The Hawkins Frame - 1

In the long run, Hawkins abandons his initial description of "Frame" and (to my mind) wanders into simple Object Oriented Design and Mathematical constructs that lie behind Quantum Mechanics. I'm not sure gets this, but he starts with a frame-based description of consciousness, which is a fine example of putting this phenomenon on the test bench. Many philosophers claim this is not possible. Daniel Dennet is happy to allow what we say about our experience to be evidence of what that experience is. The problem with Dennet is that he was writing decades before Hawkins used the powerful frame language to speak of what it "feels like" to be in the world. Armed with Hawkins' way of speaking, it may be a good idea to loop back and read Dennet again.

With apologies to Hawkins, this is what I think a frame is:

• It is a frame of reference like Cartesian space
• It contains objects, each of which has a location in the space - for example, (x,y,z) coordinates.
• In object-oriented terms, coordinates are attributes of the object within the space. Other attributes include orientation (such as an (x,y,z) vector).
• Although it is not entirely clear, it seems that these objects also have a "velocity" vector - they may be moving through the reference frame.
• The observer occupies a position in the framework and has a complex set of objects that can be used to interrogate objects in the space. In a sense, the observer experiences this set of objects as "self". An example would be fingers exploring his beloved coffee cup. We will call these objects "sensors".
• A key element of Hawkins' account is the interaction between sensors and objects in the space to determine (or guess) the attributes of the objects. This interrogation results in an updated version of the frame itself - as modeled by the brain.
• All this is experienced dynamically - there is time in Hawkin's frame. When we speak of our experience, we call it "now", but "now" is always changing. This is the flow of time. We can be grateful for any model that makes an attempt to explain this most important aspect of the experience.
• Unlike an abstract mathematical "object", a frame is an experience. When we describe it as a mathematical object, we rely on analogy. This is the entire point of the Hawkins "frame". It is claimed to be the fundamental unit of experience, not the actual "God's Eye" view of the world, nor an abstract description of the world "as it is". It is a mental model, presumably implemented with neurons and synapses. As far as I know, this is the only attempt to formalize experience itself.

Some elements here remind me of Einstein's insight - particularly placing the observer in space and making observations relative to the frame of reference. In both cases, there is no "God's eye" view of the space, only the observations of the observer and the conclusions the observer reaches, such as the position and velocity of objects in the frame of reference. If you are familiar with Einstein's view of the world, Hawkins' "frames" are easy to picture.

Along the same line, Einstein was interested in the ability to interrogate objects to determine their properties. It turns out that it is not possible to learn certain pairs of properties exactly, say a and b. Precision in the measurement of a loses precision in b. Worst yet, counterintuitive, certain objects' properties don't exist until they are measured. But that is a different subject.

The point is that Einstein's mental picture of the Universe is a frame. A very powerful one. What it lacks is a sense of "now". Time is just another dimension, like the x,y,z of space.

Hawkins is shy about generalizing this model - sticking to our familiar 3-dimensional world. He could have escaped this a little by referring to the attributes of an object, which can be more or less unlimited. It would have been clearer (to me at least) if his model included the interrogation of the object, returning another frame since the object itself has all the attributes of a reference frame. Certain sensors are limited to certain queries - "touch" returns information that "look at" does not.

Anyone familiar with Object-Oriented design would wish to add (at least) object states which add some complexity to the result coming back from a query sensor. Other things like the concept of "interface" would be helpful to isolate the "experience" of the object from any secret and unobservable properties that may or may not produce the experience. The whole of OOD* seems applicable, and for good reason: OOD* has been developed precisely to describe (at least) the real world.

That said, there are aspects of the world where OOD doesn't seem very helpful, such as chemistry, cosmology, logic, mathematics, and Quantum Mechanics. Hawkins runs into these limitations since he claims his theory covers all we can know. His theory is only a re-invention or application of OOD - a special case. OOD covers a lot more of what we can know. It underlies the design of virtually all modern computer systems, including the Internet. But we must turn to other ways of "knowing" when leaving the familiar 3-dimensional world described in Hawkins' examples.

To be fair, the areas of knowledge where the Hawkins frames start to break down are precisely those that many find difficult to understand. We are also left with the biggest and most urgent things we need to understand: human-to-human interactions.

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* OOD = Object-Oriented Design

Further Thoughts on "Box 1"

This essay builds on the concept of "Boxes" introduced in my April Summary. In a nutshell, we are all trapped in "Box 1", which is the world "inside our heads".

For millennia, there has been little dispute over the fact that our access to "reality" is far from trustworthy. In the extreme, there are those who claim that "reality" doesn't exist at all, or at least the existence cannot be proven. I am reminded of a professional geologist I once met. He managed to make a living dating million-year-old rocks, while simultaneously believing that the world was 4,000 years old. As the Red Queen said, we are capable of believing six impossible things before breakfast.

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Both "reality" and the "mind" exist and are susceptible to experimentation. Obviously, mental phenomena are correlated with events in the brain. Much of the focus of "Cognitive Studies" is on this correlation. We see books like Dennet's "Consciousness Explained," which would better be titled "Consciousness Explained Away." The core of this approach is to study the brain in the context of what I call "computational" models of how the brain produces the various phenomena it does, including consciousness. At present, this approach seems to be able to detect the presence of consciousness through sensors placed in the brain, but, apart from Science Fiction, we see no evidence that we will ever be able to "peek in" to share the experience of another human being.

I believe that this approach sidesteps the core issue, which should be to explore the mind in its own terms, whatever the "mechanism" may be. In fact, attempts to "explain" consciousness seem to misunderstand the nature of "explanation" itself. I think Sam Harris put it best when he said it's hard to imagine what an "explanation" would look like. For one thing, "explanations" of the mind in terms of physical phenomena the language of explanation itself is a major roadblock. Those who would "explain" the mind assume that "mind-like" concepts can be stripped from the explanation, in a way that evolution can be reduced to physics, chemistry, and math. Damasio's approach attacks this particular problem at the root, by defining life itself as "striving to thrive." One may view this as a metaphor, but the fact is that it is tough to describe any living behavior without introducing the "mind like" language of what the organism is "trying" to do. Planets don't "strive" to obey the laws of gravitation, nor does nature "strive" to conserve energy. Or at least, this is the way we are taught to think of things.

All this tends to bypass the most amazing capability of the human mind, which is to construct a deep, rich, detailed universe that we experience in one particular time and place. Everything we know about that universe is the product of our own mind with extensive help from other minds. The world, as we experience it, is "mind-like" for a good reason. It is an active product of the brain.  The implications of this are routinely missed.

Anne (not her real name) says things like "things happen for a reason." She is always asking"why" bad things happen to good people. Such a mindset fails to recognize that the universe, as experienced. It is a mental phenomenon, full of intentions, reasons and justifications,  The evolutionary purpose of the mind is precisely to search out reasons and explanations - expecting to find them when a more objective perspective would claim that such statements and questions are inappropriate when applied to a world governed by physics and mathematics. The misunderstanding here is to mix up Box 1 (the mind) with Box 0 (the "real world" that is assumed to exist but is forever just beyond our grasp).

Anne is not happy with the explanation that an innocent girl was killed due to broken bones, gravity and momentum when hit by a car, yet she will accept that this explanation is somehow valid. What she fails to understand is that her own mind - a reason-seeking machine - is spinning its wheels, unable to detect agency where none exists. In fact, her wheels will keep turning as she seeks out an agent, such as a negligent driver, bad breaks, unmarked crosswalk, neglectful parents and on and on. In an emergency, Anne can always fall back "karma" and "fate", which hangs on to the notion that the universe is "mind-like" but that its intentions are unknowable.

Anne experiences a feeling of profound injustice and moral outrage. She is hard-wired to attribute the source of this outrage to be some Universal "mind" behind everything that happens. She is also hardwired to accept her perceptions as real. We don't wander through the world telling ourselves that "this is not real". Anne's perception (not just her abstract belief) is that there is something beyond herself that looks upon the situation and feels the same grief that she does.

Such a problem can be said to underly the whole of religion. This may be supposed to be a consistent failure to recognize the difference between Box 0 and Box 1. It should not be remarkable to find mind-like aspects of a world that is, after all, created by a mind. Our mind.

Not all religions fail this way, but many start out being sensible about the issue then slip into superstition. For example, in the (personal) branch of Zen I follow, we trust experience over philosophical word-play, which can be taken to be all forms of "mind like" assumptions about the world. Even so, I accept that there is no escape from Box 0 such as, for example, taking LSD or sitting in a cave for years. In theory, solid things like logic and mathematics are "mind like" and should be distrusted in favor of experience itself. Such ideas go back to the Tao Teh Ching which points out the difference between what we say about reality and reality itself (depending on the translation you are reading and what you are reading into it). But if you study the book as a whole, you detect a general disdain for investigation of any kind. We actually do need to understand Box 0 as well as we can, for simple reasons of survival if for no other reason.

In practice, Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen become straightforward fantasy worlds, actively denying what the rest of us would call "science." To my mind, this takes skepticism too far. "Skepticism" becomes skepticism of opponents to my religion, rejecting all arguments on principle as existing in some "truth domain" that doesn't touch the experience of the believer.

On the other hand, I think that religious attitudes and practices can be entirely appropriate if they are admitted to belong to Box 1, where there is no such thing as "objective truth." In Box 1 the universe is full of moral principle and agency. I first grasped this in Theological School where the instructor challenged us to ask what we would see if someone videotaped the Ascension of Jesus to Heaven.

This was a challenge (an outrage to a few of us). Are we to take Acts 9:1-11 to be a literal eye witness account, or are we to ask who wrote the passage and why? I became quite comfortable with this kind of question, personally delving into similar thorny issues, such as what was the experience of Isaiah when he spoke not for God but as God.

My approach is to accept religious experience as valid in "Box 1" - the world created by the mind. It then becomes possible to discuss religious beliefs and attitudes as one might discuss literature (in fact that is precisely the approach adopted by liberal schools of theology). Even in the world of imagination, some interpretations make more sense than others.

Of course, this is often offensive to believers, who tend to insist on the literal, objective truth of their version of history. Such folks, through no fault of their own, have come to mix up Box 0 and Box 1. Educating them on this matter can be stressful but, as my own education has proven, not impossible. In fact, most thoughtful believers are curious precisely on this matter.  Not everyone follows the Red Queen.

Proto-Life

In this blog, I introduce two categories of "life" that may be regarded as controversial or "merely" a matter of definition. "Supermind" is at the "high" end. At the low, primitive, "old" end is "proto-life" - life before (or simply without) DNA ("before" being evolutionary speculation I avoid).

Here is a good presentation on work on "proto-life". I'll try to add more examples as I come across them.

Current work in this field can be regarded as an "existence proof": if there is any way we can make "life" out of non-living molecules, there may be others, one of which presumably actually happened. For my purposes, it's sufficient to see how such systems are possible, at least in theory. I leave the discovery of actual evolutionary processes to others. I avoid using "evolutionary fairy dust" to support the ideas put forward here. This blog does not put forward or support any particular theory about the sequence of events or mechanism of actual evolution here on Earth.

Among serious researchers in the field, "proto-life" is expected to exist in an environment (which can be seen as part of the proto-life system) which is:

• Not in equilibrium - the possibility of change is key;
• Liquid - hard for us to imagine life without some possibility of movement, but I'm not sure about this one ...
• Allowing making and breaking of chemical bonds - "metabolism"

For my purposes, it's sufficient to notice that the programming of this system - the rules that make it do what it does - are physical and chemical. There is no "abstraction" of the rules into some other medium like DNA. It's all chemistry and physics. On the other hand, the laws of physics and chemistry depend on something even deeper, which emerges again at the "top" of the pyramid in the supermind.

This is the subtle point, worth careful consideration. The "laws" of physics and chemistry are known to the supermind. They are a special case of "knowledge" that restricts (or should restrict) the "ideas" that make up the supermind. This means that each level of "mind" contains all the others below it. Another way of seeing it is that the supermind can't act in the world in ways that violate the laws of physics and chemistry.

As soon as we move "up" the pyramid of complexity to the DNA level, there is a separation between the "stuff" of the organism and the "stuff" of the "program" or guiding "software". DNA is a 4-letter code that just happens to be implemented in a huge molecule, but it is the code that matters. At the DNA level and levels above it, the "program" is abstract - "pure" information. It is also, interestingly, a "proto-language" that "talks" mainly about proteins. "Up" the pyramid a different kind of language will emerge that "talks" about a much wider range of things.

"Godel Escher Bach" is the book that made Hofstader famous.  Along the way to illustrating his central point (Godel's Theorem), the book this exposes the absurdity of computer intelligence simply by imagining that we switch the medium or "substrate" of the program from electronics to an ordinary book. He imagined, for example, someone using a huge rule book to translate Engish to Chinese by rote, then asking if this person (or the rulebooks)  "understood" Chinese. Somehow, when you think of the program running on a computer, there is a temptation to answer "yes" to this question. To Hofstadter, we owe the insight that the "substrate" of the "program" matters but not in the way we thought.

In the case of "proto-life", we can, indeed, separate the "meaning" of the "program" from the substrate. This is akin to Dennett's idea of a design without a designer. The "designer" is hidden in the "laws of physics" or, as the ancients would have put it, the "Tao". But, as they would have put it, there is danger in confusing talk about the Tao (even the "math") with the Tao itself. Broadly speaking, "proto-life" seems to emerge directly from the "Tao" with no programming needed.

To Bee or Not to Bee - Revised 11/22, 11/27, 2018-11-28

This essay is an "intuition pump". The term was invented by Daniel Dennet. An intuition pump is a thought experiment designed to nudge us from our usual way of thinking to see the world in a new way.

Bees have approximately one million neurons in 0.5 mm; humans have 100 billion neurons. And yet bees can learn, and understand abstract concepts, and make complex decisions

But does a bee know it's a bee?

With a mere million neurons in a speck of a brain, it's not surprising that a bee doesn't have a lot of mental hardware for luxuries like "consciousness." Its brain is busy doing things like being a skillful a flight controller. It's not surprising that we don't have bee philosophers. But if we did, would they ask a similar question of us? Do we know we are human?

Is it possible that I know less about what it is to be human than a bee knows about being a bee?

But don't I know everything there is to know about the experience of being me? Isn't this why it seems so silly to as if a bee knows it's a bee?  And nothing is more important that consciousness - precisely that feeling that I know I'm having that feeling of knowing ...

We are at a loss to explain consciousness - it's known as the "hard problem of consciousness." In fact, we are so stuck on this problem that it's hard for us to imagine what an "explanation" would even look like. It's possible that we are totally wrong about what's going on and, by implication, completely wrong about what it is to be human. For thousands of years, many philosophers have been asking if consciousness is as important as it seems. Perhaps it's not even real.

But we know the important stuff, don't we? We know consciousness has something to do with those 100 billion neurons. That's the most important thing to know, right? Maybe. But we must admit that no neuron "knows" it's part of a brain (us), nor do we know just how all these neurons add up to "us". We could be on the wrong track. Maybe all our brain theories are on the wrong track entirely. Perhaps we are like the bee, which manages to offload the really important stuff so it can do its thing with the absolute minimum of hardware on board.

Most of us would agree that being a bee is to be a smart component of the hive. All the stunning capability of the bee is in service to the hive. Its brain is part of the "hive mind." Its knowledge is part of the collective knowledge of the hive. The hive thinks and behaves as a "superorganism."  The individual bee is completely expendable from the point of view of the hive. One bee is as good as another. This may be the most important thing a bee doesn't know about being a bee.

Part of the problem is that my mind, like the iPhone, "just works". There's a lot of stuff going on under the surface.

Suppose I tried to explain my iPhone to Isaac Newton. I would quickly run into an infinite set of boxes within boxes. Along the way, I'd need to explain probability and Quantum physics before I could explain how transistors work before I could explain logic gates and computer logic. Then I'd need to explain the millions of instructions on the phone along with the trillions of instructions on remote services. Oh, and radio and telecommunications theory from scratch, along with such details as cell phone architecture and TCP/IP protocols. I would need to unpack a big chunk of all human knowledge to explain how my phone works. And that would just be the start. I'd need to explain how and where it is manufactured, the skills required for each tiny bit. Then, of course, I'd need to explain why I have one, what it cost and what I use it for. You get the idea.

But how is it that I use my iPhone so effortlessly without any of this crossing my mind? The answer is that I have been blessed with a mind that effortlessly rides a wave in a vast sea of knowledge. My mind floats along under the impression that it "knows" all this, when, in fact, what I really know is a tiny sliver of the knowledge I hold in my hand. For the bee, all the knowledge of aeronautics, navigation and "wiggle language" is buried in hive brain - the work of the "blind watchmaker," evolution. Am I so different?

And that's just the start. It's not just about iPhones. It's about language. It's about doorknobs and flush toilets. This illusion is eloquently described in "The Knowledge Illusion". This is the illusion that we feel that we move around in a world we "know" when what we actually know is next to nothing.

So, the next time I watch a bee, perhaps I will feel a little less superior.

What do I know?

I spent a long time thinking about this post and concluded that it is rather half-baked. The reader might wonder, what's the point? I wondered about the role of scale. Viewed from a "big picture" scale, humans do look a bit like ants. It's important to remember that they are not ants, but their ant-like behavior is not part of their consciousness - the "bee" phenomenon. Some connection is also needed to the concept of assimilation. I also thought a lot about the bubbles that our minds construct - we are not aware of the very small, the very large, things out of sight and far away, the past or the distant future. We seem to "move" into the future, partly because we pay so little attention ... 

The "point", if any, is how our idea of who we are, why we do what we do, is so shockingly limited. This is hardly an original point but it may be possible to express it more forcibly with a hint of practical application.

From an emotional point of view, mindfulness allows a "reset" to "bubble zero", allowing us to cautiously expand awareness to what may matter a bit more than what we allow ourselves by media traps and daily emergencies. For example, I feel like I'm an American democrat, constantly outraged by the attack on America by DT. This is a media effect. Should I not worry more about what matters to me and what matters in general?

Focus - November 19, 2017

I have a lot of time on my hands - perhaps too much. I read a lot, usually 2 serious books per week or maybe more if you count the books I check into and decide not to read or put on the back burner for later. In the "later" category is the emerging genre of books explaining all the details of Donald Trump's horrible personality and personal history. I get it. No further information required.

There is a danger of being pulled into a rabbit hole, following "click bait" until starvation sets in. Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing something similar on a larger scale, taking advantage of the cheap and easy access to books (Kindle) and general information (Google/YouTube).

So here are, in theory, the "topics" I'm following.

THE SELF & COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

This is a hold-over from the main thread in my "Christian Skeptic" blog. At the moment, it concerns questions about the nature of the self (aka, "soul"). I'm convinced that this issue is very widely misunderstood. Most recently, I have wondered if we should have another pronoun, similar to the "royal we", that refers to the conventional "I" plus all the myriad of influences that determine what "I" know, what "I" want and how "I" make decisions. See The Knowledge Illusion and Behave. Perhaps "I" should just refer to the immediate experience of consciousness in the moment - a result of all those influences. This perspective is not unrelated to long-standing questions coming from "Dragon Theory". How is it that we are deeply "assimilated" into "dragons" like religions and corporations? What does assimilation feel like?

The distinction between "I" and the "Royal We" is important on a day to day personal level - what I might call the "Zen" outlook. I increasingly separate the pseudo-spiritual aspects of Zen from the simple discipline of mental and moral clarity implicit in the practices and traditions. In this case, there is not much more to learn - only the day-to-day struggle to apply what I already know. It's also a conscious effort to be "assimilated" into the right traditions, groups, political parties, and social media "bubbles". To some extent at least, we can determine what our personal "royal we" is.

Perhaps the easy way to understand this perspective is to note that human intelligence, like bee intelligence, is collective. The bee doesn't "know" how smart it is, or why it performs its wiggle dance or why it feels compelled to fly off in a given direction after watching a wiggle dance. Yet, when seen from the viewpoint of the hive, the behavior is perfectly intelligible. This idea applies on many levels to human behavior, but the interesting one applies to everyday experience - the fact that almost all of what we "know" is actually signaled in some way from other humans. Just think of what we "know" as we drive a car across the city.

CHRISTIANITY

I found "Fantasyland" to be a particularly scathing critique of religion - especially the American fundamentalist "Christian" version. However,  I still take the Christian ideal of forgiveness as an antidote to the current witch hunt "outing" all men who have ever behaved in an outrageous manner to any woman. Let him who has no sin throw the first stone. I expect a few stones to be thrown my way when I express this idea. For my own part, I am trying to banish "moral outrage" from my emotional toolbox. In spite of the widespread acceptance of moral "relativism" (acceptance of "gays" for example), most of us are unwilling to go the entire (Christian) distance to recognize that we all have things we are ashamed of and we all need forgiveness: the permission to start over.

Can all my reading and thinking serve to address practical questions, such as What kind of person should I be, How should I act? This has nothing to do with celestial "carrots and sticks." These are questions of personal and public morality. The current tsunami of moral outrage illustrates that many of us are addressing important moral issues with rather blunt instruments. 

ASSIMILATION

The idea behind "Dragon Theory" (now "Programmable Ape") can be seen from two perspectives: "top down" from the "dragon" or "bottom-up" from the assimilated human "component" of the dragon. I started from the "top," asking such questions as Is the "dragon" alive? Quite rightly, one of my readers pointed out that this is chiefly a matter of definition. Subsequently, trying to define the dragon has been quite a project, not unlike the effort to define a "meme." There are similar problems when one attempts to say anything that can not be said without the concept or to say anything that sheds a special light on the phenomenon. Accordingly, I now consider the original vision of the "dragon" as a first draft or glimpse of the phenomenon that is in need of a major overhaul. "The Corporation" remains as one of the most accessible introductions to this idea. On the other hand, my early versions of the idea, namely the "Creedal Group" and the "Spirit System" (dating back to 1970) seem to be surprisingly durable.

I have been encouraged by seeing the progress that some have made with the "meme" idea, especially by Daniel Dennett - most recently in "Bacteria to Bach." Really durable memes are be formed as a result of environmental constraints or the laws of physics. In other words, our "ideas" don't (always) grow out of unconstrained fantasy. In a sense, our ideas connect us to the "real world." Duh. To put it in another way, our "minds" are a (perhaps muddy) reflection of the world we live in. 

I continue to be well served by "Surfaces and Essences," the classic study of how analogies form the very basis of human thought. I'm always on the lookout for the analogies that underlie my ideas. Some analogies are better than others, but they are all analogies. It is wise to use analogies as a "whiteboard" sketch of a concept but always be on the alert for the need to drill down to the details of a phenomenon - especially those that challenge your favorite analogy. For example, from the beginning, "Dragon Theory" set itself up to be a promoter of confirmation bias, especially ignoring the substantial contribution made by individual decision making and constraints imposed by the environment. For example, by definition, the corporation operates in a financial environment, resulting in "behavior" that is more accurately seen as a result of the environment. To use an analogy, the behavior of a fish is, to a great extent, determined by the physical properties of water.

I have made more progress coming from the "bottom up", asking how it is that people get "assimilated." Early on, I realized that part of the answer is to be found in common assumptions, most notably in language and money. Most recently, that has been generalized with the aid of an AI concept: the "fitness function." For example, in the case of a for-profit corporation, the fitness function is entirely expressed in terms of money. This translates directly into the way that humans are assimilated, through hiring practices, employee incentives, customer relations and investor participation. All this is increasingly implemented by AI algorithms, but this only goes to reveal the fitness function that was there all along. By automating a fitness function, we create a monster. This is eloquently pointed out in "Weapons of Math Destruction" and supported by quite a few other sources such as "WTF." "WTF" is an instructive tutorial in how the simple idea of "money" as a fitness function actually works in Silicon Valley. You'd be surprised ...

Special assimilation issues arise in fantasy-ridden, fundamentalist American culture (See "Fantasy Land").

"Wiser" gets into the nuts and bolts of how "herd instinct" works in small groups such as juries and corporate boards. "Wiser" is a road map of how people are assimilated into a group, allowing the group as a whole to be more stupid than any particular member.  "Polarization of opinion" and "race to the bottom" are psychological phenomena subject to laboratory study. There is a large literature about exactly how corporations make stupid decisions. It comes as no surprise that we don't need fancy analogies to explain how the "brain" of the dragon - the prefrontal lobe - makes wrong decisions.

CLIMATE CHANGE

This issue used to literally keep me up at night. I now regard it as a kind of background fact - one of the "givens" that we all need to deal with, such as Calgary weather. It's been awhile since I have read anything new or important on this issue, although I try to connect the skeptics to information on the subject if they chose to actually learn something about it. Strangely, I often find myself in the awkward position of pointing out that there are other things besides climate change going on. Climate change is the background, but sometimes disasters are "ordinary" things like hurricanes, floods, and droughts. We need to deal with these events whether or not they are the result of climate change. To put another way, our preparation and response are within our control. It is useful to think this way since it calls for action from all quarters, including the climate change skeptics.

Zen plays a large part in my ability to retain a cool head while the world heats up. It is important to accept what you cannot change. In particular, we must accept impermanence - even the impermanence of life on Earth.

Going Back to Church

I accompanied my 98-year-old mother in law to the Sunday Service at St. Stephen's, a "high end" middle-class urban church in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island. Dianne, the newly-minted graduate of a Baptist Theology College, expertly designed and conducted the service. She is is an excellent speaker with an intelligent, engaging, sincere manner. In many ways, she's the best that this denomination has to offer. I urge you to listen to her sermon here. If you don't have time for it, please skip this entire blog post since it is a meditation on that sermon. My remarks are irrelevant to anyone who lacks a soft spot in their heart for "old-time religion."  Dianne can take the credit for getting me to think about the sermon for days. Definitely a good omen for her career in the pulpit.

Romans 7:15-25Amplified Bible (AMP)

15 For I do not understand my own actions [I am baffled and bewildered by them]. I do not practice what I want to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate [and yielding to my human nature, my worldliness—my sinful capacity]. 16 Now if I habitually do what I do not want to do, [that means] I agree with the Law, confessing that it is good (morally excellent). 17 So now [if that is the case, then] it is no longer I who do it [the disobedient thing which I despise], but the sin [nature] which lives in me.18 For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh [my human nature, my worldliness—my sinful capacity]. For the willingness [to do good] is present in me, but the doing of good is not. 19 For the good that I want to do, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. 20 But if I am doing the very thing I do not want to do, I am no longer the one doing it [that is, it is not me that acts], but the sin [nature] which lives in me. 

21 So I find it to be the law [of my inner self], that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. 22 For I joyfully delight in the law of God in my inner self [with my new nature], 23 but I see a different law and rule of action in the members of my body [in its appetites and desires], waging war against the law of my mind and subduing me and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is within my members. 24 Wretched and miserable man that I am! Who will [rescue me and] set me free from this body of death [this corrupt, mortal existence]? 25 Thanks be to God [for my deliverance] through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind serve the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh [my human nature, my worldliness, my sinful capacity—I serve] the law of sin.

When I left the Church in 1980, I resolved to stop using religious language. I felt that "Christianity" could easily just be a private language that was intelligible only to the "in group". Can Dianne's message be re-cast without "God talk"? Eventually, I would arrive at a view almost identical to Dan Dennett's: Christianity is 99% talk.

The first thing to note is that the sermon (and Paul's letter) seems to depend on the idea of "God." Most preachers toss this word around as if everyone knows what that word means (the mark of an "in-group" language). But is this true?

You can certainly say that there is a huge difference within the Christian community as to what "God" is and specifically what "God wants" (Dianne confidently informs the congregation of what she thinks God wants - how does she know?). In Russia (now 90% Christian) and much of the Christian world, God wants homosexuals to be put to death. According to Paul, "God wants" women to keep silent in Church, and Paul himself knew that God wanted the stoning to death of Dianne's Church's namesake: St Stephen. Presumably, Paul was always confident in his ability to figure out what "God wants." He shows no doubt on that score in the passage quoted above.

Dennett explains why people "believe" in God

Among Western intellectuals and (secretly) among the professional clergy, "God" has become a kind of cloudy metaphor signifying nothing in particular. As Dennett points out, this is effectively a kind of agnosticism. Why do so many people say they believe in God? This is a different issue than actual belief.  In my year in Seminary, studying for the career path Dianne has chosen, I didn't encounter any instructors who took the idea of God literally or who considered the Bible to be magically endowed with veracity. Only a handful of students did so, and they were quickly cured by the second week. Such beliefs were for the masses. Welcome to the sausage factory.

Many people stay in the pews and push all this to the back of their minds, clinging to the tradition and ritual of the Church. Many pastors do the same since they have invested many years to earn their position are not trained for any other profession. Dan Dennett refers to this as the Concorde Fallacy.

We may also remark that, in this service, the Bible itself is treated as the word of God and afforded a special reverence if its own, effectively ruling out questions such as, Is Paul right in what he says? Ministers in the United Church are not trained to regard the Book as infallible, but they go on to create the impression among the congregation that this is the appropriate attitude. Dianne's training was in a Baptist seminary so she may lean a bit toward a more "fundamentalist" view on this issue. What is easy to see, however, is that professional training makes it virtually impossible to guess what Dianne thinks about the Magic Book.

But does Dianne's message mean anything at all without "God"? Maybe ...

Buddha's Take on the Subject

Let's look at another word she uses: "Sin." I'm afraid her definition is hopelessly vague. Centuries earlier, an ordinary man with no claims to divinity, Siddhartha Gautama (aka the Buddha or the awakened one) boiled it down in terms more easily understood. Forgive me if I paraphrase:
The world is full of suffering, but we can do what we can to reduce it. Sin is any thought, word, deed, occupation or intent that increases the suffering of any entity or reduces the happiness of any entity. In particular, we must take care to guard against thoughts that undermine our own happiness and create suffering for ourselves. The very core and cause of suffering is our own self-deception.
That's a pretty direct definition that lines up well with what we intuitively regard as sin or "evil". It goes a bit beyond to warn us of evil thoughts and intention as well as expanding our area of concern to all creation, not just close relatives or people like us.

You will not find anything this clear in the Bible. Even so, I would claim that this would have been a better definition than the one Dianne used, even when speaking from the Christian pulpit. This is because what she said is an interpretation (or rather a spin on an interpretation of an interpretation). As a "prophet" or ordained teacher, she has the authority to interpret. She should do better. There is nothing stopping her from making the idea of "sin" more clear and relevant to her congregation, especially since it is unlikely that more than a few of them know what, if anything, she means by "what God intends." For that particular group of senior citizens, what God "intends" is very likely a return to the rituals and attitudes of the past. For these folks, God is Judge Judy and Jesus is a lot like Dr. Phil. Sin is what other people do. The kind of self-examination that Paul is doing in the reading will not be taken as a recommendation to do the same, although this may have been Dianne's intent, buried deep in a thicket of misdirection.

Buddha also saw the difficulty in doing the right thing, but his advice was different. Paul doesn't offer a solution - only a vague hope of "salvation" from external forces (Jesus). The theological mechanics of Paul's "salvation" not presented in this sermon and, I suspect, never will be.

Buddha offered the eightfold path as a guideline (not a set of rules).

This is what is so starkly missing in Dianne's sermon: any indication of what to do in response to the teaching.

Having had some small experience with one member of the congregation (my mother-in-law), I suspect that she could surely come up with a "to-do" list of sins that could be banished from her life with a bit of Biblical understanding.  She is frequently agitated into a state of fury over things that her relatives did 80 years ago. Dead relatives.

"Judge not lest ye be judged". "... as we forgive others ...". "Love keeps no score of wrongs ..."

On the other hand, there is an essential element of Dianne's sermon: you can let go of the past and accept forgiveness. But I don't read it in quite this fuzzy way.  To me, the message of Jesus is to repent and start over. It's an urgent message. Don't wait for New Year's resolutions. There was no hint in Dianne's message that anyone might need to examine themselves as Paul is doing in his letter and change things. It was just a lesson in fuzzy theology. "I'm OK, You're OK".

"Letting go" is a central theme in Buddhism and their understanding of what we need let go of is much more comprehensive. The message is not absent from Jesus' teaching, but Jesus does not seem to give a reason to let go. This is partly because He is (seen as) the ultimate authority in Christianity - you need to just do what He says. Buddha must simply persuade.

Dianne struggles with the metaphor of slavery and doesn't quite come to terms with it. The battle Paul talks about is not unique to Christians. Paul is distressed that he is somehow breaking "the Law" (he doesn't say how). But we are all unable to be the best we know we should be. Buddha agrees that to reach the ultimate spiritual goal, we must contend with human nature. Spiritual growth doesn't come naturally. This is most clearly brought out in the discipline of mindfulness (which borrows a lot from Buddhism). Our minds and our lives are naturally a mess. It takes an effort to get ourselves on the right path.

Strangely, the very title of Dianne's sermon (and Paul's letter) invites us to stop trying and turn it all over to God, whatever that means.

Sympathy For The Theology Graduate

I have been in Dianne's shoes. Especially fresh out of the heady world of a seminary with a head full of all that hard-won knowledge of the "faith," it is almost impossible to appreciate the vast gulf that exists between the pulpit and the first row of pews. For many of these ladies (and they are almost all ladies), the ability to listen at all is an effort that increases exponentially with age. The very fact that they have taken the time to show up in church on a Sunday morning confirms that they are morally superior to the rest of humanity. They are confident in their ability to judge what is wrong with the world and use their ability to offer criticism of the "new" chairs and a little girl who "should not" be distracting the tiny congregation from the wise words being delivered by this lovely young preacher up front who is presumably telling us what we already know. The needs of the child must not disturb the slumber of her elders. Pulling out of the parking lot, they can confidently apply the lesson of the day to forgive themselves for perhaps being a tiny bit over-dressed.

Article VII of the United Chuch official doctrine

For the record, here is article VII of the United Chuch official doctrine, drafted almost a century ago and still part of the official doctrine of the Church.

Article VII. Of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We believe in and confess the Lord Jesus Christ, the only Mediator between God and man, who, being the Eternal Son of God, for us men and for our salvation became truly man, being conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, yet without sin. Unto us He has revealed the Father, by His word and Spirit, making known the perfect will of God. For our redemption, He fulfilled all righteousness, offered Himself a perfect sacrifice on the Cross, satisfied Divine justice, and made propitiation for the sins of the whole world. He rose from the dead and ascended into Heaven, where He ever intercedes for us. In the hearts of believers He abides forever as the indwelling Christ; above Twenty Articles of Doctrine (1925) The United Church of Canada 2 L’Église Unie du Canada us and over us all He rules; wherefore, unto Him, we render love, obedience, and adoration as our Prophet, Priest, and King.

Nowhere in the doctrine is there any claim that the doctrine is optional or metaphorical. The doctrine forms the basis of the Union itself, giving the entire United Church a backbone of smoke. The vast majority of ordained ministers in the United Church do not believe in the literal truth of this statement, yet the statement itself goes to some length to ensure that it is taken literally. In other words, ordination in the Church requires a life of hypocrisy. While the professional priesthood acts as if the doctrine is now somehow optional or subject to interpretation, it is not. For this reason, any minister who speaks frankly about what everyone knows is subject to dismissal for doctrinal reasons.

As a former insider, I should comment that it is also dangerous to speak as if the doctrine is true! Such behavior invites criticism of the Church's "liberal" credentials and encourages craziness in the congregation. For example, the minister must keep a tight lid on expectations that prayer will do anything and cast a patronizing cloak over any hint of miracles in the lives of the people. I'm not sure why this is done, but I think the core of it is that the professionals are, for all intents and purposes, atheists. To them, any hint of the miraculous seems like mental illness.

Those who have chosen to be Ministers in the United Church are not to be envied.

-----------------

My views on religion in general and Christianity in particular, are extensively documented in this blog. There is no need to repeat them here. In this post, I am asking what to think about other folks who believe what they believe and act the way they act beyond the range of anything I might say. In the one case, there is my 98-year-old mother in law who, due to no fault of her own, is more or less locked in a pattern of thought that she can no longer change. On the other hand, we have a fresh young Theology School graduate who has been trained to speak a language that that expressly encourages evasion and vague ideas. The congregation is expected to find the meaning. I know from experience that it takes many years to overcome this kind of training, made more difficult if you are employed to be the "Magic Christian" seven days a week. Like all big bureaucracies, the liberal church of 2017 is a minefield for employees who speak plainly.

Sam Harris has an interesting comment on how Judaism has also turned away from the "spooky stuff" at 30:40 in this podcast. This applies even to Rabbis who, in Sam's estimation, are for all intents and purposes, atheists.

Whatever Happened to the Meme?

The idea of the meme was invented by Richard Dawkins and hammered into its most robust form by Daniel Dennett. It is an extended analogy that claims that human ideas are somehow like genes and have their own process of evolution independent of the evolution going on in their "hosts", the human race.

It's an attractive idea and it works well as a rhetorical device, especially the way that Dawkins and Dennett use it to attack religion as an infection of the brain. True believers in "memetics" claim that all of human thought is "infection" by memes - a strong claim that memetics is a fundamental explanation of mind. Memeticists claim that the brain is a "meme machine".

The problem comes when you try to apply memes outside of the examples trotted out by the "founders". Personally, I can't figure out what a "meme" is. The old words of ideas, doctrines, theories and especially paradigm seem perfectly serviceable and don't easily translate themselves into "meme talk".

It is worth noting that respected investigators of "mind", such as Hofstadter, bypass the idea of "meme" entirely in spite of being on cordial terms with the founders of the idea. For them, it's not just a wrong idea but one not worth mentioning. "It's not even wrong".

It looks like the basic "atom" of thought, especially linguistic thought (the inner voice), is the analogy, as worked out in "Surfaces and Essences". If we start with this idea, memes must be some kind of "extended analogy" or complex of analogies. However, our mental "analogy computers" process the tangle of analogies in language at lightening speed and mostly below our level of awareness. This doesn't line up well with the "meme" idea, where it seems to be assumed that people can be "talked out" of memes (disinfected) by conscious, logical argument.

In fact, analogy processing is buried in language itself and not the "memes" that have somehow "infected" our minds. If the infection is to be found at all, it is to be found in the language, not the brain. But the analogy of infection breaks down when we study language in general, not the cherry-picked poster children of memetics. For the most part, the analogies that underlie language are benign and somewhat inevitable, given the need to "boot strap" our language from almost zero. The example of "under-stand" comes to mind. How is standing under related to "understand". If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Maybe it's a "meme" but do we need the "meme" idea to make sense of it? Does it make sense to think of this analogy as "surviving" on its own according to some pseudo-Darwinian principles, rather than its roots in human experience? What does "memetics" add to our understanding?

Hofstadter's concept is that some analogies are better than others. They are the "essential" analogies, the ones that come closest to isomorphic mappings between one situation and another. This would seem to claim that is the truth or at least "usefulness", not "survival of the fittest" that makes some ideas prevail over others in the long term. I'd go further and claim that it is our hard-wired preference for symmetry that makes one idea seem better than another. This comes pretty close to common sense about the matter. Is memetics providing a meaningful challenge to common sense?

There is a human tendency to regard people who disagree with us as being "infected", insane and impervious to logic. We are the logical ones. They are ignoring the evidence. Especially when seen in its early forms (attack against religious thinking), memetics is simply a put-down of of stupid people who fail to appreciate the majestic logic and superior mind of Richard Dawkins. Dennett smoothed over the rough edges and gave us some real insight about where "memes" come from, such as the idea that no person needs to "have" an idea, such as the great idea of evolution. But in defending the meme, Dennett has basically moved beyond it. Dennett's memetics doesn't need memetics.

Is there anything we can understand using memetics that can't be understood without it? As it has been said of Freud: "What  is true isn't new and what is new isn't true".

Wrong theories provide special insight by providing us with a new perspective on the problem, like footholds as we climb the mountain, to be used for a moment then discarded.

What is "Truth"?

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.”

As Dennett hints (with typical subtly), there is a lot of "junk philosophy" around the subjects dear to Jaynes' heart. In this post, I'd like to extract one of Jayne's ideas and wipe a bit of "junk" off it to see where it gets me.

At the center of Jayne's theory is the "bicameral mind", which is firmly based on the idea that we have a "right brain" and a "left brain" with notably different capabilities, each capable of acting somewhat on their own. The "right brain" is good at seeing the "big picture" and sends its judgments to the left brain, where they are perceived as speech - sometimes the speech of the Gods. As things get historically more complicated, we evolve our present day "inner chatter", no longer attributed to the Gods (if we are sane), but now called "reason". Jaynes regards this as the emergence of consciousness itself, which is not what I want to take up in this post. What I like about Jaynes is that he sees language in a dynamic light, evolving and building up over time toward some critical point where the modern mind (along with "civilization") emerges.

There is no particular reason to locate these two faculties at some location in the brain and this is perhaps Jaynes main mistake - built in to his terminology. But we can understand his arguments very well without referring back to his neurological ideas. In fact, he rarely does so himself. You could go through his book and translate "Left Brain" as "Kidney" and "Right Brain" as "big toe" without impacting the meaning of what he's saying.

What we regard as "truth", at least in the Western traditions, is a linguistic concept. The "most" true statements are those of mathematics, which can be "proven". As Wittgenstein famously pointed out, such proofs are basically moves in a language game, where everyone agrees to the rules and agrees about what is "proven" in dialogue. As Hofstadter points out in Surfaces and Essences, the concept of language can be broadened to include the "models" of Physics - the underlying idea is metaphor and analogy.

Jaynes, Hofstadter and others point out that language is a huge labyrinth of metaphor. We "bootstrap" our store of metaphors as children (Jaynes is particularly good at describing how this bootstrap process works) and we proceed to produce the vast store in our heads - tens of thousands of words. It is in this language that our "inner voice" speaks. If our inner voice proclaims something to be true, it does so according to the impenetrable rules of the language that has been programmed into our brains. In the vast majority of cases, the beleivability of that inner voice comes from uncounted assumptions and analogies buried in the language it speaks. For example, if my inner voice calls someone a "nigger" in my head, that one word carries centuries if history and thousands of voices. It will make no sense to me to say to the inner voice: No, that person is not a "nigger". In fact, given the language that is being spoken, such a question makes no sense.

If you think that "1" is a solution to "x squared minus one equals zero", you speak the language of mathematics. If it seems sensible to say "I think, therefore I am", you have learned to talk like Descartes. Like him, you will regard that statement as self-evidently true. Those who fail to see the statement as self-evident are used to speaking a different language in a whole different culture which, for example, may regard the "self" as an illusion. Such a statement would make no sense to Descartes. It's not a matter of "truth" outside of the rules of the "language game". Descartes spoke the language of the religion of his time, which regarded the soul as the "self" -- the "self evident" starting point for any discussion of what is "real".

Is there any other way we can reach the "truth"? Jaynes says there is: that "right brain" which sees the truth but speaks it to the "left brain". It's better to characterize this source of perception as some kind of holistic or aesthetic sense that goes beyond language and perhaps precedes language historically. It is an open question whether this "right brain" (or big toe) processing works according to analogy. I think it's better to say it works by hard wired recognition of symmetry, but that is another topic.

For example, this "right brain" truth pops up when we say a certain combination of notes "sounds right" or a scene is breathtakingly beautiful. It certainly shouts loudly at us when we judge another human being to be beautiful, honest or friendly.

This simple observation leads me to some wide-ranging conclusions.

• By definition, we cannot expect language to reach into non-linguistic "truth". Western philosophy, including that of Dennett, even when purged of "wild junk", has nothing to say about "truth" revealed by our innate mental capacity to judge certain experiences as special and valuable.
• Zen, emphasizes direct aesthetic perception and takes pains to isolate and ignore the "inner voice". There is no reason to prefer one path over the other. In fact, I'm perfectly happy to leave the whole idea of "truth" to the language experts and seek for other words that reflect the judgement of my "right brain". This consideration is a much needed justification for being open to Zen.
• Our "right brains" have a shared language, a culture and a history of their own, referred to as "art". I would also contend that they have a built-in "language" of their own - perhaps reaching back far into the past, perhaps part of the very definition of life itself. Even when the "art" in question is expressed in language (the novel for example), quality judgement are made by standards that are difficult to express in the language of logic, although critics struggle endlessly to do so.
• We need to distinguish between what is "real" and what is "true". Truth is the umpire's call in the language game. Reality is what remains after all alternatives are ruled out.

There is another road to "truth", described in our language as "Science". Advances in Scientific knowledge are made chiefly through language - vigorously expanding our vocabulary. There are maybe 180,000 words in the English language (give or take). Scientific journals add a few more with every published article. Moreover, Science is constantly adding new models of reality. The first of these was "Euclidean Space". More recently, Feynman Diagrams have added to our ability to "picture" and discuss quantum reactions. Many things are easily "said" with pictures but almost impossible to "say" with words. However, these pictures ("maps") obey the same principles as language as discussed by Hofstadter and Jaynes. All lovers of maps and models will agree that there is a strong element of aesthetic beauty in a good map. 

There is also a strong aesthetic motive in Science as a whole, most eloquently described in "The Beautiful Question" by Frank Wilczek. Wilczek makes a strong case that the universe really is governed by symmetric principles, which also appeal strongly to our sense of what "looks right" (this is a right-brain kind of "looking right"). In other words, our taste for symmetry is a reliable guide to what is real.

So, in Science all three roads to the truth come together. 

The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: a critical reappraisal of Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis

I have copied this review article into the blog as a good summary of contemporary opinion about Jaynes' theories. It seems that his main contribution has been, as I mentioned in a previous post, to ask "impertinent questions" and open up new avenues of investigation. His specific ideas, especially the "bicameral mind" and the idea that early man was not conscious have not fared well.

The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: a critical reappraisal of Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis

There’s a blind man here with a brow

As big and white as a cloud.

And all we fiddlers, from highest to lowest,

Writers of music and tellers of stories,

Sit at his feet,

And hear him sing of the fall of Troy.

Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (1916)

Andrea Eugenio Cavanna^a,b

Michael Trimble^a

Federico Cinti^c

Francesco Monaco^b

a Institute of Neurology, London, UK

b Department of Neurology, Amedeo Avogadro University, Novara, Italy

c Department of Classical Philology, University of Bologna, Italy

Reprint requests to: Dr Andrea Eugenio Cavanna

Amedeo Avogadro University

Corso Mazzini, 18 - 28100 Novara - Italy

E-mail: acavanna@ion.ucl.ac.uk

Received: October 2006

Accepted for publication: January 2007

Summary

In 1976 Julian Jaynes published his controversial book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, introducing the hypothesis of a two-chambered brain-mind model that preceded the evolutionary development of the conscious mind. Jaynes’ speculative model gave rise to a huge debate, which has reverberated throughout the current neuroscientific and neurophilosophical literature. Has the bicameral mind stood the test of time? To answer this question, the present paper adopts a multidisciplinary perspective and, after briefly summarizing Jaynes’ hypothesis, addresses two main critical issues: the neurological basis of the bicameral model and the philological accuracy of Jaynes’ arguments. Finally, the concept of a non-unitary Self is presented as one of the most relevant contemporary legacies of the bicameral mind.

KEY WORDS: bicameral mind, consciousness, qualia.

Introduction

It is now thirty years since Julian Jaynes first proposed his model of the bicameral mind, based on a wealth of archeological, anthropological, psychological, and neurological data (1). Not surprisingly, Jaynes’ thought-provoking and pioneering work in the field of consciousness studies gave rise to a longlasting debate, with contributions from a wide spectrum of disciplines (2-4). Even today, it has been argued that a multidisciplinary approach to the problem of consciousness and its development in the evolutionary process that shaped Homo sapiens cannot leave out an analysis of Jaynes’ theory of the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the preconscious bicameral mind (5,6). The present paper provides a brief summary of the bicameral mind model, followed by a critical reappraisal of some theoretical issues in the light of more recent acquisitions on the putative cerebral basis of bicamerality.

Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind

The background of Jaynes’ evolutionary account of the transition from bicamerality to the conscious mind is the claim that human consciousness arises from the power of language to make metaphors and analogies. Metaphors of “me” and analogous models of “I” allow consciousness to function through introspection and self-visualization. According to this view, consciousness is a conceptual, metaphor-generated inner world that parallels the actual world and is intimately bound with volition and decision. Homo sapiens, therefore, could not experience consciousness until he developed a language sophisticated enough to produce metaphors and analogical models.

Jaynes recognizes that consciousness itself is only a small part of mental activity and is not necessary for sensation or perception, for concept formation, for learning, thinking or even reasoning. Thus, if major human actions and skills can function automatically and unconsciously, then it is conceivable that there were, at one time, human beings who did most of the things we do – speak, understand, perceive, solve problems – but who were without consciousness. Man’s earliest writings (hieroglyphics, hieratic and cuneiform) are quite difficult for us to translate and understand in depth, especially when they refer to anything psychological. Thus, if we want to look for any historical evidence of consciousness – an analogous “I” narrating in a mind-space – we should go to a language with which we have some cultural continuity, and that is ancient Greek.

According to Jaynes, the earliest Greek text of sufficient size to test the question of whether there is any evidence of consciousness is the Iliad. In fact, the Iliad does not seem to mention any subjective thoughts or the contents of anyone’s mind. The heroes of the Iliad were not able to make decisions, no one was introspecting or even reminiscing. Apparently, they were noble “automata” who were not aware of what they did. Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no internal mind-space to introspect upon. Some lexical oddities in the Homeric text (such as the absence of a single word translating “consciousness”, “mind”, “soul”, or even “body”) led Jaynes to formulate the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by nonconscious minds, which automatically recorded and objectively reported events, in a manner rather similar to the characters of the poem. The transition to subjective and introspective writings of the conscious mind occurred in later works, beginning with the Odyssey.

In short, Jaynes claims that men in the age of the Iliad learned to speak, read, and write, as well as conduct their daily lives, yet remained nonconscious throughout their lives. Being nonconscious, they were not responsible for their actions. Who, then, made the decisions? Jaynes’ answer is that whenever a significant choice was to be made, an auditory hallucination intervened, telling people what to do. These voices, in the Iliad always and immediately obeyed, were called Gods. Before the cultural evolution of consciousness, the human brain was organized in a bicameral fashion: the right hemisphere (the synthetic, poetic, “god-brain”) used to transmit hallucinatory verbal instructions to the left hemisphere (the analytical, rational, “man-brain”), especially in response to unusual or stressful situations. It follows that human mentality was divided into two parts, a decision-making part (located in the right hemisphere) and a follower part (in the left hemisphere), and neither part was “conscious”. According to Jaynes, the bicameral mind is to be observed not only in the most ancient literature but also in the contemporary examples of throwbacks to bicamerality, such as hypnosis and schizophrenia, since auditory or verbal hallucinations (VHs) can be regarded as a remnant of this early mentality. Moreover, the bicameral mentality allowed a large group to carry around with them, in the form of VHs, the directions of the king. The leaders used these stress-generated “voices” to lead the masses in cooperative unison. The bicameral mind enabled men to build societies and the earliest civilizations (the Near East, Egypt, Southern Africa, India, China, Mesoamerica) developed through common hallucinating voices attributed to Gods and other rulers – i.e. external “authorities” – and to various symbols, such as graves, temples, and idols.

Finally, Jaynes speculates that the development of modern human consciousness began as late as around 1400-600 B.C., when men were evolutionarily forced by the chaos of huge migrations induced by overpopulation and natural catastrophes, and by the widespread use of writing, to change their mentality.

While innovative and thought-provoking, Jaynes’ sophisticated hypothesis presents several difficulties, as shown by the criticism it attracted from different angles. The next two sections will summarize the main streams of the critical arguments, focusing respectively on the neurological and philological substrates of the bicameral mind. Some of the most important contemporary legacies of Jaynes’ model will be presented in the final section.

The bicameral brain

The first line of critical argument arises when considering the theory of the bicameral mind from a neurophysiological and neuropsychological perspective. Jaynes’ neurological model for the bicameral mind relies on the structural and functional differences between the two cerebral hemispheres that emerged from brain laterality studies. The notion of the right hemisphere as a generator of hallucinatory experiences derived from the well-known experiments involving the electrical stimulation of the brain of patients with epilepsy (7). This was the only neurobiological knowledge about the “silent areas” of the right temporal lobe available around 1970. The role of the right-sided areas corresponding to Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas is still not completely clear, but recent functional neuroimaging findings (8-10) seem to confirm the hypothesis that the right middle temporal gyrus represents the source of auditory hallucinations in at least some schizophrenic patients (11). Arguably, this lateralization pattern could well be the reason why these inner voices lack the characteristic of being self-generated (12). According to Persinger and Makarec (13), the “feeling of a presence”, a subjective experience that characterizes periods of profound literary or musical creativity, could be attributed to a concomitant increase in the individual’s access to meaningful nonverbal representations held in the right temporal structures. However, the variety of hallucinatory phenomena observed in normal subjects and different neuropsychiatric disorders, ranging from schizophrenia to epilepsy, suggests that the stress situations proposed by Jaynes are far too simplistic to be a valid model for common aetiological processes (14).

Furthermore, Jaynes’ speculations appear to be shaped by the striking insights derived from the early studies on “split-brain” patients by Sperry and colleagues (15,16). The unexpected findings about the independent functionality of the two hemispheres after the surgical removal of the corpus callosum (commissurotomy) led some neuroscientists to postulate the coexistence of two parallel streams of consciousness (17,18). Likewise, Jaynes’ bicameral model requires some sort of underlying functional interhemispheric disconnection in the brain architecture. However, from an evolutionary perspective, it seems very unlikely that such a dramatic remodelling of extensive neural networks could have come about in the space of three millennia or so – the time taken, according to Jaynes’ theory, for the transition from the bicameral mind to the modern conscious mind. Furthermore, Jaynes’ idea that somehow there is an emergent function that is phylogenetically discontinuous is a position that few neuroscientists would buy.

On the whole, neurophysiological data provide weak support for a bicameral structure of the preconscious mind. Indeed, significant paradigm shifts regarding the concept of consciousness took place in ancient times, as documented in literary texts. To use the brain-computer analogy, Jaynes’ theory could, at best, account for some software (=cultural), rather than hardware (=structural), developments of the brain/mind continuum (2).

Consciousness and bicamerality

The second line of argument concerns the philological and anthropological basis of Jaynes’ archeopsychological investigation of the earliest Western literature. The Iliad is a collection of oral poetry composed by a millenary succession of “aoidoi” or bards from different traditions, and then assembled around 700 B.C. (19-21). This heterogeneity is the most likely explanation for the numerous incongruities that classical philologists have detected in the text (22,23). Indeed, several passages appear to confirm Jaynes’ hypothesis about the bicameral mentality of the represented characters, and the leading role of VHs in determining their actions. One striking example is the celebrated episode of the anger of Achilles against Agamemnon being checked by the hallucinatory vision of Athena (Book I). However, considered as a whole, the narration of the Iliad is not always consistent with the thesis of the noble “automata”. Crucial decisions, such as Hector’s decision to take on Achilles, do not seem to be inspired by anything other than the heroes’ conscious volition (Book XXII). Arguably, it might have proved more useful to restrict any speculation on the preconscious mentality to specific passages of the poem and to the oral traditions they stemmed from. As a consequence, the hypothetical transition from the bicameral mind to modern consciousness would have been shifted indefinitely backwards.

Besides these philological considerations, some important conceptual issues should be highlighted. From a psychological and philosophical perspective, Jaynes’ definition of consciousness appears to be quite limited, since it does not take into consideration the existence of any subjective, “phenomenal” experiences – or “qualia”, according to the philosophical jargon (24) recently translated into the neuroscientific lexicon (25). Philosophers of mind use this technical term to refer to the subjective texture of experience, which is the essence of the qualitative dimension of consciousness. Roughly speaking, a quale (singular of qualia) is the “what it is like” character of mental states: the way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc. Therefore, qualia are experiential properties of sensations, feelings, perceptions and, more controversially, thoughts and desires (26). From this perspective, the most difficult challenge to the scientific explanation of consciousness is represented by the “hard problem” of qualia, as opposed to the “light problems” of explaining the neuronal substrate of specific cognitive functions, such as memory, learning, and attention (27). The status of qualia is hotly debated in both philosophy and neuroscience, largely because it is central to a proper understanding of the nature of consciousness (28). On the other hand, Jaynes’ concept of consciousness seems to provide the backbone for a theory of higher-order awareness involving self-representation, while leaving such subjective experiences aside. In this sense, bicameral-minded people could be said to lack some sort of self-monitoring accessory function, rather than consciousness as a whole, including qualia.

Furthermore, Jaynes’ assumption that consciousness depends on language-driven metaphors involves the seemingly endless philosophical debate on the role of language in conscious thoughts. Which came first? Contrary to Jaynes’ claim that consciousness ultimately depends on inner language skills, both neuroscientists and philosophers of mind now tend, much more, to assume that language simply contributed to some higher faculties of consciousness (see, for example, 29), rather than being an essential prerequisite for any kind of conscious experiences. Romantic love, for instance, could represent a by-product of language, whilst sexual attraction apparently does not need any verbal component.

Overall, the attitude of philosophers of mind towards the plausibility of a bicameral mind has been controversial. For example, in his review of Jaynes’ book, Block (30) argued that even bicameral-minded people could have been conscious – in the phenomenological sense – long before they acquired the concept of consciousness. On the other hand, according to Dennett (2), since mental phenomena like consciousness are partially created by the arrival on the scene of a certain set of concepts, there is no space for conscious experiences unless the concept of consciousness has been developed. In short, the ambiguities that surround the exact meaning and the use of the term “consciousness” seem to play a central role in further entangling the philological and philosophical views on the putative bicamerality of the characters featuring in the Iliad.

The cultural legacy of the bicameral mind

Despite the above-mentioned limitations, Jaynes’ composite picture of the bicameral mind has had widespread influence and undoubtedly shaped to a considerable extent subsequent reflections on the biological and cultural underpinnings of human consciousness. The most remarkable achievement of Jaynes’ theory is that it bridges the gap between distant disciplines, establishing intriguing links between some of their unsolved issues. It has been mentioned that the exact role of the right temporal lobe of the brain is not fully explained. The issue of the development of a conscious mind, from a phylogenetic perspective, is one of the key topics of current philosophical and neuroscientific debate. Another compelling mystery is the unique Iliadic view of man as an aggregate, both physical and psychological – a problem already raised by some prominent classical philologists of the past century, including Bohme, Snell, Dodds, Onians, Frankel, and Adkins (31-36). Unlike later writings, the Iliadic vocabulary lacks a single word for the concept of consciousness, or even mind (37,38). Instead, there exists a multitude of terms, referred to by Jaynes as “preconscious hypostases”, that are thought to relate to physiological processes associated with mental life (39,40). These “preconscious hypostases” are expressed by words like “psyche” (the living breath departing from the dead) (41), “thumos” (either the blowing breath or the flowing blood) (42), “phren” (almost always in the plural form “phrenes”: presumably, the inflating lungs) (43), among others. Such lexical oddities apparently disappeared in subsequent milestones in Western literature, beginning with the Odyssey. The deep psychological analysis and the rich mental vocabulary that characterize Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Euripides’ Medea (V-IV century B.C.), for instance, do not show any significant difference from what is found in most modern and contemporary literature. This is not the case for the composite text of the Iliad, which is peculiarly devoid of any psychological insight. As such, it stands out as a unique and unexplained model in Western culture (38).

Similarly, it has been pointed out that in early Mycenaean figurative art, the human body was depicted as a curious aggregate of limbs, with marked joints and a fairly inconsistent trunk (32,44). Greek classical art, on the other hand, closely resembled more recent figurative styles.

Quite surprisingly, this non-unitary concept of the Self happens to converge with some of the findings that have emerged from cognitive neuroscience studies during the past few decades. Theories involving concepts such as “society of mind” (45), “modularity” of brain functions (46), and “cognitive homunculi” (47) have been thoroughly investigated and discussed by both neuroscientists and philosophers of mind. According to Baars’ “global workspace theory”, for instance, consciousness emerges as a result of the highly integrated activity of multiple unconscious brain processes (48). Baars claims that the prefrontal areas involved in the regulation of selective attention are the brain module playing the key role of the “internal observer” in the “theatre of consciousness”. In addition, a growing body of psychiatric literature has focused on the fragmentation of the Self, through the recognition and description of dissociative disorders, that in the most recent APA classification (49) comprise depersonalization disorder and dissociative identity disorder, formerly called “multiple personality syndrome” (37). Therefore, the debate raised by Jaynes’ hypothesis seems to support some contemporary attempts to deconstruct the concept of a unitary Self – a coherent centre of consciousness and engine of human actions. Converging evidence suggests that our common sense-based intuition of the unitary Self could be considered an illusion created by Western cultural and social paradigms, developed after the Homeric ages and philosophically enhanced by Plato’s thought in terms of mind-body dualism (47). Apparently, both religious belief and Cartesian doctrine deepened this misleading way of thinking of ourselves, which historically shaped folk psychology and pervaded most theoretical reflections on consciousness.

References

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