I vividly remember when Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind came out in 1977, and the rave reviews it got (the bloody thing was nominated for the National Book Award!); I thought then, and continue to think, that it is as prime an example of crackpottery as The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which came out a couple of years later to similar acclaim. I was lured into reading Scott Alexander’s review because he started so winningly, saying it has “only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind.” Thus suckered in, I read and enjoyed the whole thing, but wouldn’t have thought of it as LH material except for this excursus:
Jaynes partisans are able to come up with a few anthropological works suggesting that the minds of primitive people are pretty weird, and I believe that, but they don’t seem quite as weird as Jaynes wants them to be. So the question becomes whether we would notice if some people worked in a pre-bicameral and pre-conscious way.
I’m tempted to answer “yes, obviously”, but for the counterargument, see this Reddit thread.
I think I’m very different from most people because of one main thing. I never thought with language. Ever. I moved to Canada when I was 2 from Asia, and have been basically been around English speakers my whole life. I’m in my twenties now and I can speak it relatively well, and can understand every single word. However, growing up, I never ever thought with language. Not once did I ever think something in my mind with words like “What are my friends doing right now?” to planning things like “I’m going to do my homework right after watching this show.” I went through elementary school like this, I went through Highschool like this, I went through University like this…and I couldnt help but feel something was off about me that I couldnt put my hand on. Just last year, I had a straight up revalation, ephiphany….and this is hard to explain…but the best way that I can put it is that…I figured out that I SHOULD be thinking in language. So all of a sudden, I made a conscious effort to think things through with language. I spent a years time refining this new “skill” and it has COMPLETELY, and utterly changed my perception, my mental capabilities, and to be frank, my life. I can suddenly describe my emotions which was so insanely confusing to me before. I understand the concept that my friends are still “existing” even if they’re not in site by thinking about their names. I now suddenly have opinions and feelings about things that I never had before. What the heck happened to me? I started thinking in language after not doing so my whole life. It’s weird because I can now look back at my life before and see just how weird it was. Since I now have this new “skill” I can only describe my past life as …. “Mindless”… “empty”….. “soul-less”…. As weird as this sounds, I’m not even sure what I was, If i was even human, because I was barely even conscious. I felt like I was just reacting to the immediate environment and wasn’t able to think anything outside of it. It’s such a strange time in my life. It feels like I just found out the ultimate secret or something. …..Can anyone relate, or understand what Im saying? Can anyone explain what is happening to me? I have no idea where to even post this but this has been on my mind ever since I’ve been able to think about it.
This guy thinks he “barely” had consciousness (in the Jaynesian sense), and it took him however many years to notice this about himself. It was just another universal human experience you can miss without realizing it! And notice how it was the culturally learned knowledge that other people worked differently which shifted him to the normal equilibrium. So maybe if there was some tribe like this somewhere, it would be easy to miss.
I confess I can’t quite wrap my head around what it would mean not to “think with language,” but (assuming the poster is sincere and accurate) it’s certainly interesting, and I pass it along for what it’s worth.
I’ve never been sure what people mean when they say they ‘think with language.’ Is an architect designing a building thinking with language, or is he imagining three-dimensional shapes in his mind, and how they fit together? Did Beethoven think in language, or was he imagining sounds and their relationships? Just the other evening I idled away a few minutes doing a sudoku, and I wouldn’t say I was thinking in language but mentally imagining which numbers were allowed in a space and which were not. I don’t see how language comes into it.
If I were trying to parse a legal document I suppose I would be thinking in language, but surely there are many example of thinking that don’t involve language.
Or maybe I’m missing the point here. Clarification welcome.
Not thinking in words is quite widespread (my wife, for instance, doesn’t). I wish I had a sense of the proportions, but I don’t, but in any case non-verbal thinkers are often just as astonished to find out their form of human consciousness is not universal. Food for thought!
I recall this came up before. Here and here, but maybe yet another time too.
Me, I slipped into thinking in words at some point when I was a kid, and quickly shed off the habit, with a bit of an effort. It made thinking very cumbersome. I don’t remember very well what it was like, or I’d share it to help answer David L’s question.
P.S. I wouldn’t touch books like Jaynes’s or Zukav’s, but I find them repellent in somewhat different ways.
Is there a joke lurking here? I mean, given that “primitive people” are by definition non-WEIRD (in the sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias) and Alexander is certainly aware of the ongoing discussion of the ways in which studies of subjects from WEIRD societies should not be presumed to automatically scale up to the entire human species.
Is it commonly accepted that certain universals underly different ways of thinking? E.g.
1. Events or sense perceptions can be correlated and sorted.
2. Learning is possible.
3. Manipulation of symbols usefully precedes manipulation of real world entities.
4. In order to achieve objectives, both individual and cooperative effort may be required.
If the laws governing the universe were different, e.g., causality or time itself were different or e.g., physical laws changed rapidly with time or location, or could be altered by thoughts or actions, then a different basis for thinking would be necessary.
I think the article is itself unfortunately somewhat tainted by the Jaynesian drivel.
In talking about “theory of mind” as a culture-bound thing you are actually taught by your parents, he is not using the term in its normal sense at all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
Lacking “theory of mind” in this sense is a pathological state, not a cultural thing: all normal adult human beings have it, just as all normal adult human beings have language.
I have never heard of a culture in which there was no concept of deliberate deception, and the concept of deliberate deception entails having a theory of mind.
He also uses “hallucination” in a highly odd way. I had an imaginary friend as a child, but I was never under the impression that he was real in the sense my parents or siblings were. I also believe that God answers my prayers (sometimes) but have yet to hear him actually talking to me. I think I’m fairly mainstream in this … indeed, even the more enthusiastic of my coreligionists seem to regard actual hearing of the voice of God as something worthy of particular note, not an everyday occurrence. To use “hallucination” in the way the article does is just antireligious polemic, not making any actual point about anything.
However, he puts me in mind of an Argentine psychiatrist I once knew in London. She was an altogether admirable person, though almost completely lacking in a sense of humour. I remember her talking about the time Rastafarians first arrived in any numbers in the UK, and how there was a great tendency to misdiagnose them as schizophrenic before the penny dropped that hearing voices and seeing visions is in fact a cultural norm for Rastafarians. “Nowadays”, she said earnestly, “we don’t diagnose Rastafarians as schizophrenic unless other Rastafarians agree that they’ve been acting oddly.” It immediately struck me that wearing a suit and tie probably qualifies …
That sounds to me like the “inner voice”. I just learned about this a few days ago, it’s summarized well here:
https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/inner-voice.htm
I don’t have an inner voice and I’m surprised that it’s an actual thing. I don’t think I could learn to have one either.
And I recently discovered that some people imagine things by seeing pictures inside their head, which I don’t. Turns out that most people see the pictures. (If you aren’t sure which group you are in: Imagine a horse galloping past you. Now, is it galloping to the right or the left? If your answer is “Huh?” then you don’t see the pictures.)
As for consciousness, a lot of people are studying it but I think nobody really has a good idea of what it is. Or even if there’s an “it” there. A lot of what people say seems to be trying to explain why humans are better than other animals.
@DE: There’s also Everett writing about the Pirahã matter-of-factly seeing and talking to ghosts in broad daylight, which he couldn’t see or hear. With Everett, though, I never know how much he’s exoticizing the Pirahã.
I don’t think in language either. I find it bizarre when people assert to do that. Maybe in my middle age I’ve begun to “think in language” a little, but my fundamental thought process has nothing to do with language.
@Y:
The normal way to greet somebody sitting quietly alone in Kusaal is to say Nɛ sɔnsiga “(Blessing) on the conversation”, the same greeting as you would use to greet a group of people talking together. This is because a person sitting alone is assumed to be (silently) conversing with their own win “spiritual individuality, genius.” I’ve always imagined this as describing essentially the experience of just thinking your own thoughts to yourself, but that could be just my own cultural preconceptions. I suppose that at the very least it does illustrate how different cultures may express the same experiences in very different ways.
People describe talking to kikiris “tutelary spirits” too; and there are also supposed to be hostile kikiris in the bush which deliberately lead wanderers astray, and whose feet are attached backwards to confuse trackers. They sound pretty corporeal. Some sources describe them as “invisible”, but I suspect that this is some sort of oversimplification introduced to smooth over the disconnect between two very different worldviews.
There was some discussion of closely related topics around here.
Something in all that reminded me of James Hogg’s grandfather being one of the last people to meet fairy folk in Ettrick, and being told by them that they were flitting (I think because there were too many people about).
And yet that is sort of relevant, because I don’t believe that 18th century Scots had no idea of consciousness, and yet there does seem to be an era before which people sometimes had vivid encounters with fairy folk, and after which they mostly didn’t.
David E: I’ve never seen an imaginary friend, but I have seen the monster which lived in the cupboard in my gramma’s spare room, although a few years later it mostly looked like a roll of old carpet…
I feel like I don’t really know whether I think in language or not and in fact don’t actually understand the question “do you or don’t you think in language.” Outside of contexts where the language is explicit because I’m ruminating about what to say in a hypothetical conversation and/or thinking about what to write, at least. And of course there’s not a particularly clear line between “thinking” in some narrow-scope sense and “whatever my brain is generally doing that I am aware of when I am either conscious or dreaming.”
@David L I idled away a few minutes doing a sudoku, and I wouldn’t say I was thinking in language but mentally imagining which numbers …
And didn’t you name the numbers? You might point at cells (with a finger, or mentally, or by eye movement) rather than internally voicing ‘if this cell is a …, that cell must be …’; but how do you “think” the contents of the cell? If you don’t voice them you might imagine shape ‘7’ — but that’s just as much symbolic thought as saying ‘seven’. Do you visualise seven swans swimming in the cell?
Did Beethoven think in language, or was he imagining sounds and their relationships?
I can call to mind long passages of music. (Don’t count myself as a composer/no comparison to Beethoven.) And yes that recall involves no words. “their relationships” is a tricky question: Beethoven would know that sound-sequence is a ‘plagal cadence’. It’s a compartmentalised/symbolic thought, whether or not the actual words go through his head alongside the music.
As @JWB describes, “whatever my brain is generally doing” is in words. The only way I can stop the words is concentrating hard on a complex passage of music. Increasingly I find the only composer whose music is demanding enough, is Bach. (Or Beethoven, Shostakovich honouring Bach.)
As for consciousness, a lot of people are studying it but I think nobody really has a good idea of what it is. Or even if there’s an “it” there.
Except in its crasser meanings – as awareness of the kind that an anaesthetist interrupts, for example – consciousness is overripe for removal from our inventory of what there is. Let’s expunge persons, while we’re at it. Together these notions remain responsible for ruinous confusion, and reams of futile philosophastry.
From the review [**] Jaynes (writing in the 1970s) was both a psychology professor at Princeton and an expert in ancient languages, so the perfect person to make this case. He reviews various samples of Bronze Age writing from before and after this period, and shows that the early writings have no references to mental processes, and the later ones do.
I thought most early writing (that’s survived) is administrative records and accounts. I wouldn’t expect to find there references to mental processes/that’s no evidence early Bronze Age peoples had no theory of mind.
That the (non-interpolated) text of Iliad locates Achilles’ fears in his guts rather than a construct of ‘mind’ strikes me as no evidence for anything. I wouldn’t locate my mental life any particular place; I’m not aware of my brain ‘buzzing’ any more than any other part of my anatomy.
Jaynes argues the Bronze Age was obsessed with burials and the afterlife (eg the Pyramids) …
Very little of Bronze Age artefacts have survived. Only the Pharaohs/rulers could command enough resources to build permanent memorials. If people were obsessed with other stuff that got memorialised only in now-decayed or only-ceremonial forms, we wouldn’t know. Would there be celebrations of new life/Spring? What traces would those leave?
[**] I agree with @Hat, I don’t think I’d stomach (hah!) the actual book for more than a few pages.
I probably should have said “whatever my mind is doing” rather than unconsciously parroting the modern assumption that the “mind” is physically situated in the physical brain rather than in the spleen or gall bladder or whatever some other some less modern and more Homeric (or third-thing) civilization may have hypothesized.
consciousness is overripe for removal from our inventory of what there is
Well, one way of solving a problem is indeed to assert that it does not exist.
The Jaynesian thesis seems to boil down to: other cultures used very different metaphors to express some things from those we are accustomed to use ourselves nowadays. Ergo, the things in question must be mere illusions.
Well, one way of solving a problem is indeed to assert that it does not exist.
Well, where’s the onus? One way to guarantee a philosophical problem’s perdurance is to insist at all costs on a dubious ontology, with a show of Cartesian certainty buttressed by “common sense”.
@David L I idled away a few minutes doing a sudoku, and I wouldn’t say I was thinking in language but mentally imagining which numbers …
@AntC: And didn’t you name the numbers?
Not consciously, no. I see which numbers are permitted and which are not, but they are simply a set of nine symbols. I visualize them but don’t need to name them.
May it please the court, I would like to amend my testimony. I just did a sudoku and realized that if I am figuring out which number is missing from a row or a square, then I mentally count them out. But if I am looking at patterns of numbers in two adjacent squares, says, to figure out where to place a number in a third square, then I do not name them. I think.
Basically, what I wanted to write. Except that JWB very well formulated this: ‘“whatever my brain is generally doing that I am aware of when I am either conscious or dreaming.”’ and I tried, but was not able to do that:-)
Instead I began thinking what happens when I formulate (in words) a line I’m goint to type and then type it – and when I just type it.
Can we say that in the former case I first think it, then subvocalise, then type and in the second case I first think and then type? Or in the former case I first think (in words) and then type and in the second I think by typing? There does not seem to be much difference between typing and subvocalising…
I’m not sure if I am aware of any meaning of consciousness other than what Noetica calls “crasser”, “awareness” etc. “Awareness” is hardly less problematic.
Accordingly, I don’t quite understand people who explain that some people or animals have it and other do not.
I find that for me the process of formulating (in words) a line I’m going to type and then typing it is not that straightforward. It often happens that I think that I have a sentence clear in my mind, but when I type I find that there are still decisions to be made about the best word to use or details of the sentence construction.
I think it was Steven Pinker who suggested that we think in ‘mentalese’ and translate into words. This made sense to me as in my example above, and when in speaking I choose between words to express the shade of meaning that I want to convey, which implies that the thought was not already in words.
Sometimes I think via “inner monologue/dialogue.” It doesn’t mean I hear voices in my head; rather, I simply talk or dispute with myself, sometimes silently, sometimes in a whisper. But I’ve always regarded this mode of thinking as shallow and childish. Proper thinking, in my mental world, is deeper than language and original thought has to be translated into human language.
Pinker may be wrong about many things but his “mentalese” theory makes sense to me. Even if it’s flawed, Pinker is on home turf here. He only gets in big trouble when he ventures into alien fields like statistics.
The post is not absolutely crazy.
Obviously, a prson like me or JWB can use language in thinking more or less (cf. Y: “I slipped into thinking in words at some point when I was a kid, and quickly shed off the habit”). We even can speculate which particular skills may benefit from doint it “more” [than I do currently] or in some optimal combination.
It’s the experience as a whole which is unfamiliar.
I see Alexander goes in hard against Jaynes focuses heavily on “bicamerality” . I suppose in 1977 left-brain : right-brain was a big buzz. I remember in 1980’s suffering Management Training that traditional management over-emphasises right brain, whereas winning hearts needed left-brain appeals. (Or was it the other way round? It was total bollox, anyway.)
Research on brain bicamerality has validated the ‘bollox’ assessment AFAICT. Alexander: recent research has not been kind to any theories too reliant on hemispheric lateralization.
Are there population-wide correlations between left-handedness and … anything? (Maybe difficulty in writing l-to-r scripts? Now that we’re all on keyboards, that’s probably disappeared.)
By the way, I meant to comment on the unusual word in this sentence: “A few years ago, someone rediscovered/invented tulpamancy, the idea of cultivating multiple personalities on purpose because it’s cool.” Never heard of it, but there’s a Wiktionary entry: “(neologism) The culture and practice of talking to tulpas (autonomous thoughtforms).” And tulpa is:
Tulpas (or at least Lynch’s take on the concept) feature prominently in the latest even-weirderer series of Twin Peaks.
When this matter was discussed previously, and some people were asking “How is it possible to think without language?”, I wanted to say “How is it possible to think with language? Does that mean you can’t think any faster than you can talk?”
I think (heh) for me it means my mind is continually throwing out verbalizations of whatever processes are going on (“whatever my brain is generally doing that I am aware of when I am either conscious or dreaming”) behind the scenes. If I’m in another language mode for whatever reason, those verbalizations may be in French, Spanish, or Russian (the usual suspects). I certainly don’t suppose my thought-activities (“whatever my brain is generally doing”) are carried on in language, but I also can’t imagine accessing them with my conscious mind without the aid of language. The phenomenon described in the Reddit thread is alien to me.
@LH but what about say, geometry problems? Solving them requires creativity and spatial imagination.
I use some language in doing jigsaw puzzles. For instance, “let’s group all the pieces with red over here.” The primary work of putting pieces together is not verbal.
I would agree that my mind is routinely throwing out verbal descriptions of what I’m doing, and some of those verbalizations may occasionally lead to recognitions, but the bulk of the processing work seems to be happening elsewhere, as far as I can tell.
@LH but what about say, geometry problems? Solving them requires creativity and spatial imagination.
I’m not very good at geometry problems.
When I think without words it’s
I also find it hard to say if I think in words. It feels more like I am thinking thoughts, then articulating them if needed.
One thing that strikes me, though, is that I will occasionally use concepts from a foreign language when thinking. This suggests that words and their semantics do have a reality in thinking. One example that I can think of is the Japanese term 迷惑 meiwaku, which can be translated into English as ‘to cause inconvenience, disturbance, trouble for others’. I personally do think in terms of meiwaku as a concept. Of course this is not a particularistic concept — I know it occurs in most, if not all, cultures — but is not linking them all into a single semantic concept an illustration of the role of words? And thinking in terms of avoiding meiwaku surely shows that our thoughts are expressed in ‘words’. Or perhaps this is just another case where it’s not possible to really know if we are thinking in words or not.
I always thought of “The Origin of Consciousness …” as one of those elaborate hoaxes which demand admiration for the ingenious and intricate nature of its construction. Like “The White Goddess” or “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”.
I recently saw an article speculating that, because ancient texts, such as Homer, don’t have a word for “blue”, that indicates that Bronze Age people had a visual system more limited in wavelength than modern people.
The book is like that, but blown up to gargantuan proportions.
(Although I now know that the backstory of HBHG is a bit weirder than I originally thought.)
This reminds me of some passages from Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir. In addition to baboon studies, he also had various interactions with local Kenyans.
I tried trimming this down. It’s not until now that I realize how very stream-of-consciousness the narrative is.
There’s another couple of paragraphs on the same topic many chapters later:
I note that Sapolsky did his field work in the 1970s through the 1990s. I don’t know how much Kenya may have changed in the ~3 decades since.
Oh, that wasn’t what I was expecting after such a build-up. I was expecting (what might be the other half) “she hears the wrong voices” — that is, channeling personas/deities that aren’t usually voiced/don’t usually speak/don’t say stuff like that.
Is it not only that killing goats is a male prerogative, but also that there’s care and ritual in the butchering? Presumably in order to cook/eat the goat(?)
1. I seem to remember part of Jaynes’ argument was that a genetic predisposition to hearing and obeying an imaginary God’s or chief’s voice conveyed an advantage to larger groupings, enabling them to cooperate, settle disputes without collapsing in to anarchy, etc., offsetting the evolutionary disadvantage of missing the odd predator because busy taking a call from God.
2. You could probably say that all human non-extended-family groupings rely on some sort of mass psychosis (or, if one prefers, shared myths) in order to function. In this case, the mad one is the one whose individual psychosis overrides his (ok, this was a she, but I think numbers favour the male here) allegiance to the “normal” mass psychosis. If you prefer a more precise metaphor, if members of a society are like coupled cars on a track, it is easy for members to see when a car has uncoupled and left the track.
In Sapolsky’s smug anecdote Rhoda’s “She’s crazy. Can’t you just see from how she acts?” seems pretty justifiable to me. I don’t find Sapolsky’s posturing quite as amusing he he himself seems to. No doubt he enjoys gently mocking (as he supposes) the ways of amusing foreigners in general. Such people are common.
Schizophrenia is common in Africa, and the provision for dealing humanely with those afflicted is generally minimal. Deep anthropological analysis in aid of diagnosis only called for if you subscribe to R D Laing bollocks about such things. These things are really not difficult, Sapolsky.
I was trying to remember who Rhoda was, so I found the paragraph that introduces her:
So while she had more than one perspective on the world, she had no actual training in diagnostics, and Sapolsky had no reason to think that she might have a sophisticated theory of insanity.
I have a vague memory of watching a video of Sapolsky describing some sort of diagnostic test for clinical sociopathy. And he looked at the test, and applied it to himself, and found that he himself met quite a few of the criteria.
I’m not sure if the conclusion was that the tests are problematic, or that he himself is problematic, or both.
Yeah, I don’t think many groups of people, whatever their views on magic, voices, and the like, have much trouble identifying when somebody is having a severe psychotic break in public.
@Brett, there are cultures where such people are thought to be possessed by spirits, they go to the [cleric] the cleric reads [holy text], the person screams, and the spirit gets expelled from his victim’s body. Then the person is fine.
I’m pretty sure that even in such cultures there are people who are not thought to be possessed by spirits but are considered just plain crazy. People are not blind or stupid. (I trust you are not under the delusion that all crazy people could be cured by a shaman saying the right words.)
a person sitting alone is assumed to be (silently) conversing with their own win “spiritual individuality, genius.” I’ve always imagined this as describing essentially the experience of just thinking your own thoughts to yourself
One Ainu word for “think” is yay-nu, literally “listen to oneself.” Worth trying every once in a while.
When I think without words it’s
(tips hat)
Jaynes is obviously ridiculously wrong, but wrong in interestingly thought-provoking ways.
His theories would make a great concept for a science fiction novel. (Indeed, I imagine that they already have done, though I can’t immediately think of an example.)
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, IIRC.
AFAIK the Kusaasi have (or used to have, prior the the European invasions) no concept of spirit possession. (The relevant Bible verses translate “he is possessed by an evil spirit” as “a bad kikirig follows him”, leveraging the translationese use of kikirig, generally rendered “fairy” in the local Ghanaian English, for “devil, demon”, a concept absent from the traditional Kusaasi worldview.)
On the other hand, they have some perfectly good words for “mad”, readily reconstructable to proto-Western Oti-Volta.
@drasvi: I have mentioned a few times that I took Magic, Witchcraft, and the Spirit World in college. One of the things we discussed was how forms of spirit contact (Professor James Howe’s preferred term) were extremely culturally bound. Whether people were possessed, or had visions, or spoke in tongues, was determined by their societal environment. Certain forms of atypical, seemingly irrational behavior were accepted as (more or less) normal occurrences, but generic schizoid behavior was not. Frequently, the “allowed” episodes provided outlets for people (often low-status women) to express dissatisfaction with their circumstances and to have their issues addressed, without upsetting the existing power structure. Someone who is possessed by a demon (or abducted by an alien) is most typically stressed, pained, searching for fulfillment and affirmation. When the community accepts the reality of the condition and comes together to assist and to treat the possession, that confirms the sufferer’s importance and attractiveness and gives them time to recuperate and develop arrangements for further, more mundane assistance in the future.
even in such cultures there are people who are not thought to be possessed by spirits but are considered just plain crazy
The usual Standard Arabic word for “crazy” is literally “possessed by jinn” (majnūn). The current use of the term doesn’t even automatically entail a belief in jinn; but most people do, and the semantic shift suggests that the distinction was not considered particularly important.
Are you saying that people who speak Arabic do not acknowledge the existence of insanity in the medical sense (schizophrenia, paranoia, etc.) — it’s all just jinns, and can be dealt with by some sort of exorcism? Because I find that hard to believe. Needless to say, etymology is neither destiny nor semantics.
Of course not! But it is a clue about the past. No one had a concept of schizophrenia before the 20th century anyway, Arabic-speaking or not. Probably doctors in previous centuries would have drawn a distinction between “medical” insanity and possession (with schizophrenia falling squarely under the latter, obviously.) My hazy memories of premodern medical practice suggest that the former would involve humoral imbalances, to be treated by changes of diet or sleep patterns or music or the like. But most people aren’t doctors, and the generalisation of majnūn to “crazy” in general suggests that at some point they saw the distinction as just a pedantic detail.
Oh, OK, I didn’t realize you were talking only about the past — thanks for clarifying!
And he looked at the test, and applied it to himself, and found that he himself met quite a few of the criteria.
I’m not sure if the conclusion was that the tests are problematic, or that he himself is problematic, or both.
I don’t think it has to be either. It’s well-known that merely reading a list of the signs and symptoms of a specific mental disease tends to make the reader believe that they themselves have the condition in question.
Jaynes’s theories would make a great concept for a science fiction novel.
Harry Turtledove’s short story “Bluff” is specifically about this idea: the aliens turn out to have bicameral minds, but the situation is unstable and beginning to break down, starting with traders and soldiers who interact with other bicameral societies with different gods. After the story was published in Analog, Jaynes wrote to Turtledove saying he had liked the story and found that it represented his ideas well, to Turtledove’s considerable relief. Turtledove’s later fantasy novel Between the Rivers is based on a similar set of ideas, but without the external visiting-Earthman perspective of “Bluff”.
Back to the original topic.
Language production is a conscious activity. When you speak you are aware that you do. It is interesting because of the association between speech and awareness in the OP.
Whether it is unique in the concentration it requires, it is one activity you are always aware of.
Another fact (possibly related to this awareness) is that langage is either directed at someone or addressed by someone to you (I know, LH believes that language is not merely for communication, but I think he will agree that communication is an important part). It is interactive.
I also beleive it is recursive… No, I don’t associate “recursion” with Chomsky. I mean recursive in the sense: your choice of forms when it is not habitual/formulaic can be based on somewhat recursive calculations like “if I say this she’ll think that I think that I think that …”.
Daniel Everett, Don’t Look, There Are Snakes, p. xvi:
I have occasionally tried to figure out if there is a point in a recursion like he knows that she knows that … the dog is dead where both parties have exactly the same model of the other’s state of mind. Or is it like continued fractions where the infinite series can express an irrational or even transcendental number, but cutting it off at any stage leaves you with a rational number?
Does the result change if you assume that both parties are language and logic nerds like yourself and will model the outcome of the infinite series for themself and the other?
@lars
How good are you at remembering directions to an unfamiliar destination involving a number of direction changes? I do not mean “proceed at X compass bearing for a distance of N metres….” but “turn left at the second set of traffic lights…”. I suspect that the answer depends on “what are the consequences if I navigate incorrectly?” perhaps more than on your mapping or logical recursion abilities.
a recursion like he knows that she knows that …
Grice (talking of nerds) did some ur-quantification of this recursing/reciprocating in the cooperative principle. After only a few cycles, if he knows that she knows that he knows the dog is dead, she knows that he knows that she knows that the dog is dead, then both parties can infer all higher cycles of knowing-otherness. We presume each party can verify for themselves the liveness of the dog.
It works because a mind can’t keep secrets from itself — ex hypothesi, YMMV.
It gets trickier if one party is trying to deceive the other in some sort of double-bluff. But that’s for mutually promised undertakings/contracts, or for relying on some other’s claims, not independently verifiable facts about the world.
My lecturer in ‘mathematical political theory’ also was pioneering longitudinal quantification of ‘the iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma’, where if both parties know they’re going to go through the challenge repeatedly (but don’t know exactly how many times), they’ll in effect appear to be co-operating out of mutual interest. Which might or might not be a way to model ‘tactical voting’ in electoral systems with Proportional Representation. And for political aspirants who know the electorate will remember what they claimed last time. YPMV (Your Politician Might Vary.)
@pp, I’d probably be pretty bad at “random” sequences of turns, but this is more like “turn left and right at alternate corners until you see a dead dog”. I can do that, I think.
(In most cities, such a set of directions is a witness to the director not understanding the main grid. If I can tell someone “Go straight west to the Birmingham road and turn right, then straight north for 6 lights and you’ll be at the town hall” I feel that I’ve done something useful. My ex-wife hated when I did that, she preferred to construct a route from little local patches that she was confident in and was happy as long as each patch brought us “closer” to the goal in some sense — possibly just in the sense of being more confident that we could actually get there eventually — so going to some crossing of main roads out of the usual haunts was not on).
I’m squarely in the camp of putting thoughts in words when I’m thinking. Whether that’s the actual thinking process or some simultaneous translation from mentalese, I can’t tell. But I am able to solve purely visual problems (with my job, mostly where to put what graphic element on a powerpoint slide) by manipulating images in my head without talking to myself.
I do a lot of thinking in language, but that’s not my only mode of thinking. I remember a discussion I had with my mother when I was in elementary school about whether it was possible to think about certain kinds of things without forming them into words. (We did not come to any firm conclusions.) In any case, I have definitely observed the phenomenon of thinking in mentalese. Sometimes, I have a statement in my head, which feels like it is completely and explicitly laid out in words; however, when I then go to say or write it, it turns out that there are some pieces that my mentalese version had not completely specified, and which I need to decide on the fly as I speak or type.
I just ran across a post from 2010 quoting Tom Lubbock’s account of his brain tumor and consequent loss of control over speech and writing, which makes interesting reading in this context; a couple of bits:
That seems to be most of what I think.
The rest, though, is in images or motions/”muscle memory” (probably all with emotions attached – have I complained about the kolinahr fallacy recently…). For example, when I need to plan my movements because they’re of kinds I can’t leave to the cerebellum (climbing a tree, running down a muddy hill so I need to plan very fast where exactly to step…), there’s no language involved.
Supposedly yes: a recent and long history of fighting. In the West some 10% of the population are left-handed; there are more peaceful societies where there are only 5%; and there are warlike societies where the advantage of surprise that a left-handed fighter apparently has is so great that there are 20%.
This implies, BTW, that lefthandedness has, or comes with, a Darwinian disadvantage by default. I have no idea what that could be, and my source never brought this up.
That source was… something popularizing I read a long time ago. Sorry. :-/
I can read much faster than I can articulate, and there’s obviously language processing involved in that. Whether I can think in language faster than I can read I have no idea.
The immense progress of recent decades has replaced this by a tendency to dispense hydroxychloroquine…
That’s a bit of a matter of definition. Some people are capable of falling asleep while talking – in the middle of a sentence that suddenly turns into a random sequence of random, but normally articulated, words.
In my case, AFAIK, it only turns out that some of the pieces aren’t specified in the language I need to put this in – they’re simply in another, and I forgot to make sure I can translate them.
Some people are capable of falling asleep while talking …
Grandmother Tells a Ghost Story, with stage direction ‘grandmother goes to sleep’ about 1:40.
This implies, BTW, that lefthandedness has, or comes with, a Darwinian disadvantage by default.
According to what my wife said vs. what my daughter says, it’s a matter of chronic stress from being coerced into right-handed uniformity in many things from writing to which hand holds the knife when eating. (The tendency to coercion has diminished over time.) Statistics on right-handed and southpaw pitchers show that while the latter have a definite advantage when playing baseball, they don’t tend to live as long.
As I have often told my left-handed daughter, left-handed woman are all witches. (She seems OK with the idea.)
How globally widespread has that ever been, though?
It was certainly usual in my father’s day: he (also left-handed) was made to write right-handed, and he still does. It doesn’t seem to have done either his handwriting or his personality any particular damage, though.
Some people are capable of falling asleep while talking …
Presumably this depends on how boring you are. It puts me in mind of an exchange from Leo Rosten (I think) along the lines of
Patient: Doctor! You have to help me. I talk to myself all the time.
Doctor: I really wouldn’t worry about it. Lots of people talk to themselves. It’s quite normal.
Patient: But Doc, you don’t know what a nudnik I am!
Yes, it was universal in the West until quite recently, but my source’s claim spanned the globe and enough centuries for natural selection.
An interesting thread that I only just noticed. I think my responses are running a little long – and that’s with skipping a few where I wasn’t very sure what exactly I wanted to say…
And I recently discovered that some people imagine things by seeing pictures inside their head, which I don’t. Turns out that most people see the pictures. (If you aren’t sure which group you are in: Imagine a horse galloping past you. Now, is it galloping to the right or the left? If your answer is “Huh?” then you don’t see the pictures.)
Apparently it’s called “aphantasia”.
I heard that some people go very far in the other direction: their mental images are so vivid that they can almost confuse them for reality. I fortunately don’t seem to have this.
(In my case, the horse is galloping from behind, slightly to the right of me but roughly perpendicular to the right-left direction. Also, I think it might actually be trotting.)
That the (non-interpolated) text of Iliad locates Achilles’ fears in his guts rather than a construct of ‘mind’ strikes me as no evidence for anything. I wouldn’t locate my mental life any particular place; I’m not aware of my brain ‘buzzing’ any more than any other part of my anatomy.
There’s the infamous story (not sure how true) that the ancient Egyptians tried to preserve all the organs of a (high-status) dead person except the brain, because they thought that the brain isn’t actually used for anything and consequently wouldn’t be needed in the underworld.
AFAIK active thinking does seem to correlate with headaches, but this could easily be merely an artifact of cultural knowledge that thinking goes in the head.
IIRC fear, in particular, being placed in the guts (or thereabouts) is a common metaphor in many languages into the modern day, or at least into the 20th century. (In Russian it’s commonly the spleen, AFAIK.)
By the way, I meant to comment on the unusual word in this sentence: “A few years ago, someone rediscovered/invented tulpamancy, the idea of cultivating multiple personalities on purpose because it’s cool.” Never heard of it, but there’s a Wiktionary entry: “(neologism) The culture and practice of talking to tulpas (autonomous thoughtforms).”
Previously on LH.
Incidentally, when the review was written (June 2020) – and indeed when the linked comment was written (November 2020) – the phrase in brackets had read “magical creatures or imaginary friends”.
In January 2021, a practicing tulpamancer who really didn’t like this phrasing changed it to “thoughtforms capable of independent action, with a persistent personality and identity”; this was quickly reverted, and then rephrased again by the same (unregistered) contributor as “autonomous mental constructs with a persistent personality and identity”.
The current phrasing (which puts “thoughtforms” back in) dates from March 2023.
My ex-wife hated when I did that, she preferred to construct a route from little local patches that she was confident in and was happy as long as each patch brought us “closer” to the goal in some sense — possibly just in the sense of being more confident that we could actually get there eventually — so going to some crossing of main roads out of the usual haunts was not on
This is actually a not-necessarily-bad idea if you’re in a city that is not entirely built on a grid, such that local incongruencies in the grid can make a direct two-part route significantly longer and/or significantly more inconvenient.
In one route I commonly took in Izmaylovo (a relatively griddy bit of Moscow), going north and then west took me a good deal farther north than required; going west and then north took me a good deal farther south than required; and my usual route involved a complicated (and varying) combination of both westward and northward directions.
Of course if your city is not on a grid at all you’re often better off looking on a map anyway, because there could be a shortcut to your destination that is a lot shorter than the obvious route but that you wouldn’t necessarily think of because it goes in a non-obvious direction.
Sometimes, I have a statement in my head, which feels like it is completely and explicitly laid out in words; however, when I then go to say or write it, it turns out that there are some pieces that my mentalese version had not completely specified, and which I need to decide on the fly as I speak or type.
In my case, AFAIK, it only turns out that some of the pieces aren’t specified in the language I need to put this in – they’re simply in another, and I forgot to make sure I can translate them.
I think I’ve had both at various times? Certainly phrases from dreams can feel like that, but that’s a general tendency of dreams.
I’ve also noticed a few cases where the mental version included some grammatical specifications that were not actually represented in English. It’s a strange feeling to be assembling a sentence in English and have a strong impression that a particular adjective or verb should take feminine agreement.
(Side-note: English has it so nice with gender agreement that only shows up in third-person pronouns, and that with plenty of nonbinary options. In Russian you can’t say “Sam was nice” without specifying whether Sam was male, female, or neuter; Hebrew is the same except you don’t even get the neuter option.
I wonder if there are “nonbinary” West Africans who would prefer to be referred to with one of the nonhuman noun classes.)
I can read much faster than I can articulate, and there’s obviously language processing involved in that. Whether I can think in language faster than I can read I have no idea.
In my case I always assumed that I can, at least, think in language faster than I can articulate [note for comparison with further figures: the human articulatory limit is on the order of 300-500 wpm, though some exceptional cases can allow slightly higher speeds]. Whether I can think in language at least as fast as I can read, I have no idea.
The reason this is so confusing to me is that my reading (as far as I could tell) is, effectively, super-skimming: AFAICT it’s combining speed-reading techniques with skimming techniques to produce reading speeds approaching (and sometimes exceeding) 2000 wpm, but with skimming-level comprehension/retention (previously on LH; I think I might have mentioned it a few more times but I’m not sure how to search for that).
This means my brain probably gets away with not necessarily being able to directly process everything on the page by reconstructing the intermediate bits. (Obviously I can’t tell for sure, and obviously in any case there’s a ton of under-the-hood complexity that I can only vaguely approximate at.)
So I don’t actually know if I’m doing language processing at 2000 wpm (or faster) when I’m reading; presumably some place in my brain must be, but this might easily happen at a level well below that of conscious thought. I do seem to be able to think pretty fast, though.
The brain also just rots too fast.
Heraclitus supposedly: “A blow to the head can confuse a man’s thinking, a blow to the foot has no such effect, this cannot be due to an immortal soul.”
Yes, and strenuously trying to follow a conversation in a language I know just well enough for that gives me a localized headache – evidently in both frontotemporal lobes.
I wonder if there are “nonbinary” West Africans who would prefer to be referred to with one of the nonhuman noun classes.
Not in any language I know of*: referring to people with non-human concords is usually pejorative (unsurprisingly.) There’s also not a lot of point in it, with languages in which biological sex is completely irrelevant to grammatical gender anyway. It may be different in Chadic languages, but if they have gender at all, they don’t have a neuter that you could choose, anyway: just masculine and feminine.
In the Volta-Congo languages there tend to be lots of nouns in non-human classes that do refer to people, but they then take human-class agreement instead of the class-determined “grammatical gender” agreement; in Swahili, nouns referring to animals do this too. Swahili nouns placed in non-human classes secondarily, in order to produce affective senses like “dear little” or “lumbering great”, can take the corresponding class agreement, but even that is more usual with pejoratives.
Kusaal doesn’t have noun-class-based agreement any more, but only three of its seven morphological noun classes contain all sorts of nouns referring to people (and one of those probably got all its human-reference nouns through historical sound changes which led to them being thrown out of the original core “human-only” class); of the other four, three never refer to people, and the fourth is pejorative when used for people (typical human-reference members: “fool”, “coward”, “ugly person”, “slave.”)
* A tiny subset of all the West African languages that there are, though, of course.
…or… just temporal lobes, more likely.
Headaches aren’t pains in the lobes; the brain feels no pain.
No, but they’re pressure on the surrounding membranes, caused by swelling of the brain, which is in such cases caused by increased blood supply.
Jaynesian scholarship is not limited to one book written by Julian Jaynes that was published in 1976 but has involved coming on a half century of scholarship involving dozens of academics and researchers in various fields of study. The amount of evidence that has continued to accumulate in favor of his scientific theory is vast at this point. It’s not limited to a few examples from the anthropological record.
Jayne’s scientific theory is a set of testable and falsifiable hypotheses. He wasn’t interested in wild, irrational speculations. The whole point of his scholarship was to apply a broad scientific inquiry to an area of study that had largely been dismissed in science, that of consciousness. He came from a background in behavioral research and was dissatisfied with the state of science at the time.
https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/books/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/academic-scholarly-interest/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/critiques-of-jaynes-theory-a-general-pattern/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/critiques-and-responses/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/supporting-evidence/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/summary-of-evidence/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/blog/category/supporting-evidence/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/blog/julian-jaynes-theory/julian-jaynes-is-not-for-the-intellectually-fainthearted/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/blog/julian-jaynes-theory/falling-between-the-cracks-jayness-defiance-of-scholarly-conventions/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/blog/julian-jaynes-theory/the-need-to-acknowledge-bicameral-vestiges/
@Owlmirro – You quoted Sapolsky. I’m only vaguely familiar with him, but I’ll respond to the general topic. The specific quote is Sapolsky asking about how does someone in a non-Western society tell when a tribal person (on the extreme end of the non-WEIRD) is crazy. In talking to the healthcare workers in these places, they answered: “They just act crazy.” That indicates these people have not interrogated where they’ve received their own views, what has shaped them, which just makes them typically lacking in self and social awareness.
Of course, all of these highly educated healthcare workers are more Westernized than the average non-Westerner, and likely exhibit more WEIRD mentality and biases. Would they know what ‘crazy’ was if they hadn’t been taught Western categories, perceptions, and culture of what is deemed ‘crazy’? Yet in some non-Western populations, such as in parts of Africa, an individual talking to themselves is not deemed crazy, dangerous, or even odd; though they’d surely be diagnosed as schizophrenic if they were hospitalized.
In many cultures, voice-hearing is within the range of normal behavior, that is to say they have a readymade cultural explanation that fits into their cultural worldview. The anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, inspired by Julian Jaynes, researched voice-hearers in the United States and Ghana. Those in Ghana tended to hear voices that were friendly, kind, and helpful. Their voice-hearing was normalized as part of everyday experience and so was as generally positive and pro-social as talking to one’s family, friends, or neighbors. It was scary or freaky.
Daniel Everett, a linguist, has studied multiple tribal societies. He is most famous for his writings on the Piraha. He observed that among the Piraha there is no observed or recorded cases of depression, suicidality, or schizophrenia. Similarly, the nutritionist Mary Ruddick, in traveling around rural Africa, asked teachers about autism. The teachers stated that, though they knew what autism was, they had never seen it in any of their students. Such evidence indicates there is something cultural going on here, if people have different theories to explain it. We need to step outside of our own WEIRD social reality tunnel.
@bds
The local elaborated by “she hears voices at the wrong times”. Together with the impromptu goat butchering and the other extreme patternless and disruptive stuff, this was enough for the peer group or extended family to decide they could not provide sufficient care and dissuade or prevent her from injuring herself or another goat/human being (was she able to tell the difference and did her carers think she could?). It sounds like it was the call of her carers, and in any reasonable society (even WEIRD societies, even within the last 50 years were not always “reasonable”) she could obtain release and restitution for her ungentle handling when she calmed down and presented the case to an authority.
@PlasticPaddy – Those cultures were no longer fully non-WEIRD, much less traditional. They had already been influenced and disturbed by not only Westernization but modernization and industrialization, such as encroachment, poaching, conflict, environmental destruction, being pushed to marginal lands, introduction of new foods and drugs and diseases, etc. Traditional ways of dealing with diverse behaviors likely were already altered, compromised, or lost. The very presence of Western-style healthcare alone demonstrates that.
There are many cultures where possession or other altered states involve all kinds of behavior, occasionally violence without it being perceived according to WEIRD ‘madness’. In fact, many cultures, until they were Westernized, had no concept of ‘madness’ as such. Sometimes we have to go to historical records to see cultures prior to any Westernization or at least any significant Westernization. It’s hard, from the perspective of WEIRD bias, to take seriously what non-WEIRD was like prior to WEIRD globalization.
I’ll give another example. There was a Western travelogue of pre-revolutionary China. The author was specifically focused on religious Taoism. The practitioners would sometimes invoke possession by gods. It was considered risky as the gods were unpredictable and sometimes violent. There were incidents where people died. Yet apparently there was no WEIRD conception of insanity, whether or not there was an Asian conception. Anyway, it was considered understandable and acceptable within social norms.
Think about that, with China being one of the oldest and most advanced civilizations, but with little WEIRDness there until recent times. Then again, there is another factor. Thomas Talhelm has co-authored work on WEIRD, but also on mentalities in general. One famous study he did found that Chinese in the wheat-growing north were analytical and individualistic like Westerners, as opposed to holistic and communal like in the rice-growing south. What is interesting is that, in dietary research, wheat has been linked as an exacerbating factor of schizophrenia.
This is one of the many complex ways that WEIRD bias gets into everything. It’s not only a bias of ideas, beliefs, values, culture, thinking patterns, etc. It’s a difference of sociocultural environment in numerous ways. This is hard for us WEIRDos to see because we take all of the factors that make us WEIRD as normal. And increasingly because of Westernization, the rest of the world is being WEIRDified as well, eliminating counter-evidence. For example, Chinese (like Japanese) in urban centers, even in the south, are both eating more wheat and testing as more analytical and individualistic.
Maybe it would be helpful to broaden the context and so put it in perspective. Julian Jaynes’ scientific theory didn’t come from nowhere. It was based on generations of research in numerous fields: neurocognition, brain hemisphericity, anthropology, linguistics, philology, consciousness studies, etc. What made him unique mostly was that he refused to stay in his lane as an academic psychologist and former behavioralist researcher. Instead, he brought together diverse evidence that previously had typically been studied separately within scholarship.
To simplify, his hypothesis of bicameral mentality was a variation on a much older hypothesis, the bundle theory of mind. The opposite hypothesis is the ego theory of mind. Both are unproven hypotheses, in that there is no scientific consensus as yet on who is right, but both hypotheses are testable and falsifiable. Neither side can simply assume they are correct and those who disagree are wrong. The onus of responsibility for proving either hypothesis is on the side proclaiming and defending it. So, it’s not only Jaynes’ scientific theory we should interrogate with skepticism. We should be equally, if not more skeptical, about our own WEIRD bias that inclines us to the ego theory of mind.
This might even relate to the Eastern versus Western difference of mentalities, and specifically between wheat-growing (or eating) and rice-growing (or eating). The earliest proponents of the bundle theory of mind, in terms of extant records, were the ancient Buddhists, largely with rice agriculture and diet. Some argue that the philosopher David Hume inherited this view from Buddhist psychology by way of returning Christian missionaries he had contact with. Wherever it was coming from, other Western thinkers such as the philology-educated Friedrich Nietzsche and historian Henry Adams took on the bundle theory as well.
Since then, it’s been studied, researched, and defended by many others: Bruno Snell, E. R. Dodds, Eric Havelock, Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore, Tanya Luhrmann, John Geiger, Iain McGilchrist, Lisa Blackman, and many others. That isn’t even mentioning the dozens of Jaynesian scholars. It’s not a single field of study and so the various scholars come from different fields, mostly unfamiliar with or even unaware of each other’s area of expertise. It’s a broader understanding of the human psyche that has gained more credence, as the evidence keeps piling up.
@dbs
I am not sure how this relates to my reading of the narrated events and the local woman’s explanation as to the basis for her actions. I agree it is possible to view all parties as hopelessly WEIRD or “WEIRD-contaminated”, but since it is impractical to cleanse their society of WEIRDness without inadvertently introducing more WEIRDness or otherwise using coercive techniques (not just on one woman who kills a goat, but on everyone), what is your best alternative? Do you fault the local woman and the others for their actions in subduing the goat-slayer? Should they not have interfered, but instead accepted any further anti-social behaviour as they would a forest fire, landslide or other act of nature, only attempting to put themselves and their loved ones out of harm’s way?
The malapropism “behavioralist” suggests that its user has very limited grounding in cognitive science.
@Grumbly minor: The malapropism “behavioralist”
Nope, to my surprise. It is a Thing, albeit a paltry thing. Another example of inelegant variation teamed up with confused ideas.
#
Behaviouralism (or behavioralism) is an approach in political science that emerged in the 1930s in the United States. It represented a sharp break from previous approaches in emphasizing an objective, quantified approach to explain and predict political behaviour.[1][2] It is associated with the rise of the behavioural sciences, modeled after the natural sciences.[3] Behaviouralism claims it can explain political behaviour from an unbiased, neutral point of view.
#
Yet in some non-Western populations, such as in parts of Africa, an individual talking to themselves is not deemed crazy, dangerous,
Here in New York City, a very obviously WEIRD person is not considered crazy or dangerous if they talk to themselves either, particularly if they have a white cord sticking out of their ear. I myself have no such cord and yet have been talking to myself on the street (not to mention at home) for forty years and more without anyone coming to take me away (ho ho, hee hee, ha ha).
“In Boorioboola-Gha a man is presentable on occasions of ceremony if he have his abdomen painted a bright blue and wear a cow’s tail; in New York he may, if it please him, omit the paint, but after sunset he must wear two tails made of the wool of a sheep and dyed black.” I don’t do that either.
The teachers stated that, though they knew what autism was, they had never seen it in any of their students.
I know what it is too, but that doesn’t make me competent to diagnose it. (Unlike shingles.)
Those cultures were no longer fully non-WEIRD, much less traditional. etc.
That argument proves too much, for there are no cultures left, except possibly the North Sentinelese, that are unaffected by WEIRD societies. But if we stick to the original narrower definition, it obviously excludes such major world cultures as Russians and Han.
such as in parts of Africa
Which parts, exactly?
Schizophrenia is as common in Africa (at least in Ghana and Nigeria) as in Europe; it is woefully underdiagnosed and support for it is even more inadequate than in Europe and America. Those afflicted generally lead pitiful lives as outcasts: “village idiots” if they’re lucky. There is no wonderful magic realm of prelapsarian RD Laingian innocence where they are regarded as saints. That’s an exoticising fantasy.
I used to live there; I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I have talked extensively with a local psychiatrist about these very issues. He had done considerable work trying to address these problems. (In your view, I presume that his being a psychiatrist immediately invalidates his opinion.)
The local languages all have words that mean, perfectly straightforwardly, “mad.” This is not some mere artefact of translation, and the words quite certainly long antedate the European invasions.
I’ll respond to everyone in one fell swoop. And while I’m at it, I’ll add some other info following that. But before I get to my specific responses, I wanted to make one observation. It is amazing how hard it is to get many WEIRD individuals to admit or even become aware of how unusual is their own WEIRD mentality that they take as normal human nature that corresponds to objective reality, but even that assumption of a universal human nature and objective reality is a WEIRD bias. It’s amusing.
@PlasticPaddy – “I am not sure how this relates to my reading of the narrated events and the local woman’s explanation as to the basis for her actions.”
Well, I didn’t have any particular intention to relate all of my comments to your comments. I had my own independent reasons for commenting, more responding to the original piece above and the broader discussion in the comments section. I directed one initial response to you, but not necessarily having any strong opinion on the specific events you were narrating. I was using that as a jumping off point for a broader discussion.
“I agree it is possible to view all parties as hopelessly WEIRD or “WEIRD-contaminated”, but since it is impractical to cleanse their society of WEIRDness without inadvertently introducing more WEIRDness or otherwise using coercive techniques (not just on one woman who kills a goat, but on everyone), what is your best alternative?”
Based on the article, the topic at hand is bicameral mentality, Jaynesian consciousness, and the WEIRD. On that level, it’s first and foremost an intellectual inquiry. So, I had no intention of solving all of the potentially WEIRD-caused or WEIRD-affected problems in the entire non-WEIRD world. My purpose was simply to point out the facts of the situation, in order to distinguish actual examples of the fully non-WEIRD from that of WEIRD-influenced societies. Otherwise, we’d be simply further projecting our WEIRD bias on everything, using our own WEIRDness reflected back to us as proof that our WEIRDness is normal and universal.
“Do you fault the local woman and the others for their actions in subduing the goat-slayer? Should they not have interfered, but instead accepted any further anti-social behaviour as they would a forest fire, landslide or other act of nature, only attempting to put themselves and their loved ones out of harm’s way?”
I don’t necessarily fault anyone. All that I stated was that, looking at the anthropological record and other accounts, we know that various non-WEIRD societies have dealt with unusual and even violent behavior in numerous ways not requiring psychiatric intervention. Modern WEIRD-style mental healthcare is a fairly recent invention, not even fully existing in the West until a few generations ago. Until literacy and education and particularly higher education became the norm, most Westerners were fairly non-WEIRD as well.
@John Cowan – “Here in New York City, a very obviously WEIRD person is not considered crazy or dangerous if they talk to themselves either, particularly if they have a white cord sticking out of their ear.”
In that case, they aren’t actually talking to themselves. They are simply talking to another person who isn’t physically present at that same place. This has become so common that most people quickly realize that the individual isn’t talking to themselves, and so they don’t fit the category of insanity as defined by someone talking to themselves. That example is completely irrelevant to the discussion here, other than maybe in terms of media studies involving the affect on the human psyche and neurocognition (e.g., Marshall McLuhan), but I don’t think that angle has been brought up here by anyone, if it does relate to Jaynesian scholarship.
“I know what it is too, but that doesn’t make me competent to diagnose it.”
Yet another irrelevant comment, as the disagreement isn’t over either your expertise or my own. That is why we are, instead, discussing the work of scholars like Jaynes who are experts in their own fields of study, such as psychology. With that in mind, I’d note that the teachers Mary Ruddick spoke to were presumably trained in education, including what affects education. So, learning about autism would’ve likely been part of their formal training. That would be part of their field of expertise. It is probably safe to assume that it isn’t part of your field of expertise, but it’s appreciated that you admit your incompetence in this area. I too am incompetent and admit it openly. That is why I’m pointing to the evidence from those who are competent.
“That argument proves too much, for there are no cultures left, except possibly the North Sentinelese, that are unaffected by WEIRD societies. But if we stick to the original narrower definition, it obviously excludes such major world cultures as Russians and Han.”
Now that is a relevant comment, not to mention worthy and interesting, actually contributing to the present debate. It potentially could be a fair criticism. But I think it’s portraying the situation in too black-and-white of terms. There are plenty of traditional populations that, though not completely isolated, have almost entirely maintained their traditional cultures and lifestyles.
The Piraha, for example, have resisted two centuries of missionary apologetics attempting to convert them. They retain their lack of linguistic recursion, numeracy, linear time, etc; not to mention still demonstrating bundled mind, animism, 4E cognition, communal identity, voice-hearing, identity change, and what we would call spirit possession. It’s fair to refer to such a population as mostly non-WEIRD, if not absolutely unaffected by Western influences, and there are still plenty of such populations remaining.
@David Eddyshaw – “Which parts [of Africa], exactly?”
I have a close friend who is a Libyan refugee. His tribe is Dazaga and his family came from Sudan. He is an interesting example because he was diagnosed with schizophrenia after coming to the US. Yet he remembers that his grandmother spoke to herself when alone in rooms. She had spirit familiar. But there was no psychiatric framework and no mental health services used. She wasn’t considered insane, if unusual. Others in the family left her alone and didn’t talk about it.
They were already urbanized at that point, but his parents and grandparents had grown up as rural herders. So, they retained their rural culture, mindset, and practices. To put it in context, Westernization has been limited in that region, partly because of underdevelopment. Under Muammar Gaddafi, Libya was intentionally isolated from the West and education was discouraged, with a population that is some combination of illiterate and barely literate, the majority having been illiterate a half century ago. Literacy is central to both Jaynesian consciousness and WEIRD mentality.
The lack of schizophrenia, even when voice-hearing (hallucination) and voice-speaking (i.e., possession) is common, is also observed in other populations elsewhere, such as the Amazonian Piraha. Individuals will change personality, speak in other voices, and experience hallucinations. The entire tribe has apparently collectively hallucinated, once witnessed by Daniel Everett and his family. Yet none of these behaviors are treated as insane or even abnormal, even thought they would typically land a modern urban person, even in many non-WEIRD countries, in a hospital or psychiatric institute. Everett has stated that there is no known case of a Piraha with schizophrenia or depression, suicide, etc.
But part of it is simply a set of behaviors, when perceived differently, will be identified, labeled, and treated different. This sometimes leads to entirely different results when WEIRD-like mental healthcare isn’t involved: “Despite the scientific quest to universalise the experience of mental illness, the devil remains in the cultural detail. For example, as you’d expect in places where television is a rarity, schizophrenic delusions are often solely attributed to spirits, ghost possession or black magic, rather than the voice from the flickering box in the corner – and this can redefine the whole experience of illness and suffering. In the small rural villages of India, where people seek healing in temples rather than in a doctor’s surgery, this is not uncommon” (https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2003/03/13/2119456.htm).
Of course, from a WEIRD perspective, we tend to not take traditional perceptions at face value. For example, if someone of the South African Xhosa people claims to be bewitched, WEIRD psychiatry would call that delusional and possibly diagnose them as schizophrenic (Megan M. Campbell, et al, “The content of delusions in a sample of South African Xhosa people with schizophrenia”). But many people who hear disembodied voices otherwise live normal lives, particularly in societies where that is within acceptable social norms. So, what exactly makes that person mentally ill, other than the WEIRD perception imposed upon it? After all, even in the West, the mentally ill actually have lower violent crime rates than the general public. So, pointing to anecdotes of violent ‘mad’ people in traditional societies comes across as cherry picking and sensationalism, since that is not typical of voice-hearers in any society.
“Schizophrenia is as common in Africa (at least in Ghana and Nigeria) as in Europe; it is woefully underdiagnosed and support for it is even more inadequate than in Europe and America. Those afflicted generally lead pitiful lives as outcasts: “village idiots” if they’re lucky. There is no wonderful magic realm of prelapsarian RD Laingian innocence where they are regarded as saints. That’s an exoticising fantasy.”
But what if the rate of diagnoses precisely increases in correlation with the rate of schizophrenic-inducing conditions? You have no evidence to base your assumption on, as the availability of psychiatric data increases simultaneously also with modernization, urbanization, industrialization, globalization, and Westernization. To claim underdiagnosis is to argue that the lack of evidence is proof that the rate of schizophrenia being higher because you’re assuming that not only schizophrenia is a universal human condition, rather than culture bound, but that it also must be the same everywhere, such that any population lacking similar rates as the West must be underdiagnosed. This is rather circular thinking.
This isn’t “exoticising fantasy.” That is an uninformed or disinformed dismissal. This is an actual academic debate. Biological anthropologist J. S. Allen stated that, “Schizophrenia is apparently less common in traditional than in nontraditional societies, and the course of illness in these cultural settings may also be more benign” (“At issue: Are traditional societies schizophrenogenic?,” Schizophrenia Bulletin, Volume 23, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 357–364). Indeed: “A culture may interpret abnormal behavior as relating to some kind of voodoo or anger and may regard the symptoms as normal even though symptoms are consistent with schizophrenia” (“Culture-Bound Syndrome,” Encyclopedia of Social Measurement, 2005). Supporting this, the data shows that psychosis has increasing rates among urban youth in the US. Schizophrenia is a modern Western category. Some argue that it’s the result of an evolutionary mismatch involving maladaptive conditions, not something genetically inherent, essentialist, and determinist within the human psyche.
Tanya Luhrmann, inspired by Jaynes, has written how voice-hearing in non-WEIRD societies, even a more Westernized society like Ghana, often doesn’t lead to schizophrenic diagnosis. That is because voice-hearing is culturally perceived within normal human experience. In those societies that normalize voice-hearing, it is experienced more positively. The voices are friendlier and more helpful, rather than antagonistic and persecutory as they are in Western countries like the United States. If someone lives healthily and normally, as part of stable social norms, are they schizophrenic? Why are we to assume that everyone with verbal hallucinations is schizophrenic? If we make that assumption, then, sure, schizophrenic rates are higher everywhere. But that might be a false assumption that confirms our WEIRD bias.
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2017/05/30/urban-weirdness/
https://news.stanford.edu/2014/07/16/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614/
“I used to live there; I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I have talked extensively with a local psychiatrist about these very issues. He had done considerable work trying to address these problems. (In your view, I presume that his being a psychiatrist immediately invalidates his opinion.)”
I never made such a claim nor implied it. In accusing others as being anti-intellectual, you come across as anti-intellectual in refusing to intellectually engage an intellectual debate. Some Jaynesian scholars and advocates of similar or related theories are also psychiatrists. Psychiatrists supporting or speaking positively of Jaynes’ theory include: Paul Allen, Jan Dirk Blom, Kenneth Blum, T. Buchan, Dirk Corstens, Timothy J. Crow, Timothy J. Crow, Stanley I. Greenspan, Michael Lewis, Rachel L.C. Mitchell, Henry A. Nasrallah, Robert Pos, Leo Sher, Khalid Sohail, I.E.C. (Iris) Sommer, Rick Strassman, and Thomas Styron.
https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/academic-scholarly-interest/
https://www.julianjaynes.org/blog/julian-jaynes-theory/neuroscience-confirms-julian-jaynes-neurological-model/
Also, not agreeing with Jaynes, there aree psychiatrists like Iain McGilchrist with a different theory about the brain hemisphericity and the split psyche, though I don’t know his view on schizophrenia as culture bound. Guess what? Psychiatrists disagree with each other. God forbid! Heck, Jaynes himself was a psychologist and originally a behaviorist researcher who taught at Harvard, not exactly an intellectual lightweight who was out of his depths.
We’re not talking about conspiracy theorists, flat earthers, and such. This is part of respectable academic debate, not to be dismissed out of hand by those who are uninformed about said debate. If you’re not interested, don’t read about it. But it’s not a resolved issue yet. There is no consensus. Still, that doesn’t mean that, even if particular psychiatric labels are socially constructed, that it doesn’t indicate a real pattern within human neurocognition that could be culturally interpreted in many other ways. The available evidence and analyses indicate a complex social reality, and that requires us to bring to bear the complexity of our critical thinking skills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_schizophrenia
https://raggeduniversity.co.uk/2017/03/24/culture-bound-syndromes-mental/
https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/discursive/guest-post-the-manufacture-of-madness-why-social-construction-in-psychiatry-is-not-as-simple-as-it-seems/
https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/2203/1/McCann_IsMentalIllness.pdf
“The local languages all have words that mean, perfectly straightforwardly, “mad.” This is not some mere artefact of translation, and the words quite certainly long antedate the European invasions.”
Words themselves change meanings over time. And any changes in society will feed back into language. Anyone even vaguely familiar with linguistics, etymology, and philology understands how meanings and definitions shift, often imperceptibly and sometimes quite quickly. Many indigenous words indicating something akin to ‘mad’ would likely have meant something far different generations or centuries ago, prior to any Western contact or other modern, etc influences. That would require an expert in each language to explore word usage, as it would be easy for a non-expert to project one’s own linguistic biases onto another language.
To really get at the root of this aspect, it might be best to turn to linguistic relativity, as that brings in the element of how language shapes our thought, perception, behavior, and identity. But all of that seems too far afield of this debate. Between you and I, this is not going to be resolved at the present moment. I honestly have no clue what various words that might or might not translate as ‘mad’ really mean in their original context prior to all foreign influences. But if you have some evidence about this area, I’d be willing to look at it. I’m always curious and open minded.
Some other things could be cleared up. Besides Jaynes’ scientific theory being about the bundle theory of mind, it’s also a scientific theory of media studies, linguistic relativity, and philology; along with neurocognition, neurological structures, etc — all being separate fields of academic study and/or scientific research. To be more accurate, it’s not a single scientific theory but rather a set of hypotheses where each stands alone. Some are more easily testable and falsifiable than others, but all of them can be analyzed according to the scholarly literature and evidence from the respective fields. To be specific, there are four independent hypotheses, where proving or disproving one doesn’t prove or disprove the others:
1) Jaynesian consciousness (J-consciousness) is an imagined inner mental space that is introspectable; i.e., inner voice of egoic individuality, or the ego theory of mind; not mere general awareness, sensory perception, or biological reactivity, nor the sum of thoughts). It is historically contingent, culturally specific, socially constructed, and mediated through language, metaphor, and analogy, specifically literacy and recursive application of the container metaphor of mind. It makes possible greater abstract thought, rationalization, long term planning, theory of mind (cognitive empathy, mind-reading), deception, etc.
2) Bicameral mentality is a variation of the bundle theory of mind and 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended), based on verbal hallucinations where one brain hemisphere spoke and the other listened. It had some similarities to animistic mentality that is common among hunter-gatherer tribes, as evidenced in the anthropological and other social science literature on voice-hearing, hallucinations, possession, personality change, trance, hypnosis, other altered states, schizophrenia, etc.
3) There is specific dating to the appearance and disappearance of bicameral mentality, followed by a specific dating of the appearance of J-consciousness. Bicameral mentality first emerged in the earliest agricultural settlements (with their death cults and temples), reached it’s peak in the city-states that followed, and then destabilized in the late Bronze Age with large, expansive, complex, and hierarchical empires; with it surviving only in remnants following that. After the Bronze Age collapse, J-consciousness began developing in Greece, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere, but wouldn’t first fully form as part of a stable social order until what some call the Axial Age. The transition was gradual and occurred in a different timeframe in other civilizations, possibly with bicameral mentality persisting much longer in some cases.
4) The neurological model for bicameral mentality is based on brain hemisphericity, as supported by brain imaging studies. If you go to the official website of the Julian Jaynes Society, you’ll find the evidence listed, described, and summarized (see linked articles in one of my comments above).
Part of the problem in most reviews of Jaynes’ book and discussions of Jaynes’ ideas is that J-consciousness is rarely understood correctly. J-consciousness consists of:
1) Spatialization: “The first and most primitive aspect of consciousness is what we already have had occasion to refer to, the paraphrand of almost every mental metaphor we can make, the mental space which we take over as the very habitat of it all. […] When we introspect (a metaphor of seeing into something), it is upon this metaphorical mind-space which we are constantly renewing and ‘enlarging’ with each new thing or relation consdousized.”
2) Excerption: “In consciousness, we are never ‘seeing’ anything in its entirety. […] We excerpt from the collection of possible attentions to a thing which comprises our knowledge of it.”
3) The Analog ‘I’: “A most important ‘feature’ of this metaphor ‘world’ is the metaphor we have of ourselves, the analog ‘I’, which can ‘move about’ vicarially in our ‘imagination’, ‘doing’ things that we are not actually doing.
The Metaphor ‘Me’: It’s a third person perspective of of the self.
4) Narratization: The individual creates stories about the analog “I” to create a sense of consistency, coherency, constancy, and continuity of Jayesian consciousness, but in reality very little of what we do happens in consciousness, and so that is why we require narratization to fill in the gaps to maintain the illusion of a singular self in total control by a singular ego.
5) Conciliation: “What I am designating by conciliation is essentially doing in mind-space what narratization does in mind-time or spatialized time. It brings things things together as conscious object just as narratization brings together things as a story. […] In conciliation we are making excerpts or narratizations compatible with each other, just as in external perception the new stimulus and the internal conception are made to agree. [example, because this one is odd]: If I ask you to think of a mountain meadow and a tower at the same time, you automatically conciliate them by having the tower rising from the meadow. But if I ask you to think of a mountain meadow and an ocean at the same time, conciliation tends not to occur and you are likely to think of one and then the other. You can only bring them together by a narratization. Thus there are principles of compatibility that govern this process, and such principles are learned and are based on the structure of the world.”
https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/overview/
http://www.fogbanking.com/julian-jaynes-on-what-consciousness-isnt/
You are evidently determined to interpret all other cultures than your own entirely in terms of a specifically Western ideology: viz Jaynesian bicameralism.
Where they fail to fit your preconceptions, your get-out-of-jail-free card is “Ah, but they’ve been corrupted by Western influence.”
Incidentally, nobody (in our cultures or others) thinks that talking to yourself is diagnostic of madness; accordingly, regarding talking to yourself as acceptable behaviour is not evidence for a bicameral mind.
When I talk, I talk exclusively to myself. It’s the only way to monitor whether what I say makes sense. There’s no relying on other people to understand what I say. More often than not they listen only to what they say, and not to me.
This makes socializing easy and pleasant. One learns so much by minimizing expectations.
J-consciousness is by no means distinguished by being difficult to understand, whether correctly or not. It is merely another matter of grandiose claims and small import.
No, it’s the null hypothesis.
Why only now, and why not in the rest of the West?
I… doubt anybody has claimed that schizophrenia is the only possible cause of verbal hallucinations.
I had one once. It was part of sleep paralysis instead of schizophrenia.
I don’t think this list is going to impress anybody here – I don’t think anybody reading this blog knows anywhere near that many psychiatrists. But that’s beside the point. Scientists are beside the point in science, appliers of the products of science even more so. What are their arguments?
BTW, you included Timothy J. Crow twice.
Unfortunately for Harvard, nothing of the part behind the comma follows from anything before the comma.
Yes, yes, yes – we’re instead saying Jaynes himself is uninformed about some of the things he’s been talking about.
What is that last word a typo of?
Uh… I imagined them next to each other instead.
How bizarre of a psychologist, of all people, to assume he knows how everyone else even just in his own culture thinks.
I’m getting a motte-and-bailey vibe here: accepting the obvious fact that mental disorders are in significant part culture-bound, or even the barely more debatable fact of cross-cultural variation in how one models one’s own consciousness, does not entail taking seriously the notion of a bicameral mind, much less Jaynes’ rather stretched attempts to read it into the Iliad (of all the texts he could have chosen).
It’s been many years since I read Jaynes, but I’m tempted to add that the enterprise of localising different aspects of consciousness in different hemispheres seems particularly unhelpful here. Zeus for the Homeric Greeks, or some bori-spirit in Hausaland, is not something localised in a specific part of one person’s head; on his own account it’s minimally an intersubjective reality, like “the English language” (which is not conveniently restricted to Broca’s or Wernicke’s areas) or “chess”.
Why only now, and why not in the rest of the West?
Indeed. Why not even in swathes of the U.S.?
The incidence of ‘diagnosed’ youth ADHD in the USA varies wildly across the country. Higher in middle-class areas with middle-class child psychiatrists. Presumably parents in less wealthy areas are too busy scratching a living to (afford to) take their kids to psychiatrists. (Curiously low in California, where you’d expect doting/flakey parents would be off for a diagnosis at the least behavioural/learning difficulties.)
@AntC
Sunlight. Are rates in northern Cal different to southern Cal?
To claim underdiagnosis is to argue that the lack of evidence is proof that the rate of schizophrenia being higher because you’re assuming that not only schizophrenia is a universal human condition
My claim was not based on anything so rarefied. Rather, whenever my African psychiatrist friend looked, he found much previously undiagnosed schizophenia. However, there are very few African psychiatrists per capita, especially looking at people outside major cities. It seems not unreasonable to conclude that there must be many people who are undiagnosed because there are far too few diagnosticians. This was not some cranky personal opinion of his own: he had been instrumental in trying to remedy this situation in cooperation with other psychiatrists in Africa.
I have no a priori opinion about the prevalence of schizophrenia in rural Africa, though I have been told that the received opinion in the past was that it was uncommon, on the (spurious) grounds that it was little reported; I imagine Laing-style fantasies about the nature of schizophrenia in general probably bolstered this. Your untroubled assumption that schizophrenia is a purely Western artefact of specifically modern stresses comes out of this mindset too, I think.
(Incidentally, I wonder why people imagine that being a subsistence farmer or herder is unstressful? Or that polygamous families are somehow less prone to creating anxiety than monogamous?* This is all exoticist fantasy.)
* They fuck you up, your mums and dad.
DM:
Unfortunately for Harvard, nothing of the part behind the comma follows from anything before the comma.
This is not the first time I have seen “behind the comma” from you David, and each time I am intrigued. One such occurrence (and another of related interest; both now in bold):
Standard would be “after the comma” (and “after its noun”). I find this use of behind among a few native Dutch and German speakers. It is very rare among native English speakers, but here is a 17C example in print.
No doubt the opposition of before and behind makes sense spatially in English, when before just means “in front of”. But we don’t use in front of temporally, do we? This connects with my interest in expressions such as those used here:
Such expressions can occasion confusion, as sometimes discussed online: here and here for example.
These are interesting too:
So are these concocted push-pull variants of the two given earlier:
Acceptability and meanings of these two? Is it always that re-assignment of a date toward the present is forward, and movement away from the present is back, in English? And in German, for example, verbis mutatis mutandis?
There was some discussion of DM’s use of “behind” and of terminology for moving dates a few years ago.
This is not the first time I have seen “behind the comma” from you David [M], …
Seems quite unexceptional to me — maybe slightly whimsical. I’m not only not a native Dutch/German speaker, I don’t speak Dutch at all; I speak German very badly.
we don’t use in front of temporally, do we?
Yes. I’ll bring this agenda item to the front of the meeting, because Bloggins needs to get away early.
“push-pull” of meetings also seems entirely sensible usage. I was forever doing that when I was trying to
herd catsorganise programming teams.You’re raising the shibboleth of “can occasion confusion”. I’m pretty sure there’s contexts for any expression to ‘occasion confusion’. That’s not grounds to avoid the expression; it’s grounds to avoid the context.
This is not the first time I find @Noetica to be suspiciously close to peeving. (And won’t be the first time you’ll promptly disclaim it with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.)
_If_ you’re not peeving, please try to avoid exactly the forms of ‘argument’ peevers use. ‘occasion confusion’ indeed!
Keith Ivey:
Ah, thanks. I’m not surprised it’s come up before (or in front, for that matter).
There can be no reasonable doubt that compared to “after the comma” the string “behind the comma” is extremely rare. The few hits in those ngrams are mostly non-examples, or demonstrably not from native speakers. These are easily found on Google:
Any sort of purely temporal in front of is also demonstrably rare; but of course many unusual and jargonistic things will be said, in a universe of a zillion utterances.
I’m still wondering what clear meanings (if any) people would assign to these that I ask about above:
To explicate the tension (which I had not thought I’d need to do):
Much here can occasion confusion. That, at least, has become more obvious! ♥
Such expressions can occasion confusion, as sometimes discussed online: here and here for example.
I see no confusion suggested at those links. [**] They seem to be coaching aimed at people who don’t speak English/or aren’t familiar with corporatespeak. Yes any variety of ‘in-group’ jargon can cause confusion to those outside the group.
Perhaps @Noetica doesn’t get invited to corporate meetings? Or at least not the variety that gets rescheduled and re-agenda’d?
[**] The first link seems to a) be a discussion amongst mostly non-native speakers; b) lead on to pages of first-class bullshit about language. I’d be ashamed to link to it in pursuance of any claim whatsoever.
And right there in former days at the Hattery (my bold):
Perhaps this early hatter was not invited to enough jargon-inculcating meetings, during formative months in early career. I wonder how long finance remained the Field of Mars?
In the same thread we find David Eddyshaw holding forth (not holding back, note) on another perennial and skunked confusable in English:
I’m sure that’s been discussed elsewhere chez Chapeau. It’s a favourite of mine.
@Noetica
I took “behind the comma” as interpreting the text as an ordered visual sequence to be processed sequentially. I believe you can be in front of / before or behind / after someone in the queue, and figures can appear before, in front of and after (maybe also behind for some speakers?) the decimal point.
That’s as may be, PPaddy. For myself, in the absence of context and cross-language background knowledge I’m not confident that I could ascertain which was intended by “behind the comma”: to the left or to the right of it (with reference to my own point of view as reader)? I’d need to know where I am situated within the sentence (or before or after its playing out as a whole, in whatever space sentences play out). That’s even more tricky than the standard temporal uses of bring forward and push back, in which cases we can normally locate ourselves in some sort of a present time.
Sub specie aeternitatis infinitatisque nothing is behind or before (or after or in front of) anything else, ugye?
How does this work with musical notes (written or sounded)? Does anyone ever say “The G comes behind the F#”? If they did, what would it mean? (And if a lion said it?)
Actuality precedes Potentiality in Being, Time and Dignity.
As you’ve reminded us in this forum at least twice before, Stu. How very Aristotelian of you (see Physics, Metaphysics, and … De Anima, I think. To say nothing of Aquinas. These days I prefer my metaphysics of possibility and necessity in Ulysses (“jejune jesuit”) mode. From “Nestor”:
From “Scylla and Charybdis”:
Well, since a comma is a spatial feature of written text rather than a temporal one, I automatically stayed in that way of looking at it.
Interestingly, that’s handled differently: vorverlegen (literally “prepone”) and vorziehen (lit. “pull to the fore”) mean “move to an earlier date”, verschieben (schieben literally “shove”, “push”; ver- “per-“, “mis-” and a few other things) means “move to some other date” that can be earlier or later; there’s no verb for moving something to an explicitly later date (“postpone”).
I agree that looking at it spatially makes sense, but I guess I view the characters as standing in a row facing me, rather than in a line with each letter facing the one before it. If people are standing in a row facing me, and B is to the right of A, then B is after A when I’m looking across the row, but not behind A.
English is hopelessly muddled in this. You look back on things that came before, and you look forward to things that come after.
(Kusaal is consistent: the past is in front, and the future is behind.)
Hebrew has made a point of following the Kusaal example.
@Noe: As you’ve reminded us in this forum at least twice before, Stu.
It’s a precessional conundrum especially for you, dollink, not a reminder for the masses. Looks like I made it too cryptic.
Actuality “precedes” in time, so it is temporally behind Potentiality as seen from the present moment (from where else !). But in the procession of Dignity, Actuality goes first, so it is in front of Potentiality as seen at the present moment.
Aristotle does not get enough love.
It is amazing how hard it is to get many WEIRD individuals to admit or even become aware of how unusual is their own WEIRD mentality that they take as normal human nature that corresponds to objective reality,
That may be true, but this is hardly the place to find it.
but even that assumption of a universal human nature and objective reality is a WEIRD bias.
So Confucianist Chinese is a WEIRD culture? Funny, when it was neither Western, (broadly) educated, industrialized, rich (by modern standards), nor democratic.
In that case, they aren’t actually talking to themselves. They are simply talking to another person who isn’t physically present at that same place.
That’s a reasonable assumption, but it might be wrong. In my case, it is wrong. In any case, the point of the Boorioboola-Gha quotation (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary s.v. “presentable”) is that a WEIRD person is perfectly capable (even if not an anthropologist) of writing New Yorkers under the same sign as non-WEIRD people.
That example is completely irrelevant to the discussion here
So you say.
I’d note that the teachers Mary Ruddick spoke to were presumably trained in education, including what affects education. So, learning about autism would’ve likely been part of their formal training. That would be part of their field of expertise.
Diagnosing autism is in the field of expertise of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, not teachers. Jaynes was neither, so he would have no special competence. However, even having a special competence is not enough to necessarily make sense. Linus Pauling was a world-class molecular biologist, but his ideas about Vitamin C were crackpot.
He is an interesting example because he was diagnosed with schizophrenia after coming to the US. Yet he remembers that his grandmother spoke to herself when alone in rooms.
I too speak to myself when alone in rooms. So did my father. Both of us were WEIRDos and certainly did not have bicameral minds.
When I talk, I talk exclusively to myself.
“In one thing you have not changed, dear friend,” said Aragorn: “you still speak in riddles.”
“What? In riddles?” said Gandalf. “No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.”
Higher in middle-class areas with middle-class child psychiatrists.
Hardly. Highest in the Inner South, which is not particularly a middle-class area (in any case, cities have middle-class areas, states don’t).
Looks like I made it too cryptic.
Weave on, Studude – so venerable as to have assisted Socrates at the debriefing of Alcibiades. Weave the fabric of your choice. These “that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long”. We must at all costs keep things sufficiently obscure.
Give my love to Aristotle – and τῷ Ἀσκληπιῷ ὀφείλομεν ἀλεκτρυόνα.
I don’t find Sapolsky’s posturing quite as amusing he he himself seems to. No doubt he enjoys gently mocking (as he supposes) the ways of amusing foreigners in general.
Now he’s grandly announced that “We don’t have free will.” Glad that’s settled!
If we have free will, we don’t have any choice about having it. I find that rather constraining. On the other hand, if we can choose to have free will, what’s all the flap about ?
Sapolsky wrote:
“I’m really, really, really trying not to sound like a combative jerk in the book,” he said.
Huh, trying sounds like willing.
My favorite quote of the day is from Saul Lieberman introducing a lecture by Gershom Scholem:
“Nonsense is nonsense, but the history* of nonsense is scholarship.”
* or did he say “the study”?
There’s also a story that Liebermann himself was the author of the saying, and later projected it back on Scholem.
Whatever. Here‘s some background:
#
In the middle of the 19th century, German Jews with a rationalist cast of mind founded what they called the “Wissenschaft des Judentums/Science of Judaism,” an attempt to submit Judaism to the rigors of such academic disciplines as philology, history, and literary criticism.
Part of the Haskalah and closely allied with the nascent Reform movement, the Wissenschaft thinkers were engaged in spirited apologetics, arguing for the long and proud history of their people. One of the elements of that history of which they were less than proud was Jewish mysticism. Historians like Leopold Zunz and key founding members of the Reform movement like Abraham Geiger and the Conservative movement’s Zecharias Frankel were dismissive of Kabbalah and its forebears and openly contemptuous of Hasidism, which embarrassed them with what they felt was its boisterousness, credulity, and superstition. This was the state of things when a young graduate student named Gershom Scholem decided to write a thesis on Jewish mysticism.
Scholem (1897-1982) tells a story about his early research that sums up the position of mysticism in Judaic studies in Weimar Germany. He was directed to a prominent rabbi who was considered an expert on Kabbalah. Scholem visited the rabbi in his home, saw the many books, and asked the rabbi about them. He replied, “This trash? Why would I waste my time reading nonsense like this?”
That conversation, Scholem always said, made him realize that this was a neglected field in which a dedicated scholar could make a mark. He explained his interest in Jewish mysticism to Herbert Weiner, “I’ve done my research in this history of the Kabbalah simply because I loved Judaism and wanted to show that mysticism was a legitimate part of this Judaism. Not some strange flower, but an indigenous growth.”
#
The link Stu gave to Robinson is a loose paraphrase of Scholem’s 1922 visit to Prof. Philip Bloch in his home in Germany, recounted in Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth (Schocken Books, Harry Zohn ET) page 150.
“After all, we are both _meshugga_,” he said . He showed me his kabbalistic collection, and I admired the manuscripts. In my enthusiasm I said, quite naively: “How wonderful, Herr Professor, that you have studied all this!” Whereupon the old gentleman replied, “What, am I supposed to read this _rubbish_, too ?” That was a great moment in my life.”
Now he’s grandly announced that “We don’t have free will.”
I refute it thus. (Or do I?)
Neuroscientists seem to be particularly prone to the delusion that they understand philosophy ex officio.
(At least, the attention whores among them do. No doubt there are plenty of worthy neuroscientists plugging away doing humble but valuable work in their backrooms somewhere.)
Sapolsky has stumbled on the (age-old) variant that asserts that there can be no such thing as moral responsibility because we have no free will. He should read a nice easy introduction to Calvinism, but I am afraid that he is predetermined not to.
attention whore
Only yesterday a cute German equivalent for that came up that I hadn’t heard in a while: Rampensau. It’s a bit animalist, of course, but no curb swallows are harmed.
I refute it thus. (Or do I?)
No, because that was Sam’s refutation of subjective idealism. His refutation of compelled will did not involve an argumentum ad lapidem (this is a thing), and was, “Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end on’t.”
For myself, the issue of free will does not arise, because I do not believe in consciousness as something objective (obviously there is a perception of consciousness, but I hold that to be an illusion).
I am aware of SJ’s priority …
However, it is possible for a single experiment to refute more than a single hypothesis, though I agree that this may be methodologically undesirable. However, when funding is tight, it may be necessary to economise in these matters. (I would like to point out that I received no external funding for this project.)
Do you hold that the subjective is, ipso facto, illusory? (If so, what do you understand by “illusory”? We may perhaps not be disagreeing about substantive issues.)
We may perhaps not be disagreeing about substantive issues.
Let me encourage both of you to disagree solely about substantive issues. That makes the discussion much easier to follow. It may be necessary to meet off-stage to reach a basic consensus about terms, before resuming the performance. The public is here for the play, not for squabblings over the script, which traditionally are covered later in a “Making of …” sequel.
I suppose it’s possible that this is one of those “experimental” plays showing closely scripted disarray. Then everything’s ok.
I mean pretty much what is meant by
mamelon[*] and ravelinoptical illusion: it is not the case that a pair of Müller-Lyer arrows have shafts of different lengths, even though it appears to you[*] that they do. By the same token, it seems to me that I am conscious, but I think that this is a misperception on my part. See Dennett’s Consciousness Explained for detailed explanations.[*] The Mamelon was a breast-shaped hillock near Sevastopol on which the Russians built a redoubt, eventually stormed by French and British troops. According to WP, the British, who attacked the outskirts, lost 30 officers and 350 other ranks. This is the first I have heard that there were anywhere near so many ranks in the British Army as that.
[**] I use a second-person pronoun because I am very insensitive to the illusion. The arrow shafts appear to me to have the same lengths (as in fact they do), even though I have blue eyes and have always lived in a “carpentered environment” (see the link).
I attribute this to having radically different acuities of vision (20/30 or 6/9 right, 20/200 or 6/60 left), which means that my eyes had become markedly exotropic (wall-eyed) by the time I was seven. Corrective lenses and eventual surgery helped, but by that time I was pretty much looking at things with one eye at a time, though I can force my eyes to converge with some effort. For the most part, seeing is not believing for me, but in the case of this and related illusions, it is.
@jc
Maybe you mean that the unitary “self” is for you an illusion and that your existence is an emergent property constructed continuously from memory and sense impressions, with some kind of selection/arbitration. It would be hard to refute such an idea, but I think you need to add something to avoid falling in to an existentialist morass (and to explain some of your behaviour, which may not be entirely consistent with a naive denial of consciousness).
However, it is possible for a single experiment to refute more than a single hypothesis, though I agree that this may be methodologically undesirable.
I have just now learned that prior to the introduction of lawyers into the English trial process in the 1720s and ’30s, in criminal trials “the same jury would listen to successive unrelated cases, then retire to consider them all, returning the verdicts as a batch.” I find that to be methodologically undesirable as well. (As I said when posting the LRB letter on Facebook: “Having served on juries, I can attest that it’s hard enough to keep the details of a single case straight.”)
By the same token, it seems to me that I am conscious, but I think that this is a misperception on my part.
Like PP, I find that hard to credit as written and think you must mean something else. Being conscious is pretty much the only thing that is self-confirming.
@ JC … it seems to me that I am conscious, but I think that this is a misperception on my part…
I think I recognize this, in the metaphor* of consciousness as the surface of an ocean of rumination, where you can sometimes sense concepts assembling themselves, foresee things – storms, mental weather… in its depth, or on the horizon. It’s occurred to me that all serious ratiocination takes place while asleep, that in waking life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Life
all we’re doing is executing the program we planned out in our dreams.
?* surface : volume :: consciousness : the self
I’ll just drop in here what Peter Hankins says: “If consciousness is an illusion, what is it that’s being fooled?”
In this case I think that one can escape from the apparent paradox by saying that, although “illusion” in the Common Speech does imply a conscious faller-for the-illusion, that here it is being used in a technical sense of “failure of a perception to correspond to an objective* reality.”
“Perception”, again, need not imply a conscious perceiver; this is related to the point I was recently making in moaning about the inappropriateness of the term “observer” in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_(quantum_physics)
Indeed, if one is (like Dennett) in fact committed a priori to the view that consciousness must be an illusion, because of an erroneous belief that otherwise one is committed to mysticism or believing in ghosts in machines**, all words like “illusion” and “perception” must be interpreted in this Pickwickian sense, and the everyday senses have to be regarded as a mere form of speech, contaminated by the very delusion from which the Enlightened have freed themselves.
* “Objective” is, one suspects. smuggling the conclusion into the premises, though.
** This is a rhetorical trick, essentially: “you must accept my explanation, however counterintuitive or plainly wrong-headed it may appear, if you are unable to come up with an alternative that I will not call mysticism. What are you, a Fundamentalist of some sort?” Essentially “You must accept my evidently wrong analysis instead of saying that no satisfactory solution is currently apparent.”
It is possible, of course, that if I were clever enough actually to understand Dennett’s argument, I would be persuaded by it that my consciousness is an illusion: I would then Go Mad from the Revelation, and begin to believe that my consciousness is an illusion.
It is likely (therefore) that my inability to follow his reasoning is in fact a beneficent provision of a wise Nature to prevent this unfortunate outcome. (Less teleologically, those who can follow the argument are at a significant reproductive disadvantage.)
It’s occurred to me that all serious ratiocination takes place while asleep, that in Waking Life all we’re doing is executing the program we planned out in our dreams.
There sure seem to be a lot of people with insomnia out there.
I prefer serious ratiocination direct from the farmer, which alternates with the sleep of reason. They call it crap rotation.
those who can follow the argument are at a significant reproductive disadvantage.
(Nice girls don’t go out with Philosophical Zombies.)
(Nice girls don’t go out with Philosophical Zombies.)
That is a theme related to the wonderful short story The Whore of Mensa, to which JC recently drew my attention.
@ Stu
I like small-batch artisanal ratiocination …
Социализм плюс электрификация равняется коммунизму
says Google, my wife isn’t sure about accusative vs instrumental…
It’s dative: S + E is equal to K.
As seen here in 2011.
Maybe you mean that the unitary “self” is for you an illusion and that your existence is an emergent property constructed continuously from memory and sense impressions
So far so good.
with some kind of selection/arbitration
In the sense that there is a decision process, yes; in the sense that there is a Central Arbitration Bureau, no. Decisions about what’s real are also an emergent property of the network, and it can be fooled.
“the same jury would listen to successive unrelated cases, then retire to consider them all, returning the verdicts as a batch.”
I suspect this was a hangover from the original function of a jury after Henry Two migrated this institution from Normandy to England. The jury was convened to answer the questions of the court not because they initially knew nothing and were presented with evidence by the parties, but because they were the neighbors and were presumed to know everything. “In the last reign, who held Blackacre?” “Does John the Smith do villein service for his forge, and if so, is he personally a villein or a free man?” “Have the boundary stones between Blackacre and Whiteacre been moved, and if so, who moved them?” “Who is the father of Alicia’s daughter?” “In the fight between George and Frank at Midsummer Fair, who struck the first blow?” Etc.
Being conscious is pretty much the only thing that is self-confirming.
Optical illusions seem pretty self-confirming too. Try talking yourself out of one sometime. “I know those shafts are the same length!” So you do, but they still look up to 30% different.
It’s occurred to me that all serious ratiocination takes place while asleep, that in waking life
I think that’s a little extreme. The evidence is, though, that rather than deciding to act and then acting, we act first and then find out what we have decided.
what is it that’s being fooled?
The system as a whole. Dennett’s Multiple Drafts Model” is well-explained in Wikipedia, and yes, it explains consciousness away. Chalmers’s complaint that “Dennett has produced no more than a theory of how subjects report events” is true, and requires only a “So what?” What more do you actually want?
See also the Systems Reply to Searle’s Chinese room problem, which is that the man doesn’t know any Chinese, it’s the whole system of man+instructions that does. (Searle’s rebuttal that in that case the man can just memorize all the instructions is preposterous: nobody can keep in their heads all the instructions a computer would need to translate Chinese perfectly, or even imperfectly.)
here it is being used in a technical sense of “failure of a perception to correspond to an objective* reality.”
I don’t think so. That’s just part of the evidence that the perception of consciousness doesn’t always align with what we say is the content of our consciousness. Most of the time the perception of consciousness serves us well, just as most of what we see is not an optical illusion.
(continued in the next comment)
Being conscious is pretty much the only thing that is self-confirming.
Optical illusions seem pretty self-confirming too.
“This insect is pretty big.” “The universe is big too!” I have no idea what optical illusions might be supposed to have in common with consciousness. I repeat, to feel that one is conscious is to be conscious, in much the same way as 1 = 1. Your comparison (or Dennett’s) seems to me pure flimflammery.
Indeed, if one is (like Dennett) in fact committed a priori to the view that consciousness must be an illusion
I really don’t think he is; I think he’s a lot more humble than my imperfect representation (or even his imperfect representation) might cause you to think.
“you must accept my explanation, however counterintuitive or plainly wrong-headed it may appear, if you are unable to come up with an alternative that I will not call mysticism. What are you, a Fundamentalist of some sort?”
Of that charge I will absolve him. He is very careful to say that his theory is a scaffolding to be kicked away and replaced with something much more convincing in times to come.
I would then Go Mad from the Revelation
I’m here to tell you that that species of Going Mad is really not so bad. “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” And furthermore, “whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgement passes upon that Individual”.
Nice girls don’t go out with Philosophical Zombies.
On the one hand, there are no P.Z.s. On the other hand, we are all P.Z.’s. (Hagbard Celine hands you his business card. On one side it says “There are no enemies anywhere.” On the other, it says, “There are no friends anywhere.” After you think about both sides for a while, he carefully splits the business card into two thinner halves and writes on the insides in fine calligraphy, “There are no / gurus anywhere.”) He shows you this, glues the two halves back together so as to hide the third message, and puts the business card away.)
I never had much use for Nice Girls anyhow.
I repeat, to feel that one is conscious is to be conscious, in much the same way as 1 = 1. […]
That’s what your networks say. My network disagrees. Mostly.
I don’t particularly enjoy getting involved in discussions of consciousness, but I will give my reminder that Searle’s Chinese room problem does not concern translating Chinese, but rather answering questions posed in Chinese, a significantly harder task and thus traditionally felt to be more interesting as a way of exploring what it means to “think.” However, recent developments have placed the difference in a rather different light. It turns out that it may not actually be that much more difficult to bullshit answers algorithmically than to produce translations. The interesting issues (to whatever extent one thinks they actually still are or ever were interesting) now seem to hinge a lot more on the “bullshit” part.
By the same token, it seems to me that I am conscious, but I think that this is a misperception on my part.
“I think, doctor, but I am not.”
(IIRC, a few weeks ago, one of the systems on the server mentioned at that link had to deal with a new addition who semi-jokingly declared that she didn’t exist, and proceeded to disappear. She was fortunately recovered by her other headmates, but really didn’t like the experience.)
Being conscious is pretty much the only thing that is self-confirming.
It might sometimes be nontrivial to tell, though, whether the consciousness you are currently using is in fact yours, especially if there are other candidates in the same brain (as previously discussed in this thread, under “tulpamancy”).
In other words, cogitatur, ergo cogitatur. Perhaps Mrs. Gradgrind had the right idea.
Decisions about what’s real are also an emergent property of the network, and it can be fooled.
Indeed so; this is how the Mandela effect happens, and on a larger scale it’s how fictive headmates can believe (and even appear to have memories of) their source backstories.
but I will give my reminder that Searle’s Chinese room problem does not concern translating Chinese, but rather answering questions posed in Chinese, a significantly harder task and thus traditionally felt to be more interesting as a way of exploring what it means to “think.”
…but also a task that is much easier to imagine being automated; indeed for sufficiently simple questions it requires little more than a database query.
(TIL that True Knowledge, a project from the late 2000s/early 2010s that attempted to do this for as many databaseable questions as they could, had since been acquired by Alexa. Wolfram Alpha also does a good approximation.)
“As of the census of 2010, there were 1,594 people, 659 households, and 441 families living in the village. The population density was 1,180.7 inhabitants per square mile (455.9/km2). There were 720 housing units at an average density of 533.3 per square mile (205.9/km2). The racial makeup of the village was 95.4% White, 0.4% African American, 0.3% Native American, 0.6% Asian, 2.2% from other races, and 1.1% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 4.5% of the population.”
– Wikipedia, on the village of Random Lake, Wisconsin; you could do this in Swedish or Cebuano just as easily as in English if you had a base text to stick the numbers into and maybe some rules on how to decline the words.
…looks like my comment on consciousness had too many links and/or too many edits, because I can’t see it any more.
I guess I’ll do just the last part for now, since it was the most hurried in the original (I forgot to add it until the editing period started) and it really deserved an expansion anyway…
[EDIT: I didn’t really do it justice, because after some point I forgot what I wanted to say.]
but I will give my reminder that Searle’s Chinese room problem does not concern translating Chinese, but rather answering questions posed in Chinese, a significantly harder task and thus traditionally felt to be more interesting as a way of exploring what it means to “think.”
Turns out it’s sometimes even easier to automate, though; depends on how narrow the questions are. For example, if all you need is to look up people’s phone numbers, you just need a phone book, an alphabetical table (…nontrivial for Chinese, admittedly*), and instructions on which part of the text is the phone number; very much doable in a room.
(I’ve done similar things myself for some football results; it sounds really impressive to look up football scores in Hungarian, but one doesn’t need rather much Hungarian to tell which part in the description is the score.)
True Knowledge (apparently since acquired by Alexa) was a 2007 project (piddling along until 2012) that had attempted to do this for a wider range of questions, via a database vaguely resembling Wikidata combined with an attempt to convert users’ questions into something that can be done as a set of database queries. (It was probably the latter that’s the hard part, in thinking terms, and indeed True Knowledge sometimes failed in it.)
To a large extent, WolframAlpha includes a project to do a similar thing, though now that it had (probably) incorporated neural networks it probably isn’t as good at it.
And then there’s the numerous bot-created articles on Wikipedia…
*) this actually might make the experiment neater; it’s possible to imagine replacing the full alphabetical order table with an instruction of how to tell whether a character is before or after the one you’re looking for in alphabetical order, and such an instruction would probably be shorter than the table!
The experience of consciousness is not like an optical illusion at all. If it is an illusion, it is more like mistaking the number 43 for a rabbit and feeding it some lettuce, or mistaking a bus for influenza.
To call this an “Illusion” is to mask fundamental unalikeness.
Dennett’s conclusion should be used as a reductio ad absurdum, and lead to a search for logical errors in his reasoning, and/or unthinkingly adopted false premises. Not to acceptance.
Quite. One can doubt that other consciousnesses exist — it is childish and pointless, but people manage to do it, or at least claim they do — but to doubt that one’s own exists is incoherent.
@ JC : The evidence is, though, that rather than deciding to act and then acting, we act first and then find out what we have decided.
Yes, life is a crapshoot, and everyone makes snap decisions, but my own sense is that many of our defaults are worked out (and continually revised by Systems Maintenance) while we sleep. [William Gibson and I suspect that dreams may be communications from versions of ourselves in adjacent timelines…]
`Systems Maintenance’ => what (I think) Bayesians mean by `updating our priors’…
The evidence is, though, that rather than deciding to act and then acting, we act first and then find out what we have decided.
AFAIK some of it is mostly only because the process of deciding takes up quite a few milliseconds to play out properly, and in a lot of situations you don’t really have this many milliseconds to devote to decision, so some preliminary actions have to be sent quickly and then you can figure out exactly why you would have done that.
(IIRC in some extreme cases the processing has to occur in other body parts, because there’s not even enough time to send the signal to the head and back.)
What we experience as the “present moment” is actually quite a complex construct, obligingly provided for us by a lot of preprocessing we’re unaware of: its relationship to the actual temporal ordering of physical events is quite variable. (I suspect that it is rumination on such matters, which actually are accepted physiological facts, which has led Sapolsky to suppose that he has grasped the Truth about Free Will.)
For what it’s worth, I think that consciousness exists to enable free will, and that the medium of free will is consciousness’s ability to focus (freely!) on one or another aspect of the environment. When our focus changes, so does our subjective world, and our actions toward that world then follow deterministically from our freely chosen focus. This helps explain why people like Sapolsky or (the early) Libet think that they’ve proven neurologically that our actions are determined: they’re looking at the wrong point in the process.
My views on free will in general (not this interpretation in particular) have been strongly affected by an online PDF by a pair of biologists, which I had bookmarked on my old work computer but whose names no amount of focusing on my part has been able to pull up. They adduce evolutionary advantage and have a pleasingly straightforward writing style.
Of course “consciousness” means more than one thing. When John Cowan said consciousness is an illusion, I disagreed strongly, but now it seems he means that the unitary self is a construct, which is another kettle of anatman entirely.
My views on free will in general (not this interpretation in particular) have been strongly affected by an online PDF by a pair of biologists, which I had bookmarked on my old work computer but whose names no amount of focusing on my part has been able to pull up. They adduce evolutionary advantage and have a pleasingly straightforward writing style.
If you do retrieve it somehow, please share; I’m sure I’m not the only one around here who would be interested.
Perhaps Mrs. Gradgrind had the right idea.
…in retrospect, that description as applied to thinking/consciousness is (almost) exactly what dissociation is.
Googling /free will biology evolution pdf/, I find that the topic has been addressed quite a bit by both voluntarists and determinists, but I don’t spot the names I’d recognize, probably because it was quite a few years ago.
I note sardonically that when I say I don’t believe in consciousness, you all say “Oooh”, but when the gentleman in black velvet who tells us about J-consciousness (a special case) above, we all agree that it doesn’t exist.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda …
Hypotheses non fingo
hypotheses non sunt fingenda praeter necessitatem. That’s a cardinality constraint, not a hypothesis. Multiplication has not yet even been defined.
Illegitimati non carborundum.
I learned it with illegitimatis. The ablative of agency or whatever (“by them”).
mistaking a bus for influenza
I got run over last weekend, and still haven’t quite recovered.
He thought he saw a Banker’s Clerk
Descending from a Bus,
He looked again and saw it was
A Hippopotamus.
“If this should come to dine,” he said,
“There won’t be much for us!”
I learned it with illegitimatis. The ablative of agency or whatever (“by them”).
Only version I ever learned starts with illegitimi, though I vaguely recall that other versions exist.
As it happens, Wikipedia agrees; however, I do not recall where I got the phrase from, and it might well have been Wikipedia itself.
(I could swear I’ve mentioned it, but apparently that comment was lost in a browser crash.)
Only version I ever learned starts with illegitimi
Same here.
As the Wikipedia article says, in The Handmaid’s Tale it’s “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” for some reason.
The commander explicitly says that’s not actually Latin.
Sure, and neither are any of the other versions.
It’s especially the look-alike carborundum that grates on me. An 18th century trademark, but even if it also were a legitimate Latin gerundive, it’s not a finite verb. (And -u- as a thematic vowel is not regular in any of the conjugations, I think, so even though eundum, secundum also look like gerundives, their present stems are too unlike to give a good base for analogizing the verb for carborundum. carboror, anyone?)
(gerundivus seems to be from gerendum, the gerundive of gero 3. So no -u-, but a red herring. If a 3rd conjugation gerundive, carborundum would stress the penult and a change to -u- would be irregular innit).
Nolite te carborundum esse illegitimis
It’s especially the look-alike carborundum that grates on me
I think it belongs to that species of cockeyed Latin which includes virii as the plural of virus. The idea being that if you want to make some pseudo-Latin but your Latin is no good, make it obvious that the ugliness is intentional.
Concerning the relationship between sleeping and waking, a recent SMBC opens up a new perspective .
My illusion persists completely unchanged when I close one eye or the other while looking at the arrows.
That’s not remotely what my dreams are like, if that’s what you mean.
Uh, I lack that. All my conscious attempts to ignore anything outside my skull cause inability to focus on anything at all.
My illusion persists completely unchanged when I close one eye or the other while looking at the arrows.
As expected. The point is that I grew up not seeing in depth, which meant that I saw things flat.