Backstage @ Julian Jaynes' Magic Show

Modern Issues in

Scientific Confirmation:

Julian Jaynes' Theoretical

Sleights of Hand.

Jonah S. Bossewitch

Professor David Lewis

Philosophy Junior Paper

May 6, 1996

"I used to think that my brain was the most important organ in my body, until I remembered who was	telling me that."

Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist

The publishers wanted to name his book The Death of the Gods, but Julian Jaynes was not interested in the superficial sensationalism flashy packaging would generate. Instead he chose the lenghthly academic title, The Origins of Consciosness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, printed in a simple black font on an all white background. But this packaging could not disguise the fact that the ideas in his book were, by his own admission1, preposterous. Although the book's cover may have intimidated some readers, and possibly hurt the book's circulation, the title brings into focus the central hypothosis that Jaynes attempts to confirm through a convoluted network of interelated ideas—consciousness is learned, and is generated by language.

Many find it difficult to distill the essence of Jaynes, and this task is complicated by the fact that Jaynes himself stresses the modularity of the various components of his theory. His book attempts to explain everything from the origins of language, consciousness, religion, and civilization, to the mysteries of poetry, music, hypnosis, and madness. He does this by appealing to his hypothesis of the Bicameral mind which he bolsters with a sketch of its neurological counterpart. It is easy to see why this 'theory of everything' would spawn tremendous controversy, since it makes claims involving virtually every academic discipline. The seemingly holistic nature of Jaynes' approach has resulted in a binary responce pattern from his collegues. They either love it or hate it, with very little middle ground, and some of his critics have a hard time seperating their emotions from their evaluation.

Reading Jaynes is like watching a magician conjure the Statue of Liberty out of existence by uttering a few magic words. In both instances, the typical reaction is to demand to know how the trick was preformed. The most pressing question facing Jaynes' readers is what sort of tricks does Jaynes employ, and is the structure that he creates anything more than an illusion resting on imaginary foundations? How can we evaluate a theory that resists unraveling no matter how many threads are pulled from it? Is his top-down methodology a valid way of conducting research, or is it just an evasive technique designed to create a theory that is immune from critisism?

Jaynes' seperate hypothesis seem to mutually support one another, and this raises important issues for any theory of confirmation. Does the structure of Jaynes' argument fit the Bootstrap confirmation model proposed by Glymour?

Finally, we need to examine the status of Jaynes' methodology in the context of "just-so" stories. It is often the case that we know the neccessary stucture of a transition (i.e. we had to get from state A to state B somehow), but we lack the means to directly confirm which of the various possible paths was actually taken. In these situations, we must examine the role of creative guesses at what might have happened. All of these factors have play an important role in formulating a modern sophisticated theory of scientific confirmation, and Jaynes' provides a wonderful case study which demonstrates these principles at work in the Social Sciences.

The Many Voices of Julian Jaynes.

The Origins of Consciousnes reads like a well written fairy tale, and indeed one of his critics claimed that Jaynes "has the repotorial skill of a Tolkein." While his entertaining style is enjoyable, Jaynes paid dearly for it. The manner in which he elaborates his theories masks the structure of the logical relationships connecting his hypothosis. This confusion was compounded by the fact that Jaynes' book touches so many fields, and grapples with many big questions. Some people understood his work to be primarily an explanation of the origins of religion2. Others tried to reduce his work to a treatise on the origins of deliberation3, or the concept of consciousness as opposed to consciousness itself4.

These reactions promopted Jaynes to add a postscript to the original book when it was reprinted in 1990. In the Afterword which appears in the second edition of the book5, Jaynes explicitly outlines his argument as he originally intended it. He breaks down his theory into four separate hypothesis: (I) "Consciousness is based on language."–language precedes consciousness, and consciosness is learned. (II) "The Bicameral mind–preceding consciousness there was a different mentality based on verbal hallucinations." (III) "The dating–consciousness was learned only after the breakdown of the bicameral mind." (IV) "The double brain."–There exists a neurological model that corresponds to the bicameral mentality.

The first hypothesis forms the core of Jaynes' entire theory, and it is the only component of his theory that is truly indispensible. In fact, from a simplified perspective, the other hypothesis can be viewed as evidence that confirms this core hypothesis. Conversly, it also possible to view the first hypothesis as evidence that helps confim the other hypothesis. Later we will explore how a circular system of beliefs can become more credible as a result of its components mutually supporting each other. As we shall see, there may also be a way of grounding Jaynes' core hypothesis independently, freeing his theory from the circular model.

Jaynes' core hypothesis is one that has been gaining popularity and acceptence in recent years. He argues that "consciousness is not all mentality, not necessary for sensation or perception, that it is not a copy of experience, nor necessary for learning, nor even necessary for thinking and reasoning, and has only an arbitrary and functional location... Subjective conscious mind is an anolog of what we call the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as methematics... Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or a repository. And it is intimately bound with volition and descision."6

W. T. Jones voices a standard objection to this hypothesis and accuses Jaynes of making the"use mention" error. The use mention critisism has been applied to many theories that seem to confuse the phenomena X with either the concept of X, or the name of X. Jones attemts to unpack Jaynes' metaphor that 'metaphor generates consciousess', and wonders how 'generation by metaphor' can be distinguished from 'description by metaphor'. "Speaking picturesquely, and very loosely, we might allow ourselves to say that metaphor created the language in which physicists now talk about nature; analogously, we might sat that metaphor created the language in which psychologists talk about consciosness." Jones argues that just as it is absurd to think that physicists' language creates nature, as opposed to merely describing it, it is absurd to think that natural language creates consciousness, as opposed to merely giving us a way to talk about it. He points out, that according to Jaynes "metaphor not only created the language in which we talk about consciousness, it also created the consciousness that is talked about in this language... Language brought one absolutely new feature into the world–the distinction, within the [experiential] feild, between what is outer and what is inner, between what is experienced, and the experiencing of it"7

Consciousness is not the only phenomena that is suseptible to this type of confusion. At the McMaster-Bauer Symposium on Consciosness, Daniel Dennet defended Jaynes' distictions by offering some other examples where the concept does equal the phenomena, or at least precedes it. The most famous of these involves the origin of morality. Thomas Hobbes has been repeatedly crititicised for claiming that the social contract gave birth to morality, and right and wrong did not exist before this contract. "Right and wrong, however, are parts of morality, a peculiar phenomenon that can't predate a certain set of concepts of right and wrong. The phenomenon is created in part by the arrival on the scene of a certain set of concepts."8 Similarly, it has been argued9 that, in a sence, history did not exist until the concept of history was invented. "Is there a history of lions and antelopes? Just as many years have passed for them as for us, and things have happened to them, but it is very different. Their passage of time has not been conditioned bt their recognition of the transition, it has not been conditioned and tuned and modulated by any reflexive consideration of that process. So history itsef, our having histories, is in part a funciton of our recognizing that very fact."10 Dennet points out that there exists a large set of phenomena which exhibit the strange property where the concept of the phenomena necesarily precedes, or is identical, with the phenomena. Money, marriage, citencenship, law, and baseball all seem to fall into this category.11 Dennet understands Jaynes "to be making a similarly exciting and striking move with regard to consciousness. To put it really somewhat paradoxically, you can't have consciousness until you have the concept of consciousness. In fact, he has a more subtle theory than that, but that's the basic shape of the move."

I. Summary of Jaynes' Theory - 4 Hypotheses

1. Cs is generated and accessed by lang: "You can't have Cs until you have the
concept of Cs" Dennet

2. Preceding Cs there was a diffferent mentality based on verbal halucinations

3. Cs. was only learned after the Breakdown of the Bicameral mind.

4. Neurological model of bicameral mind

II. Verifiability and Inference to the Best explanation

1. Jaynes = Frued?

2. The Sociology of Belief (Jones)

3. top-down theories and modularity

4. Just-So stories: necc structure of transitions (we had to get here somehow)

III. Hypothoses or data

1. Cs generated by metaphor, Cs as an operator, Mulaik, Lakoff

2. Similarity/complenatary with Dennet

a. other predictions/ways to independantly confirm - boundary cases

1. ai/animal models (Vicky Hearne) - Teaching Cs.

2. childhood development

3. hypnosis, madness

b. independant confirmation supports Jaynes' historical interpretation

3. Overlap with work on creativity - did Jaynes stumble accross the mechanism for	creativity?