Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral M

What is a human being? What is life? Can science give us reliable answers to such questions? The electricity of life. The meaning of human consciousness. Are we alone? Are the traditional contests between science and religion still relevant? Does the word "spirit" still hold meaning today?

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ETSubmariner
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Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral M

Unread post by ETSubmariner » Wed Aug 13, 2014 5:38 pm

Hello to all,

A while back I introduced a University of Washington professor to the Electric Universe fold, and you may know his name - Gerald Pollack. He's been to at least one EU conference since then. I think his work is directly relevant to the EU and he thought so as well. His was a welcome addition at the conference!

Here I am again with a possible other, good connection between professionals. I see that only two other, older threads from 2008 brought the theory of bicameral mind to these forums, and I want to reintroduce the concept and see where it goes in the same hope that something mutual might be found between The Julian Jaynes Society http://www.julianjaynes.org/bicameralmind.php and Thunderbolts.

In short, I believe that the theory of psychologist Julian Jaynes (now passed), as espoused in his theory of a bicameral mind and consciousness (written in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind), and the ideas of the good Thunderbolts scientists to whom we owe a good deal - might make for a good mutual connection.

I'll let two short reviews I pulled from the book and the Society website give you a good intro:

"At the heart of this book is the revolutionary idea that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but is a learned process brought into being out of an earlier hallucinatory mentality by cataclysm and catastrophe only 3000 years ago and still developing. The implications of this new scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion - and indeed, our future. In the words of one reviewer, it is "a humbling text, the kind that reminds most of us who make our livings through thinking, how much thinking there is left to do.""

* * *
"Presents a theory of the bicameral mind which holds that ancient peoples could not "think" as we do today and were therefore "unconscious," a result of the domination of the right hemisphere; only catastrophe forced mankind to "learn" consciousness, a product of human history and culture and one that issues from the brain's left hemisphere. Three forms of human awareness, the bicameral or god-run man; the modern or problem-solving man; and contemporary forms of throwbacks to bicamerality (e.g., religious frenzy, hypnotism, and schizophrenia) are examined in terms of the physiology of the brain and how it applies to human psychology, culture, and history.

From those reviews, I think you may start to see in what ways Julian Jaynes theorizing about the changing/changed mind of man from recent history (12,000 BC+), and the way Thunderbolts offers its ideas, might be a good mix. The catastrophes of our ancestors, and witnessed in the skies above would provide additional evidence for both sides of this conference table.

In my last effort with the UW professor, as I hoped, some of you good people took proactive action by calling him up and going to see his lab. I'd like to see more of that occur here too, by people more lucid and prepared to speak EU than I.

Do with it as you will.

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Re: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamera

Unread post by tholden » Sat Aug 16, 2014 9:52 pm

I attended the Jaynes Society meeting in Charlston WVA last year (2013). Some of what I heard was interesting but the overall impression I had was that they were overly hung up on an evolutionary paradigm and that they were not going to make any real progress until they got over that.

An updated version of my own take on Jaynes and antediluvian language serves as one of the appendices in "Cosmos in Collision", an early version of the same thing is this:

http://bearfabrique.org/History/babel.html

Cosmos in Collision lives at www.cosmosincollision.com


Jaynes was limiting his field of view to the period between the Exodus and Alexander. He needed to be looking at the antediluvian period and, again, his findings called for a much bigger change than could be dealt with within any sort of an evolutionary paradigm.

If you've alrady given up on evolution or have never believed in evolution, you can stop reading here.....

My normal little facebook/forum screed on evolution...

The educated lay person is not aware of how overwhelmingly evolution has been debunked over the last century.

The following is a minimal list of entire categories of evidence disproving evolution:

The decades-long experiments with fruit flies beginning in the early 1900s. Those tests were intended to demonstrate macroevolution; the failure of those tests was so unambiguous that a number of prominent scientists disavowed evolution at the time.

The discovery of the DNA/RNA info codes (information codes do not just sort of happen...)

The fact that the info code explained the failure of the fruit-fly experiments (the whole thing is driven by information and the only info there ever was in that picture was the info for a fruit fly...)

The discovery of bio-electrical machinery within 1-celled animals.

The question of irreducible complexity.

The Haldane Dilemma. That is, the gigantic spaces of time it would take to spread any genetic change through an entire herd of animals.

The increasingly massive evidence of a recent age for dinosaurs. This includes soft tissue being found in dinosaur remains, good radiocarbon dates for dinosaur remains (blind tests at the University of Georgia's dating lab), and native American petroglyphs clearly showing known dinosaur types.

The fact that the Haldane dilemma and the recent findings related to dinosaurs amount to a sort of a time sandwich (evolutionites need quadrillions of years and only have a few tens of thousands).

The dna analysis eliminating neanderthals and thus all other hominids as plausible human ancestors.

The total lack of intermediate fossils where the theory demands that the bulk of all fossils be clear intermediate types. "Punctuated Equilibria" in fact amounts to an attempt to get around both the Haldane dilemma and the lack of intermediate fossils, but has an entirely new set of overwhelming problems of its own...

The question of genetic entropy.

The obvious evidence of design in nature.

The arguments arising from pure probability and combinatoric considerations.


Here's what I mean when I use the term "combinatoric considerations"...

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, the specialized system which allows flight feathers to pivot so as to open on upstrokes and close to trap air on downstrokes (like a venetian blind), a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

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Re: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamera

Unread post by Steve Smith » Mon Aug 18, 2014 7:34 am

Not to mention that there can't be only one example of multiple mutations "evolving" towards a goal, there must be a large group of evolved types in order for them to pass their acquired characteristics down through the ages. Just one tiger wouldn't work -- two might, but then there's that pesky 50-50 chance that they'd be the same sex...

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Re: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamera

Unread post by D_Archer » Tue Aug 19, 2014 2:45 am

Life responds to information from the environment. Before the Mathis article (see below) this was always my stance and how i knew evolution was wrong (or had the wrong mechanisms, chance, natural selection, mutation). The charge field (ie light) can provide a direct communication channel for life to get the needed information to 'intelligently' build creatures.

Miles Mathis: http://mileswmathis.com/evol.pdf

I do not think any humanoid was ever unconscious, as Miles says:
This is the problem we get to in the consciousness question: when does the intelligence turn on? At
what level of size or complexity does the organism quit being automatic and start having volition? My
answer: no level. If intelligence exists, it exists all the way down
Regards,
Daniel
- Shoot Forth Thunder -

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spark
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Re: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamera

Unread post by spark » Mon Aug 25, 2014 12:45 am

i don't think humanoid was ever unconscious either.
i think it was more like different state of consciousness than our current problem solving state.
-
is it possible that evolution has something to do with collective higher consciousness of all life on earth?
what if species on collective consciousness level somehow can decide it want to evolve into something else?
causing dna to change in response to collective higher consciousness of that species?

assuming that all species whatever form and state of consciousness, has higher consciousness which together forms collective higher consciousness which is very intelligent, non-physical in nature, undying and completely capable of creating, modifying, controlling dna. species may not even be aware of its higher consciousness while in physical form while the higher consciousness will be aware of everything.

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Re: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamera

Unread post by spark » Mon Aug 25, 2014 10:16 am


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Re: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamera

Unread post by nick c » Mon Aug 25, 2014 12:09 pm

This thread seems to be going way off topic. The discussion here should be centered upon Julian Jaynes' theory of human consciousness.
Jaynes gives a precise definition and description of what is consciousness and more importantly, what it is not. He spends 60 pages or more in the opening two chapters dealing with that.
Most of the posters here have a very different view of what is consciousness, which is fine, but for the purpose of this thread the focus should be on Jaynes' view, whether pro or con.

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Re: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamera

Unread post by Krackonis » Thu Nov 27, 2014 11:23 am

I have incorporated Julians Jaynes work into my EU "mindset" and consider it truth. I have began to question HOW we ended up in the pre-conscious state to begin with. At 2700 BC, Plato, Confucius, Siddhartha and LaoTzu all wrote their works. It's a bit coincidental. It believe it had to do with the sky calming down by 680BC (The last event we witnesses) One we got over that we began to build religions and became very much "as we are now".

For me I recognize the advanced technology of ancient civilizations and I recognize some amazing events which have altered the earths "charge potential". I believe that once we lost the charge we lost life expectancy, many giant fauna, and we lost all of our elders. These elders may have lived 900 years according to biblical, Sumerian and Chinese sources.

We never recovered from that event circa 3100bc.

Now we are at a point where we might be able to recognize the past from which we came from. Julian Jaynes take on our schizophrenic past translates well into platos own words... He described when he was younger, how we should cherish the wisdom of these schizophrenics, and by the time of his death he suggested we kill them all.

It is akin to today where we do not tolerate "closed minded non thinkers".
Neil Thompson

EET

"We are the universe trying to understand itself." - Delen, Babylon 5

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Re: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamera

Unread post by phyllotaxis » Sat Dec 13, 2014 1:01 pm

I really enjoyed this book- it is very thought-provoking and lucid. There's so much to discuss...
One of the questions I've always had about his theory seems to mesh with others observations on the scale of time.
How can we define a year? A month? A second?
Of course we can measure it as it progresses today, but with the theoretical EM difference that is proposed by Jaynes, what's to say that a year once occurred in several months of today's scale? Would it be beyond feasible to posit that the centuries-old inhabitants of times past lived within an environment where, in conjunction with the brain-related differences one could find with a significantly different EM environment (look up modern trans-cranial direct stimulation experiences and research) earth rotated more rapidly, allowing larger creatures (including human Giants, like those found in the northeast US) and plants to grow. In addition, a faster rotation could also shorten winter periods, making it less damaging to plants, allowing them to grow larger with less die-off.

I really liked that book- it sent my imagination off in all kinds of interesting directions.

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Re: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamera

Unread post by King David » Thu Feb 05, 2015 4:20 pm

Consciousness is learned and shared with Fungi that populate the skin, guts, and wherever else they might work their way into. Fungi have been a part of the ecosystem for over 1500 million years, they have been here for everything from trilobites to hominids. They interact with melanin, nerves, and keratin. In other words all the hard bits that your nervous system and therefore electrical systems and consciousness is comprised of. I believe that fungi are the method to evolutionary madness.

KD

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nick c
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Re: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamera

Unread post by nick c » Thu Feb 05, 2015 7:37 pm

Consciousness is learned and shared with Fungi that populate the skin, guts, and wherever else they might work their way into. Fungi have been a part of the ecosystem for over 1500 million years, they have been here for everything from trilobites to hominids. They interact with melanin, nerves, and keratin. In other words all the hard bits that your nervous system and therefore electrical systems and consciousness is comprised of. I believe that fungi are the method to evolutionary madness.
When we use the word 'consciousness' everyone has their own definition, so often times participants in a discussion are talking about different conceptions. Therefore, it is important to define the word.
Julian Jaynes gives his definition in the beginning of his book and then the discussion moves forward in the context of that definition.

Fungi would definitely not have the ability to be conscious at any time, as Jaynes defines the word. The book goes on to show how and why humans can perform many daily tasks with out being 'conscious' and he shows the difference between 'consciousness' and 'awareness.' Jaynes gives numerous examples of consciousness (within his definition) and why. He devotes the first third of the book to an analysis of what is, and more importantly, what is not consciousness.
I highly recommend reading his book, it is quite an amazing work!

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Re: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamera

Unread post by Chromium6 » Sat Feb 14, 2015 6:52 pm

Did Jaynes ever discuss gut-bacteria? It may have been after his time.

I do think he had to realize that "consciousness" must be continually "fed" with glucose/ketones/dextrose or or it simply breaks down... that is "consciousness" is often impaired or lost after less than 40 mg/dl of blood glucose.

There is something about this molecule C6H12O6 and the maintenance of human consciousness.
---

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... ond-brain/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... uman-ones/
http://www.bioportfolio.com/resources/p ... Brain.html

Study links Parkinson's disease to gut bacteria
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/286912.php

Like most animal tissues, brain metabolism depends primarily on glucose for fuel in most circumstances. A limited amount of glucose can be derived from glycogen stored in astrocytes, but it is consumed within minutes. For most practical purposes, the brain is dependent on a continual supply of glucose diffusing from the blood into the interstitial tissue within the central nervous system and into the neurons themselves.

Therefore, if the amount of glucose supplied by the blood falls, the brain is one of the first organs affected. In most people, subtle reduction of mental efficiency can be observed when the glucose falls below 65 mg/dl (3.6 mM). Impairment of action and judgment usually becomes obvious below 40 mg/dl (2.2 mM). Seizures may occur as the glucose falls further. As blood glucose levels fall below 10 mg/dl (0.55 mM), most neurons become electrically silent and nonfunctional, resulting in coma. These brain effects are collectively referred to as neuroglycopenia.

---

Most dietary carbohydrates contain glucose, either as their only building block, as in starch and glycogen, or together with another monosaccharide, as in sucrose and lactose.

In the lumen of the duodenum and small intestine, the glucose oligo- and polysaccharides are broken down to monosaccharides by the pancreatic and intestinal glycosidases. Other polysaccharides cannot be processed by the human intestine and require assistance by intestinal flora if they are to be broken down; the most notable exceptions are sucrose (fructose-glucose) and lactose (galactose-glucose). Glucose is then transported across the apical membrane of the enterocytes by SLC5A1 (SGLT1), and later across their basal membrane by SLC2A2 (GLUT2).[19] Some of the glucose is converted to lactic acid by astrocytes, which is then utilized as an energy source by brain cells, some of the glucose is used by intestinal cells and red blood cells, while the rest reaches the liver, adipose tissue and muscle cells, where it is absorbed and stored as glycogen (under the influence of insulin). Liver cell glycogen can be converted to glucose and returned to the blood when insulin is low or absent; muscle cell glycogen is not returned to the blood because of a lack of enzymes. In fat cells, glucose is used to power reactions that synthesize some fat types and have other purposes. Glycogen is the body's "glucose energy storage" mechanism, because it is much more "space efficient" and less reactive than glucose itself.
On the Windhexe: ''An engineer could not have invented this,'' Winsness says. ''As an engineer, you don't try anything that's theoretically impossible.''

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nick c
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Re: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamera

Unread post by nick c » Sun Feb 15, 2015 9:06 am

Chromium6 wrote:Did Jaynes ever discuss gut-bacteria? It may have been after his time.
It does not matter if it was after his time. Unicellular plants and animals display some small degree of awareness (reaction to external stimuli) as do all living things.
Awareness is not consciousness, in fact awareness has little to do with consciousness.
Within the context of Jaynes' work, human subjective consciousness is an abstract structure which arises from language, specifically the use of metaphors and analogies.
Note: This thread is not about a general discussion of consciousness (with all participants having differing unspecified definitions of such) but rather a discussion of Jaynes' work.

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Re: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamera

Unread post by Chromium6 » Sun Feb 15, 2015 8:53 pm

nick c wrote:
Chromium6 wrote:Did Jaynes ever discuss gut-bacteria? It may have been after his time.
It does not matter if it was after his time. Unicellular plants and animals display some small degree of awareness (reaction to external stimuli) as do all living things.
Awareness is not consciousness, in fact awareness has little to do with consciousness.
Within the context of Jaynes' work, human subjective consciousness is an abstract structure which arises from language, specifically the use of metaphors and analogies.
Note: This thread is not about a general discussion of consciousness (with all participants having differing unspecified definitions of such) but rather a discussion of Jaynes' work.
Well, in my prior post, I meant "conciousness" in terms Cristof Koch to be specific. I'm not too familar with Jaynes' works but will catch up.

http://christofkoch.com/my-books-and-papers/

Anyway in hypoglycemia, the human mind loses higher reasoning-self awareness skills first even though they may retain awareness of events around them. Auditory and sensory hallucinations have been pretty common during periods of famine among many people.

Prenatal Exposure to Famine Increases Risk of Schizophrenia
August 3, 2005
http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/195 ... zophrenia/
http://www.yluhovy.com/MML/genocide_revealed.html (The Ukrainian mass starvation lead many to hallucinations (from low blood-sugar)).
On the Windhexe: ''An engineer could not have invented this,'' Winsness says. ''As an engineer, you don't try anything that's theoretically impossible.''

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Re: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicamera

Unread post by ztifbob » Sun Mar 29, 2015 4:02 pm

Great thread, thanks for posting. Like Velekovsy it may be better to look at the wide angle view of Jayanes. He is a major ground breaker and lots of honing and in fill may be in order. Besides the folks assosciated with Janyes you might find through the Janyes Society there is also writer/researcher Ian McGilchrist who covering the same territory with fresh eyes. See:

http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com

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