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Author Topic:   Is bicamerality bullshit?
arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 76 of 126 (449890)
01-19-2008 4:41 PM
Reply to: Message 70 by Fosdick
01-19-2008 12:49 PM


Re: Onward Bicameral Soldiers!
Here's a test. Suppose an atheist occupied the White House (which of course is impossible) instead of president Bush. As such, I don't think we would have preemptively attacked Iraq.
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.
Please! We need to probe the hell out of this bullshit! I'm calling it bicameral bullshit. You guys are calling bicamerality bullshit. Meanwhile, presidential candidates rise and fall on their claims to speak with God and have a "personal relationship with Him." Those are the people I don't trust. I have empirical evidence that they get us in to deep doodoo because of their _____________ (aka "biacmerality"). And yet ya gotta be one to get elected. Holy smoke! Something is wrong here. I'm calling it "bicamerality." I could use a better word, if there one.
"religiosity"


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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 77 of 126 (449891)
01-19-2008 4:45 PM
Reply to: Message 71 by Fosdick
01-19-2008 1:05 PM


Re: Extreme Consciousness
Stand eye to eye with a born-again Christian and tell him or her that while this hymn is playing:
...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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Buzsaw
Inactive Member


Message 78 of 126 (449913)
01-19-2008 7:27 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Fosdick
12-05-2007 9:34 PM


Bicameral Brain
I've been doing some research on the two chambers of what appears to be the bicameral frontal lobes of the left and right brain hemispheres.
As I read about these chambers Jayne's theory seems to make a little more sense, given the properties of the left and right hemispheres.
Humankind throughout recorded history appears to have been for the most part religious. According to most religions there is a metaphysical unseen dimension of existence which is capable of manipulating the human brain in one fashion or another. For example, the NT teaches a "born from above" experience known as being "born again" or being born of the the Holy Spirit of the Biblical god Jehovah and of his christ/messiah Jesus. This experience allegedly renews the mind and renders a person "a new creature" as the apostle Paul describes it. The text goes on to say "...old things are passed away; behold all things are become new." It's in Corinthians some place I believe. I'll edit the text in if I think of it when I have time.
According to both the NT and OT, there are unseen evil entities which actually move into one's being (likely right frontal) to manipulate the thinking and actions of the person.
If my brief reading of some on Jayne's Theory has been understood it appears that he thinks there was a less advanced stage of the human brain which was more receptive to this metaphysical influence than is experienced today.
Am I making any sense here?
Below are some links to statements which I see relative to this discussion:
we do know that the left side of the brain is the seat of language and processes in a logical and sequential order. The right side is more visual and processes intuitively, holistically, and randomly. Most people seem to have a dominant side. A key word is that our dominance is a preference, not an absolute. When learning is new, difficult, or stressful we PREFER to learn in a certain way. It seems that our brain goes on autopilot to the preferred side. And while nothing is entirely isolated on one side of the brain or the other, the characteristics commonly attributed to each side of the brain serve as an appropriate guide for ways of learning things more efficiently and ways of reinforcing learning.
http://www.mtsu.edu/~studskl/hd/hemis.html
Pursuing the bicameral mind, Jaynes focuses on the corpus callosum, the major inter-connector between the brain's hemispheres. In human brains the corpus callosum can be likened to a small bridge, a band of transverse fibers, only slightly more than one-eighth of an inch in diameter. This bridge "collects from most of the temporal lobe cortex but particularly the middle gyrus of the temporal lobe in Wernicke's area." And it was this bridge that served as the means by which the "gods" who dwelled in one hemisphere of the human brain were able to give "directions" to the other hemisphere. It is like thinking of the "two hemispheres of the brain almost as two individuals." Hence the bicameral mind! (Ibid, p. 117)
With the Golden Age of Greece, in the starstruck sixth century b.c.e., with Solon, with Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras, Jaynes claims we are now with human minds with whom we can feel mentally at home!
http://www.bizcharts.com/...el_sol/conscious/conscious3.html

BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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Fosdick 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5499 days)
Posts: 1793
From: Upper Slobovia
Joined: 12-11-2006


Message 79 of 126 (449916)
01-19-2008 7:32 PM
Reply to: Message 66 by arachnophilia
01-19-2008 3:28 AM


Mortuphobia?
arach, you posted this to Buzsaw about me:
basically, he's taking a faulty idea and running to extremes with it.
Yes, you are probably right. Jaynes seemed to answer a lot of questions about religion for me, mainly because I have no religious experience myself. To me, people who claim to be religious fundies are not of their right minds. And those people make personal choices and often executive decisions based on their fundamental religious beliefs. That scares the bejeezus out of me. People like Pat Robertson and his club don't appear to be fully consciousness to me. What is that? I'll tell you what it is. It's primitive behavior originating from the primal fear of death. It's a form of hysteria. What ever it is appears to be so strong that it can make some of them shake and quake and talk in hallucinated voices. It looks real to me, and scary.
I thought Jaynes had it; but I'm probably wrong. He argues his points on linguistic principles, which appeal to me. Metaphors and analogs are interesting things. I suspect they, and their attendant language, have a lot to with what consciousness is all about. I don't think "religiousity," "bicamerality," you name it, is a fully conscious enterprise. To me, true human consciousness emerges from the ashes of "bicamerality."
Maybe a better word would be "mortuphobia." For that you would need a Savior.
”HM

This message is a reply to:
 Message 66 by arachnophilia, posted 01-19-2008 3:28 AM arachnophilia has replied

Replies to this message:
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Fosdick 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5499 days)
Posts: 1793
From: Upper Slobovia
Joined: 12-11-2006


Message 80 of 126 (449919)
01-19-2008 7:48 PM
Reply to: Message 78 by Buzsaw
01-19-2008 7:27 PM


Re: Bicameral Brain
Buz writes:
Am I making any sense here?
Yes! And thank you. It's the best post yet on this thread.
But I must say that structuralism and location are not as interesting to me as linguistics. I seriously doubt that human consciousness will ever be found to have a specific place in the brain, such as microtubules or buckyballs. So I look instead to arguments like Jaynes' to explore the matter. Despite what others say, I think metaphors and analogs make plausible tracers for revealing "the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind."
For me, it's an evolutionary thing. Just looking for fossils.
”HM

This message is a reply to:
 Message 78 by Buzsaw, posted 01-19-2008 7:27 PM Buzsaw has replied

Replies to this message:
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nwr
Member
Posts: 6408
From: Geneva, Illinois
Joined: 08-08-2005
Member Rating: 5.1


Message 81 of 126 (449931)
01-19-2008 8:53 PM
Reply to: Message 79 by Fosdick
01-19-2008 7:32 PM


Re: Mortuphobia?
Yes, you are probably right. Jaynes seemed to answer a lot of questions about religion for me, mainly because I have no religious experience myself.
Arachnophilia and I have both had some religious experience, and perhaps that's why it is so obvious to us that you are on a wrong track.
People like Pat Robertson and his club don't appear to be fully consciousness to me.
They are as fully conscious as anybody else.
I'll tell you what it is. It's primitive behavior originating from the primal fear of death.
Some people fear death; others don't.
I doubt that there is any greater fear of death among religious fundamentalists than there is among other people.
I drive my wife to the commuter train station most weekday mornings. Usually the train stops on the north platform. But occasionally it stops on the south platform, and there is an announcement informing riders.
I guess I could drop off my wife at the north platform, where she could check the announcements. But, in practice, I look at where the people are waiting for the train, and drop my wife off there. Instead of getting the facts and making a rational decision, I trust that the other passengers have made a rational decision, and play "follow the leader". I happen to think this is still rational behavior, a sensible way to act when the information is not readily available.
A religion is like a club. The members of the religious group trust other members of their club more highly than they trust those outside the club. They mostly haven't tried to follow the esoteric theological arguments, and they are left trying to make a decision based on incomplete information. So they play "follow the leader". That is, they do what other members of the club is doing.
The effect is a kind of "group think" or "mob psychology." But I think it a mistake to characterize it as non-rational. The decision to join the club in the first place was perhaps non-rational. Or perhaps it, too, was a matter of following what trusted friends are doing as a way of handling lack of information.

Let's end the political smears

This message is a reply to:
 Message 79 by Fosdick, posted 01-19-2008 7:32 PM Fosdick has replied

Replies to this message:
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Buzsaw
Inactive Member


Message 82 of 126 (449938)
01-19-2008 9:58 PM
Reply to: Message 80 by Fosdick
01-19-2008 7:48 PM


Re: Bicameral Brain
Hoot Mon writes:
But I must say that structuralism and location are not as interesting to me as linguistics. I seriously doubt that human consciousness will ever be found to have a specific place in the brain, such as microtubules or buckyballs. So I look instead to arguments like Jaynes' to explore the matter. Despite what others say, I think metaphors and analogs make plausible tracers for revealing "the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind."
The problem I see with Jayne's Theory if I understand it that much is that the brain perse has changed. Imo, it's knowledge that has advanced. Modern brain is no more capable than it has ever been in human history.
As the prophet Daniel prophesied in Daniel 12:4:
But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased.
1. Perhaps man's brain has become more concious via knowledge of his environment, the cosmos, etc and how to conciously apply this knowledge.
2. The majority of cultures are equally as religious as in the ages of Judiasm and Gentile paganism. The change was effected by the Christian Gentile era.
3. I'm not comprehending how linguistics perse is related to Jayne's Theory of the bicameral mind.
As the following link applies the computer model to how children learn, it seems to counter Jayne's notion that the brain has undergone a change either neurolinguistly or otherwise. (Perhaps I'm miss-applying Jayne's Theory here.)
New evidence suggests that the brain is much more malleable than previously thought. Recent findings indicate that the specialized functions of specific regions of the brain are not fixed at birth but are shaped by experience and learning. To use a computer analogy, we now think that the young brain is like a computer with incredibly sophisticated hardwiring, but no software. The software of the brain, like the software of desktop computers, harnesses the exceptional processing capacity of the brain in the service of specialized functions, like vision, smell, and language. All individuals have to acquire or develop their own software in order to harness the processing power of the brain with which they are born.
Page not found – Center for Applied Linguistics

BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 80 by Fosdick, posted 01-19-2008 7:48 PM Fosdick has replied

Replies to this message:
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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 83 of 126 (449969)
01-20-2008 1:24 AM
Reply to: Message 81 by nwr
01-19-2008 8:53 PM


Re: Mortuphobia?
Arachnophilia and I have both had some religious experience, and perhaps that's why it is so obvious to us that you are on a wrong track.
...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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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 84 of 126 (449972)
01-20-2008 1:44 AM
Reply to: Message 79 by Fosdick
01-19-2008 7:32 PM


Re: Mortuphobia?
Yes, you are probably right. Jaynes seemed to answer a lot of questions about religion for me,
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.
mainly because I have no religious experience myself.
maybe if you did, you wouldn't be so quick to call religious people schizophrenics.
To me, people who claim to be religious fundies are not of their right minds.
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.
And those people make personal choices and often executive decisions based on their fundamental religious beliefs. That scares the bejeezus out of me.
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.
People like Pat Robertson and his club don't appear to be fully consciousness to me.
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.
What is that? I'll tell you what it is. It's primitive behavior originating from the primal fear of death. It's a form of hysteria.
hysteria? yes. schizophrenia? no. bicamerality? no.
What ever it is appears to be so strong that it can make some of them shake and quake and talk in hallucinated voices. It looks real to me, and scary.
are you referring to "speaking in tongues?" they don't hallucinate those voices. it's a practice they learn.
I thought Jaynes had it; but I'm probably wrong. He argues his points on linguistic principles, which appeal to me. Metaphors and analogs are interesting things. I suspect they, and their attendant language, have a lot to with what consciousness is all about.
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.
I don't think "religiousity," "bicamerality," you name it, is a fully conscious enterprise.
no, it's not rational. people consciously do a lot of irrational things.
To me, true human consciousness emerges from the ashes of "bicamerality."
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.
Maybe a better word would be "mortuphobia." For that you would need a Savior.
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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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 85 of 126 (449973)
01-20-2008 1:56 AM
Reply to: Message 82 by Buzsaw
01-19-2008 9:58 PM


Re: Bicameral Brain
The problem I see with Jayne's Theory if I understand it that much is that the brain perse has changed.
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.
3. I'm not comprehending how linguistics perse is related to Jayne's Theory of the bicameral mind.
...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?
As the following link applies the computer model to how children learn, it seems to counter Jayne's notion that the brain has undergone a change either neurolinguistly or otherwise. (Perhaps I'm miss-applying Jayne's Theory here.)
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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Fosdick 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5499 days)
Posts: 1793
From: Upper Slobovia
Joined: 12-11-2006


Message 86 of 126 (450035)
01-20-2008 12:06 PM
Reply to: Message 82 by Buzsaw
01-19-2008 9:58 PM


Re: Bicameral Brain
Buz writes:
3. I'm not comprehending how linguistics perse is related to Jayne's Theory of the bicameral mind.
Jaynes posited that the metaphor "me" is a linguistic reflection of the bicameral state of mind, while the analog "I" a linguistic indication of the emergence of consciousness. He traces this in Homer's lit.
”HM

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Fosdick 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5499 days)
Posts: 1793
From: Upper Slobovia
Joined: 12-11-2006


Message 87 of 126 (450044)
01-20-2008 12:44 PM
Reply to: Message 81 by nwr
01-19-2008 8:53 PM


Re: Mortuphobia?
arachno writes:
Some people fear death; others don't.
I doubt that there is any greater fear of death among religious fundamentalists than there is among other people.
The origin of religion can be traced to archeological discoveries of grave goods, pollen at first, which paid respect to the mystery of death. Religion plays this to the hilt. Christianity, for example, uses a bloodied body hanging on a cross as an icon of death and resurrection. I've often wondered that if Jesus has been hanged instead of crucified would Christians wear nooses around their necks instead crosses. Bicameral religions are about dealing with the fear of death. As such, those religions offer promises of immortality or reincarnation. You need to speak with God, in one form or another, to settle your bicameral angst about what happens to you after you die. And I don't know how people can claim to pray to God and not be engaged in bicamerality.
I'm open to another word, but it will mean the same thing:
Now I lay me down to sleep
And pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And if I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Good Lord! What are we teaching our children? I'd say bicamerality. But it's bullshit, isn't it? So what is it that would scare the little children half shitless when they are being bedded down for the night? There is a continuum running between that and strapping a bomb of a child to create a suicide terrorist. Religion is all about death and fear of it.
”HM

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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nwr
Member
Posts: 6408
From: Geneva, Illinois
Joined: 08-08-2005
Member Rating: 5.1


Message 88 of 126 (450048)
01-20-2008 12:59 PM
Reply to: Message 87 by Fosdick
01-20-2008 12:44 PM


Re: Mortuphobia?
Now I lay me down to sleep
And pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And if I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Good Lord! What are we teaching our children?
Well, they really aren't being taught that - at least not in the way you think they are. The children are mostly repeating that as a mantra, without thinking of what the words mean.

Let's end the political smears

This message is a reply to:
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Fosdick 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5499 days)
Posts: 1793
From: Upper Slobovia
Joined: 12-11-2006


Message 89 of 126 (450054)
01-20-2008 1:22 PM
Reply to: Message 88 by nwr
01-20-2008 12:59 PM


Re: Mortuphobia?
Now I lay me down to sleep
And pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And if I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Little kid: "Mommy, do you think I will die before I wake?"
Mommy: "No, no, of course not, dear."
Little kid: "Then why do you put ideas like that in my head, Mommy, just as I am trying to go to sleep at night?"
Mommy: "Bicamerality, dear, bicamerality."
”HM

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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 90 of 126 (450076)
01-20-2008 2:39 PM
Reply to: Message 86 by Fosdick
01-20-2008 12:06 PM


the analog I in the bible
Jaynes posited that the metaphor "me" is a linguistic reflection of the bicameral state of mind, while the analog "I" a linguistic indication of the emergence of consciousness.
"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:
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;
Genesis 14:22-23
and the bolded part in hebrew:
quote:
-‘
ani he'eshrati et-abram
"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.
He traces this in Homer's lit.
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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