Julian Jaynes

Julian Jaynes ( born February 27, 1920 in Newton ( Massachusetts), † 21 November 1997, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Iceland ) was an American psychologist. He received worldwide recognition for his book on the origin of consciousness by the collapse of the bicameral mind.

Life

Jaynes was the first of three children of a Unitarian clergyman, who worked for 37 years in his hometown of Newton. Early fascinated by the questions on the nature and origin of human consciousness began Jaynes in 1940 on the adjacent Boston Harvard University to study philosophy and literature.

In 1943 he moved to McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he disappointed by the traditional philosophy, turned to psychology. After a short lecturing the end of 1944 at the University of Toronto, he continued his studies in 1945 at Yale University continue. Here he earned his master's degree in 1948 and then worked as a research assistant. He made ​​his career in 1964 at Princeton University, where he taught from 1966 to 1990 psychology.

Work

Prior to the publication of his main work, which presents the results of three decades of research, versatile, Jaynes has published only a few behavioral and neuropsychological as well as historical studies. Even his master's thesis on embossing learning in the interaction between a learned and innate behavior he has worked out only after publication of his book and apparently only at the urging of colleagues in a formal dissertation, so that he finally, in 1978, and thus twelve years after taking up his professorship in Princeton was awarded his PhD from Yale.

His later works were devoted to the explanation and discussion of his ideas and theories on the evolutionary development of human consciousness, which he published in 1990, to the reprint of his book summed up again in an afterword. They were so provocative for the hitherto developed academically accepted views on this topic that few scientists they might understand or could. Jaynes came by in person at increasing isolation. She obviously heavily loaded him: In the fourteen years until his heart attack he has not even completed one until recently advertised another book entitled The Consequences of Consciousness to all appearances as a manuscript. Here Jaynes wanted the consequences of the general shift in consciousness, which should have used after its results in our cultural space only 3,000 years ago to discuss.

The origin of consciousness

1976 Jaynes published his major work, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. He takes it as an attempt, origin and development of human consciousness in the course of human history from a central, to reconstruct displayed in the title of thesis: the emergence of consciousness from a structure, which he calls the bicameral mind. Traces of these precursor of today's consciousness he finds amongst other things in Homer and in the Old Testament, but also in phenomena such as hypnosis or schizophrenia.

The main thesis of Julian Jaynes, which he ( " bizarre " ) calls itself preposterous, states: awareness has developed in historically detectable extent only in the millennium before the Classical Greek civilization, about 1300-700 BC The people. before this time had no consciousness, no autonomous self in the modern sense.

Consciousness vs. responsiveness

According to the peculiarity of Jaynes ' consciousness concept and the fact that he wants to know this term used (as self-confidence ) in a specific, fairly narrow sense and understand him from his readers so treated, a large part of his book, the question of what consciousness in accordance with this believes everything is not.

Jaynes believes it can demonstrate that awareness, contrary to the traditional view

• Not a reflection of our experience ( " memory theory " ),
• Not a prerequisite for the ability to learn
• And is not the basis for concept formation, thinking and rational activity.

In fact, the latter thanks to the skills, what Jaynes calls the reactivity: the scientific ( neurophysiological and behavioral research ) detectable basic skill of organic life to learning and memory performance.

This Jaynes occurs contrary to popular, has become the general matter of course believes that has found its basic expression in the history of ideas in Descartes. Descartes had the self-assurance of consciousness ( cogito, ergo sum ) raised to the basis of all knowledge and thus shaped the modern science and the rationalistic self-understanding of modern man.

In order to explain why consciousness produces the illusion of comprehensive knowledge, Jaynes used the image of the flashlight in a dark room looking for a subject. Everywhere the flashlight is directed, it is bright, so they can identify any object in the non- lit room. Because we have no consciousness of it, which we have no consciousness, Jaynes says, arises the fallacy into full production in the world. This was particularly true for the self- detection of the mental life of the conscious individual as well as the idea of ​​continuity and identity of the self.

In practical, everyday behavior and functioning of the individual consciousness plays a minor role; actually it proving to be more than one source of interference and practiced the routines of non- conscious the licensed activity. A pianist about would be completely out of the concept fall while trying to insinuate the learned complex movements of his game of control of consciousness ( which is, however, originally have been necessary when learning the piano ). That awareness, however, appears on the scene in crisis situations of disorder otherwise quasi- automatically of successful functions, show the overall experience; the connection of a self-reflexive instance immortalized then typically the failure of the original intention, if consciousness is exhausted in an attempt to compensate by controlling the exposure: Jaynes refers to the tennis player, who promptly produced only double fault after the first unsuccessful surcharge; otherwise the dancer Nijinsky, who have not tried to control his movements, but have themselves been watching from the Zuschauerloge the dance: " So he was not every single one of its movements consciously, but the image that he made for others. "

The memory theory of consciousness, which assumes that consciousness is like a camera experiences maps directly, while proving to be just as questionable and erroneous. Jaynes recommends imagine how you swam the last time in a lake; He points out that most people will consider themselves as Nijinsky from the outside and not from the originally experienced perspective. The awareness copied here is not the experience, but draws it from the other, a wider perspective, which is also, as Jaynes, plausibility by the imagination as well as falsified: " They are things not as see, hear, feel, as you originally experienced, but to look more or less like a stranger occur in a scene. When reminiscent retrospect so a good deal of invention is at play: See you as others see you. Memory is the medium of "So it must have been. "

Due to the criticism of the naive consciousness concept Jaynes looking for a Vorverständis for his irritating thesis that civilizations could arise without the people would have had this "consciousness" to establish. Starting point of his considerations is the idea that "(...) that at some time or have lived people who spoke, judged, and conclusions subjected solved problems, so who could virtually everything we do, to do, but not the slightest consciousness possessed. "

The properties of consciousness

Jaynes believed that the basis of this awareness is the language and more specifically the ability to grow this language through metaphors. A new metaphor is not only subjectively the object, which is illuminated so, lighten up, but even create new concepts. Jaynes called in analogy to mathematics the object is said about something Metaphorand and expression, which extends the language, Metaphorator. The associations that brings the Metaphorator with it, he called Paraphoratoren, and lead to new concepts, the Paraphoranden. The spatial quality of the outside world as a result of the language that describes them, by constant repetition of a mental space ( "mind- space" ), which represents the first fundamental property of consciousness. The second property is the analog I ( in which a relative of Kant's transcendental Jaynes I see ), which is formed to take over the mental vision in the mind space. This analog I is not to be confused with the "self" that emerges only later. There is no content.

Further properties of consciousness are, among others, the ability of Narratisation ( analog simulation of actual behavior ), concentration ( the analog equivalent of perceptual attention) and Consilience ( the analog equivalent of perceptual assimilation ).

For very many phenomena of the animal (or preconscious ) life thus exist analog counterparts by Jaynes. The awareness is therefore in a sense duplications of states before, out of shame is guilt, for fear of fear, out of anger hatred. But also external phenomena such as pain have their analog counterpart. Only conscious people, in addition to the sensitive pain have also conscious pain, which explains, for example, placebo effects and phantom pain.

The bicameral mind

The emergence of consciousness goes Jaynes with the collapse of what he called the " bicameral mind" hand in hand. The people in the pre-Homeric times had, and this is the second main thesis of Jaynes, a " bicameral mind ", an executive and a commanding, both non- conscious. In times of crisis, when a situation requiring a decision, hallucinated the executive mind the voice of gods, who told him what to do.

The emergence of the bicameral civilization sets Jaynes in the time of the creation of the first cities around the year 9000 BC civilization, Jaynes says, is the "art of living in towns where not everyone knows everyone else ." For the functioning of these societies, the hallucinated voices of kings and / or gods were necessary.

The most extensive part of the book attempts to provide historical evidence for this second hypothesis. The crisis, which was caused by the disappearance of the gods, possibly also by the advent of writing, resulted in the fact that people have developed a consciousness.

The awareness has seen evolutionary theory advantages. The ability of the Narratisation about means that revenge be lived only in the conscious idea or may be postponed if the circumstances are favorable. However, this awareness is not a development step of evolution, but a cultural performance. A child today, the growing crop in Egypt 3,000 years ago, would develop a bicameral mind and vice versa.

Consequences

Without the ability to own and independent considerations and reflections, especially on themselves, people should have so experienced with a bicameral mental structure and inner experiences, such as spontaneous memories or ideas how we experience adventures in the outside world around us; just separated or foreign, and especially how Jaynes assumed as crisp and clear as this. Audible reminders or ideas would have been then, for example, as a hallucinatory clear " inner voices " perceived, that may have been experienced in commanding or commenting about.

Also for the reaction and behavior of people in this pre-reflective stage of development arise after Jaynes consequences: Without the ability to deliberate considerations and decisions to them just a spontaneous reaction on the basis of innate, preformed reflexes or embossing learning would have been possible, for example, an emotional Seized - and Beeindrucktsein of votes and, as such machines exemplary reaction to it, is conceivable as a reminder of a guide or a solicitation of others, particularly of respect for people or their subsequent elevation to revered ancestors, humans or gods, who seemed to speak as if from outside.

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

The reception of the theses to consciousness

The intellectual appeal of Jaynes'schen theses on the development of consciousness is, inter alia, that his interpretation of historical texts enables an original view of such mental phenomena which are today regarded as mental disorders: voice hearing as a symptom of schizophrenia is of him as a relic, if not interpreted relapse to an earlier stage of the development of human consciousness.

The serious intellectual problem in dealing with his theories on consciousness has Jaynes himself so aptly:

Julian Jaynes, it is despite or perhaps even because of journalistic success of his book does not appear to have succeeded in keeping his theses and technical considerations taken seriously enough and would be scientifically discussed and reviewed. These may have helped that he is predominantly based on his psychological derivations on documents of various historical sciences, on the other hand hardly insights from developmental psychology for his theories tried to make it usable.

The radical nature of his ideas is Jaynes were well aware he put at least suggests that he settled on a level with the theory of evolution and the theory of relativity. In animals and children to see mere machines, since Descartes was not a popular view more. Jaynes described himself as a "neo- behaviorists ". Pain, for example, is reduced to pain behavior, except that the conscious human pain behavior is perceived once again with the analog I. His ideas about the emergence of language in front of no more than 200,000 years are very controversial.

1984 Jaynes wore his theses on a Wittgenstein Symposium ago, in the assumption to take you there to kindred spirits. ( Wittgenstein, for example, asks ironically, if a dog was to be honest, because he was not a hypocrite. ) However, he did not achieve great resonance. The only significant philosopher who has taken seriously Jaynes should be Daniel Dennett.

Some expressions might represent further obstacles, if this about Hellenist would have come to the conclusion Jaynes had declared the heroes of ancient epics to psychologically disturbed individuals.

Have suffered his theses perhaps even under highly speculative neurophysiological considerations of a different kind after his earlier thesis collaboration of cerebral hemispheres, because of he set up the thesis of the Bikameralität the pre-conscious or pre-reflective consciousness structure. With it, he seeks to establish that and how people could process experiences that had formed yet no knowledge or awareness that it is ideas also in spontaneously emerging memories, ideas and dreams, which does it automatically and by special ( Association - form ) laws and thus arise autonomously, but which are nevertheless self-produced. Only Jaynes has hardly recovered the relevant psychological literature on unconscious mental processes. So he was not well received in brain research to a significant extent, even in psychiatry, psychology, or philosophy.

In the bibliography of Raoul Schrott "The Invention of Poetry" (1997) Jayne's main work is mentioned in a prominent place.

Quotes

Without ... << religious motivation, science would have been mere technology, limping along on economic necessity << JAYNES 1976: 435

Publications

• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Houghton Mifflin, Boston / New York 1976, ISBN 0-395-20729-0; with extensive afterword as A Mariner Book ibid. since 1990; 2000, ISBN 978-0618057078 The origin of consciousness by the collapse of the bicameral mind. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1988, ISBN 3-498-03320-4; ( = Rororo. 9529 ) ibid 1993, ISBN 3-499-19529-1