Jaynes Legacy

Lawrence Wile

Description

Julian Jaynes' 1976 book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, continues to arouse an unsettling ambivalence. Richard Dawkins called it "either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between". The present book suggests that the bicameral mind is a phantasm; the dating of the origin of consciousness contradicts archeological and literary evidence; and the theory contributes nothing toward explaining why some physical states are conscious while others are not because the nonconscious bicameral brain is neurophysiologically equivalent to the conscious brain.However, the author pays tribute to Jaynes's work as a work of "consummate genius" because it compels us to re-evaluate the significance of humankind's earliest traditions and texts that might shine light on the "very suspicious totem of evolutionary mythology" that consciousness has evolved continuously and gradually from worms to man.The present book suggests that the evolution of the relationship between consciousnesses, mass, energy, and spacetime radically changed nearly 6,000 years ago during the epigenetic, evolutionary degeneration of a little-known, threadlike structure originating from the center of the central nervous system called Reissner's fiber. The earliest Egyptian, Hebrew, Indian and Chinese traditions, buried beneath the dust of fallen Babel and thousands of years of distortions and disguisings, describe this process during the origin of religion and mystical traditions.

Sujets

• Mysticism

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 03 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845409715
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Jaynes Legacy
Shining New Light Through the Cracks of the Bicameral Mind
Lawrence Wile
imprint-academic.com




2018 digital version converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited
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Copyright © Lawrence Wile, 2018
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK



Introduction
Julian Jaynes’s 1976 book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind , continues to arouse an unsettling ambivalence. Richard Dawkins called it “either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between.” It is, in my opinion, “complete rubbish” because Jaynes’s analysis of consciousness contravenes logic and self-evident psychological truths. The bicameral mind as the orchestrator of a hierarchical theocracy of nonconscious individuals via auditory hallucinations is a phantasm. The dating of the origin of consciousness contradicts archeological and literary evidence. The theory contributes nothing toward explaining why some physical states are conscious while others are not because the nonconscious bicameral brain is neurophysiologically equivalent to the conscious brain.
On the flip side it is, in my opinion, a work of “consummate genius” because it inspires us to reinterpret humankind’s earliest religious traditions and texts in ways that might shine light on the “very suspicious totem of evolutionary mythology” which has dissuaded us from our intuition that consciousness has not evolved continuously and gradually from worms to man. The evolution of consciousness took a qualitative leap during the era of Homo sapiens. Furthermore, Jaynes’s interpretation of our earliest religious texts as factual accounts based on states of consciousness radically different from our own inspires us to explore new neuropsychological interpretations of religion.
However, while Jaynes boldly challenges evolutionary theory’s axiom that consciousness has always evolved continuously and gradually, he worships at the altar of its axiom that consciousness emerged from nonconscious physical reactions. The difference between Jaynes’s emergentism and conventional emergentism is that Jaynes dates the emergence of consciousness at 1000 BC while conventional emergentism places the date at 500 million BC, or perhaps much earlier, to the level of organization of the first single-celled organisms. According to Jaynes, until 1000 BC, hallucinations, poetry, and civilizations were merely nonconscious physical reactivity.
Instead of clarifying the mechanisms and dates of the emergence of consciousness, Jaynes inadvertently highlights the vacuity of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. His magnificent failure to explain the origin of consciousness is not due solely to the preposterous dating of the emergence of consciousness at 1000 BC, but to the principle of emergentism itself. An unintended part of Jaynes’s legacy, therefore, is the inspiration to re-examine emergentism.
My book, The Jaynes Legacy: Shining New Light Through the Cracks of the Bicameral Mind , explores the possibility that consciousness pre-existed matter. Consciousness is coeternal with the initial singularity that gave rise to spacetime. This characterization of consciousness is consistent with the infinite regress of the consciousness of consciousness and the consciousness of the consciousness of consciousness and so on, free will, and the capacity of human consciousness to discover natural laws and mathematical truths.
Consciousness began its relationship with physical reality during the leap from “nothing” to “something” 13.8 billion years ago. More than ten billion years later, pockets of negentropy fueled by the sun evolved into the first living cells on earth. Nanoengineered microtubules constituting cilia, centrioles, mitotic spindles, and neuronal cytoskeletons served as functional interfaces with the “nothingness” of the eternal vacuum wherein virtual particles and antiparticles are created and annihilated in the zero-point field.
Five hundred million years ago, during the Cambrian explosion, glycoproteins in the fluid-filled neurocele of protovertebrates aggregated around a one-dimensional thread to form an evolutionarily persistent, little known, threadlike structure called Reissner’s fiber. This macroscopic structure greatly amplified quantum coherences achieved by microtubules. The relationship between consciousness and physical reality was thereby greatly strengthened.
One hundred thousand yeas ago, consciousness took another leap when the analog language of screeches and howls transformed into a digital infinity. The idea of physical objects independent of the perceptions that gave rise to them brought humankind to the threshold of the road of science and the unification of experience into a rational system. Coinciding with this leap of consciousness was the epigenetically induced perinatal involution of Reissner’s fiber in humans.
Over the course of thousands of generations, the dynamic self-referential, digital web of language that began with nouns directly connected to the triggerings of sensory neurons progressed toward greater and greater conceptual unity. About 6,000 yeas ago, it converged upon its center. Humankind transcended itself and contemplated its origins, meaning, and ultimate destiny. But, like the self-referential point of an Escher drawing, the words used to represent the center of the web - Brahman, Tao, and God - embraced contradictions and reflected the ineffable.
Consistent with Jaynes’s interpretation of religious texts as factual accounts based on a mentality radically different from our own, I propose that descriptions of the “subtle anatomy” from humankind’s earliest mystical traditions - the nadis and chakras of yoga, the meridians and vessels of acupuncture as applied Taoism, and the Sephirot of Kabbalah - are based on interoceptions of Reissner’s fiber by a few rare individuals for whom the fiber persisted into adulthood. We currently know the subtlest activities of the fiber as mathematical abstractions representing transtemporal, multidimensional realities and a hierarchy of infinites. We are denied direct consciousness of what is represented by these abstractions, because, according to quantum theory, they are only there when no one is looking. Quantum orthodoxy, therefore, denies realism. I propose that the quantum world is real and that Reissner’s fiber as a macroscopic quantum system allows the direct supersensory consciousness of it.
The authors of our earliest religious texts had access to supersensory perceptions mediated by Reissner’s fiber, but their teachings, out of necessity, were communicated in the digital infinity of language that had separated humankind’s consciousness from its eternal source. Humankind moved further and further from knowledge based on supersensory perceptions based on the fiber. By the sixth century BC, the era of prophecy, the era of direct consciousness of the eternal source of consciousness ended. But beneath the dust of fallen Babel lies the blueprint for a unified neurocosmology organized around Reissner’s fiber, a roadmap to transcendence and salvation. Now, 6,000 years after the original convergence of the web of language upon its center was integrated with interoceptions of Reissner’s fiber, a new mathematically precise language and technological enhancements of our sensory experience is bringing us to the threshold of a higher integration in which interoceptions are synthesized with exteroceptions of the reborn fiber at the limit of objectivity.
My proposed neurocosmology organized around Reissner’s fiber is currently an insubstantial web of parallels between ancient mystical traditions and modern science, scientific speculation, preliminary evidence of evanescent quantum biophysical effects, and the fiber’s associations with neural circuits involved with altered states of consciousness. Reissner’s fiber seen through the current lens of science is a morphogenetic structure that typically involutes during late human fetal development and might be involved in the pathogenesis of hydrocephalus, the detoxification of the spinal fluid, or possibly in the promotion of neurogenesis in adults to repair the effects of degenerative and traumatic brain disease. However, now, for the first time in history, we have the tools to control the epigenetic factors responsible for the fiber’s typical involution and regenerate it. New technologies could provide feedback of the fiber’s activity at the limits of objectivity - the quantum level - and thereby create the opportunity of controlling and amplifying its possible quantum effects. We can begin a journey along an ancient, forgotten, broken, strategically located neural circuit to explore the frontiers of consciousness. A journey into the unknown.



One - The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind : A Synopsis
Julian Jaynes’s notion that humans were not conscious until 3,000 years ago continues to entice and perplex us. “If our reasonings have been correct,” he tells us, “it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things that we do, but were not conscious at all.” What, then, is consciousness? What explains its recent origin?
Consciousness, according to Jaynes, is a dynamic web of metaphors weaving itself within an introspectable mind-space. It weaves not only the stuff of consciousness but also the weaver, an “analog ‘I’”. Before the origin of consciousness, a pre-conscious “bicameral mind” fed voices from Wernicke’s area of the r