The voices in your head.

[Audley Strange]

Somewhat different, but in the same territory, is Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Fascinating - truly fascinating. Probably bullshit, but entirely worthwhile reading.

And down the rabbit hole I go.

Cheers Orpheus. That is kind of a missing link to a more general consideration I had. I checked out the wiki and it seems that even those who are skeptical like Dawkins and Dennet seem to think there might be something there.

[hiyymer]

Somewhat different, but in the same territory, is Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Fascinating - truly fascinating. Probably bullshit, but entirely worthwhile reading.

Wasn't Jaynes' basic premise that before full blown literacy, people basically followed the voices in their heads (right hemisphere to left hemisphere), interpreted as gods. The development of the illusion of the autonomous rational self is very recent and bound up in the left-brained symbolic depth of written language; unification of the bi-cameral mind in a new kind of self consciousness. Yes, probably bullshit, but resonates nevertheless. We're still talking about it. His "evidence" was basically that written stories, presumably preceded by the oral version, did not contain references to self motivated acts until quite late in the game (I think like the last few thousand years).

[rasetsu]

Yeah, your original posts brought Jaynes to mind, as its essentially of a piece, only substituting Greek legend for Hebrew (and specifically Homeric narratives). Unfortunately, the evidence for Jaynes' hypotheisis is weak at best. (It's entertaining reading, but not essential literature).

Recent presentations I've indulged suggest that ritualistic dance and music preceded actual linguistic religious forms (largely due to the neurological effects of dance and music on the human brain), but I think such ideas are, at the limit, reflecting perhaps basic features of the evolution of language (vocal language no doubt served very simplistic purposes, many of which are evident in the animal kingdom today, before becoming fully linguistic in the sense we use today. I have no doubt there was an intermediate stage in which speech was more behavioral and musical than communicative, but how to determine the sequence of developments when any trace of them has been erased in time?

I'm rambling, zeroing in on drunkenness, and distracted. Take all the fruit, throw out the seed.

[Audley Strange]

Well I get his hypothesis is quite weak. However as someone who has indulged in ritual invocation and evocation in a variety of places and in a variety of states I can attest to the seemingly alien quality of written language as symbol rather than the immediacy of say something like incense or poly-rhythmic drumming or even song. Some of these techniques seem to go back a long way, perhaps even retain some of their power from the times of the neolithic, but I completely accept we cannot know if their internal narratives were complex or not.

Still intrigues me though.

[orpheus]

Yeah, your original posts brought Jaynes to mind, as its essentially of a piece, only substituting Greek legend for Hebrew (and specifically Homeric narratives). Unfortunately, the evidence for Jaynes' hypotheisis is weak at best. (It's entertaining reading, but not essential literature).

Recent presentations I've indulged suggest that ritualistic dance and music preceded actual linguistic religious forms (largely due to the neurological effects of dance and music on the human brain), but I think such ideas are, at the limit, reflecting perhaps basic features of the evolution of language (vocal language no doubt served very simplistic purposes, many of which are evident in the animal kingdom today, before becoming fully linguistic in the sense we use today. I have no doubt there was an intermediate stage in which speech was more behavioral and musical than communicative, but how to determine the sequence of developments when any trace of them has been erased in time?

I'm rambling, zeroing in on drunkenness, and distracted. Take all the fruit, throw out the seed.

rasetsu, could you point me in the direction of some of the literature to which you refer in your second paragraph? It sounds like it might have relevance to something I'm working on. Thanks.

[orpheus]

I figured if I didn't mention Jaynes, someone else would. His thesis is a real stretch, And the evidence is weak, but it's such an intriguing idea, and he explored it rather extensively, so it's hard to ignore it entirely.

I wonder, also, about the question of evidence. It seemed to me (and I read that book many years ago, so I might be dead wrong) that it wasn't so much that the evidence was scanty, but that a) using early literature (e.g. the Homeric texts) as evidence is a bit out of the usual ballpark, and b) it's less a matter of little evidence, and more a matter of him looking at the evidence from a totally bizarre angle.

[hiyymer]

A side note. A saw in my latest "Science News" a blurb on a new book, "The Ravenous Brain" by Daniel Bor, a neuroscientist.

"Consciousness, Bor argues, is a 'chornic mental hunger.' The brain's demand for more and more information about the world."

Reminds me of the article, "Athymhormia and Disorders of Motivation in Basal Ganglia Disease" by Michel Habib, M.D., which can be found online. Interesting cases where damage to a specific area of the limbic system turns off the limbic loop and consciousness and motivation with it. Interestingly the patients can be brought to consciousness by external stimulation, at which point they report that in their inert motivation-less state they had no thoughts.

Not sure what the relevance is to the current discussion. Except that God like anything else is the brain's way of learning about the world. It cannot learn the mechanism directly so it creates the agent model, which is not a rational model and cannot be reconciled directly to material reality. One thesis is that the agent model developed first in response to external mechanisms like predators and prey. The "self" was not so much an agent as what Damasio calls the "core self", the brain relating the organism to its surroundings. To my way of thinking the God agent may well be a necessary counterpart to the development of the agent self; what we call self awareness which is just the brain's capacity to represent the self as agent in consciousness. We have a self agent, but life teaches us that the self agent is not running the show, so the god agents become a necessary corollary. Under that scenario the two forms of agency would develop in tandem.

[Audley Strange]

Surely then we're speaking of the autonomic nervous system at the point where we discuss things like flight or flight? Could that be the "core self", so to speak, the reptilian brain?

[rasetsu]

A side note. A saw in my latest "Science News" a blurb on a new book, "The Ravenous Brain" by Daniel Bor, a neuroscientist.

"Consciousness, Bor argues, is a 'chornic mental hunger.' The brain's demand for more and more information about the world."

Reminds me of the article, "Athymhormia and Disorders of Motivation in Basal Ganglia Disease" by Michel Habib, M.D., which can be found online. Interesting cases where damage to a specific area of the limbic system turns off the limbic loop and consciousness and motivation with it. Interestingly the patients can be brought to consciousness by external stimulation, at which point they report that in their inert motivation-less state they had no thoughts.

Not sure what the relevance is to the current discussion. Except that God like anything else is the brain's way of learning about the world. It cannot learn the mechanism directly so it creates the agent model, which is not a rational model and cannot be reconciled directly to material reality. One thesis is that the agent model developed first in response to external mechanisms like predators and prey. The "self" was not so much an agent as what Damasio calls the "core self", the brain relating the organism to its surroundings. To my way of thinking the God agent may well be a necessary counterpart to the development of the agent self; what we call self awareness which is just the brain's capacity to represent the self as agent in consciousness. We have a self agent, but life teaches us that the self agent is not running the show, so the god agents become a necessary corollary. Under that scenario the two forms of agency would develop in tandem.

Awesome info. Thanks!

There's also, Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith by J Anderson Thomson.

I haven't read it yet (next month, same bat book club, same bat channel), but the author gave a kick ass presentation of some of its major topics at the recent American Atheists' conference. (I have the PPT file, which doesn't have his narration, but still. PM me for the link. 200MB)