"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.