Comment by AltruisticGap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AltruisticGap | Hacker News Reader

> Jaynes recognizes that consciousness itself is only a small part of mental activity and is not necessary for sensation or perception, for concept formation, for learning, thinking or even reasoning. Thus, if major human actions and skills can function automatically and unconsciously, then it is conceivable that there were, at one time, human beings who did most of the things we do – speak, understand, perceive, solve problems – but who were without consciousness.

In the spiritual teachings & traditions the wording would be different. I think they would refer to was Jaynes call "consciousness" as "self awareness"; and then assert that "consciousness" is prior to any of that. For example in the dream state we are typically not in control, nor are we aware it's a dream.. yet when we "wake up" we remember having dreamed and having "been there".

In fact I'd argue that we DO many times of the day every day... speak and act without much self awareness. And yet, we remember afterwards and then claim those moments as something we did.

> In short, Jaynes claims that men in the age of the Iliad learned to speak, read, and write, as well as conduct their daily lives, yet remained nonconscious throughout their lives.

Maybe they were indeed much less "self-aware" as we are today, which again is not same as saying not conscious.

edit: it seems to me this is the main contetion in science often times people just conflate mind activity and consciousness , as an (possibly not deliberate) attempt to chuck away the "hard problem of consciousness".

pps: funny enough it is actually an hypothesis, that for human beings to recongize consciousness is also something made possible through self awareness. For example, what is called "awakening" in spiritual teachings is supposed to be the natural state, hence, whatever "spiritual" state it is thought to be, is a self-refetential acknowledhgement of a change of one's perception of self and world. That is, "self awareness" allows for human beings to acknowledge consciousness (since we have to conceive of it).. whereas a dog or cat can be consciouss, and relatively free of worry, yet will never know themselves as "free of worry" (I mean in a rational / self aware way).

Jaynes addresses this critique in the revised Afterword:

> The most common error which I did not emphasize sufficiently is to confuse consciousness with perception... This type of confusion was at least encouraged back in 1921 by Bertrand Russell: “We are conscious of anything that we perceive.” And as his logical atomism became fashionable in philosophy, it became difficult to see it any other way. And in a later book Russell uses as an example of consciousness “I see a table.” But Descartes, who gave us the modern idea of consciousness, would never have agreed. Nor would a radical behaviorist like Watson, who in denying consciousness existed certainly did not mean sense perception.

Earlier in the book he makes a linguistic argument, claiming that his usage of "consciousness" is the only that unifies both the subjective (I am conscious) and objective (I am conscious of X) usages.

Beyond Jaynes and more broadly, I'd consider comparing his theses with that of McLuhan in Gutenberg Galaxy, namely McLuhan's theories about mass literacy. There seems to be a unifying element in that the structure of one's experience (of one's interpretation of their sensory inputs) is strongly related to the sorts of media they consume and to the sorts of epistemological "channels" available. The structure of knowledge and its dissemination (collectively oral? Or privately read? Think about problems such as "atomization of society" and a lightbulb should go off) seems to determine our internal experience to a large degree: older writers such as Walter Benjamin have touched on "movie consciousness" (although not strictly in those words), while more contemporary authors like Sarah Perry discuss "Social Media Consciousness" (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/09/07/social-media-conscious...).

These issues are only going to be more complex as time marches onward. Our understanding of neuroscience and the mind are just getting out of infancy with the optogenetic and CRISPR revolutions. It's going to be pretty cool to see how our definitions change as the science marches onward.

I'll give a concrete example: Persistent vegetative states. Prior to some recent research [0,1], people in these states were thought to be just, well, akin to vegetables. However, under MRI, it was found that there were conscious people 'trapped' in these bodies. Not for all, but for some. Communication out of their 'locked-in' state is now possible. In terms of Jaynes, this means that the acts of perception, concept formation, learning, thinking, and reasoning are not all directly linked; they can occur independent of each other.

Sure, you can argue if these people are conscious still or not, just like with Ulysses. But what we are now seeing is that the seat of the mind, our brains, can be parceled out. Bits of it can act independent of the other parts. That a mind is kinda, sometimes, in specific cases, sorta like Legos. That a human mind is divisible, that the idea of a mind is likely to encompass more than just humans, and that we're just in a small sub-set of 'minds'.

So, it's going to be fun to watch how our ideas of a 'mind', of 'consciousness', of 'personhood', all change as the data keeps rolling in.

[0]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4913176/

[1]https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/74/11/1571

Where is the value of such distinction? What is consciousness without self awareness—memory?

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