The Greeks in The Iliad Weren't Conscious | JULIAN JAYNES

0:00 In 1886, Nichzche posed a hypothesis about the relation between consciousness and language, which he admits is only a conjecture. This is part of a section called on the genius of the species, which I have quoted from many times, but it's worth recalling this particular excerpt within that passage. Quote, "Consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication, that from the first it has been necessary and useful only between man and man, especially between those commanding and those obeying, and has only developed in proportion to its utility. Consciousness is properly only a connecting network between man and man. It is only as such

0:45 that it has had to develop. the recluse and wild beast species of men would not have needed it. The very fact that our actions, thoughts, feelings, and motions come within the range of our consciousness, at least a part of them, is the result of a terrible, prolonged must, ruling man's destiny. As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection. He needed his fellows. He was obliged to express his distress. He had to know how to make himself understood. And for all this he needed consciousness first of all, consequently to know himself what he lacked, to know how he felt, and to know what he thought. For to repeat it once more,

1:30 man, like every living creature, thinks unceasingly, but does not know it. The thinking which is becoming conscious of itself is only the smallest part thereof. We may say the most superficial part, the worst part. For this conscious thinking alone is done in words, that is to say, in the symbols for communication, by means of which the origin of consciousness is revealed. In short, the development of speech and the development of consciousness, not of reason, but of reason becoming self-conscious, go hand in hand. End quote. This bit of speculative anthropology on the part of NZ is a remarkable prefiguration of the hypothesis of Julian James as put

2:16 forward in his highly controversial work the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicamal mind. It must be said that Jane's theory about the emergence of consciousness as we know it today. Uh it does consist of many novel elements that were unknown to Nze. Not least of which is the theory that the earliest civilizations were what James called biccameal. That is to say that the everyday experience of human beings at this time uh sometime before the first millennium BC was not what we would call conscious. These people at the dawn of civilization lacked all interiority according to James and instead experienced

3:02 communications from the right side of the brain, the right hemisphere of the brain which is more involved in the spatial constructive tasks to the left side which is verbal and analytical. And they received these communications in the form of what we would call auditory hallucinations but what they would call commands from the gods. But interestingly enough, Nichze does anticipate James on more than one point, namely that what we call consciousness ought not be conflated with thinking or reasoning, and that man actually thinks ceaselessly, often without bringing these thought contents into consciousness. James would agree that consciousness is not necessary for reasoning or even for learning and that

3:49 it's not simply a copy of experience, but refers to something very specific. He also contends that it is by no means obvious that consciousness would naturally be reached as a progression through degrees of so-called sentience. Perhaps more importantly, NZ anticipates Jane's hypothesis that consciousness in fact is a product of language and not the other way around. As Nze says, our conscious world is made up of these signs, these word concepts. It is only in linguistic thought that we experience ourselves as conscious. It is not that we as animals have reached a certain apogee of sentience such that we gained the capacity for linguistic

4:34 communication, but rather the use of linguistic communication eventually created what it is that we call consciousness. As Nichzche said in the passage we looked at a moment ago, speech and the development of consciousness go hand in hand. That's certainly a shocking claim. And unlike Nze, Julian James will therefore spend hundreds of pages attempting to justify this claim with historical evidence, neurological data, and philosophical argument. He writes that he originally approached this topic as part of his own search for the meaning and the origins of consciousness. He wanted to know exactly what consciousness is, that's not exactly obvious, and how it could possibly emerge, which is a related question. And this search took him in a

5:21 direction that he didn't expect and led him to the impossible sounding proposition that the human beings of our earliest epics, kings such as Hammurabi who ruled Babylon, the Greeks whose deeds were recounted in the Iliad, were not themselves conscious, that is to say, not conscious in the way that we are now. They lived in a strange kind of bicamal reality in the imminent presence of gods without interiority, without the analog eye, without internal narratization of reality. And that if there is anything resembling such a state today, we would behold it in the modern schizophrenic. that ancient bicamaral societies were effectively civilizations full of

6:07 schizophrenics who lived in a relatively stable structure and hierarchy owing to the fact that they all experienced and acknowledged the same gods with the breakdown of the bicamaral mind. Mankind's gods would steadily vanish and what we call consciousness would fully come into being. Before we take a dive into the hypothesis of Julian James regarding the human mind and the origins of consciousness and human civilization, we will take a brief look at the man's life. He was born in 1920 in the state of Massachusetts. His father was a Unitarian minister and he was the oldest of three children. The Janes family would take their summer vacations on Prince Edward Island in Canada, and as

6:54 such, the young Julian would form a lifelong connection to Canada. In fact, he would draw his last breath on Prince Edward Island. James achieved a bachelor's in psychology at McGill University in Montreal, but he was eager to learn more about the human brain and went to continue his studies in Toronto. However, in December of 1942, he returned to the United States to fulfill one of those obligations of citizenship and registered for the draft. World War II was happening, but James was a conscientious objector, which was consistent with the Unitarian principles under which he was raised. And in Jane's case, as is the case of many conscientious objectors, the government thought that his objections to military

7:41 service were sincere and religious in nature and he was exempted from military service. But this didn't mean that the government simply cut you loose. Uh the norm at this time was that conscientious objectors, if drafted, would instead be ordered to report to a camp for civilian public service. James was ordered to a camp in New Hampshire and he complied, but his conscience apparently did not sit right with him while at the camp. And shortly after his arrival, he wrote a letter to the attorney general declaring his intentions to leave. James believed that the entire system was against his principles and that even if he served that system in some alternative manner, he was still ultimately contributing to its evil. In

8:28 his letter, he said that he could not work within an evil system, even for its own destruction, and asserted that Jesus would have deserted the camp just the same. After this, James was arrested and sent to federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. There, he worked for 3 years in the prison hospital until he was released after the war in 1946. He returned to his studies, enrolling at Yale University. He received a master's degree by 1948, but he refused to accept a doctorate again on principle. In his research, he would pursue the questions of consciousness further, including a number of experiments with plants, animals, and other life forms in an

9:14 attempt to establish levels of sentience. Later he would describe this series of experiments in his book origins of consciousness and he would ultimately conclude there that they were based on a misguided premise. James writes, quote, "My first experimental work was a youthful attempt to produce signal learning or a conditional response in an especially long-suffering mimosa plant. The signal was an intense light. The response was the drooping of a leaf to a carefully calibrated tactile stimulus where it joined the stem. After over a thousand pairings of the light and the tactile stimulus, my patient plant was as green as ever. It was not conscious. That expected failure behind

10:00 me, I moved on to prozzoa. Delicately running individual parramia in a te-isease engraved in wax on black bely using direct current shock to punish the animal and spin it around if it went to the incorrect side. Moreover, I was extremely interested in what would happen to the learning and the consciousness when the animal divided. A first suggestion of positive results was not borne out in later replications. After other failures to find learning in the lower filyla, I moved on to species with synaptic nervous systems. Flatworms earthworms fish and reptiles which could indeed learn, all on the naive assumption that I was chronicling the grand evolution of consciousness. Ridiculous. It was, I

10:47 fear, several years before I realized that this assumption makes no sense at all. When we introspect, it is not upon any bundle of learning processes, and particularly not the types of learning denoted by conditioning and T-azes. Why then did so many worthies in the lists of science equate consciousness and learning? And why had I been so lame of mind as to follow them? End quote. Later, we'll pick up on the issue of what Janes thinks consciousness isn't when we get further into the book, but for now it is enough to note that these are the kinds of experiments James was engaged in at this time, the kinds of questions driving his research. James would eventually take a position at Princeton where he would spend the next

11:34 decades of his life. And over the years, James finally began to develop his own novel theory of consciousness, the first public presentation of which was an address to the American Psychological Association in 1969. Eventually, his theories would be compiled into the book we are considering today, the origins of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicamal mind, which was published in 1976. The book is in three parts. Two additional sections were set aside at the suggestion of Jane's publisher for a future book that he planned to call the consequences of consciousness. But unfortunately, it was never published. In fact, James never published any other books than this one, though some papers and notes that might have formed the

12:21 basis of other publications do apparently survive. As mentioned before, this work was controversial and James included an afterward in 1990 to address the many criticisms that the book had drawn. Nevertheless, he was invited to speak all over the world after the book's publication. And after his death in 1997, the Julian James Society was established to promote his theories. He was 77 years of age at the time of his death and he felt that his work was not truly finished since his grand explanation of consciousness had not been widely accepted or in his view understood. And so today we will do our small part in trying to spread awareness

13:07 and understanding of Julian Jane's of fascinating ideas about the history of the human mind. To begin with [snorts] in origins of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicamal mind, James begins by listing off a number of theories as to what consciousness is, including consciousness as a property of matter, consciousness as emergent in evolution, behaviorism, which actually denies there's such a thing as consciousness, and so on. All of which James finds to be unsatisfactory explanations. James suggests that most or even all of these attempts at explaining consciousness have actually been a recapitulation to something like the spirit of the times in which the explanation emerged. Quote, "Each age

13:52 has described consciousness in terms of its own theme and concerns. In the golden age of Greece, when men traveled about in freedom while slaves did the work, consciousness was as free as that. Heracitis in particular called it an enormous space whose boundaries, even by traveling along every path, could never be found out. A millennium later, Augustine, among the caverned hills of Carthage, was astonished at the quote mountains and hills of high imaginations, quote, "the plains and caves and caverns of my memory, with its recesses of manifold and spacious chambers, wonderfully furnished with innumerable stores." Note how the metaphors of mind are the world it perceives. The first half of the 19th

14:39 century was the age of the great geological discoveries in which the record of the past was written in layers of the earth's crust. And this led to the popularization of the idea of consciousness as being in layers which recorded the past of the individual. There being deeper and deeper layers until the record could no longer be read. This emphasis on the unconscious grew until by 1875 most psychologists were insisting that consciousness was but a small part of mental life and that unconscious sensations, unconscious ideas and unconscious judgments made up the majority of mental processes. In the middle of the 19th century, chemistry succeeded geology as the fashionable science and consciousness from James Will to Vunt and his students such as

15:25 Tisher was the compound structure that could be analyzed in the laboratory into precise elements of sensations and feelings. And as steam locomotives chugged their way into the pattern of everyday life toward the end of the 19th century, so they too worked their way into the consciousness of consciousness. The subconscious becoming a boiler of straining energy which demanded manifest outlets and when repressed pushed up and out into neurotic behavior and the spinning camouflaged fulfillments of going nowhere dreams. There is not much we can do about such metaphors except to state that this is precisely what they are. End quote. The phrase that James

16:11 uses at the end there, the consciousness of consciousness will become important in the first chapter in which he claims that the consciousness of consciousness is not itself consciousness. And that might seem like a difficult assertion to make sense of, but he explains that what he means by this is that when we consciously reflect on what consciousness is, we tend to roll together concepts, learning, reasoning, thinking and so on, all into the fabric of consciousness. And the final aspect of this is that we then tend to locate the center of this consciousness in the head. But none of these elements are themselves the stuff of consciousness, so to speak. The very nature of

16:56 consciousness is in fact to appropriate whatever it is conscious of as part of itself. But this can mislead us. Quote, consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say, how difficult to appreciate. It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not. End quote. And James provides some rather simple but

17:44 compelling arguments as to why it does not. For one thing, there are plenty of instances in normal everyday life in which we're not totally conscious of what we are doing or in which we perhaps do not as rigorously consciously attend to certain aspects of our environment while attending studiously to other aspects. I mean, many of you have probably had the experience while you're driving, suddenly realizing that you're not consciously paying attention to everything that you're doing while driving. And perhaps you haven't even formed memories of the past number of minutes while driving. And you know, I'm sure that this sudden realization that you've been driving unconsciously could be rather scary, but it it doesn't

18:30 necessarily mean that you're driving dangerously. It means that you've been doing so automatically. As another example, when I'm immersed in reading or writing, I'm not usually conscious of my surroundings in the same way that I normally am. Or at the very least, I'm not attentive to my surroundings in the same way that I would be if I were doing something different, like walking through an unfamiliar environment. In fact, when I'm reading or writing, the room I'm in disappears in some sense, and my consciousness is totally attenuated to the book or to the page. And these lapses in consciousness, they don't just occur in terms of spatiality, but also temporality. That is to say that in terms of the space around us, we're not always consciously attending

19:16 to every object or every person or event going around in our environment. We tend to think that we're simply copying down our experience of what's going on around us into consciousness. But that's not always true. And James suggests that it may not even be true regarding time. He raises the question, are we conscious the whole time that we are awake? Again, we we pass much of the day within these activities in which consciousness is not required. In order to walk down the street, it's not necessary that I'm conscious of every muscle movement needed to pick up one leg and put it in front of the other. And in fact, being conscious of these movements could be a hindrance to making those movements. Uh when I'm playing music in front of an audience, I can attest to the fact that

20:04 the more conscious I am of what I'm doing and the individual placements that my fingers have to make on the fretboard and the way I have to grip the guitar pick and so on, the more conscious I were to be of any of that, the more hindered I would be in performing. In fact, the less conscious one is or that one has to be while performing such a task, whether it's playing a musical instrument or doing gymnastics or even something mundane like chopping vegetables. The less conscious you have to be, the better you generally are at fulfilling the task. Consciousness, it seems, is really only useful when we don't already know what to do. This dovetales into the issue of learning. One might say surely then when we are

20:51 learning to do something we require consciousness in order to absorb and retain the information. But we can see from the straightforward example of Pavlovian conditioning that consciousness does not have to enter into the picture for someone to learn. It has been demonstrated many times in fact that methods of associative learning are effective and that it occurs without any consciousness of the subject involved. This also applies to complex tasks as we just talked about. Uh James uses the example of typewriting which he says has been extensively studied. And one experimentter noted that the adaptations of the ones learning how to type were all made without conscious intentions entering the picture at all. But regarding the issue of time, it's not just that we

21:38 spend so much time involved in tasks that don't require consciousness. James pushes the issue further. Suppose there were a constant continuity to one's consciousness in day-to-day life. We could potentially test this idea by breaking our waking life into units of time. For example, that a minute could be seen as 60,000 milliseconds. And then we could ask, are we conscious for each one of those milliseconds? Now, however you answer that question, we could continue breaking down time into smaller and smaller units. But lest you think this is some sort of uh Zeno's paradox like rhetorical point as we break time down into smaller units we have to quote remember that the firing of neurons is

22:24 of a finite order end quote and given that I think we'll be hardressed to come to the conclusion that quote consciousness somehow floats like a mist above and about the nervous system completely ununited to any earthly necessities of neural refractory periods end quote. quot and thus the more likely conclusion for James is that the continuity of consciousness is something that may seem imminently obvious in waking life but is actually a kind of illusion just as with the analogy of the flashlight earlier regarding space we can use a similar metaphor regarding time quote the flashlight would be conscious of being on only when it is on though huge gaps of time occurred providing things were generally the

23:11 same. It would seem to the flashlight itself that the light had been continuously on. We are thus conscious less of the time than we think because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious. End quote. So in effect, we return to the same problem that consciously reflecting on what we are conscious of is not an effective way of understanding what consciousness is in itself. First because we are conscious of many things that are not themselves consciousness in itself and second because we can't distinguish consciousness from unconsciousness by means of the consciousness even thinking itself which has traditionally been held up as the stuff of consciousness uh for

23:57 Decart the proof of the existence of the consciousness that is usually done unconsciously according to James and there are a number of ways to demonstrate this for example example, Carl Marb's experiments in which the subjects were asked to hold two small weights and place whichever was heavier in front of the experimentter. Quote, "And it came as a startling discovery both to the experimenter himself and to his highly trained subjects, all of them introspective psychologists, that the process of judgment itself was never conscious." End quote. In other words, when they thought back as to how they made the quantitative judgment as to which weighed more, they couldn't find a conscious moment in which they made the

24:44 judgment. It happened as it were automatically. And when they consciously reflected, they knew they'd made the judgment, but they couldn't say when. Uh, another experiment by HJ Watt uh involved subjects being given cards with words printed on them. For example, the word oak. And then they were asked to take the concept on that card and associate it with a concept written on another card which could be any number of things. So for example superordinate categories in this case tree or subordinate categories in this case a beam or a hole eg a forest or a part such as acorn and so on and so forth. uh the subjects were asked to focus in particular on the inner process of

25:31 making an association. They were supposed to introspect on what it was like to search for the term that would fit the parameters of the task. But the subjects of course found that when they searched their minds for this process, their minds were stunningly blank. quote, "What seemed to be happening was that thinking was automatic and not really conscious once a stimulus word had been given." Another way of saying it is that one does one's thinking before one knows what one is going to think about." End quote. Is consciousness then synonymous with reasoning or logic? On this possibility, James focuses on, among other things, the curious phenomenon of the stroke of genius and how so many great thinkers

26:17 have come to their insights as a kind of Eureka moment that seemingly came out of nowhere. I mean, in fact, the the Eureka moment comes from Archimedes having something like this experience, right? Von Helmholtz said that his thoughts would creep into his thinking, sometimes arriving suddenly. Gaus said that the answer to a mathematical theorem came to him like a flash of lightning and he was unable to say what it was that prompted the answer. Poare described how when traveling and having laid aside all his mathematical work not consciously thinking about it at all suddenly while walking the idea came to me without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it. End quote.

27:02 And these are not just random people. These are prominent uh experts and scientists uh who made advancements without ever having to consciously think about them. Now, there are many more arguments and examples presented in this chapter. Perhaps we've lingered a bit too long on this if we want to get into the full breadth of the topics covered in this work. But I just wanted to give you a sense for how James goes about arguing that we don't really know by default what consciousness is. Most of the activities that we would assume require consciousness don't actually require it. Which raises the question, what is consciousness even good for? Why is it even necessary? Is it necessary? And as we talked about at the very beginning, many of these same questions

27:48 were raised by Nze. And we've talked about Nichzche's ideas on consciousness at length. Uh so I I won't go into that much further other than to say that um he actually was satisfied to conclude that consciousness is just a kind of uh superficial skin a gloss on reality that it's really not necessary and like James Nichze also distinguish it from reason and from thinking as we discussed and Nze concluded that whatever is done consciously is usually done badly. He makes that point in the antichrist and in some other places as well. But if consciousness is truly unnecessary, if that's the case, then quote, "It is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged,

28:36 reasoned, solved problems, and indeed did most of the things that we do, but who were not conscious at all." End quote. That is the possibility that James is going to explore in a subsequent chapter using the Iliad as the window into such a way of being which seems almost incomprehensible for us modern people uh for whom consciousness is something we almost can't imagine living without. As James puts it, for us consciousness is quote an introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. this consciousness that is myself of selves that is everything and yet nothing at all. What is it and where did it come from and why? End quote. Before we get

29:21 on to talking about the Iliad, uh James takes a stab at defining consciousness. And the way that he does so is very difficult to summarize in a succinct fashion. He does give us a list of six things that consciousness is which I suppose would be easy enough to list off but the preamble to that list is important and it begins with a discussion of metaphor here. James echoes Caser and Nietze when he says that quote metaphor is not a mere extra trick of language as it is so often slighted in the old school books on composition. It is the very constitutive ground of language. End quote. Even to speak of the quote unquote ground of language, however, is to attempt to

30:08 convey something in the form of a metaphor in so far as we're using the image of the ground beneath your feet to convey that language stands on metaphor as it were. But in fact, language doesn't exist in physical space. It doesn't stand on anything. And so we see in this very example how our understanding of concepts occurs by this metaphorical process by which something abstract is related or analogized to something concrete and spatial. And if you ever spend any time studying epistemology, you'll find this to be true. The the wonderful and fascinating thing about language is that everything we take as an abstract concept originally referred to something

30:53 metaphorical using something in physical space as a metaphor for the abstract. And even the most basic concepts uh abstract concepts terms like to be right existence. Well, this originally comes from a Sanskrit word for to grow, literally referring to growing plants. The words am and is, these come from Sanskrit terms for to breathe. And what happens with these words over time is that the concrete metaphors become obscured by shifting phonms. And the word seems to just hold an abstract meaning independently of the metaphor. Quote, "Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the busy give and take of talk have worn away with

31:40 use." End quote. And I swear I'm not just going to keep comparing Janes to Nze. Uh he actually doesn't mention Nichzche even one time in this entire book, which was actually kind of shocking to me because of some of the similarities and his his clear the fact that he clearly has a familiarity with a lot of the philosophical canon, but maybe he wasn't familiar with some of these passages in Nietze. But uh I mean if we look at that last statement side by side with one of the more famous remarks from NZ's essay on truth and lies in the non-moral sense. Nichze even uses the exact same metaphor in that essay for the same thing. Quote truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions. metaphors that

32:27 have become worn out and sensuously powerless. Coins that have lost their stamp and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal. End quote. So the metaphor has become sensuously powerless because now it's simply denoting the idea and no longer the appeal to the senses that the metaphor actually were originally represented. And James argues that so often what we consider to be understanding is in all content simply arriving at a metaphor for something which puts it into familiar terms. So we take something unfamiliar that we don't understand and we compare it to something familiar. We say it's like this. That's how language proceeds. That is the metaphorical

33:12 activity that is constitutive of language. But this is the very nature of the difficulty involved in talking about consciousness itself because quote there is not and cannot be anything in our immediate experience that is like immediate experience itself. There is therefore a sense in which we shall never be able to understand consciousness in the same way that we can understand things that we are conscious of. Most of the errors about consciousness that we have been studying have been errors of attempted metaphors. End quote. So for example, when John Lock called the mind a blank slate, tabularazza, he was using a metaphor. The the metaphor is that the mind is

33:58 like the stone slab that school boys used at that time where you know on the slate you could write on it with chalk and then you could wipe clean and start over again. And so the mind to lock was being quote unquote explained or understood by being compared to something familiar. He was saying that the mind begins blank, but we quote unquote write experiences onto the mind. The mind copies down experience the way a student might jot down notes. But of course, the mind doesn't really just copy down experiences. Again, most day-to-day experiences simply blur into one another. Most don't enter our consciousness at all. Much of what we do in experience is forgotten. But, you

34:45 know, that issue aside, what Lock did is what we've always been doing. We we've always been trying to explain consciousness by saying what consciousness is like, metaphorizing it. uh but we always come short of the mark because as Jane says this is like comparing something in the immediate experience to immediate experience itself the field on which that experience happens and no thing encountered within the field will truly be like the field itself. And so what is consciousness? James attempts an answer. Consciousness is itself created out of metaphor as an analog of the world. Quote, subjective conscious mind is an analogy of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary

35:32 or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analoges of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or a repository, and it is intimately bound up with valition and decision. Consider the language we use to describe conscious processes. The most prominent group of words used to describe mental events are visual. We quote see solutions to problems, the best of which may be brilliant and the person brighter and clearheaded as opposed to dull, fuzzy-minded or obscure

36:18 solutions. These words are all metaphors, and the mind space to which they apply is a metaphor of actual space. In it, we can quote approach a problem perhaps from some viewpoint and grapple with its difficulties or seize together or comprehend parts of a problem and so on using metaphors of behavior to invent things to do in this metaphored mind space. And the adjectives to describe physical behavior in real space are analogically taken over to describe mental behavior in mind space. When we speak of our minds as being quick, slow, agitated, as when we coitate or co-agitate, nimble-witted, strong, or weak-minded.

37:06 The mind space in which these metaphorical activities go on has its own group of adjectives. We can be broad-minded deep open or narrow-minded. We can be occupied. We can get something off our minds, put something out of mind, or we can get it. let something penetrate or bear, have keep or hold it in mind. End quote. And so on and so forth. Uh James gives many more examples. So the entirety of our mental world or to speak more precisely, our subjective conscious world is always described in these terms which are really just metaphors for the physical. Does this mean that our interiority is not real? Well, for one, notice the term interiority. the fact that we describe

37:54 consciousness as a kind of interior space within ourselves. So on the one hand, spatialization is incredibly important to this this whole affair of the creation of consciousness through metaphor. But um you know we're again trying to understand what consciousness is by um using a familiar metaphor for something physical. But nevertheless, the argument is certainly not that this isn't that consciousness is not real. In fact, James ridicules the view of the behaviorists that consciousness isn't real. I mean, he compared it in uh this passage to mathematics very much real, but it's an operator and not a thing. Now, uh the spatialization uh it's within that that the perception of time becomes possible. The chronology of time

38:41 itself is a spatial metaphor. without the spatial metaphors of placing a a moment uh quote unquote before another moment as I might say place a cup of coffee before you or uh placing a moment after as in someone following after me right these terms before and after we tend to associate with time but they actually refer to space originally and without that spatialization there there's no way to perceive the chronological progression of moments as as if they were you know sort arranged in a line or a sequence, a series. This is why consciousness goes hand in hand with the perception of time and the reason why there is scarcely any consciousness without the remembrance of the past or imagination of the future.

39:29 Even though memory strictly speaking does not have to be conscious, uh non-concious organisms can remember things even if they aren't aren't uh constantly holding on to a sense of of self with a continuity of memories. And we can even anticipate future outcomes we might say in our nervous system or something like this again on an unconscious level. But it's the sequencing within a spatialized metaphor of the progression of time that occurs within the consciousness um and is some sense part and parcel with consciousness. That's where we really get the the conscious perception of time. not something that might happen. Again, anticipating something on an unconscious level or remembering something on an unconscious level. When we bring things into consciousness, they

40:14 become sequenced in this spatialized uh analogy for what time is. Now, to explain further what consciousness is for James, we have to get into some technical language which will probably sound more complicated than it really is. So, brace for that. Now a metaphor is not one thing. It's made up of constituent parts of the metaphrand and metaphier which relate to one another as a multiplicand to a multiplier in mathematics. This is all Jane's uh coinage. The multiplicand is the number that is being multiplied and the multiplier is the number of times it is multiplied. And so the metaphr is the thing that's being referred to. Whereas

40:59 the metaphier is the analogy to the familiar by which the thing can be understood. The example James uses is when one says snow blankets the ground. The snow covering the ground is the metaphr and even thickness with which the ground is covered by snow. End quote. The metaphier is the analogy to a blanket which we use to cover ourselves. But we can go further because there are constituent parts of the metaphor which James calls paraphers and paraphrs project back into the metaphrand as what I shall call the paraphrans of the metaphrand. End quote. James acknowledges that this is beginning to sound like a bunch of technical jargon,

41:45 but by means of extending the example snow blankets the ground, I think we can easily show what these terms all mean. quote, "The pleasing nuances of this metaphor are in the purifiers of the metaphor blanket. These are something about warmth, protection, and slumber until some period of awakening. These associations of blanket then automatically become the associations or paraphrans of the original metaphr, the way the snow covers the ground. And we thus have created by this metaphor the idea of the earth sleeping and protected by the snow cover until its awakening in spring. End quote. And thus within the metaphorical operations of language, James sees what he calls a generative

42:31 potential in that many if not all metaphiers that we use to understand the various metaphrans generate new associations as a consequence of this analogical means of understanding. And thus, quote, consciousness is the work of lexical metaphor. It is spun out of the concrete metaphiers of expression and their paraphiers, projecting paraphras that exist only in the functional sense. Moreover, it goes on generating itself, each new paraphr capable of being a metaphr on its own, resulting in new metaphers with their paraphiers and so on. End quote. Now, this is not a historical or anthropological account of how consciousness comes about. This is something that we're going to talk more

43:17 about in part two. Rather this is Jane's description of the process of consciousness expanding out of language itself such that if we search for the original metaphrans so to speak what we will find is that intensely practical demands such as uh designating a quote unquote arm of the sea as a good place to fish for shellfish these practical necessities and the terms uh that we use to communicate things to achieve these necessities they all refer to actions and physical things, happenings in physical space, and they become expanded and expanded such that an entire inner space of meanings emerges that was not there before that is generated out of the lexical metaphor. And so James

44:03 continues, quote, consciousness is the metaphr when it is being generated by the paraphras of our verbal expressions, but the functioning of consciousness is as it were the return journey. Consciousness becomes the metaphier full of our past experience. Constantly and selectively operating on such unknowns as future actions, decisions, and partly remembered pasts, on what we are and yet may be. And it is by the generated structure of consciousness that we then understand the world. End quote. So, let's break all this down just so it's clear before we move on. What is being generated by the paraphrase of our verbal expressions is consciousness. What is consciousness?

44:49 It's a sense of mental spatialization which comes with temporal spatialization. It's generated by the when we say by the paraphrase it's generated by these secondary associations which themselves are part of the process of metaphorizing the world. As one metaphies the world, you also bring in sort of this this endless branching off of different associations. But the thing generated by the process consciousness, the operation of consciousness then becomes the metaphier. It becomes, you know, because it it has all this past experience, all all of this stuff within consciousness. Um that becomes the thing used to describe something unfamiliar by means of what is familiar. In other words, the

45:36 operations of consciousness become familiar to us and then consciousness then itself metifies by means of past experience. It metifies various unknowns such as future decisions by analogy to the familiar. So consciousness is both generated by metaphor and it has generative potential within itself for future metaphors. James then goes on to describe the six features of consciousness as he sees them. I'm just going to give a short explanation of each and then we'll get onto the chapter about the human mind as we see it in the Iliad. First, consciousness is spatialization. We've discussed this at length and that aspect should be self-explanatory at this point. The most important detail to note here is quote

46:22 things that in the physical behavioral world do not have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness otherwise we cannot be conscious of them. End quote. Second, exerption, meaning that consciousness consists of excerpts, not of a perfect continuity or a perfect copying down of experience. Much of what we take in on a sensory level does not enter conscious reflection. It is distinct from memory because quote an excerpt of a thing is in consciousness the representative of the thing or event to which memories adhere end quote. And by way of example to explain this quote, if I wish to remember what I was doing last summer, I first have an exerption of the time concerned, which may be a fleeting image

47:08 of a couple of months on the calendar until I rest in an exertion of a particular event, such as walking along a particular riverside, and from there I associate it and retrieve memories about last summer. End quote. Next, the third quality of consciousness is the analog eye. This is the sense of inner self, we might say. Quote, the metaphor we have of ourselves, the analog eye which can move about vicarially in our imagination, quote, doing things that we are not actually doing. End quote. The fourth aspect is the metaphor me which is distinct from the analogy I. It is distinct because where the analog eye is something like uh our image of our conscious self moving about in inner

47:55 space quote unquote doing things like quote unquote making decisions and so on. The metaphor me is the autoscopic image of the self in physical space. In other words, James says when you think of yourself for example entering the room you're in now think back to when you entered the room you are currently in. We actually tend to generate a peculiar thirdp person perspective on ourselves. We imagine ourselves as we would look from the third person perspective. And this too is part of consciousness. Fifth, narratization. Within the spatialized metaphors of consciousness, we gain a sense of ourselves as part of a story which we might say is generated by analogy to the physical journey moving from one place

48:42 to another in the way we might say of our past. uh I was in a a dark time back then or dark place back then or I'm ready to move on to better things and so on. But narratization is more than this. It is the narrative, the explanation of the movement that accompanies the consciousness. Quote, the assigning of causes to our behavior or saying why we did a particular thing is all a part of narratization. Such causes as reasons may be true or false, neutral or ideal. consciousness is ever ready to explain anything we may happen to find ourselves doing. The thief narratizes his act as due to poverty, the poet his as due to beauty, and the scientist his as due to

49:27 truth, purpose and cause inextricably woven into the spatialization of behavior in consciousness. End quote. The sixth and final aspect of consciousness according to James is consiliation. This is what we mentioned before in which we assimilate the unknown into the familiarity of previous experience. Quote, "What I am designating by consiliation is essentially doing in mind space what narratization does in mind time or spatialized time. It brings things together as conscious objects just as narratization brings things together as a story. And this fitting together into a consistency or probability is done according to rules built up in experience." end quote. And it's very interesting to consider everything James

50:14 just said there uh you know in comparison to the work of David Hume but uh we'll leave that aside in the interest of time. So now what brings us to the Iliad is the prospect raised at the end of this chapter that given the story we have sketched out thus far consciousness must have come after language and not before. And so in order to verify our theory, we would have to look to the earliest examples of written language. See if we can find anything that corroborates that possibility that man was not conscious until after language. And you know, one piece of evidence for this potentially would be if we could find a written work which portrays human beings without portraying them as conscious. Obviously, as James points out, the development of

50:59 consciousness is almost certainly not a neat continuity in which it emerges linearly or all at once. We should expect vestigages of what James calls biccameal thought, perhaps even well into the age of consciousness. And we should expect prefigurations or early developments of consciousness in the bicamal world. And this would likely happen in fits and starts in various places throughout the world at different rates and at different times and in response to different environmental and social factors. Nevertheless, with all this in mind as caveats, if we look to the Iliad of Homer, what we find is a rather strange portrayal of human beings seemingly without inner narratization or any kind of interiority. According to

51:45 James, quote, there is in general no consciousness in the Iliad. I am saying in general because I shall mention some exceptions later and in general therefore no words for consciousness or mental acts. The words in the Iliad that in a later age come to mean mental things have different meanings all of them more concrete. The word psyche which later means soul or conscious mind is in most instances life substances such as blood or breath. A dying warrior bleeds out his psyche onto the ground or breathes it out in his last gasp. The thumos, which later comes to mean something like emotional soul, is simply motion or agitation. When a man stops moving, the thumos leaves his limbs. But

52:33 it is also somehow an organ itself. For when Glalcus prays to Apollo to alleviate his pain and to give him strength to help his friend Sarpedon, Apollo hears his prayer and quote casts strength into his thumos. The thumos can tell a man to eat, drink, or fight end quote. And further down in the passage, continuing, quote, "A word of somewhat similar use is friend, which is always localized anatomically as the midriff or sensations in the midriff and is usually used in the plural. It is the frenies of Hector that recognize that his brother is not near him." This means what we mean by quote catching one's breath in surprise. It is only centuries later that it comes to mean mind or heart in

53:20 its figurative sense. Perhaps the most important word is the word noose which comes to mean conscious mind. It comes from the word noin to see. Its proper translation in the Iliad would be something like perception or recognition of field of vision. Zeus holds Odysius in his noose. He keeps watch over him. End quote. And so on. Uh so based on what James has already said about the metaphorical operations of language uh it this should come as no surprise. This is we can understand how these words would eventually expand out of their paraphiers and consequently extend the inner space of the mind. But at this early phase they are physical concrete

54:07 referring to actions, movements or things. Furthermore, there is no concept of the will in the Iliad and consequently there's no concept of free will. Whenever a character is conflicted, the term used is murmurizan, which means literally to be in two parts. I'm sure my ancient Greek pronunciation's terrible guys, but just just bear with me. Uh James says to that to translate this term as something like divided mind is actually incorrect. quote, "Essentially, it means to be in conflict about two actions, not two thoughts. It is always behavioristic." End quote. And so, we might ask in light of such a theory, how then did people back then decide what to do? How could a

54:55 preconscious person come to a decision? Or or how could they come to the the state of mind of being in two parts wishing to take two contradictory actions and then how could they transcend that state of mind and come to the decision between those two alternatives and again even calling it a state of mind is inappropriate given everything we've said but uh you know have to use metaphors here but without the ability to introspect this is really what we're getting at without the ability to make their thinking conscious for one we might ask how How did they experience their thoughts? How did they experience deliberation? And how did that deliberation occur? And what motivated their actions? How how was their valition experienced? James's theory is that this is the role

55:42 of the gods and that contrary to the many many theories about how the Greeks thought about their gods whether they were the inventions of poets or the result of ancestor worship or mere metaphors or whatever. He advances the theory that in fact the Greeks actually heard the voices of their gods speaking to them and that particularly in moments of stress or in a moment where a pressing decision is needed, they would literally hear commands from the gods who would direct their actions. We're going to talk about the physiological explanation for this in a bit. But for now, let's look at a passage from James where he gives many examples of the gods more or less taking the place of conscious deliberative reasoning in the

56:29 Iliad. Quote, "When Agamemnon, the king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon. It is a god who then rises out of the gray sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black ships. A god who whispers low to Helen to sweep her heart with homesick longing. A god who hides Paris in a mist in front of the attacking Menaaus. A god who tells Glauas to take bronze for gold. A god who leads the armies into battle. Who speaks to each soldier at the turning points. who debates and teaches Hector what he must do, who urges the soldiers on or defeats them by

57:15 casting them in spells or drawing mists over their visual fields. It is the gods who start quarrels among men that really cause the war and then plan its strategy. It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another urges him to go, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans, rousing them in ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness. The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives. They are in the actions and speeches of gods. To another, a man seems to be the cause of his own behavior, but not to

58:02 the man himself. When toward the end of the war, Achilles reminds Agamemnon of how he robbed him of his mistress, the king of men declares, quote, "not I was the cause of this act, but Zeus and my portion and the Arenes who walk in darkness. They it was in the assembly put wild a upon me on that day when I arbitrarily took Achilles prize from him. So what could I do? Gods always have their way. End quote. Whereas some scholars have interpreted such statements from Agamimnon psychologically maybe as meaning that his behavior has become alienated from his ego. James says that doesn't go far enough. in his view, all of the

58:47 characters in the Iliad, quote, did not have any ego whatsoever. End quote. The Iliad itself, the story that it tells, does not purport to come from human beings. The first lines of wrath sing, O goddess, invokes the divine as the true source of the poem. The poet then recounts the story that he claims he has heard while enraptured by the goddess. And while this idea of the muses singing through the poets would eventually develop into the idea of being fully possessed by the muse, an idea that we encounter in the dialogues of Plato, James will say later in the text that that's a development that happens once consciousness is firmly established. Stories of possession of the

59:33 consciousness being entirely displaced by another personality are actually a very different phenomenon from what he is describing. And it may have even been the case that conscious men brought on these states as a means of attempting to reestablish this link to the divine that was originally very near at hand for any man. He would say that the iliatic poets or the the the homeriic poets we might say because Homer's not one person almost certainly these stories were sort of compiled together. Um he would say that they actually heard the goddess sing the poem. In modern terminology, James's theory can be phrased this way. The Iliadic heroes were having auditory hallucinations.

1:00:19 This perhaps accounts for why the Greek gods seem so different in their portrayal in the Iliad from anything that we might find in, for example, the Old Testament. Not only in their temperament and their nature, we might say, but in so far as they are not owed worship, nor are the Aayans commanded to love their gods. They're not feared in the same way that for example Yahweh is feared. In the context of Yahweh's religion, we're we're called to be God-fearing. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and so on. God in that mythos is the creator of all the world who makes demands. He make he demands supplication from mankind. On the other hand, the Greek gods in the Iliad never they're not creator gods. They never create something out of nothing. Furthermore, quote, "The Greek

1:01:07 god never steps forth in thunder, never begets awe or fear in the hero, and is as far from the outrageously pompous God of Job as it is possible to be. He simply leads, advises, and orders. Nor does the God occasion humility or even love and little gratitude." End quote. Now, there are obviously complications to this picture of how the Greeks regarded their gods. Especially if we look outward from the Iliad into the broader literary cannon and into the writings of later Greeks or even if we look into the Odyssey, it's different. But if James is correct, then we should expect to see such a portrayal of the gods as this. And we do indeed find it

1:01:55 here in the oldest epic poem of their culture. The relationships between gods and heroes in the Iliad is far more personal or intimate than anything in the monotheistic religions. Even though the the human beings in the story do almost always defer to the decisions of the gods because the argument would go that the voice of the god is sort of like the communication from the right hemisphere of the brain to the left as to what kind of decision should be made and that there's not really any need to you know have fear and trembling before the voice of the god. It's sort of obeyed automatically. It's just obvious. there's no sort of intermediary consideration of whether or not to obey

1:02:42 the god. But especially when we consider the idea of gods uh consoling Achilles or gods commanding human beings to do impulsive or even selfish things like commanding Agamemnon to claim Brissus or counseling individual soldiers, intervening in human affairs on the ground level. Their relationship to man seems more as though the gods are something like companions of men rather than their all powerful masters. And while James doesn't really stress this point, I think it is clear that later interpreters of the Iliad took this portrayal as evidence not for a shift in the mental experience of mankind because obviously there was no bicameal theory until recently, but as evidence that the Greeks sort of pridefully accounted

1:03:28 their past heroes as being friends of the gods, beloved by the gods, perhaps almost on par with the gods. Um indeed this seems to be sort of Nichch's interpretation but nevertheless uh the voices had this kind of commanding authority because in some sense they're the voice of the part of the brain that's responsible for spatial reasoning and creative problem solving for for making judgments essentially and that it's the kind of reasoning that we need for dealing with novel situations. Because of this, the gods aren't really questioned. And you know, we might say the very act of questioning, of being critical, of inquiring is part of the conscious revolution. And it's why when the enlightenment dawn in Europe more than 2,000 years later, the spirit of critique is a central part of this

1:04:15 awakening of the human mind or however we like to eulogize narratize about the enlightenment with all sorts of metaphors. Right? In contrast, the Iliad is quote, "a window back into those unsubjective times when every kingdom was in essence a theocracy and every man the slave of voices heard whenever novel situations occurred." End quote. Now, James answers a number of objections to his interpretation of the Iliad. He talks about some of the exceptions to what he's describing here which uh he some things that he sees as later additions to the poem. James says look the Iliad is a kind of turning point and so we should expect that there would be

1:05:00 signs of the dawning of consciousness even here and especially in the Odyssey just as there will be vestigages of bicamal thinking in later ages. But if you want to dive deeper into that and see the objections he responds to and further elaborations in this chapter, I'd recommend that you go ahead and just pick up the book already. If you're interested so far, uh trust me, you'll have a blast reading this. Uh James is a delightful writer. I really enjoyed this book, even at its length. Um I breezed through it and I enjoyed it pretty much more than anything I've read in the past several months. So regardless of whether his theory is true or not, it's a great read. I'll I'll say that for the book. But in any case, you're probably wondering at this point, how could this

1:05:47 all possibly work neurologically? Why would it be the case that human beings would have once lived in a state of regular auditory hallucinations and lived without a sense of ego consciousness? Presumably because the auditory hallucinations were doing the work that we now rely on consciousness to to carry out. What is the neurological explanation for this? Why would it ever change? I don't want to get too far into the neurological jargon as we've already introduced enough technical terms in this episode. But Jane's hypothesizes that the reason has to do with our double brain. As is commonly known, the verbal analytical aspect of the brain is located on the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere is usually dominant. Although there are

1:06:33 some people who are right brain dominant. uh usually they are left-handed or ambidextrous. James says, "For the purposes of of this document, even though there are always exceptions with human beings, we're just going to speak in general terms given the facts that apply to the vast majority of the populace who are left brain dominant. There are three main areas of the left hemisphere that have to do with language. the supplementary motor area involved in articulation. Broca's area having to do with articulation inflection and uh grammar and vernick's area involved in vocabulary, syntax, meaning and understanding speech. Of particular interest to James is Vernick's area as it is the area revealed by experiment to be quote most

1:07:20 indispensable to normal speech end quote. Now the interesting thing about our bicamal minds is that we have the same neurological structure for language in the right hemisphere as we do in the left but it would seem to be redundant in the right side of the brain. Quote the areas on the right hemisphere that correspond to the speech areas have seemingly no easily observable function. Why this relatively less essential part of the brain? Could it be that these silent quote speech areas on the right hemisphere had some function at an earlier stage in man's history that they now do not have end quote? And though James admits that the this conclusion here is tentative, the claim is not without evidence. The two halves of the

1:08:05 brain communicate with one another via the corpus colossum. We know that we

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