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{\Large {\bf Language, consciousness and the bicameral mind} }

%Peirce, abduction
%Has consciousness been "good"? Maybe less in touch with surroundings? It has brought "knowledge of good and evil"
%Consciousness/ego -> alienation?

{Andreas van Cranenburgh\footnote{\texttt{andreas@unstable.nl}}, \today} \\
{\em Final essay, Language \& Cognition course, University of Amsterdam}
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%\abstract{ }
\tableofcontents
\section{Expos\'e of the bicameral mind}
\begin{quote}
``At one time, human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god,
and a follower part called a man. Neither part was Consciously aware.''
(Jaynes, 1976)
\end{quote}

Jaynes (1976) puts forth the radical but fascinating thesis of the bicameral
mind. He argues that consciousness is a linguistic skill, and merely a
relatively recent phenomenon at that. Before devoloping consciousness humans
had a bicameral mind, a division of two chambers: one in regular control, and
the other occasionally intervening. These interventions were experienced as
divine voices (such as from dead leaders and kings, and later, as religion
developed, of gods). Evidence for this is claimed to be in classical texts such
as the Iliad and the Old Testament, which contain no introspection, initiative
or conscious reasoning, but only divine interventions. Rather than being merely
a literary or poetic device, this is taken to be a significant feature of ancient
psychology. Radical as this hypothesis may sound, it has received some
empirical corroboration (Kuijsten, 2007) and favourable reviews such as Dennett
(1986).

\begin{quote}
``Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It
is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or
analogs of behavior in the physical world.'' 
(Jaynes, 1976)
\end{quote}

In ancient Greece the skill of consciousness was developed, Jaynes argues,
shortly after the Iliad was written. This led to the possibility for people to
reflect and introspect, as well as to the development of the concept of self
--- the very concept that Varela et al.\ (1991) argue is causing our
philosophical confusion. Note that the invocation of metaphor as crucial to
cognition appears to agree well with Lakoff and Johnson's (1999) views; this is
striking because the Bicameral Mind hypothesis was published in a time when
traditional cognitivism was still `the only game in town.' Jaynes derives his
views, instead, from comparative psychology, history and ancient texts. Some of
the same examples of the power of metaphor are mentioned. For example the
metaphor of ``time as a spatial dimension.'' With this metaphor the possibility
of history comes into being. Keeping track of one's own history makes the
concept of a stable self possible. Following that, is the emergence of the
feeling that one is causing one's own actions, and not some god or inner voice.

The result is that inner speech, far from being an obvious phenomenon, is a
contingent skill that follows communicative use of language. The bicameral
undivided (not individual) mind is not yet capable of inner speech of its own,
such that there is no conscious control. Communicative use of language always
requires two parties: a speaker and a listener; this originally inner speech
had a bicameral structure. Later this developed into full-blown consciousness,
through an internalization (turning inwards) of language, as opposed to it
being merely external, directed to each other or heard as inner voice. This
development could have occurred due to having to survive in isolation. The
transition was marked by desperate attempts to retain the influence of the
gods, by heeding oracles and looking for god's will in the intestines of
animals. Ironically, this seems to be a precursor to an ``active externalism''
-- deferring import decisions to externalities, in a somewhat more passive way.
The way the divine voices of the bicameral mind are portrayed by Jaynes as
intervening in unknown and difficult situations is also in accordance with
language as a problem solving tool. Clark (1998), however, sees ``language as the
ultimate upgrade,'' whereas bicameralism shifts the weight to the emergence of
consciousness and the concept of self.

%So ``god is'' indeed ``dead,'' and our self is very much alive, but this
%transition from absolutism leads to nihilism.

\section{What consciousness?}
It is important to note that Jaynes is talking about a specific kind of
consciousness. It is not about perception and sensation. Mere self-awareness,
such as that of monkeys who came to recognize themselves through a dot they see
in the mirror, is not consciousness in the proper sense of self-reflection and
control. Ned Block (1981) has argued that Jaynes has only dated the forging of
the {\em concept} of consciousness, while consciousness might have been present
{\em sans} so-called higher-order thought. Dennett (1986) effectively disproves
this criticism, however.

\section{The role of evolution}
The arguments for the thesis rests on evolutionary psychology: experiments
with split-brain patients and schizophrenics on the one hand, and classical
philology on the other. But it does not seem to be in conflict with the
critical re-appraisal of evolutionary thinking made by Varela et al.\ (1991):
there is no pre-given, objective external world steering towards optimality,
but consciousness is a toolbox invented through enculturation, which actively
shapes the world. 

\section{The role of metaphor}

\section{Neurological sketch}

\begin{comment}
notes for lang\&cog essay

http://www.uoregon.edu/~uophil/metaphor/neurophl.htm

traditional theory states that metaphor/figurative meaning is a bag of tricks
to extend literal meaning. eg. Searle (1979) figurative interpretation is cued
when literal interpretation fails.
but: processing time is often not longer with metaphors. processing is probably
parallel, or unitary. (see Gibbs 1994, pp. 92-108 for a useful overview)

the opposite could also be true: meaning is initially metaphorical, literal
interpretation is forced.

perharps both hemispheres necessary for metaphor comprehension: breakdown of
bicameral mind --> increased co-ordinnation between hemispheres.


basic feature of literate language use: fiction. thus, much of our metaphors/
concepts can be useful fiction, eg. the self, prop. attitutudes etc.

language evolves to be useful, practical, parsimonous -- not faithfulness to
reality. NB: language seems to lack power to describe the intermediate stages
of attaining personhood -- what happens is anthropomorphizing: 'mindlessly'
ascribing categories to infants/earlier humans without being able to conceive
of different stages (intentional stance)

cave art: traditional interpretation sees this as proof that prehistoric mind
was same as modern mind.

consciousness has to have originated *sometime*, the mystical belief that it
has always been there is naturalisticly untenable. no reason why consciousness
should have evolved before humans evolved.

breakdown of bicameralism:
1: growing civilization = complexity
2: neurological basis: bilateral symmetry
3: vestiges: schzophrenia etc.

consciousness according to Jaynes:
1: mind space (time as dimension, introspection)
2: analog "I", self concept

"I hope it is obvious that P-consciousness is not a cultural construction.
(...) The idea would be that there was a time at which people genetically like
us ate, drank, and had sex, but there was nothing it was like for them to do
these things. Further, each of us would have been like that if not for specific
concepts we acquired from our culture in growing up. Ridiculous!" (...)

"What about A-consciousness? Could there have been a time when humans who
are biologically the same as us never had the contents of their perceptions
and thoughts poised for free use in reasoning or in rational control of action?
Is this ability one that culture imparts to us as children? Could it be that
until we acquired the concept of `poised for free use in reasoning or in
rational control of action', none of our perceptual contents were A-con-
GREEK ZOMBIES (final draft) : 6/18 scious? Again, there is no reason to take
such an idea seriously. Very much lower animals are A-conscious, presumably
without any such concept" (Block, 1995, p. 238, my italics). quoted in Sleutels (20xx)

NB: note lack of any argument, purely appeal to intuition. cf. Searle against
AI. critique against arm-chair philosophy applies here. consciousness is taken
for granted as "natural kind"!

consciousness: "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" -- yet we have
no reason to chase white ravens.

bicameralism rests on assumption that concepts can be had without consciousness
seems more like a set of "habits", instead of what we commonly understand as
concepts.

history of personal pronouns? was greek "ego" late invention?

importance of historical dimension:
"If consciousness is real now, then it has always been real, while if it is
not, then it never was." (Sleutel, 20xx)

\end{comment}


\section{Illusory self?}
The arguments that the self is an illusion are in themselves quite convincing.
A problem is their implausibility, their counter-intuitiveness. It is rather
like arguing that the universe doesn't exist (acosmism), whatever is put
forward, something's not right: the idea seems to levitate in a vacuum. The
danger is that such an argument is merely an intellectual gesture, which is not
acted upon. For example: do any of the authors refuse royalties because they
don't believe in the self? Can it become part of the fibres of your being, can
you act selflessly when you're rudely woken up in the middle of the night?

How can we act on this Eastern enlightenment? Doesn't this mean deriving an
ought from is? Acting on the belief that there is an ego seems a most natural
mode of survival, so the belief is deep-seated and ingrained.

%VS Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms of the Brain, 1998 Quill/William Morrow NY, pp. 246-257 on self, esp. as representation; "our sense of having a private, non-material soul 'watching the world' is really an illusion" p. 25

%Naturalism

%Higher-order consciousness, distinguished in humans by an explicit sense of
%self and the ability to construct past and future scenes, arose at a later
%stage with reentrant pathways linking value-dependent categorization with
%linguistic performance and conceptual memory (Edelman 2003). -- scholarpedia
%models of consc.

%"At much later evolutionary epochs, further reentrant circuits ap-
%peared that linked semantic and linguistic performance to categor-
%ical and conceptual memory systems. This development enabled the
%emergence of higher-order consciousness." -- Edelman (2003)

%Consciousness of consciousness becomes possible via the linguistic tokens that
%are meaningfully exchanged during speech acts in a community. -- Edelman (2003)



\section{Research question}
How does the embodied mind and enactivism relate to the hypothesis
of the bicameral mind? Is the self a linguistic construction?

%What does non-representational cognition entail for the relation between
%language and consciousness? Is there a dichotomy between conscious and
%unconscious language use or learning?


\section{Elaboration, projected contents}

\subsection{The Embodied Mind}
\addcontentsline{toc}{subsubsection}{\numberline {2.1.1}Mental representation}
\addcontentsline{toc}{subsubsection}{\numberline {2.1.2}Views of the self}
\addcontentsline{toc}{subsubsection}{\numberline {2.1.3}Language as tool}


In analytic philosophy it is customary to conceive of language as directly
relating to objects in the world, as well as to conscious thoughts: the
representational view of language (and cognition in general). Continental
philosophy takes a much less simplistic point of view, but has been less
succesful at informing science. Varela, Thompson \& Rosch (1991) argue for
enactivism: the mind as a non-representational, self-modifying part of our
bodies. Enactment is the process where something is brought from the background
to the fore. According to them two fundamental mistakes characterize Western
thought. On the one hand the concept of the self, which is argued to be
illusory, and on the other that of the pre-given world, imbued with
significance when in fact it is only constituted through our interaction with
it, as in ``laying down a path in walking.'' Lakoff and Johnson (1999) also
argue for embodiment, but add a focus on metaphors as constitutive of
cognition. They claim that the self is a metaphor, and identify several
different selves. 

According to Clark (1998), the concept of self is a result from ``second-order
cognitive dynamics.'' Clark describes language, in a very optimistic and
practical manner, as a tool for cognition. He draws from Vygotsky to argue for
the importance of inner speech and scaffolding in development. This leads to
a much more concrete form of embodiment, so-called `active externalism,' where
the mind is extended onto tools, both material and abstract. Language, in
this view, is a problem solving tool (aside from its obvious role in
communication).

Lakoff and Johnson (1999) commence their book by arguing the importance of the
{\em cognitive unconscious}. It is a rule of thumb in cognitive science that
95\% of cognition is unconscious. Since consciousness is such a small part of 
coginition, might this suggest, evolutionarily, that
consciousness is not necessary for cognition?

\subsection{The Bicameral Mind}
\addcontentsline{toc}{subsubsection}{\numberline {2.2.1}Language without consciousness}
\addcontentsline{toc}{subsubsection}{\numberline {2.2.2}The role of metaphor}

%Language and metaphor, primitive versus modern: looking for logic in all the
%wrong places; Zerzan?.

\section{Expected conclusion}
An embodied view of consciousness with a formative role for metaphor is called
for; this leaves the self as either illusory, or as a useful linguistic
construction. Language on the other hand might be independent from
consciousness, and perhaps also from metaphor.  Although it is hard to imagine,
`primitive' man might have been wholly unconscious. This thesis does not seem
to contradict enactivism or embodied cognition, but lessens the influence of
language in itself. Instead, it is consciousness which is the quantum leap.

\section{Bibliography}
%turn off bold for labels (all bow to magic incantations!)
%\renewcommand{\descriptionlabel}[1] {\hspace{\labelsep}#1}

\begin{description}
\item[Block, N.] (1981), Review of Julian Jayne's `Origins of Consciousness in
the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.' Cognition and Brain Theory, 4, 81-83.

\item[Clark, Andy] (1998), ``The Magic of Words'' in Carruthers \& Boucher
(eds.) Language and Thought.

\item[Dennett, Daniel] (1986). ``Julian Jaynes's Software Archeology.''
Canadian Psychology, 27, 2.

%\item[Feldman, Jerome A.] (2008), ``From Molecule to Metaphor: A neural theory
%of language,'' MIT press paperback edition.

\item[Jaynes, J.] (1976), ``The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind.'' Boston: Houghton Mifflin

\item[Kuijsten, M.] (2007), ``Consciousness, Hallucinations, and the Bicameral
Mind: Three Decades of New Research." In M. Kuijsten (ed.) Reflections on the
Dawn of Consciousness. Julian Jaynes Society.

\item[Lakoff, George \& Johnson, Mark] (1999), ``Philosophy In The Flesh: The
Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought,'' Basic Books.

%\item[Putnam, Hilary] (1975), ``The meaning of `meaning','' in Language, Mind
%and Knowledge, ed.\ K. Gunderson

\item[Varela, F.J., Thompson, E., \& Rosch, E.] (1991), ``The Embodied Mind:
Cognitive Science and Human Experience.'' Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

\end{description}
\end{document}


%http://www.springerlink.com/content/k26j8675jl448208/

%[on construction grammar]
%The earliest study was "There-Constructions," which appeared as Case Study 3
%in George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.[1] It argued that the
%meaning of the whole was not a function of the meanings of the parts, that odd
%grammatical properties of Deictic There-constructions followed from the
%pragmatic meaning of the construction, and that variations on the central
%construction could be seen as simple extensions using form-meaning pairs of
%the central construction.

%Searle: syntax by itself is not constitutive of semantics.
% --- This point is missed so often, it bears repeating: the syntactically specifiable objects over which computations are defined can and standardly do possess a semantics; it's just that the semantics is not involved in the specification.
%Rey (2002) attacking Searle
%this means that characterizing programs as formal systems is unfair
%a program needs semantic specification as well.
%Rey, G., 2002, Searle's Misunderstandings of Functionalism and Strong AI  in Preston and Bishop (eds.)
%Searle, J., 1980, ‘Minds, Brains and Programs’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3:417-57

%[..]there is, of course, a familiar philosophical ambiguity lurking in the
%wings here -- the confusion of behaving in a fashion describable by a rule
%with following or applying a rule -- and arguably advocates of an algorithmic
%level of description have not always kept this distinction in mind. 
%On Marr's computational theory of vision

%However, Lowenheim-Skolem assures that there is at least one interpretation S*
%that maps all of the referring terms onto only mathematical objects. S* cannot
%be the canonical interpretation, but there is nothing in the syntax of
%Mentalese to explain why S is the correct interpretation and S* is not.
%Therefore syntax underdetermines semantics. (Compare acknowledgement of this
%in Pylyshyn 1984: page 44.)
%(criticism that representational theory of mind does not account for semantics)
