Bicameral psyche

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The bicameral psyche is a hypothetical preliminary stage of human consciousness in psychology , which is postulated in 1976 by Julian Jaynes in his work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind . He tries to reconstruct the origin and development of human consciousness in the course of human history on the basis of a central thesis indicated in the title: The emergence of consciousness from a structure, the traces of which he thereby a. in Homer and in the Old Testament , but also in phenomena such as hypnosis or schizophrenia .

The main thesis of Julian Jaynes, which he himself calls preposterous ("strange"), says: Consciousness did not develop to a historically verifiable extent until the millennium before the classical Greek civilization , between 1300 and 700 BC. Before that time people had no consciousness, that is, in the sense of Jaynes' no autonomous , executive self .

Consciousness vs. Responsiveness

In accordance with the peculiarity of Jaynes' concept of consciousness and the fact that he uses this concept in a special, rather narrow sense (as self- awareness) and wants it to be understood by his readers, a large part of his book deals with the question of what consciousness is according to this view is not anything .

Jaynes believes she can show that awareness goes against traditional beliefs

  • no image of our experience ("storage theory"),
  • not a requirement for learning ability
  • and is not the basis for concept formation, thinking and reasoning.

In fact, the latter abilities owe to what Jaynes calls the ability to react : the scientifically (neurophysiological and behavioral research) verifiable basic competence of organic life for learning and memory.

To explain why consciousness produces the illusion of comprehensive knowledge, Jaynes uses the image of the flashlight looking for an object in a dark room. It is bright everywhere the flashlight is pointed, so it cannot identify an object in the unlit room. Because we have no awareness of what we are not aware of , says Jaynes, the fallacy arises of fully opening up the world. This applies in particular to the self-understanding of the soul life of the conscious individual as well as the idea of ​​continuity and identity of the self.

In the practical, everyday behavior and functioning of the individual, consciousness plays a secondary role; in fact, it turns out to be more of a source of disturbance once practiced and left to the routines of the unconscious. A pianist, for example, would lose his concept completely if he tried to subject the learned, complex movement sequences of his playing to the control of his consciousness (which, however, was originally necessary when learning to play the piano). However, general experience shows that consciousness comes into play in crisis situations when there is a disruption of otherwise quasi-automatically successful functions; switching on a self-reflective instance then typically perpetuates the failure of the original intention, provided that the consciousness is exhausted in the attempt to compensate for the suspension through control: Jaynes refers to the tennis player who after the first unsuccessful serve promptly only produces double errors; Unlike the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky , who did not try to control his movements, but instead watched himself dance from the spectator's box: “So he was not aware of every single one of his movements, but of the image that he gave for the others. "

The storage theory of consciousness, which assumes that consciousness directly depicts experiences like a camera, turns out to be just as questionable and flawed. Jaynes recommends imagining the last time you swam in a lake; he points out that like Nijinsky, most people then see themselves from the outside and not from the perspective they originally experienced. Here, consciousness does not copy the experience, but represents it from a different, expanded perspective, which, according to Jaynes, is also made plausible and falsified by the imagination: “You will no longer see, hear, and feel things the way you do them originally experienced, but see yourself appearing more or less like a stranger in a scene. When looking back, a good portion of invention is involved: You see yourself as others see you. Memory is the medium of "that is how it must have been". "

By criticizing the naive concept of consciousness, Jaynes seeks a preliminary understanding of his irritating thesis that civilizations could also emerge without people having to have “consciousness”. The starting point of his considerations is the idea “that at one time or another there were people who spoke, judged, drew conclusions and solved problems, yes, who were able to do almost everything we do, but who were not at all conscious ".

The properties of consciousness

Jaynes believed that the basis of this awareness is language and, more precisely, the ability to grow that language through metaphors . A new metaphor can not only subjectively illuminate the object it illuminates, but can even create new concepts. In analogy to mathematics, Jaynes calls the object about which something is said the metaphorand and the expression that expands language the metaphorator . The associations that the metaphorator brings with it are called paraphorators , which in turn lead to new concepts, the paraphorands . The spatial quality of the outside world as a result of the language that describes it, by constant repetition of a mental space ( "mind-space"), which represents the first fundamental characteristic of consciousness. The second quality is the analog ego (in which Jaynes sees a relative of Kant's transcendental ego ) that arises to take over the mental seeing in the spirit space. This analog self is not to be confused with the “self” that emerges later. It is without content.

Further properties of consciousness include the ability to narrate (analogue simulation of actual behavior), concentration (the analogue equivalent of perceiving attention) and consilience (the analogue equivalent of perceptual assimilation).

For many phenomena of animal (or preconscious) life, according to Jaynes, there are analogous equivalents. Consciousness therefore doubles states in a certain sense, shame becomes guilt, fear becomes fear, anger becomes hate. But external phenomena such as pain also have their analogous counterparts. Only conscious people can have conscious pain in addition to sensitive pain, which explains, for example, placebo effects and phantom pain .

The bicameral psyche

According to Jaynes, the emergence of consciousness goes hand in hand with the collapse of what he calls the “bicameral mind”. The people in the pre-Homeric period had, and this is the second main thesis of Jaynes, a "two-chamber spirit", an executive and a commanding, both unconscious. In times of crisis, when a situation required a decision, the executive spirit hallucinated the voice of gods telling it what to do.

Jaynes places the emergence of the bicameral civilization in the time of the emergence of the first cities, around the year 9000 BC. BC Civilization is the "art of living in cities where not everyone knows everyone". The hallucinated voices of kings or gods were necessary for the functioning of these societies.

The largest part of the book attempts to provide historical evidence for this second thesis. Jaynes refers to a number of civilization crises in the history of mankind, which in his view were each exacerbated or even caused by the disappearance of the gods and in the face of which people were forced to develop an awareness. According to Jaynes, this could also have been facilitated by the emergence of writing as a form of fixed language and the associated new possibility of holding onto previously only heard commandments and instructions (now in the form of laws) to which an individual, unlike the up to then accustomed, direct, acoustic-hallucinatory inspirations, now for the first time independently, but could also withdraw it.

In evolutionary terms, consciousness has advantages. The ability to narrate, for example, means that thirst for revenge can only be lived out in the conscious imagination or can be postponed until later if the circumstances are more favorable. However, awareness is not a step in evolution, but a cultural achievement. A child today who grew up in Egypt 3000 years ago would develop a bicameral mind and vice versa.

Consequences

Without the ability for their own and independent considerations and reflections, especially on themselves, people with a bicameral mental structure should also have internal experiences, such as spontaneous memories or ideas, in the same way as we experience experiences in the outside world around us; just as separate or strange and above all, as Jaynes implies, just as clear and clear as this. Acoustic memories or ideas would then have been perceived, for example, like hallucinatory clear "inner voices" that could have been experienced as commenting or commanding.

According to Jaynes, there are also consequences for the reaction and behavior of people at this pre-reflective stage of development: Without the ability to consciously consider and make decisions, they would only have been able to react spontaneously on the basis of innate, preformed reflexes or through learning from learning, for example an emotional grasp. and being impressed by such voices and, as it were, automatically reacting to them, conceivable for example as a reminder of instructions or requests from others, in particular from respected persons or their later exaggeration of revered ancestors, superman or gods who seemed to speak from outside.

Jaynes takes traditions such behavior in the Iliad by Homer , but also at sites in the Old Testament and in numerous other literary evidence seriously and does not understand it as a poetic fiction or metaphorical ways of speaking:

“Actions are not set in motion by conscious planning, deliberations or motives, but rather initiated by the talk of the gods. The human being appears to his fellow human beings as the cause of his own actions. Not so to yourself. As Achilles towards the end of the Trojan War, the Agamemnon holds like this at the time robbed him of the beautiful prey prisoners, the king of men, lord says of the people, not me who caused the action, but Zeus (...). The goddess does everything. ' And that this is not a hastily improvised excuse by Agamemnon, with which he intends to shift responsibility from himself, is evident from the fact that Achilles is completely satisfied with this explanation - because Achilles also obeys his gods. When Graecists note in their comments on the quoted passage that Agamemnon's behavior borders on ' self-alienation ', they are far, far off the beaten track. Because the question is: What was the situation with the psychology of the Homeric heroes in the Iliad? And I say: the heroes of the Iliad had no selves at all. "

Varia

Jaynes' theory of the bicameral psyche was taken up in the science fiction television series Westworld to show that androids can develop consciousness. In the film, this happens in such a way that, in addition to the elaborately conceived storylines that determine their behavior and drive the guest experience in the park, the ability to remember certain traumatic experiences is implemented in the case of selected robots. These experiences remain for the androids, which are reset to the defined initial state after each execution of the program routine, even after a reset as optical and acoustic hallucinations and are understood by the amusement park developers as a preliminary stage to consciousness, as propagated by Jaynes becomes.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Julian Jaynes: The origin of consciousness. Book 1, Chapter 1.
  2. ^ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind . Houghton Mifflin, Boston / New York 1976, ISBN 0-395-20729-0 , p. 208.