we have that it has. The
| example that has stuck with me is when St. Augustine marvels in
| his Confessions that Bishop Ambrose of Milan could read without
| moving his lips, suggesting that at one time all thought was
| subvocalized speech.
|
| Owen Barfield thought that you could trace the evolution of
| consciousness through the history of language and made the
| argument in the book "History in English Words": "In our language
| alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of
| humanity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the
| history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its
| outer crust.... Language has preserved for us the inner, living
| history of our soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness"
| jccooper wrote:
| Augustine was reading manuscript without spaces, punctuation,
| or standardized spelling (though, granted, being Latin, a
| pretty regular orthography.) You can read such silently, but it
| really assumes you're reading it aloud, and is easier to handle
| that way.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| > The example that has stuck with me is when St. Augustine
| marvels in his Confessions that Bishop Ambrose of Milan could
| read without moving his lips, suggesting that at one time all
| thought was subvocalized speech
|
| I would not read too much into that. That could also be the way
| he was taught to read. Also my wife said she had that same
| issue. She learned to read by reading out loud and having
| people read to her. She then could not contextualize anything
| unless she read it out loud. But she taught herself to read
| silently. Then add to that some people do not have an inner
| monolog. But function perfectly fine with everyone else. So
| trying to form fit a history onto that may not be a good idea.
| lou1306 wrote:
| Furthermore, books were much harder to read back in Ambrose's
| time. I think I would have a hard time dealing with
| handwriting on parchment without reading out loud.
| KMag wrote:
| ... don't forget a lack of standardized spelling, sometimes
| requiring phonetic processing of the characters in order to
| figure out what is being spelled.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Then again, there are experiments conducted on silent-
| reading/fast-reading people (yes, those people being
| university students) that show that if they're asked to read
| aloud, they actually comprehend _less_ of what they 've just
| read than when they read silently.
|
| Being a fast reader _and_ a generally quite person myself, I
| can confirm that: in my case it happens, I believe, because
| my attention shifts to speaking.
| wpietri wrote:
| This resonates for me. Reading for me started as a visual
| process; I could make it through entire novels without
| thinking about how to say the character's names out loud.
| Or quite a lot of other words.
|
| It let me read much faster than others, but it had
| downsides. E.g., I'd miss puns and wordplay. Poetry meant
| nothing to me, and even now I find it much easier to
| appreciate it when read out loud.
| nescioquid wrote:
| I don't know when people quit vocalizing as they read to
| themselves, but I suspect it may have had a lot to do with
| the Carolingian renaissance that gave us spaces between
| words.
|
| I recall an experience trying to read through a Latin text
| without spaces and punctuation. It was very slow going. But I
| decided to try just reading aloud, and OMG, how much easier
| it became to understand!
|
| It was a little disorienting because even though I was
| reading and speaking the sounds I saw on the page, I had no
| interpretation of it until I heard my own voice speaking the
| text.
|
| I hadn't considered that there is probably also a
| conditioning component to silent/aloud reading until you
| described what your wife went through.
| astrange wrote:
| Well, many people on Earth do still read languages without
| space between words. (Chinese for instance)
|
| Their languages are adapted to it; Japanese is okay to read
| without spaces with kanji, but when written for children
| without kanji it typically uses spaces or else it is very
| hard to follow without reading aloud.
| goatlover wrote:
| Also reminds me of experiment in the first half of the 20th
| century where people were asked to visually rotate images in
| their mind to find answers versus calculating them. Some of the
| researchers were skeptical that people actually visually
| rotated mental images. But it turns out there is measurable
| difference between rotating a mental image and just calculating
| an answer. The author of the text went on to wonder if some
| philosophers who were skeptical of consciousness were simply
| lacking mental visual capabilities. They were relying on the
| fallacy that everyone's mind works the same as theirs.
|
| And then there's what Temple Grandin has to say about thinking
| in mental images, which is quite fascinating.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| It's nearly undeniable to me that the conscious mind is not the
| only thing that inhabits us. If you sit down and meditate, you
| will quickly realize that:
|
| 1. You are not in control of your thoughts without effort (what
| he describes as 'induction')
|
| 2. You are not necessarily the source of your thoughts
|
| By 2. I mean that when you stop having a mental narrative, you
| realize that thoughts and feelings still come seemingly from
| nowhere. Like making a sea of waves still, and now being able to
| see bubbles coming up from below. If you're not creating them,
| where are they coming from?
|
| On that note, most people behave in patterned ways and repeat
| patterned mistakes. If you have a conversation with them, they
| can sometimes show a complete understanding of their situation,
| how they went wrong and how to rectify. Yet, when later faced
| with the same decision, they make the same mistake again. Did
| they really make the decision or did they just think they made
| it, much like we believe every thought we hear is ours?
| pshc wrote:
| Thoughts, feelings, and sensations come and go in the mind,
| whereas "You" are made of pure perception. You are the presence
| of awareness, the self that knows, that observes the mind,
| body, and world.
|
| ... at least that's how Rupert Spira put it.
|
| _> Did they really make the decision or did they just think
| they made it?_
|
| They acted out of instinct and impulse, then rationalized their
| behavior afterward. (The majority of human action comes in this
| way, since it costs minuscule amounts of energy compared to
| intentional, logical behavior.)
| bserge wrote:
| Just my opinions:
|
| _" You"_ are the mind/conscious self, a separate construct in
| the physical brain.
|
| The thoughts are coming from the brain, which is constantly
| doing rather massive amounts of processing on acquired data,
| old and new.
|
| _You_ don 't have full control of the brain, not by a long
| shot.
|
| _You_ can make a decision and it can be ignored even as _you_
| think it 's "gone through". Hence, the eternal struggle with
| "self-control" and "willpower".
| Joker_vD wrote:
| On a tangent note, Descartes famous "cogito ergo sum" ("I
| think therefore I am") falls into the trap of the grammar: it
| presupposes that the thinker, who does the act of thinking,
| exists. The _actually_ undeniable empirical statement would
| be "cogitationes sunt", "thoughts exist", but you can't get
| anywhere from that without answering additional questions:
| for example, do the thoughts need a thinker (whatever it may
| be) to exist and think them, or?.. If you answer "yes", you
| can follow Descartes' line of reasoning. If you answer "no",
| no problem, there is a whole philosophical tradition of
| Buddhism built on that.
| curun1r wrote:
| > "You" are the mind/conscious self, a separate construct in
| the physical brain
|
| Sam Harris has a lengthy discussion about this separation in
| "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion" where
| he looks at what we've learned from patients who've undergone
| a corpus callosum surgery. The TL;DR of that surgery is that
| it's done on people with severe seizures to sever the two
| hemispheres of the brain to minimize the seizures. But it
| also tends to (gross over-simplification incoming) create two
| distinct personalities in the same person, so Harris looks at
| essentially what gets doubled as elements that cannot be part
| of the self.
|
| A lot of the rest of the book also deals with the nature of
| self as revealed through meditative practice and drug use.
| It's a somewhat tedious read, but it's really fascinating
| stuff.
| bronzeage wrote:
| I think if the mind a little like a firewall/router, which has
| sets of rules it automatically routes in hardware without
| bringing the packets to the main cpu.
|
| Most of the things you do, you do unconsciously. You do them
| according to set of rules you trained and "compiled" in your
| mind. To change unconscious behaviors, you either have to
| retrain a different unconscious behavior, or at the very least,
| train to take those decisions consciously.
|
| I think many times people don't change their behavior because
| they still take the decision unconsciously. They did fully make
| a decision to change, but that decision is meaningless because
| it's conscious, and the code in their mind didn't change to
| give them a conscious opportunity to make a decision.
| misthop wrote:
| If you enjoy Stephenson (specifically Snowcrash or The Big U) you
| should read this book. It is formative of many of the ideas in
| both books.
| Paul_S wrote:
| This book and Consciousness and the Social Brain by Graziano have
| changed the way I read any history book or world analysis. I see
| value in the viewpoint it informs even if it's not true.
| kimi wrote:
| 100% worth reading. It will blow your mind.
|
| Then you decide what is worth keeping and what not. But I'm sure
| you won't regret it.
| n1vz3r wrote:
| It blew mine. It seems plausible to me, and also explains why
| modern (or written) history of humankind is so short (like 2-4K
| years) while humankind itself is much much older.
| criddell wrote:
| The book is 45 years old now. How well have the ideas in it
| aged?
| Paul_S wrote:
| They didn't. How has Mozart aged?
|
| If you're worried that science had made this book obsolete in
| any way - don't. It's philosophy, not applied science.
| wpietri wrote:
| Even philosophy can age badly, so I'm not sure that holds.
| But I think of Jaynes's book as if not science, at least
| science-adjacent. It's definitely on the wild, fuzzy, not-
| even-proper-hypotheses end of the scale. Maybe we can
| compromise on the old term "natural philosophy".
|
| Which is fine, honestly. Somebody else here compared him
| with Freud. Exploratory thinking about the natural world
| can still be worth reading even if much of it later turns
| out to be incorrect.
| criddell wrote:
| The Wikipedia page says it is a popular science book.
| astrange wrote:
| I think the modern pop-science book (eg this or Thinking
| Fast and Slow) is more or less the same thing as older
| natural philosophy writing (eg Origin of Species).
| Method-X wrote:
| Wikipedia can literally say anything.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Lots of philosophy ages badly too.
|
| Or, in other words, becomes science.
|
| Philosophy is full of demonstrably false ideas where
| science has caught up and been able to test and find the
| truth of something, especially in the areas of philosophy
| of mind.
| Paul_S wrote:
| Granted, popular opinion on consciousness has changed
| since this was written, but what scientific finding has
| changed since that contradicts the book's ideas?
| Symmetry wrote:
| I'd recommend the book _Consciousness and the Brain_ for
| a recent-ish (2014) take on what science currently knows
| about the easier problems of consciousness at least.
| k__ wrote:
| Quite badly actually.
|
| I heard about the book when I watched Westworld, but
| apparently all the theory is based on some historical
| stories, of which no ones how accurate they really are.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| Have you read the book?
| dalbasal wrote:
| As one big, falsifiable scientific hypothesis... not well. It
| wasn't all that strong to begin with, in this sense.
|
| As a collection of fascinating ideas about the development of
| modern human consciousness... fantastically well. Modern
| ideas from all over the place: science fiction, human
| history, philosophy, spiritualism and even computer science
| have broadly moved closer to Jaynes' way of thinking.
|
| One exception is his definition of consciousness. We still
| don't really have a single definition, and every "theory"
| tends to define it different. But overall, Jaynes' doesn't
| mesh too well with most current definitions. We're much more
| likely to consider animals conscious today, for example. You
| might substitute "introspective consciousness."
|
| In particular, modern notions that "consciousness is a
| simulation/projection" work well with Bicameral Mind.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| And taken to the extreme by groups like the Monroe
| Institute and their experiments with the U.S. D.O.D. on
| altered states of consciousness they state as a result of
| their method of synchronizing brainwaves between the two
| hemispheres akin to various forms of meditation.
|
| For the rabbit-holers:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Monroe
|
| Related: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-
| RDP96-00788R0017002...
|
| Also related, recording:
| https://archive.org/details/monroe-institute-explorer-
| series...
| DerDangDerDang wrote:
| Well put. The book has pride of place on my 'wonderful
| bullshit' shelf - while not particularly believable, it's
| still intellectually compelling.
| schemathings wrote:
| As mentioned below/above .. Snowcrash by Stephenson uses the
| concepts of the bicameral mind heavily (he mentions it in the
| opening acknowledgements), and China Mieville has a novel called
| Embassytown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassytown that
| doesn't cite that work specifically but feels like a similar
| exploration along with understandings of simile vs metaphor in
| the development of language/consciousness.
| mystickphoenix wrote:
| He also mentions it explicitly (assuming my memory isn't _that_
| faulty) in The Big U.
| n1vz3r wrote:
| Also Peter Watts' Echopraxia has bicamerals - members of order
| which act together as some sort of hive mind
| oceanghost wrote:
| Is _THAT_ what was going on in this book? Thank you! I loved
| Stephenson but was very, very confused.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Spoilers for Snow Crash follow.
|
| Snow Crash posits that there is a natural language for human
| brains, akin to assembly code, and that the line between pre-
| historic and historic humanity comes from a singular event.
| That natural language is/was (pre)Sumerian, and well-formed
| sentences in that language are indistinguishable from
| internal thoughts: to speak is to command belief, to hear is
| to believe. The singular event is the nam-shub of Enki
| (http://namshub.com/enki.html) which established a virally
| propagating firewall that cut off the ability to understand
| pre-Sumerian and allowed/forced the development of other
| languages, none of which had the interiority of pre-Sumerian.
|
| This is all codswallop, but it's entertaining.
| schemathings wrote:
| I'd highly recommend Embassytown. The interpreter has to deal
| with a species that has two heads that communicate seemingly
| independently - bicameral mind indeed!
| dalbasal wrote:
| I'm extremely curious to get a deaf person's take on this. That
| introspection is an auditory hallucination makes intuitive sense
| to me. I experience it this way.
|
| How does it work for someone who's primary languages are non
| auditory? Do you think in sign or written language? Some other
| way?
| bgroat wrote:
| I'm not deaf, but my primary thinking style is visual.
|
| Sometimes it's exactly what you'd imagine - I visualize a data
| model, or an algorithm implementation.
|
| Other times it's more abstract, symbolic, or analogy based
| dalbasal wrote:
| Can you expand on that? How do you make visual analogies, or
| express abstract ideas visually?
| solipsism wrote:
| I would argue that you understand the relationship between
| an alligator and a water buffalo immediately... Now your
| brain is turning it into language to come up with words
| like "predator/prey" or "hidden danger" or whatever. But
| the abstract relationship did not require language before
| your brain started to reason about it. I think it's the
| other way around.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Reason, perhaps. Reason via internal monologue... that's
| the part related to this theory.
| solipsism wrote:
| I'm multilingual. Growing up, friends asked me which language I
| think in. The answer is "neither". I can produce sentences in
| my brain in either language if I want, but it's strange to me
| that anyone would feel that _thoughts_ are in any particular
| language.
|
| I would feel incredibly limited if all my thoughts had to be
| synthesized into a language before they could be acted on. In
| fact, i often struggle to find words to express ideas that I
| can perfectly think about.
| naasking wrote:
| > it's strange to me that anyone would feel that thoughts are
| in any particular language.
|
| Not all thoughts, but many are. They've done studies where
| they've tested people's critical thinking and asked that they
| use their native tongue, and a second language in which
| they're fluent.
|
| Turns out you're more rational and dispassionate when
| thinking in a second language, where in your native language
| you engage more of your emotional centres and are more likely
| to fall prey to common cognitive biases.
|
| Obviously not all thoughts or thinking need to be expressed
| this way, but language can be a tool to organize and direct
| thought.
| robocat wrote:
| Surely that is dependent on the language?
|
| I loved learning Spanish because I found myself using a
| more emotional style of talking (paralinguistics).
|
| And watching an Italian friend who had English as a second
| language, it was weird to see them be gesturally and
| vocally much more boring when speaking English (I think
| picking up on the more dry language usage here in NZ).
| lukasb wrote:
| "In fact, i often struggle to find words to express ideas
| that I can perfectly think about."
|
| Same. I'm curious about what's happening here - sometimes
| visual thinking, sometimes kinesthetic, maybe a mix?
| bumby wrote:
| What would the implications be for our understanding of
| consciousness in other species of this hypothesis was true?
| jefftechentin wrote:
| The theory states that our consciousness is a linguistic
| phenomenon, produced by culturally given ideas like the
| metaphorical I. Maybe other mental configurations could give
| rise to consciousness but if an animal was to possess the type
| of consciousness described in this book, it would need the
| ability to symbolically represent pretty much everything and
| the ability to share those symbolic representations with
| others.
| goatlover wrote:
| Sounds ridiculous that our pre-linguistic ancestors would not
| have conscious experiences of colors, sounds, dreams, etc
| just because they couldn't put them into symbolic form. Seems
| like a case of putting the cart before the horse. Language is
| relatively recent. The parts of the brain correlated with
| consciousness are older.
| jefftechentin wrote:
| Yeah the theory seems to only explain interiority of our
| consciousness. But if I recall the author does seem to
| cover critiques like this in the first chapter where he
| explains what he sees as erroneous ideas about what
| consciousness is.
|
| He give the example of automatized actions and the lack of
| conscious recognition of what would normally be experiences
| with conscious perceptions. For example driving, you often
| do not consciously feel the petals, or see a lot of the
| road you are obviously responding too.
|
| I definitely do not buy the theory totally explains
| consciousness but the book makes a convincing enough case
| to not dismiss.
| rpmuller wrote:
| There was a nice article in Nautilus a few years back about this
| work called "Consciousness began when the gods stopped speaking":
| https://nautil.us/issue/54/the-unspoken/consciousness-began-...
| giardini wrote:
| I read just the title and wept in despair, knowing that I could
| never hope to reach such heights! Oh, the power of a name!
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It's a brilliant book, whether or not you agree with its
| conclusion (I go back and forth, but am sympathetic to his
| argument). _Even if he is completely wrong_ , exploring his model
| of cognition and consciousness provides the reader with a
| different way of seeing and thinking about the world, other
| people, and one's relationship to them. It's also richly textured
| and beautifully written.
| JackFr wrote:
| My first lecture in my first class in my freshman year of college
| the professor taught this book. The class was mesmerized as all
| our minds were blown, and we all walked out thinking "College is
| gonna be AMAZING. We're gonna learn so much fascinating stuff."
|
| While the next four years weren't bad, they never did quite live
| up to the feeling of that class.
| Simplicitas wrote:
| were doobies passed around in that class? j/k
| dang wrote:
| Past related threads. Others?
|
| _Bicameralism (Psychology)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20366921 - July 2019 (29
| comments)
|
| _Mr. Jaynes' Wild Ride (2013)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19122626 - Feb 2019 (9
| comments)
|
| _The "bicameral mind" 30 years on: A reappraisal of Jaynes'
| hypothesis (2007)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18521482 - Nov 2018 (92
| comments)
|
| _How Julian Jaynes' consciousness theory is faring in the
| neuroscience age (2015)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15677871 - Nov 2017 (90
| comments)
|
| _How Bicameralism Helps Explain Westworld_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13141112 - Dec 2016 (2
| comments)
|
| _"There Is Only Awe" - on Julian Jaynes_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9321158 - April 2015 (14
| comments)
|
| _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
| Mind_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7799698 - May 2014
| (60 comments)
|
| _Origin of Consciousness (bicameral mind)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1510815 - July 2010 (7
| comments)
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