\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article} \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx} \usepackage[english]{babel} \usepackage[pdfborder={0 0 0}]{hyperref} \usepackage{verbatim} %\usepackage[cm]{fullpage} %\usepackage[left=2cm,top=2cm,right=2cm,bottom=2cm]{geometry} \usepackage{geometry} \usepackage{setspace} \onehalfspacing \usepackage{sober} \begin{document} \begin{center} {\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} \end{center} %\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)