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

I came across the same conundrum when I was studying psychology. It all came down to the medium becoming the message. Language is the prime means through which we convey experience. Of course there are other means visual, spacial but when you're "studying consciousness" you're typically reading books. Serious treatise in the area are delivered in the form of books. We come to think of thought as being predominantly verbal because that's the predominant means through which we acquire an "objective" appreciation for what consciousness "is". Even to use a word "consciousness" puts that set of concepts in a delineated box. I could go on ... but I risk becoming stream of consciousness ...

It's clearly formalised in words (except for the occasional visual programming languages/programs), but that's mostly superficial. The actual structure, or thoughts of how to change it seem to me more abstract and often hard to explain other than by combinations of diagrams and code - but those weren't the source of the idea(s).

--> it's not clear to me that programming (which is quite clearly a conscious activity) is reducible to purely verbal or visual thoughts.

Similar comments apply to other intellectual endeavours.

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 question of consciousness - as language, it has a thousand shades. I don't know if it can even be meaningfully expressed in other modalities but if it could, it doesn't seem like it could be easily manipulated in the fashion of language.

I've been surprised by the hostility/resistance to the idea that we don't think in language, especially when I'm trying to convey to people how my own mind works.

In trying to convey my experience with language, I have to try to express a layer of...as best as I can get in programmer speak...multithreaded-notthreadsafe-consciousness-impressions. These I then have to translate into single-threaded verbal language in order to communicate with others.

Indeed, without my years of practice to try to become a better communicator, I find this results in my natural speech being a kind of stocatto-mid-sentence-pausing way of speaking, as I have to join each thread of threaded-conscious-impressions before coercing and outputting it in the best approximation of a serial structured verbal language. Over the years I've just become better at pre-buffering before the verbal component is output and consciously shutting down other threads.

When I'm thinking of logic and computer programs alternatively, I often find myself thinking visual-spatially.

Indeed, when I'm really thinking hard and trying to understand some algorithms, I can sometimes be seen closing my eyes and even engaging my arms/hands as though i'm moving, conducting or manipulating physical things. Because in my head that's exactly what I'm doing: the arrays/lists/things exist as spatial objects in my mind, and I'm running things through by manipulating them in space or seeing how they fit together spatially/in relation to each other.

This Temple Grandin bit is great!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child

Perhaps at some point you will travel into the past and do the nasty in the pasty with one of your ancestors, and that past nastification results in you being your own ancestor. That is known to be capable of causing one to have a mind that works differently from that of the rest of humanity.

Huh? Yes, yes I am watching the Futurama marathon on SyFy right now. How did you know?

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 language, they were a collection of emotions, fears, desires, etc. After language, they existed for the first time. They could name things, including themselves.

This looks a lot like the transition to self aware consciousness. Which means Jayne isn't entirely wrong.

The ego (or the default mode network, in which I hypothesize the ego "resides") basically connects those disparate parts of the brain and makes the leap to turn the brain from a few interacting modules into an integrated whole, giving rise to the sense of the self as we understand it today. This must somehow activate our self-awareness by us understanding not only that we inhabit a body, but that the mind doing so can also be identified.

However, when we test for language in other animals, we do not test for these underlying cognitive abilities. Rather, rather, we test for the animals ability to express these facilities through some communication system with other animals (either in the same species, or with humans).

It is conceivable to have an animal that has all of the cognitive abilities we associate with language except the ability to serialize/deserialize [0] it. While this ability is significant at the species level, it does not seem like it would be particularly significant at an individual level.

Further if you take the view that language was evolved primarily as a tool for thinking (rather than a tool for communicating), this possibilities seems even more likely. Under this view, we would first develop the cognitive aspects, then develop the communicative aspects on top of them (in the same way that we evolved our "speech organs" on our digestive (tongue) and respiratory (lungs/airway) ones.

It also seems plausible that it was this adaptation that allowed humans to pass the singularity point necessary to reach modern society (which grew up very quickly on an evolutionary timeline). If this were the case, then I would expect to see that the rest of the cognitive abilities associated with speech are actually present and similar in related species.

[0] Our current model of human language is that of a tree. We do not see processes that act on a linear structure until we get into phonology.

I don't agree. Many other types of animals have rudimentary languages, but I wouldn't dispute the sophistication of human language towers above all others, that in itself rests (along with other uniquely sophisticated behavioural endowments) upon what really differentiates us which is the capacity for imagination and abstract thought. The capability to imagine things that aren't actually real, but perhaps could be. It's thought that the seat of all this is the frontal cortex but I see now on wikipedia that is contentious these days [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lobe#In_other_animals

But computers are nowhere near being able to have conscious thought. So what's the difference? Clearly it's not just natural language that differentiates the conscious from the unconscious.

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.

Theories in physics has always been useful even though they are incomplete to this day.

But almost all pschological educated people I talked to found it too muddy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_mathematics

For instance, there is a Babylonian clay tablet from ~1700 BC that gives an approximation of sqrt(2) as 1.414213 (correct to 6 decimal digits).

At best I think such ideas help challenge beliefs about ourselves in the modern era. At worst I think they perpetuate a tendency for people to dehumanize those whom we can't personally identify with.

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...