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Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited

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For three decades I have been enthralled by the ideas put forth in Julian Jaynes's "The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and have been waiting in vain (until now) for a follow-up volume. "Reflections On the Dawn of Consciousness" is a collection of incisive essays by Julian Jaynes himself and by others, commenting on and extending his previously published work.

Even after thirty years I cannot say that I feel that I have fully accepted (or, perhaps, fully understood) all aspects of Jaynes's theories about the eruption of consciousness just a few millennia ago, but I do believe he provided a very strong case for the reality of the bicameral mind and its role in providing the auditory hallucinations which were interpreted as the voices of gods in ancient times. Kuijsten's book reinforces these points. Although "Reflections On the Dawn of Consciousness" could be read independently (and as an introduction to Jaynes's work), it will probably be most appreciated by those familiar with Jaynes's book. Neither volume provides what might be called "light reading," but both are intensely thought-provoking.

I particularly enjoyed the fairly detailed biographical information about J. Jaynes which was included in several of the essays. The technical essays aren't all necessarily accessible to everyone who's read and understood "Origin", though many are. Anyone fascinated and moved by "Origin" will find much of interest in this collection, though not everyone will find appeal in exactly the same things. I'd buy it again.

An indispensible resource for ideas on consciousness, religion, and theory of ancient civilizations. Includes various authors including some important but lesser known articles by Julian Jaynes himself. Interdiscliplinary, insightful, provocative, in the original spirit of Jaynes' seminal work, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, but goes well beyond mere support and evidence of that work. Contains profuse notes and bibliographies for each article.

In the seventies a largely unknown Princeton academic by the name of Julian Jaynes published a book with the most leaden title imaginable: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It was, and is, an extraordinary book, which playfully announces an utterly preposterous premise: that human beings acquired consciousness less than 3000 years ago, that it was a cultural rather than a physiological development, and this cultural acquisition either led to, or was prompted by, a deterioration in the previously prevailing human mental configuration which, in a nutshell, involved hallucinating gods out of the effigies of fallen leaders and was, more or less, schizophrenic in nature. You read that right: human civilisation got past the point of the Iliad courtesy of imaginary voices.

Having announced that absurd premise, Jaynes' book then impishly, wittily, elegantly but always compellingly, set out to justify it and, while it did not revolutionise the fields on which it expressed opinions (and there were many, including anthropology, psychiatry, linguistics, epistemology, biology and philosophy) - which is what it would have needed to do to gain widespread acceptance - Julian Jaynes' outrageous theory has proved surprising elusive of its critics. Only philosopher Ned Block has had a really good go at it, and the consensus is that his efforts have largely been in vain.

Thus, and against all odds, Jaynes' theory hangs on, long after its progenitor's passing, and still attracts the odd furtive glance from the establishment: Dan Dennett gave admiring if qualified support, and Richard Dawkins was at least sufficiently moved to mention it in his The God Delusion, even if by all appearances he hadn't really read or thought about it in any great detail.

Jaynes' book is interesting not only in its own right, but also because it is such a fantastic example of the operation of scientific paradigms in the sense identified by Thomas Kuhn. Jaynes isn't properly credentialised at all - he was never tenured and only received his Ph.D. late in life and apparently only then almost by accident - and his theory flies in the face of the accumulated wisdom of so many unrelated research programmes that it is no wonder it has never been taken entirely seriously. Note that, pace Karl Popper, nor has it been humiliatingly dismantled or falsified - it has, for the most part, been quietly ignored, the traditions that it challenges not being particularly "in crisis"; the questions which Jaynes answers so much more convincingly (why did the ancients bury their dead with food and possessions? Why did they have such a visceral, apparently delusional, affection to gods? What made the ancients believe they were engaging in conversations with beings who weren't there?) are ones which the prevailing paradigms simply don't feel the need to ask, or are happy to cast off with a shrug of the shoulders. (Dawkins: religious people are simply deluded: Jaynes: as a matter of fact, back in the day this may have literally been the case).

Again, Jaynes' failure to attract attention - to not even get an audience - is what Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions suggests tends to happen when an internally robust theory is challenged from outright left field in such a way.

So, especially now he's dead, we can expect Jaynes' book and the small fame he acquired to wither on the vine - but not if Marcel Kuijsten has any say in the matter. Kuijsten's an enthusiastic adherent of Jaynes' and is doing what he can in this present volume to keep the flame alive. He's retrieved a few odds and sods from Jaynes' unpublished papers and has invited a few like-minded souls to contribute further thoughts on the implications of Jaynes' work, particularly in light of subsequently published neurological research which Kuijsten tells us (without a lot of detail) supports and confirms Jaynes' theories.

Kuijsten has a delicate balance to trike: on one hand he needs to bolster the delicate superstructure of the theory by setting a solid platform of academically robust support for it; on the other, to avoid seeing sycophantic and credulous he needs to subject the theory to constructive criticism, but without making it look like an obvious lemon.

The trouble is he manages neither. Jaynes' own pieces are short and largely restate material already put more elegantly in the original book. The new third-party material he's got doesn't really develop Jaynes' work,and the more thoughtful pieces tend to be the most equivocal about Jaynes' theory, and are yet riven with qualifications and distracted by irrelevant reservations about the theory itself. Missing are new contributions from the very two world renowned academics who have previously expressed views: Dennett and Block.

In a nutshell, if you haven't read the Jaynes' original, you definitely should; until you do this book won't be much use to you; if you have, I'm not sure this collection will get you a whole lot further down the track.

For completists only.

Olly Buxton

If you are interested in Julian Jaynes's theory in particular or the topics of the origin of the modern mind and human history in general, "Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness" is a must read and will make an excellent addition to your collection. I enjoyed this book's multidisciplinary approach, with discussion of Jaynes's theory by scholars from the fields of psychology, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, ancient history, and neuroscience, as well as a captivating biography of Julian Jaynes.

I've been looking forward to reading this for a while. It is worth buying just for the short essays by Jaynes himself which are very interesting and represent the more speculative of his ideas. Also, there is a summary of where Jaynes' ideas were headed in his unwritten next work which is also very worth reading. As always, I'm surprised Jaynes' work hasn't recieved more attention but perhaps this book will change that (and this book also gives tentative explanations why it has recieved so little attention). Very worth reading if you have already read Jaynes' work. Otherwise i'd buy that first.

What was pretty nearly inscrutable to many readers of Jaynes's =TOOCITBOTBM= is made no less so in certain sections of this collection of articles by Jaynes himself as well as others. (The last one on the developmental history of Chinese pictograms was numbing much of the way.)

BUT (and this is a very =big= "but") if one will read from the bottom of p. 48 to the bottom of p. 49, the last graph on p. 90 and the first on p. 91, "The Problem of Agency" on pp. 204-205, most of p. 291, and the "General Bicameral Paradigm" on pp. 388-389; one =will= "get it."

And in getting it, he or she may experience something like a "life-changing" or "transcendental experience." Because what Jaynes really figured out is little less than how those who really are conscious continue to make the rules of order for those who aren't.

Lest one believe after reading =TOOCITBOTBM= that the bicameral era is "over and done," =Reflections...= (if read carefully) will make it clear that we are merely in transition. We are moving from outright bicamerality towards something like "post-modern, rational empiricism." But as most freshman philosophy and critical thinking professors know, we have surely not arrived there.

Any clinical psychologist who paid attention in class -- and to his first ten patients -- knows that The Problem at the dawn of the second millennium since the first Christmas is one of existential truth vs. comfortable fiction. And that we're all in a footrace to see if enough people =will= arrive at Jaynes's definition of "consciousness" before the authoritarian automatons either blow us up, flood the place or cook us all.

Man may now be capable of searching for, identifying, processing and determining the accuracy of the evidence, but he rarely does so. In fact, most of us continue to seek the various voices of authority in our culture to tell us what to do. (Do you vote because you really =know= the candidate? Have you been sleeping in the same bedroom with them for the past 20 years? Or do you vote on the basis of sound bites either fitting or flying in the face of your unconscious prejudices?)

Jaynes understood that those slaves kept pulling those ten-ton blocks of stone up those ramps on the sides of pyramids because nothing else occured to them, given the unquestioned but very much "heard" truths of their culture. What he didn't say (because it was way too hot a topic in the mid-'70s?) was that we're still too busy pulling blocks up the sides of commercial pyramids of one sort or another to notice =why=.

That neither one of these books won the Pulitzer Prize when Jack Miles's =God, A Biography= did is no mystery to me. =G,AB= makes some extremely significant points, but only to those capable of grasping them. Jaynes and his followers are making even more significant points, but there are many -- including the "voices" -- who probably prefer that stuff like this remain locked away with that "lost ark" in some big warehouse full of well-hidden secrets.

An excellent book - required reading for anyone interested in the origin of consciousness, the history of religion, or Jaynes's bicameral mind theory and its many modern-day implications.

Since Julian Jaynes (RIP) wrote his classic "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", further evidence in support of Jaynes's theory has come to light. Notably, the study of Chinese culture and specifically the evolution of their "personation" ceremonies.

Not only does this book cover this, but it covers other academics' thought regarding Jaynes's hypothesis. The collection of essays, and the simple fact of the support that Jaynes has had from respectable academics is itself impressive.

Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness explains, extends, and expands many of Julian Jaynes's most provocative ideas. For readers who finished The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and wondered 'What comes next?', this collection provides answers. Gathering together both additional writings by Jaynes himself, along with thoughtful essays by scholars from a wide range of disciplines, the book both explores ways in which Jaynes's thought can be applied in specific fields of study and serves as a testimony to the centrality of the issue of consciousness to all fields of intellectual endeavor. This worthy sequel to Jaynes's original book has been a long time coming, but the wait has been worth it