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How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

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Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#81

Post by _nedR »

vinceguidry wrote: post #6

Any useful theory of consciousness has to be able to explain animal consciousness too. Language is really the only differentiator between us and other primates, cognitively. (naturally it's a powerful difference) Primates far and away clear the bar for sentience, we know enough about dogs and cats to grudgingly accept them into the fold too. Plenty of birds are extremely intelligent and social as well.

>Any useful theory of consciousness has to be able to explain animal consciousness too

Taking it further, i would argue that whatever physics theory that claims to state the truth about the Universe and its origins has to explain how consciousness works down to the elementary level. Similar how electronic circuits can be explained based on the atomic model and quantum theory. Like a "Quantum theory of consciousness" or some such.

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#82

Post by nwatson »

joe_the_user wrote: post #77
nabla9 wrote: post #12

Wacky and entertaining idea. The theory rests on another idea that many people assume is obviously true without ever thinking twice. It's the notion that verbal thought and verbal thinking is required and fundamental part of consciousness and self awareness. When I started to read about the philosophy of consciousness, it became obvious that most people experience their own consciousness differently than I do. Their…

Hmm, I think the assumption that consciousness is wrapped-up in language is justified. Language involves representation. "self-consciousness" as generally expressed, is one's representation of one's self. Obviously one can have visual or spatial representation of one's body. But the unique quality of language is that it involves an easy shorthand for the manipulation of representations. "Who am I?" is the standard qu…

Much of how I think involves a pretend version of my body and a manipulation of virtual objects or better yet sets of those objects in some kind of physical space, to understand, manipulate, test hypotheses, and reach conclusions (I can feel my muscles twitch often as I do this). Also, there are shadowy visuals with edges, colors, and I move around those objects to get different viewpoints. This is most concrete when contemplating how to navigate or manipulate the physical world, but even quite concrete when contemplating how I build and understand software -- hypothetical data structures, functions, objects, etc., they take on some almost tangible form, and I might give them a verbal tag, but they're very much not verbal.

Even when dealing with people, social situations, my feelings for them, about them, situations I am in or might be in, or things I'm contemplating in the past -- so little of that is verbal. I flash to prior experience, prior situations, I posit new ones, I wonder how a person might sound, what their voice might show. I had a very hard time completing sentences and constructing verbal arguments before I was around 25. I was different, and my senior classmates in high school in Brazil, I don't think maliciously, voted me "most likely to go insane".

The stream-of-consciousness self-dialog in some literature is a necessarily limited mapping of this mode of thinking to words. It's a hint of how I feel most people really think. Words and phrases are but one element of inner thought, and become paramount only when laying out written or verbal communications with others ... and even then, in live or recorded conversation, can be overshadowed by vocal quality and intonation, and non-verbal body-language.

EDIT: added high-school superlative ... and also, I'm INFP, if there's anything to that.

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#83

Post by joe_the_user »

nwatson wrote: post #82
joe_the_user wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I think the assumption that consciousness is wrapped-up in language is justified. Language involves representation. "self-consciousness" as generally expressed, is one's representation of one's self. Obviously one can have visual or spatial representation of one's body. But the unique quality of language is that it involves an easy shorthand for the manipulation of representations. "Who am I?" is the standard qu…

Much of how I think involves a pretend version of my body and a manipulation of virtual objects or better yet sets of those objects in some kind of physical space, to understand, manipulate, test hypotheses, and reach conclusions (I can feel my muscles twitch often as I do this). Also, there are shadowy visuals with edges, colors, and I move around those objects to get different viewpoints. This is most concrete when…

You seem to be describing non-verbal subjective experience. Of course I wouldn't argue with someone's non-verbal experience.

The thing is that I don't think language being tied to self-consciousness in the sense of Jaynes is really a statement about what internal experience involves.

Further, the point is that language is a tag which allows to whatever extent internal experience to be represented and sent to other "consciousnesses" (other language-processors who attempt to reproduce those experiences either verbally or non-verbally).

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#84

Post by beefield »

JackFr wrote: post #67
beefield wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had some astonishing discussions where people actually refuse to accept that the verbal part of the thinking (talking in my head) is almost insignificant part of what thinking actually is. Or to be accurate, people claim that language is somehow crucial component of thinking. To me that is really weird idea, and I think that it can even be "proved" to be wrong (obviously my opponents disagreed also there) Name…

> ... there would be no difficulties to convey my thought to you without errors. But obviously that is very difficult for anything but the most trivial thoughts. The sentence itself is evidence against.

I think that is pretty trivial thought. To go tto the other end, if thinking is verbal, why can't I pick a book where Einstein explains general relativity and immediately grasp it?

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#85

Post by beefield »

gizmo686 wrote: post #63
beefield wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had some astonishing discussions where people actually refuse to accept that the verbal part of the thinking (talking in my head) is almost insignificant part of what thinking actually is. Or to be accurate, people claim that language is somehow crucial component of thinking. To me that is really weird idea, and I think that it can even be "proved" to be wrong (obviously my opponents disagreed also there) Name…

>There would need to be significant concepts that people talking different languages think differently. Not necessarily. If you study linguistics you will find that (human) languages are very similar. So it is possible, that lanugage is a central part of thinking, but the differences between languages are too minor to have significant effects. I agree with point 2 though.

That is a valid point. But to give context, the discussion I refer to was about whether there are reasons to keep small languages alive. And my opponents argument was that losing a languagle loses also ways to think, whereas my argument was that language is to a very good approximation means to communicate, nothing more, nothing less. so there is no reason to keep small languages alive. (My native language is a relatively small language)

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#86

Post by wallace_f »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #52
wallace_f wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you think about abstract concepts, like morality, which have no visual structure?

By analogy? They don't necessary have verbal structure either. Use of spatial analogies for abstract concepts is common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor

I'm convinced that different people have very different experiences thinking about the world.

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#87

Post by hugheth »

remir wrote: post #55

I had a couple of episodes of sleep paralysis where I experienced auditory hallucinations. Often times, the voices I heard were clear as day, which was strange since I wore ear plugs during a lot of these experiences. Also, I saw an article on the news about a treatment involving VR for people who hears voices in their head. In the video, the person described the voices as distinct and she could even interact with th…

For me this is one of the most interesting concepts which has only been briefly touched on -

Jaynes proposes that in the Iliad the Greeks "heard the voices of the gods" and used those to make decisions. In our modern society I'm sure a lot of religious people would find God(s) speaking directly to them a fabrication of the mind, but auditory hallucinations are common and well documented. I often find on the edge of sleep I can lucidly think of a tune or song and hear at as clearly as if it was actually being played in the room.

I think Jaynes made a really interesting observation about older theistic societies that took for granted the ability for people to receive instructions in their heads from the gods. It seems commonplace in religious literature at the least that people can interact with gods and hear what they have to say, something which we tend to interpret more as a metaphor nowadays.

If we reject his theory on consciousness as being a modern substitute for heavenly direction, I don't think that necessarily rules out a cognitive function that we've lost over the past few thousand years - one which could have developed from a young age by not writing off auditory hallucinations as mental noise...

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#88

Post by nyir »

adekok wrote: post #45
paulsutter wrote: post #7

Crucially, Jayne's definition of "consciousness" is basically introspection. If you replace the word "consciousness" with "introspection", all the controversy evaporates and the story becomes (only mildly) interesting. > Jaynes ... decides to read early texts, including The Iliad and The Odyssey, to look for signs of people who aren’t capable of introspection—people who are all sea, no rime. And he believes he sees t…

> Crucially, Jayne's definition of "consciousness" is basically introspection. With language as a key portion. See any discussion of deaf people who aren't taught language until late in life, such a Helen Keller. The stories consistently have them emotionally overwhelmed when the first learn language. They want to know the names of everything. And also, they consistently talk about "before" and "after". Before langua…

A quick search yielded something from a book about Keller - do you have some other good sources for what you mention?

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#89

Post by gscott »

rusk wrote: post #62
gscott wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have pets and they try to entertain themselves when they are board. Seems like thet are thinking abstractly with limitations imposed by body and brain.

I don’t think it’s the same. They can’t reason about what they’re doing abstractly. That’s why they’re acting it out.

This ape took a selfie all on his own just as good as any human. https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/monkey-selfie...

Re: How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015)

#90

Post by rusk »

gscott wrote: post #89
rusk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s the same. They can’t reason about what they’re doing abstractly. That’s why they’re acting it out.

This ape took a selfie all on his own just as good as any human. https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/monkey-selfie...

Ape is a corner case, they're the only species we know of that share to a limited extent the enlarged forebrain that humans have.

A single outlying data-point hardly disproves a theory, and even so, you can't possibly know that the monkey knew what he was doing. It could just be mimicry. Your thinking about what the monkey is thinking is distinctly the distinguishing trait of human psyche I'm talking about.

EDIT: Also relevant. Operant theory can explain seemingly "intelligent" behaviour as random or observed and mimicked actions that are then reinforced by the environment [0]

Your monkey's behaviour could be explained in a similar vein to that which explains "cargo cult" behaviour [1].

Now, you could say that this is indeed "intelligent" behaviour, but then again a dog can be trained to open a door, and pigeons can be trained to orient themselves based on a clicker [2]. But what I'm talking about here is what distinguishes human intelligence from other forms of life on this planet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning#Origins_o...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#First_occurrences

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtfQlkGwE2U

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