Is bicamerality bullshit?

Sorry, brennakimi. My remark was meant as hyperbolic humor. I do value your opinion. But I really don't think Jaynes' bicamerality as totally "debunked." Please see Message 118.”HM

Am I supposed to take a highly speculative hypothesis published in "WIRED" as truth? Or is your point that somebody else has strange ideas after reading Jaynes?From the Wired article:

quote:

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Persinger has tickled the temporal lobes of more than 900 people before me and has concluded, among other things, that different subjects label this ghostly perception with the names that their cultures have trained them to use - Elijah, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, the Sky Spirit.

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This sure seems to suggest that the religion comes from the culture, rather than from the genes.

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Let's end the political smears

do you really not understand the difference between what we're saying and what you're saying? i don't think you understand. nobody is justifying religious thought as accurate, but there are explanations for its origin and function that don't involved falsified hypotheses that everyone was schizophrenic. it's not like modern psychology has not studied prayer and the phenomina associated with it. ...because it's bullshit. look, you can keep insisting on how it makes everything make sense to you, but that does not make the hypothesis correct. the data does not bear it out -- it's wrong. and your adherence to an idea that so much evidence contradicts as an explanatory story is anything but rational. you argue a lot like a religious fundamentalist, who when corned with evidence ignores, and keeps insisting on the truth and usefullness of their claims. that's a silly and self-contradictory question. education is not evolution. and to assume that atheists are more evolved than other human beings is arrogant in the extreme. like it or not, all of h. sapiens is one single subspecies.further, as i have pointed out repeatedly in this thread, there is no point in human evolution where there has been a brain matching jaynes's description of the bicameral mind. if anything, mammalia as a whole has tended away from a unicameral brain towards a bicameral one. and even so, a bicameral brain neither produces the phenomina that jaynes describes, nor does he attempt to use it as explanation for modern religious behaviour.do you see the flaws in your thinking yet?

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well, the problem is that technically and in a non-jaynesian context "bicameral" is the right word to describe the modern human brain, as it has two hemispherical lobes. but jaynes uses it to mean something highly specialized. the difference, i suppose, is that he means the mind not the brain -- that consciousness is divided into the two hemispheres which essentially fought for control. yes, basically. if i recall, his position is the corpus callosum existed in a rudimentary sense, functioning well enough to send signals back and forth but not to integrate consciousness. perhaps hoot can elaborate, if he's actually interested in discussing the topic.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

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Arachnophilia, I have reread your arguments against bicamerality, and those of others, too, and I cannot defend Jaynes' position on the structural aspects of consciousness. My interest focuses more on two other issues that remain unresolved:1. The use of a symbolic language to put metaphors into use as a means of conceptual communication, upon which any form consciousness must find its landscape.2. The role of "the guts" in both religiosity (a subjective state of belief in a god and an afterlife) and consciousness (an objective state of knowledge about nature).Love, for example, can be experienced by a fully conscious person, and a religious one, as well. But does love have anything top do with the corpus callosum of the brain? Maybe it has more to do with "the second brain" in the lower thorax, as I suggested in Message 101. As such, maybe there is something to "vertical bicamerality"”the "heart" and the "head" of an individual are known to compete for judgment on a issue; it is even said that they "talk" to each other. How much does that play into explanations of religiousity, bicamerality, spirituality, consciousness, or whatever interprets the metaphors running around in our extant nervous systems?”HM

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The most incomprehensible thing about nature is that it is comprehensible. ”A. Einstein

Correctamundo: Jaynes in no way suggests that the corpus callosum is unique to humanity or that it underwent evolutionary change to bring about consciousness. Actually, his idea of consciousness involves somewhat LESS communication between the "two minds" than for preconscious humans.I feel that Jaynes is important stuff. He may have been on the trail of the truth, even if the truth ends up looking quite different from his theory. Most importantly, he asks questions that other scholars weren't asking.The part of his theory that requires the most imagination, for me even more so than the hallucinated god-voices, is the idea that human beings could build cities and organize themselves into specialized societies without consciousness. But of course, ants get up to some pretty complex social behavior, and all with no language, brains the size of a small freckle, and a lifespan of a few weeks.