February 27, 1920

Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 to November 21, 1997) was an American thinker who wrote a popular book that suggested an alternative view of the origins of human history. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), proposed that when human speech developed it was first understood as an external voice, of a godlike origin, and thus the stories of the deities appearing in history. Jaynes said the evidence indicated that the change from the voices in your head seeming to be god's voice, to the realization it was an individual private voice of your own thoughts, took place from about 1800 BCE, to 800 BCE.

To sharpen a point (that consciousness is not just ideas in your head) Jaynes discusses Max Muller's, The Science of Thoughts, (1887):

Now the relation between concept and consciousness could have an extensive discussion. But let it suffice here simply to show that there is no necessary connection between them. When Muller says no one has ever seen a tree he is mistaking what he knows about an object for the object itself. Every weary wayfarer after miles under the hot sun has seen a tree. So has every cat, squirrel, and chipmunk when chased by a dog. The bee has a concept of a flower, the eagle of a sheer-faced rocky ledge, as a nesting thrush has a concept of a crotch of upper branch awninged [stet] with green leaves. Concepts are simply classes of behaviorally equivalent things. Root concepts are prior to experience....Indeed what Muller should have said was, no one has ever been conscious of a tree. For consciousness, indeed, not only is not the repository of concepts, it does not usually work with them at all! When we consciously think of a tree, we are indeed conscious of a particular tree, of....the elm that grew beside our house, and let it stand for the concept, just as we can let a concept word stand for it as well. In fact one of the great functions of language is to let the word stand for a concept, which is exactly what we do in writing or speaking about conceptual material. And we must do this because concepts are usually not in consciousness at all.


Who was the person who wrecked such creativity on the academic world? We excerpt a recent article.


....Jaynes was the son of a Unitarian minister in West Newton, Massachusetts. Though his father died when Jaynes was 2 years old, his voice lived on in 48 volumes of his sermons, which Jaynes seems to have spent a great deal of time with as he grew up. ....Jaynes emerged after three years,[in prison for refusing to assist the war effort] convinced that animal experiments could help him understand how consciousness first evolved, and spent the next three years in graduate school at Yale University...[befpre he realzoed that Many creatures could be trained, but what they did was not introspection. ...But for much of Jaynes’ career, inner experience was beyond the pale. In some parts of this community to say you studied consciousness was to confess an interest in the occult....In 1949, Jaynes left without receiving his Ph.D., apparently having refused to submit his dissertation. It’s not clear exactly why—some suggest his committee wanted revisions he would not make, some that he was irked by the hierarchical structure of academia, some that he simply was fed up enough to walk. One story he told was that he didn’t want to pay the $25 submission fee. (In 1977, as his book was selling, Jaynes completed his Ph.D. at Yale.) ....In the fall of 1949, he moved to England and became a playwright and actor, and for the next 15 years, he ricocheted back and forth across the ocean, alternating between plays and adjunct teaching, eventually landing at Princeton University in 1964. .....Perhaps most striking to Jaynes, ...., is that knowledge and even creative epiphanies appear to us without our control. You can tell which water glass is the heavier of a pair without any conscious thought—you just know, once you pick them up. And in the case of problem-solving, creative or otherwise, we give our minds the information we need to work through, but we are helpless to force an answer. Instead it comes to us later, in the shower or on a walk. Jaynes told a neighbor that his theory finally gelled while he was watching ice moving on the St. John River.


[Academics do not always embrace his work.] [N]europhilosopher Patricia S. Churchland, an emerita professor at the University of California, San Diego [stated this]. “It is fanciful,... [I]don’t think that it added anything of substance to our understanding of the nature of consciousness and how consciousness emerges from brain activity."

....Jaynes himself saw his theory as a scientific contribution, and was disappointed with the research community’s response. Although he enjoyed the public’s interest in his work, tilting at these particular windmills was frustrating even for an inveterate contrarian. Jaynes’ drinking grew heavier. A second book, which was to have taken the ideas further, was never completed.


Julian Jaynes  put the question that lead to his studies, this way "This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all—what is it? "

And he concluded: "...the problem of consciousness is still with us....it is...the difference between what others see of us and our sense of our inner selves and the deep feelings that sustain it..."


What Jaynes got right is that there is something unprecedented about human thought, and that answers must come from within the object of study.