Where does one start with this book? It begins with a radical idea and ends when the radical has been thoroughly transformed into the commonplace and sensical. It spans archaeology, anthropology, literary history, neurology, psychiatry, theoretical linguistics, and history of science, across several civilisations. One might think that this addresses too much and in the end accomplishes nothing. But this is mistaken -- I am a theoretical linguist and was thoroughly convinced about the author's notion of metaphorical perception. The author gathers an impressive range of evidence through time, space, and academic perspectives to show convergence towards the bicameral thesis. Truly a towering intellect.

Good God, the epilogue. This guy writes.

He’s onto something

Calling Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Development of the Bicameral Mind an ambitious work would be selling it short. Spanning a wide variety of fields, it tries to trace the evolution of consciousness through history. His hypothesis and conclusion is controversial to put it mildly, directly contradicting an immense amount of scientific standards and generally agreed upon facts. As summarized by Jaynes himself in the later addition of an afterword, his main hypothesis are 4, and as follows:

1) Consciousness is based on language.
2) The bicameral mind.
3) The dating.
4) The double brain.

Jaynes argues that that language arose before consciousness, and not, as is 'common knowledge, by evolution far earlier than earliest language. In fact, consciousness is claimed to be a very recent phenomenon, arising sometime around 1000 BC. The implications of this is astounding to say the least. The development of consciousness is seen as generated by, arising from, language, more specifically from metaphors. The ability to map one thing upon another is the evolutionary principle of language and is what enables progression. If consciousness is largely defined by introspection, of an internal "Mind-Space" which an analog 'Self' can move around and exist in, then this is enabled progressively by the metaphoric vision. Phrases like "I see what you mean" acts as breadcrumbs through history, providing clues as to this development.

What then, existed before consciousness? As he calls it, the 'bicameral mind'. In essence, man was separated from himself, his right hemisphere of problem solving not recognized as an internal part of himself but rather viewed as God, communicating through auditory and visual hallucination, much like schizophrenics today. Whenever novelty occurred, something which could not be dealt with in a habitual way, God spoke to man and commanded him to act. This is of course an extremely crude sketch, and I can only hope that it entices someone to read the actual work.

I will dedicate the rest of the review for discussing not the book itself but some implications, connections with other theories and interesting structural phenomena which are brought to light. Firstly, I was quite amazed by the lack of references to semiotics. The core argument presented fits so perfectly into that body of knowledge that I find it hard to believe it wasn't developed by a theoretician from that field. Having read Lacan, the structural similarity between them both in understanding the psyche is large enough to be equivalent, although of course having very different approaches and motivations. What I find fascinating is their emphasis on the organic growth and symbiosis of widely varied structures, such as found between language and the human mind.

This leads us nicely into the term aptic structures, defined in passing in a footnote as "the neurological basis of aptitudes that are composed of an innate evolved aptic paradigm plus the results of experience in development. [...] They are organizations of the brain, always partially innate, that make the organism apt to behave in a certain way under certain conditions." That was quite a mouthful, but the concept is in essence quite intuitive. It is also closely related to the structural effects of language discussed here and acting at the core of semiotics. I am tempted to approach the concept from the eastern, Taoist, perspective, as Jaynes himself enables through the reference to Zen in the Art of Archery. Liken the human mind to an ocean, infinite in its possibilities and quite defined by its fluidity. Aptic structures are then like undercurrents, directing and guiding the flow of water. These structures are in fact the defining property of the mind as we normally approach it. It creates the contrast in which the totality emerges. As Lacan puts it in his introduction to the unconscious, "Rupture, split, the stroke of the opening makes the absence emerge - just as the cry does not stand out against a background of silence, but on the contrary makes the silence emerge as silence."


These aptic structures act as constraints, directing the flow into actions (with varying degrees of abstraction; thoughts, too, are mental actions), eventually creating habits. Jaynes like the example of playing, and especially learning to play, the piano. The extraordinarily complex array of tasks that need to be simultaneously executed in a harmonious fashion while playing piano is a perfect example of the shortcomings of consciousness, such a task would be impossible without aptic structures in place. Consciousness is merely creating the constraints, slowly enabling the building of aptic structures with abstract objectives. Building on aptic structures, structions is a term that signifies the conjunction an instruction and the building of the correlated aptic structure.

"Thinking, then, is not conscious. Rather, it is an automatic process following a struction and the materials on which the struction is to operate. [...] If I say to myself, I shall think about an oak in summer, that is a struction and what I call thinking about is really a file of associated images cast up on the shores of my consciousness out of an unknown sea."

"The essential point here is that there are several stages of creative thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the problem is consciously owrked over; then a period of incubation without any conscious concentration upon the problem; and then the illumination which is later justified by logic. ... The period of preparation is essentially the setting up of a complex struction together with conscious attention to the materials on which the struction is to work. But then the actual process of reasioning, the dark leap into huge discovery, just as in the simple trivial judgment of weights, has no representation in consciousness. Indeed, it is almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to solve."

Consciousness indeed oftentimes acts as nothing more than a barrier in our lives, distancing us from flawless action, always second-guessing. As the Bhagavad Gita says "It [the Self] does not create the means of action, or the action itself, or the union of result and action: all there arise from Nature" so Jaynes follow "between the act and its divine source came the shadow, the pause that profaned, the dreadful loosening that made the gods unhappy, recriminatory, jealous."

I agree with him 100%