The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

2000-08-15
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

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  • Author: Julian Jaynes
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • ISBN: 0547527543
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 580

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

The Origin of Consciousness

The Origin of Consciousness

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  • Author: Graham Little
  • Publisher: Lulu.com
  • ISBN: 099510848X
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 378

The Origins and History of Consciousness

2020-03-31
The Origins and History of Consciousness

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  • Author: Erich Neumann
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • ISBN: 0691209995
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 552

The Origins and History of Consciousness draws on a full range of world mythology to show how individual consciousness undergoes the same archetypal stages of development as human consciousness as a whole. Erich Neumann was one of C. G. Jung's most creative students and a renowned practitioner of analytical psychology in his own right. In this influential book, Neumann shows how the stages begin and end with the symbol of the Uroboros, the tail-eating serpent. The intermediate stages are projected in the universal myths of the World Creation, Great Mother, Separation of the World Parents, Birth of the Hero, Slaying of the Dragon, Rescue of the Captive, and Transformation and Deification of the Hero. Throughout the sequence, the Hero is the evolving ego consciousness. Featuring a foreword by Jung, this Princeton Classics edition introduces a new generation of readers to this eloquent and enduring work.

Origins of Consciousness: How the Search to Understand the Nature of Consciousness is Leading to a New View of Reality

2015-07-04
Origins of Consciousness: How the Search to Understand the Nature of Consciousness is Leading to a New View of Reality

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  • Author: Adrian David Nelson
  • Publisher: Lulu.com
  • ISBN: 1329298772
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 222

In recent years science and philosophy have seen a resurgence of open-mindedness toward deeper views of consciousness. This book explores ideas and evidence now changing the way scientists and philosophers approach the place of consciousness in the universe. From the frontiers of modern physics and cosmology to controversial experiments exploring telepathy and mind-matter interaction, the emerging view promises to change how we understand our place in the universe, our relationship to other life, and the nature of reality itself.

Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness

2008
Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness

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  • Author: Marcel Kuijsten
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 9780979074417
  • Category : Consciousness
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 428

The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul

2019-03-12
The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul

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  • Author: Simona Ginsburg
  • Publisher: MIT Press
  • ISBN: 0262351102
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 665

A new theory about the origins of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in the evolutionary transition to basic consciousness. What marked the evolutionary transition from organisms that lacked consciousness to those with consciousness—to minimal subjective experiencing, or, as Aristotle described it, “the sensitive soul”? In this book, Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka propose a new theory about the origin of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in the transition to basic consciousness. Using a methodology similar to that used by scientists when they identified the transition from non-life to life, Ginsburg and Jablonka suggest a set of criteria, identify a marker for the transition to minimal consciousness, and explore the far-reaching biological, psychological, and philosophical implications. After presenting the historical, neurobiological, and philosophical foundations of their analysis, Ginsburg and Jablonka propose that the evolutionary marker of basic or minimal consciousness is a complex form of associative learning, which they term unlimited associative learning (UAL). UAL enables an organism to ascribe motivational value to a novel, compound, non-reflex-inducing stimulus or action, and use it as the basis for future learning. Associative learning, Ginsburg and Jablonka argue, drove the Cambrian explosion and its massive diversification of organisms. Finally, Ginsburg and Jablonka propose symbolic language as a similar type of marker for the evolutionary transition to human rationality—to Aristotle's “rational soul.”

The Ancient Origins of Consciousness

2016-03-25
The Ancient Origins of Consciousness

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  • Author: Todd E. Feinberg
  • Publisher: MIT Press
  • ISBN: 0262333279
  • Category : Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 387

How consciousness appeared much earlier in evolutionary history than is commonly assumed, and why all vertebrates and perhaps even some invertebrates are conscious. How is consciousness created? When did it first appear on Earth, and how did it evolve? What constitutes consciousness, and which animals can be said to be sentient? In this book, Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt draw on recent scientific findings to answer these questions—and to tackle the most fundamental question about the nature of consciousness: how does the material brain create subjective experience? After assembling a list of the biological and neurobiological features that seem responsible for consciousness, and considering the fossil record of evolution, Feinberg and Mallatt argue that consciousness appeared much earlier in evolutionary history than is commonly assumed. About 520 to 560 million years ago, they explain, the great “Cambrian explosion” of animal diversity produced the first complex brains, which were accompanied by the first appearance of consciousness; simple reflexive behaviors evolved into a unified inner world of subjective experiences. From this they deduce that all vertebrates are and have always been conscious—not just humans and other mammals, but also every fish, reptile, amphibian, and bird. Considering invertebrates, they find that arthropods (including insects and probably crustaceans) and cephalopods (including the octopus) meet many of the criteria for consciousness. The obvious and conventional wisdom–shattering implication is that consciousness evolved simultaneously but independently in the first vertebrates and possibly arthropods more than half a billion years ago. Combining evolutionary, neurobiological, and philosophical approaches allows Feinberg and Mallatt to offer an original solution to the “hard problem” of consciousness.

The Psychology of the Bible

2020-09-17
The Psychology of the Bible

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  • Author: Brian J. McVeigh
  • Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
  • ISBN: 1788360435
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 215

Fire and brimstone, bellowing prophets, and a good dose of old-fashioned sermonizing — these are the images the Bible brings to mind. But this assortment of sacred writings, in particular the Old Testament, is more than a collection of colorful allegories or miracles-and-morals mythology. Though written in the first millennium BCE, these holy writings are a nostalgic recounting of a lost 'super-religious' mentality that characterized the Bronze Age. The Psychology of the Bible explores how the Old Testament provides perspective into the tumultuous transition from an earlier mentality to a new paradigm of interiorized psychology and introspective religiosity that came to characterize the first millennium BCE. By examining the Old Testament's historical background and theopolitical context, utilizing linguistic analysis, and applying systems and communication theory, this book interprets biblical passages through a new lens. It analyzes divine voices, visions, and appearances of heavenly messengers — angel and prophets — as neurocultural phenomena and explains why they were so common. This book also answers why definitions of God changed so radically, illuminates the divinatory role of idols and other oracular aids (e.g. the Ark of the Covenant), provides a framework for appreciating why ‘wisdom literature' became so significant, and clarifies the linkages among music, poetry, and inspiration.

Feeling & Knowing

2021-10-26
Feeling & Knowing

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  • Author: Antonio Damasio
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN: 1524747564
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 257

From one of the world’s leading neuroscientists: a succinct, illuminating, wholly engaging investigation of how biology, neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence have given us the tools to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness “One thrilling insight after another ... Damasio has succeeded brilliantly in narrowing the gap between body and mind.” —The New York Times Book Review In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the problem of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings across multiple scientific disciplines have given us a way to understand consciousness and its significance for human life. In the forty-eight brief chapters of Feeling & Knowing, and in writing that remains faithful to our intuitive sense of what feeling and experiencing are about, Damasio helps us understand why being conscious is not the same as sensing, why nervous systems are essential for the development of feelings, and why feeling opens the way to consciousness writ large. He combines the latest discoveries in various sciences with philosophy and discusses his original research, which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behavior. Here is an indispensable guide to understand­ing how we experience the world within and around us and find our place in the universe.

Discussions with Julian Jaynes

2016
Discussions with Julian Jaynes

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  • Author: Brian J. McVeigh
  • Publisher: Novinka Books
  • ISBN: 9781536100679
  • Category : Psychology
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 113

In 1976, the late Julian Jaynes of Princeton University published the groundbreaking The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in which he argued that before the twelfth century BC, the minds of individuals were of a different neurocultural organization. Rather than being consciously self-aware as people nowadays think of it, the behavior of our ancient predecessors was governed by religiously-inflected "voices" and visions. These were produced by a "two-chambered" or "bicameral" mentality: language areas in the right hemisphere (the ruler or "god" side) organized advice and admonishments and coded them into hallucinatory experiences that were conveyed over the anterior commissure to the left hemisphere's corresponding language regions (the follower or "person" side). Brian J. McVeigh, a student of Julian Jaynes, took the opportunity in 1991 to record a series of informal, wide-ranging, and unstructured discussions with Jaynes, considered a controversial maverick of the psychology world. Weaving their way in and out of the discussions are the following themes: a clarification of the meaning of "consciousness"; the relation between linguistics, consciousness and language study as a crucial method to reveal this relation; the history of psychology and its prejudices (e.g., the marginalization of consciousness as a research topic, ignoring socio-historical aspects of psyche, the significance of religion, the fraudulence of Freudianism, and the overuse, vagueness, and emptiness of "cognitive"); and some practical, therapeutic implications of Jaynes's ideas on consciousness. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the emergence of consciousness, language and cognition, cultural psychology, the history of psychology, and the neurocultural transformation of our species. A glossary of names provides useful historical context. Presenting a series of wide ranging and thought-provoking conversations with Julian Jaynes, who was one of the most insightful and original thinkers of the twentieth century, Discussions with Julian Jaynes constitutes an important contribution to the growing literature on Jaynes and his ideas.