Is bicamerality bullshit?

it's tempting to think that, as "schizophrenia" literally means "of two minds" as bicameral, but the actual causes are nothing like what jaynes proposes. it is not caused by problems with communications between hemispheres. do you hear yourself? you honestly think that every religious person in the country is a schizophrenic? that's a medically diagnosable problem -- not just shit you can make up to attack people. you might as well claim that 40% of americans are walking around with undiagnosed ebola. *sigh* look, we've been over this. for all intents and purposes, i have read jayne's book. and i am not letting anyone form my opinions for me -- i just happen to know enough psychology, biology, and ancient literature to refute his hypothesis myself. understand? i've considered his idea, and it's just not sound. i didn't need anyone to tell me this: my bullshit detector works.now, perhaps you should consider the biological, neurological, psychological, historical, and literary information for yourself, and stop letting jaynes form your opinions.

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i'm starting to believe that you have not read the book. so far, you haven't commented any of the substance of my counter-evidence against the book's claims, and you have grossly abused what jaynes actually wrote to levy attacks against modern religion. which is not the subject of jayne's book at all, as i recall. he talks about ancient religion a lot, but views modern religion as a sort of vestigal remnant, based largely on the now absent gods. jaynes refers to schizophrenia as a "vestige" or "partial relapse to the bicameral mind." they're not the same thing, but jaynes procedes to conflate the two throughout the chapter on the subject. so i can understand your confusion. but he does not assert that modern religious people are all schizophrenics.the problem is that, while we may not have known the causes of schizophrenia in the 70's, when jaynes wrote, we now know that it is most certainly not caused by anything remotely like jayne's bicameral mind. i don't think you really understand what the discussion is about. you are misusing the term in rather ridiculous ways -- jaynes was a bit on the fringe, but you've taken totally over the edge.Edited by arachnophilia, : typos etc

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your misrepresentations of history aside (offtopic), yes. he's essentially asserting that all religous people are crazy in a very clinical way. this is neither supportable by evidence, nor is it julian jayne's point.basically, he's taking a faulty idea and running to extremes with it.

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at least i know i'm not crazy. it's been about 12 years since i read any of this book, so i might have been a little fuzzy on the details of the argument. if hoot were actually interested in discussing it, i might be tempted to give it another go and carefully critique points as i come to them. but it looks like that's far more debate than we're actually going to have here. instead, he's just ignoring the fact it doesn't match reality, and running with it to extents that jaynes himself would have disagreed with (and rather explicitly does, in his book, if memory serves).

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er, no. not by popular consensus. by fact. the facts disagree with jaynes's hypothesis. it's falsified, end of story. so many people disagree with your position because it's wrong. it's not wrong because people disagree. bicamerality and schizophrenia are about hearing voices, not prayer. most people who claim to hear god's voice don't, and are simply using a kind of code-language i've come to call "jesus-speak." most of it is largely meaningless. the people who actually hear voices while they are conscious are schizophrenic.there is some middle ground here, too. there are people who claim to have visions during episodes of fainting in pentecostal churches. these visions typically bear the hallmarks of dreams -- something i promise that your mind does. social pressures and extreme preoccupation with religious imagery produce religious imagery in visions. they certainly interfere with rationality. but somehow i don't think that's what you mean. and it's not possible that he was simply using religion to manipulate people? just like it's been used for the last.... always? i've pointed out several times in this thread the sort of things that produce the sensation. do you really need a catchy name for it? i think you're missing the point. nor is any other eutherian mammal. i don't believe you. prove it.

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i don't think we would have "preemptively" attacked iraq if anyone besides george w. bush were in office. there's a lot of personal motivation there. however, if bush were athiest, i don't doubt for a second that we'd still be in the war. because religion was just one of MANY ways he sold the war. i'm not even totally sure that an atheist bush wouldn't use religion anyways. "religiosity"

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...go read jayne's book again. attend an evangelical church, and note that most christian songs are something like forlorn love songs in the key of "i miss you."hymns like the above are designed add to that social pressure i was speaking about. "we all hear god, don't you?" well, no. and none of you really do. you've just been conditioned to think you do and to reply that you do to fit into your church.

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...well, no. i wouldn't say that, especially with the way that sort of statement can be confused with "i'm religious and i won't accept any counter arguments." what hoot says is rather clearly ridiculous, but it's not the experience with religion that tells me that jaynes is wrong. it's the evidence.

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similarly, epicycles in the geocentric view of the universe seemed to answer a lot of questions about the movements of the heavens. that doesn't make it right. jaynes's hypothesis was an interesting one, yes, but the data no longer supports it. i'm not totally sure if it ever did. maybe if you did, you wouldn't be so quick to call religious people schizophrenics. nor are people in cults. but it's not because they're schizophrenic. it's because they've been conditioned by group-think and manipulative rhetoric. actually, i see it as the other way around, very often. people make decisions and justify them after the fact with their religion. or, at worst, people use the manipulative power of religion (as above) to manipulate other issues. i think you'll find that they meet every definition of consciousness there is, including julian jaynes's. perhaps we should be more concerned that you walk around view other people as less than human. hysteria? yes. schizophrenia? no. bicamerality? no. are you referring to "speaking in tongues?" they don't hallucinate those voices. it's a practice they learn. jaynes argues on a lot of things. his linguistic points also happen to be wrong. consciousness is not a linguistic thing, but i would think that language represents some degree on consciousness. jaynes, btw, goes on for quite some lengths in his book about the writings of bicameral peoples -- clearly he does not think that consciousness is linguistic.and, like i stated before, being an artist i am well aware of what consciousness is like without linguistic analogs. part of a good artistic training is learning to use more of your right hemisphere and not let the left and its speech centers interfere. so it's an interesting excercise in exploring what consciousness is like undominated by words. and it's just as conscious as anything else. any notion that regards one full half (laterally) of the brain as "unconscious" is inherently wrong, and neuroanatomy tells us this. the unconscious parts of the brain are the lower parts that control things like heartbeat and breathing, not the left or right temporal lobes. no, it's not rational. people consciously do a lot of irrational things. again, jayne's ideas about bicamerality have all turned out to be false. evolutionarily, there never was any such state. this is NOT "the origin of consciousness" because it is just as mythic as the tree of knowledge. and what do you make of the religious people who are not afraid of death? and the atheists who are? it's a rather simplistic notion to think that religion comes out of the fear of death, but i think the reality is far more complex than that.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

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this is basically the problem, yes. jaynes proposes a major evolutionary shift in neuroanatomy in the last 3,000 years. it's not i'm incredulous that such a thing could happen. it's that it's mighty funny that the feature jaynes describes as a new advance and the source of consciousness, the corpus callosum, is also present in every other eutherian mammal. so either this is convergent evolution to the point of freakin' miracle, or our h. sapiens ancestors had it too. ...actually, i'm a little lost too. i'm familiar with a few of the arguments he made that could be called linguistic (no self-reflection in early texts, etc), but i'm admittedly a little rusty with the text.perhaps hoot can elaborate on the linguistic argument, since he seems to think this is the important point among many, many errors? you're not. the plasticity of the brain and studies into the development of the brain are perhaps the primary development of neurology that falsify jaynes's hypothesis.Edited by arachnophilia, : typos

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"me" is an object and "i" is a subject. they're the same word, just different parts of speech.i'm not sure about greek, but biblical hebrew does not have an object/subject delineation. the same spelling is used for both. but the actual word for "me/i" is generally used only for emphasis, and is inferred from the verbs. but just for fun, here it is in a sentence:

quote:

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And Abram said to the king of Sodom: 'I have lifted up my hand unto the LORD, God Most High, Maker of heaven and earth, that I will not take a thread nor a shoe-latchet nor aught that is thine, lest thou shouldest say: I have made Abram rich;

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Genesis 14:22-23

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and the bolded part in hebrew:

quote:

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-‘
ani he'eshrati et-abram

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"ani" is your analog i. in fact, this verse not only relates self reflection but abram's ability to identify potential avenues of self-reflection in someone else. i would believe that fits any linguistic definition of consciousness. this is the part that the other jaynesian i know -- my mother, who happens to have a degree in classics -- cried foul on, because she knew it didn't quite make sense. certainly, odysseus represents a conscious individual, very literally shrugging off the gods. did homer himself somehow evolve into consciousness between the iliad and the odyssey? yeah, i think not.this leaves us with two options:

1. either homer did not write both, or
2. it's simply a stylistic issue.

now, the first one is a somewhat interesting option. you might be tempted to say that homer merely recorded existing oral (post-literate!) traditions intact. but then we start running into problems like we do with the bible regarding oral transmissions of tales and supposing that the final document is 100% authentic to the original. no, if homer is a later author penning the works, he must have done so under his own influence, using his own language.the second option is the likely candidate: stylistics. that's just how ancient literature is written. the example from the bible is a good one -- grammatically, biblical hebrew simply does not need first person pronouns in most sentances and chooses to use them for effect. this effect is typically applied to god (who wants you to know that HE did stuff, not some other god), but is indeed used by human beings who express conscious thought.Edited by arachnophilia, : list, subtitle

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...and fertility icons. and frankly, any number of other things.

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... look, go back and read jaynes again so you can at least get his argument straight. you can't learn bicamerality. it was a hypothetical state of neuro-anatomy, the physical shape of the brain. and it's been disproven.

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it has indeed, the moment he indicated that he was probably wrong but was going to keep using his ideas anyways.but personally, i don't think it's trolling, in the same way the creationism isn't trolling. he doesn't know how to respond to a good argument (or five) that says his ideas are bunk, and so he keeps sticking to his guns with one-liners, misrepresentations of his own support, invented strawmen of the opposition's boogeyman, and just general religious adherence to faulty dogma.he says he can't possibly think like a religious person, but he sure argues like one.

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er, i did. all of that information that utterly contradicts jaynes' hypothesis, upon which your even wilder ideology is based. i believe if you ask more christians here, they will decribe god as tri-cameral.

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