From: Paul Turner (paulj.turner@ntlworld.com)
Date: Wed Nov 26 2003 - 10:28:59 GMT
Hi Mark, Platt, Bo
Mark:
Jaynes has made assumptions and inferences, therefore he does not know
at all. Indeed, as Platt indicates from his Campbell quote, in order to
know, one requires the products of thought; writing. As those who Jaynes
is discussing left no written evidence we do not know what they were
thinking or why they were thinking it.
Paul:
Actually, most of his "Origin of Consciousness" is spent analysing
Iliad, Odyssey, various pieces of Assyrian literature e.g. The Epic of
Gilgamesh, Babylonian cuneiform writing, The Old Testament, Hesiod's
"Works and Days," as well as figurines and pictorial records of the
period. His theory comes almost entirely from an interpretation of early
writing to speculate on the presence of consciousness of the people who
wrote it.
That said, of course Jaynes' theory is speculation and, as I've said
before, it is of no concern to me whether or not anyone thinks it is a
good theory in its entirety. As an interpretation of ancient texts, it
just offers historical support to the MOQ assertion that intellect
evolved from society, and more specifically, agrees with Pirsig's
statements about language such as this one quoted in Ant's Textbook:
"[Intellectual patterns] have their genesis in society the same way that
society has its genesis in biology. Without biology there is no society.
Without society there is no intellect since there would be no one to
talk to anyone else and thus no language to speak and thus nothing to
contain the ideas." (Pirsig, 2003)
Something else I found interesting but haven't taken further is that
there is also agreement between Jaynes' speculation on the relationship
between language and the two sides of the brain and something Pirsig
says in a letter to Bo (published in the Essay section).
"I had always assumed that this blockage of direct quality perception
was social, but in Mexico a few years ago I talked to a neurologist who
argued that it was physiological. She said that recent experiments are
showing that the right side of the brain, the "artistic" side, filters
all experience before it reaches the left "rational" side of the brain.
This would concur with the MOQ assertion that value precedes concepts in
human understanding. I have read elsewhere that the left rational side
of the brain can never perceive the right brain as an object, but only
receive messages from it. This would explain why everyone knows that
something is better than other things but no one can define what this
betterness is. All they get are the quality messages but they don't know
where the quality messages are coming from. This is not to say that the
right brain creates the quality, only that it filters it before passing
it along to the left brain for conceptualizing."
Cheers
Paul
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