"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" - Reflections.

I just finished reading "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes. I'm not going to give much of a book report on it, since it's a complex idea and the above-linked Wikipedia article should give an introduction. I'm more interested in this article in this book's relationship with the purposes of art and media.

This book has touched a large number of disciplines and can have serious implications about the human future, but I'm going to stick to my point about art, media and eventually relating it to gaming and interactive narrative here. I addition to this, I think the book offers a scientific explanation for why we create and love art, and I'll try to touch on this as well.

To briefly describe the book, I'll say it makes a good case for the idea that our human brains have evolved rapidly and particularly about 3,000 years ago there was a big shift. Jaynes discusses how our brains changed around then, allowing the development of consciousness as we think of it today. Previously humans had hallucinated the voices of Gods who told them what to do, much like schizophrenics today (this is bicameralism). As this part of ourselves died out it was replaced over several hundred years by a sense of self, individuality and consciousness. He points at a great volume of convincing material that includes writing, art, music, poetry, religion, iconography, history and the structure of the human brain.

One of the things discussed I personally found interesting is the way it fundamentally changes the way we might understand much of art and its development. He argues convincingly that music, poetry and visual art emerged out of the bicameral mind and remains as a remnant of it. In fact, according to Jaynes, a lot of the art we continue to create is created out of a kind of yearning for what was lost when we changed from a bicameral mentality to a conscious mentality. Music and the poetry of song lyrics still speaks to us much like the voices of the gods spoke to primitive cultures. However, it is part of a yearning and feeling of a lost bicamerality, as opposed to actual bicamerality, that drives a contemporary love for art and music.

Whether this is the original purpose of art is obviously up for discussion, but I think Jaynes' thesis is one that must be taken into account. Assuming he's correct, the purposes of art have surely expanded far beyond beyond a relationship to bicamerality. Art can engage our reasoning facilities, our consciousness, our relationships with others, be a means of education etc. But considering bicamerality and art, even our relationship with art and media today, can be enlightening, especially when you start to consider the cognitive physiology of bicamerality.

I think it would be a worthwhile study to compare what we can assume is bicamerality's influence on art and what we can identify as clearly different from bicamerality. In terms of gaming, it's interesting to note the nature of our metaphorical relationship with characters in games. We might find interesting correlations between non-player characters in video games, the sense of authority that many games exhibit over the game (presumably guiding the player, but this becomes a clear authority over the player) and bicamerality. Further, the ability to inhabit another human character is an act that seems to break with bicameral traditions, and this is one of the more interesting features of many video games. (It was after the breakdown of bicamerality that Greek theatre really took off).

How do we understand participation in the narrative? I might suggest that an ability to actively alter a narrative's outcomes engages our consciousness. However, if our participation is guided (such as the voice of authority mentioned above) does this not suggest a bicameral mentality?

Anonymity, the subconscious and the internet

William Gibson published an article today in the New York Times, commenting on a recent interview with Eric Schmidt, reflecting on the idea of Google as the HAL bot we never quite expected. His point was that we may have expected a super computer to be telling us what to do, but we always expected a genii in a bottle (like HAL) not a faceless distributed being like Google advising us on where we want to go for dinner.

I do believe we all have to get used to living in public, with the deepest recesses of our minds creeping up into the public sphere and becoming knowable to the machine intelligences on the web and to fellow people who want to Google-stalk us or even employers being able to divine aspects of our private life they really shouldn't necessarily be looking for. I also believe it's important for the mind to be able to play in this sphere of activity without repercussions.

In order to make good decisions on the internet, one must be given space on the internet to make bad decisions as well. This argues all the more for anonymous online environments where one can live out experiences through virtual selves and experience consequences, even if the consequences are entirely virtual. This is how people learn about themselves and the nature of their actions. This is play, and we've learned how play is essential to self understanding and the eventual taking-on of responsibility.

The solution Schmidt discusses is that we should be given a new identity at a certain age, where actions will start to matter because the internet will now remember your new identity, and this new identity will be the identity that goes to college and interviews for jobs etc. This is a fascinating idea, both for the notion of the plasticity of identity and for the ancient (even bicameral) behavior of a coming of age.

This solution gives some space to play in, but it can't be the whole picture. The ability as young people and throughout our lives to act anonymously in situations on the web is more and more essential to learning about our own behavior.

I would like to attach another metaphor to this. The spaces where we act anonymously within this environment is more like the subconscious. Google is less a super-smart robot and more an extension of our own brains. Google's algorithms quantify our collective behaviors and information and makes that information more useful to us, and easier to get. It may be an independent super-smart robot in one sense, but in another sense it is just organizing ourselves in a whole new way. The darker underbelly of the internet, where people use aliases and do and say things they'd never say otherwise may be a nasty place sometimes. But this is the part of the giant brain that is not meant to come to light. Maybe there are times that the subconscious sends us something that requires attention, or something comes to light that had to come up. But the subconscious works because it is the place where things may percolate without direct consequences. If we apply the same metaphor to the brain-like aspects of Google, then we can understand the importance of subconscious behaviors where a subconscious thought or decision is critical to proper functioning.

Evolving Attention Spans

In light of our fragmented attention spans, I've started to wonder about another implication for the development of media. Namely, I'm wondering if our attention span will continue to fragment for a period, but then turn around back to something akin to "deep reading" with further developments in our media technology.

Given the development of the app and the "death of the web," our relationship with media will change dramatically. Our interaction with media will move rapidly in the next 5 years to Ipads

and other similar devices. The media we use on them will change radically in the next 10 years. There is every reason to assume the next 10-15 years will see another great change in behavior, and no reason to assume the current trajectory will last.

Perhaps the only thing missing is the new media which enables deep, engaged thought. The Ipads and Kindles are designed in such a way that deep interaction should be enabled, as opposed to our mobile devices and computers, which encourage distractions. Once media production has adjusted itself to the new technology, it may be that people find themselves deeply engaged in new forms of deep media that engages us in ways similar to long Victorian novels again.

I would argue that many TV shows are already falling into this category, as we remain engaged in new seasons of "Mad Men" or "Lost." Likewise with cable news, which actually follows stories over the course of years, and will often pick up threads from decades ago. We don't assume following news stories to be deep reading, and it's arguable to what degree it actually is, but millions of people do follow stories over long periods of time. One can easily state that video games are a deeply immersive experience that engages the player in a deep state, with the capacity to become more and more complex in its narrative structures and character developments.

Will we be reading novels and books on our Ipads with the deep reading experience many of us grew up with? Some probably will - especially as new books begin to engage us in more interactive ways, and even as we spend less time in front of computers and more time with our new devices. I think it's important to look for new forms of media that will enable deep reading experiences, and to put what pressure we can on software developers to encourage deep, immersive experiences over shorter, distracting experiences.

Group Narrative: Democratic vs. Entrepreneurial Group Story Telling

I've been considering how interactive narratives can become increasingly social and group driven. There is a history of this, and indeed the entire prehistory of narrative can be considered a group effort to build a story. But how can we create a technology that enables groups to participate in the unfolding of a story?

There's an example from Czech film history which I can't cite exactly right now where an audience would sit in a movie theater and vote on the process of the story. Of course, this means the story has to be constructed in a branching structure, and one that probably loops back around a good deal due to the shear economics of film making. I might call this democratic group narrative building.

Democratic group narrative building does not always require a branching structure the way it would when applied to traditional films. Plenty of games online use democratic structures in their imitation of real life social situations. The ways in which this constitutes a narrative or could lead to further developments of narrative is a rich debate to be had, but I'll let it go for now.

However, I'll argue that Democratic group narrative building is probably most effective when the narrative is one that attempts to engage the audience (or players) as members of a group making social decisions. It may not always lead to the most interesting story endings, as we all know that interesting story endings are frequently the ones that leave the group surprised.

I'll introduce the idea of the entrepreneurial model, which probably better imitates the ancient methods of constructing a story. In this, the entire group is given access to the story's structure, and has the ability to toy around with it. However, like a group of open-source programmers, the best structures emerge from that group and become accepted by the group and it gets added to the overall structure.

Another example of this is a group of children playing with blocks, all working on some sort group structure out of the blocks. Every child is capable of working on different parts of the structure, but it is one child with a great idea who does it on their own that may make the structure particularly interesting and let it go off in another direction altogether.

It's hard to say exactly how to harness entrepreneurial group story telling in a new way. However, by pursuing this model, there could be really interesting results with bold new stories and ways of telling and sharing stories.

Max Richter

I've been listening to music by Max Richter. He's a composer with some beautiful and haunting music. Below is music right off his website. Description from the webpage:

Max's ringtone album. Fragmentary and partial by nature, 24 postcards is a varied collection of evocative miniatures. The longest track is just under three minutes, whilst the majority clock in at around just sixty seconds, a series of sketches on the nature of time and memory, stitched together to form a series of jump-cuts and foldbacks. As though extracting the absolute essence, simple, plaintive piano and string melodies butt up against passages of rich, borderzone ambience - radio static / voices leaking through dense, shifting drones.

24 Postcards In Full Colour by max richter

Untro

Another semester of grad school is right around the corner. It'll be a semester of animation and video production for me. Hopefully there will be further opportunities for projection design this semester and I have a few things coming up along those lines that may prove successful.

The things to watch for will be further work toward defining my grad school goals, along with a widening of technical knowledge about video and animation. I'm excited to be working in the LIU motion capture lab with Adam Noah. Additionally I'll be looking for a chance to audit some Computer Science courses.