Julian Jaynes: The Last Modern Psychologist

Julian Jaynes, late professor of psychology at Princeton, is best known for his controversial yet provocative book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  Based on an unpublished manuscript, and other archival documents, we can gain valuable insights into the development of Jaynes’ ideas, largely based on his earlier research in ethology with Frank Beach. This unpublished work,  The “History of Comparative Psychology,” represents (in part) a failed search for the origin of consciousness as a “natural kind”: an object that is a product of nature and natural laws rather than human society.  Jaynes abandoned this work to begin the Origin of Consciousness, which represented a radical break in theorizing not only about the emergence of consciousness, but what consciousness fundamentally was.  My presentation will review Jaynes’ turn from a naturalistic discourse about the ontology and aetiology of consciousness to a language and metaphor-based account.  The issues and questions Jaynes addressed – whatever we may think of his solutions – are important to discuss and critical for any theory of consciousness.  I will discuss the reasons for his social constructionist turn, and what implications it has for the foundation of an essentially ethical understanding of consciousness. In his “History of Comparative Psychology,” Jaynes wanted to trace the evolution of consciousness back through time, linking the roots of human conscious mentality with animal behavior.  Jaynes reached a turning point, however, in his study of Aristotle’s De Anima, and showed great interest in Aristotle’s functionalistic conception of “psyche.” Although the Greek use of the term psyche actually has little connection to that of today, Jaynes outlined an historical sketch of “psyche” as it was interpreted and transformed through reification by Scholasticism (into “soul”) and by the “New Physics” (into “mind).  This journey saw psyche take on the job of explaining animate motion, while, at the same time, Aristotlean causality was collapsed into Galilean (efficient) causality, resulting in an agentic will and a thinking homunculus encased within a material body, now firmly located in the head. In revisiting Jaynes’ mature theory, it is critical to first recognize that there are three separate components.  Jaynes noted that each of these three parts may be independently true or false; it is this third component that will be the focus for my talk: 1) The theory of the “bicameral mind,” which is clearly the most famous and controversial part of his Jaynes’ work, claims that until around 1200 B.C. humans did not have consciousness as we understand it.  They were unable to introspect, reminisce, make plans, or engage in any reflexive deliberation.  When faced with important or meaningful decisions, they heard voices that they took to be gods, which directed their behavior.  2) This bicameral mind was thus a mind in two parts, and these corresponded to the two halves of the brain: the “voices of the gods” resided in the right hemisphere, while the left side dealt with the workaday world of human experience.  This division of mental labor is rooted in neurological differences (primarily with regard to speech) between the right and left hemispheres.  3) The “breakdown” of the bicameral mind was precipitated by the combination of a variety of factors, but most important were external stresses in the environment such as natural disasters and war, and an evolution in language (including writing), which involved the increasing use of metaphor, more specifically.  Through this evolution of language and language use, the breakdown also led to a further symbolic process of internal narratization.  Jaynes described it as the linguistic assimilation of the voices of the gods into a single sense of self, existing through time in what he called a “mindspace.”  Mindspace was defined as a functional as opposed to a physical space, where we can create a (usually visual) analog of the world.  Jaynes theorized that when objects are perceived, words are fit to these objects, and as the brain matures, more abstract relationships and arrangements are made possible, leading to the emergence of metaphors, the building blocks for consciousness.  Jaynes’ final and most comprehensive definition of consciousness was that of “an analog ‘I’ narratizing in a mindspace,” and as “based on metaphor, developed through language, and is an operator, not a thing.”  Understanding consciousness, and tackling the “hard problem” as Chalmers put it, has more to do with understanding our society rather than our brain, our language practices rather than neurotransmitters, and our cultural history as opposed to our genetic endowment.  A number of profound implications follow from this understanding of consciousness.  Most dramatically, Jaynes concluded that consciousness does not ‘exist’ – at least not in the way it is often assumed, as a brain function.  Eschewing centuries of reification, Jaynes even went so far as to explicitly say that “consciousness does not have a location.”  Consciousness is an activity, one that is in part enabled by biological factors, but cannot be completely described or explained by these same factors.  Consciousness, as phenomenal experience, can only be said to exist intersubjectively (i.e., within a community, or perhaps a field, of language use and meaning).  Moreover, in such a view, consciousness would take on a moral and ethical dimension as well – something a purely naturalistic investigation of consciousness is unable to address. In some of his lectures, taped later in his life, Jaynes discussed how one of the “consequences of consciousness” was an increased sense of interdependence among conscious individuals, now that the gods had died.  Without an a priori, authoritarian voice giving us a sense of good and evil, and right and wrong, morality became much more complex, now a matter of human construction and deliberation.  In this light,  consciousness might be argued to be not only the medium of our social contract, but something better understood as fundamentally ethical (rather than neural) in nature.