5 ms·

It’s one of my favorite books! I have a first edition lying somewhere around my apartment. Dawkins called it: “either complete rubbish or a work of consummate

It’s one of my favorite books! I have a first edition lying somewhere around my apartment. Dawkins called it: “either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius.” Janyes’s hypothesis, bicameralism, is thought provoking at its least relevant by challenging our static perceptions of what consciousness actually is. Alongside Feynmann’s autobiographies, this book made me think about not only how language and culture can deeply affect consciousness, but what consciousness actually is in the first place. My favorite part of the book explores metaphor and language as a means of perception instead of just communication: “Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb ‘to be’ was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, “to grow, or make grow,” while the English forms ‘am’ and ‘is’ have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmiy “to breathe.” It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for ‘existence’ and could only say that something ‘grows’ or that it “breathes.” And, of course, his chapter on what consciousness isn’t is really quite interesting: “Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.” (I just woke up, so bear with me for some fuzziness in this comment)

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
Why did Feynman’s autobiographies make you think about what consciousness actually is in the first place?
- SirensOfTitan 5y ago
  While Jaynes prompted me to think of consciousness in terms of language and culture, Feynman did the same on a micro, person-to-person scale. He detailed a challenge with his fraternity mates where they did something like: read a book and count seconds (accurately) as you're doing it. He couldn't do it, but his fraternity mate could. He realized that while he counted using inner dialogue, his frat mate counted using visual images instead (seeing 1, 2, 3 in his mind's eye). If people embedded in the same culture and circumstances could count differently, I figured, how many unspoken differences in how we process and model the world around us could there be? (story subject to deterioration by way of memory) Perhaps a mundane insight, but I feel like personal growth is paved by mundane insights, and my job is to capture and remember them as I have them, instead of letting them come and float away.
  - MrYellowP 5y ago
    I saw an interview with him, where he told that story. I believe the other person was counting with their "hearing", while Feynmann was counting visually.
    - samatman 5y ago
      Which shows another inner-mind distinction, because some people hear voices when they read. I don't, with the exception of some rich dialogue. In general this is true of the fastest readers (this has been studied I believe), and what's interesting is how recent this is, the normal medieval fashion was to read out loud (at least moving lips and muttering) and those who were able to read without doing this were considered spooky.
      - dalbasal 5y ago
        The ability to read silently being uncommon until recent times makes the idea of the inner dialogue switching on at some point more thinkable, for me. I wonder if there was a point where people spoke to themselves out loud to reason verbally.
        cheese_van 5y ago
        Reading aloud was taught as the proper way to learn the medieval Trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric, especially grammar and rhetoric. It was effective, perhaps as a mnemonic device. But it was how the Trivium was taught and learned and why reading aloud was the norm during the medieval period.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us? Frank Herbert
    - goatlover 5y ago
quijoteuniv 5y ago
This is such a good title for a book. I bought it inmediately after it catched my attenttion while browsing a friend’s personal library. I could never really read it, too many words, did not connect.
kbelder 5y ago
It was very influential in my development. Not that I necessarily buy into all of what Jayne is saying; but the nature of the book, and the nature of his arguments, was illuminating to me when I read his book at around eighteen years of age. Plus, yeah, possibly the best title of any book ever.
AlbertCory 5y ago
I'm thrilled if anyone rediscovers this book. Like "Snakes on a Plane" it's one of those works where the title tells you everything you need to know :) No, not really. Read the book.
Ar-Curunir 5y ago
The etymologies for am and is are wrong. The Sanskrit equivalents, अस्मि and अत्सि, mean, well, “am” and “is”, and all the words descend from PIE roots that don’t mean “breathe”
- shadowfox 5y ago
  Exactly. And the usage of something like "asti" (for "existence" or "being") is at least as old as the Rig Vedas.
lioeters 5y ago
> The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. I wonder how true this characterization of consciousness is. It seems to be a critique of the classic Hindu/Buddhist perspective that there is light everywhere - in fact, light is all there is. I also wonder about how relevant this might be to the role of consciousness in quantum mechanics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_int...
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Well, I think we know that we are mostly unconscious of the vast number of biological processes keeping us alive, even though we can choose to shine the light mentally on various ones and get in tune with them.
- taneq 5y ago
  > I also wonder about how relevant this might be to the role of consciousness in quantum mechanics. Everything about that 'theory' seems philosophical at best and total speculation at worst. If you see someone talking about quantum mechanics and consciousness in the same sentence it's a pretty good signal that what they're saying is pure woo.
canjobear 5y ago
Both etymologies are wrong.
jdmichal 5y ago
As others have mentioned, that etymology section is complete bunk. Sanskrit and English words have similarities because they are both Indo-European, and those specific words are descended pretty directly from PIE roots. https://www.etymonline.com/word/be https://www.etymonline.com/word/be PIE *bheue- "to be, exist, grow" https://www.etymonline.com/word/am https://www.etymonline.com/word/am PIE *esmi-, first person singular form of root *es- "to be" https://www.etymonline.com/word/was https://www.etymonline.com/word/was PIE *wes- (3) "remain, abide, live, dwell" And the merger of all these forms in English from different verbs happened around the 13th century, not because of some pre-linguistic history.
- mcguire 5y ago
  "It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for ‘existence’ and could only say that something ‘grows’ or that it “breathes.”" "when man had no independent word for ‘existence’"??? I take it the author has provided evidence for why he thinks proto-Indo-European was the first human language, and that it did not have a word for "existence"? Somewhere, a linguist is crying.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    Why does PIE need to be the first language? The author is making a point about abstract terms (and thoughts) evolving from earlier, more concrete ones. All he needs of PIE is for it to have preceded english, or more precisely, to have origins from before 2200 BC.
    - jdmichal 5y ago
      There's pretty clear reconstructions for abstract terms in PIE. And there were certainly copula verbs to indicate existence. PIE was not cavemen grunting. The fact that we can reconstruct it so well from languages spanning two continents indicates it was both stable and well-featured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_copula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_copula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
For more on metaphors as fundamental to perception and even low-level brain function (maybe), be sure to check out "Metaphors We Live By" (1980, Lakoff & Johnson) Lakoff took those ideas even further in his ideas about embodied philosophy.
- goatlover 5y ago
  I didn't realize how much our language relies on metaphorical thinking until I read that book. Although I think they end up making rather strong claims about philosophy and science which are questionable, to say the least.
  - yesenadam 5y ago
    Their later book Philosophy in the Flesh looks in detail at various philosophers and philosophical concepts and systems, analysing the conceptual metaphors in them, and showing e.g. how much whether an argument seems sensible depends on the metaphors it involves, e.g. the metaphor of knowing as seeing. I can't think of another book that shed nearly so much light on philosophy for me as this.
ssivark 5y ago
For more on metaphors, check out Douglas Hofstadter’s fascinating talk on “Analogy as the core of cognition”: https://youtu.be/n8m7lFQ3njk https://youtu.be/n8m7lFQ3njk Ended up inspiring Melanie Mitchell, and became a driving theme of her research :-)
fettucini 5y ago
SirensOfTitan says >"It’s one of my favorite books! I have a first edition lying somewhere around my apartment."< I too, use spare copies as doorstops. It is bulky enough and has a sufficiently commanding title so that people don't kick it (likely fearing it MAY bite back).
a1369209993 5y ago
> either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius. I'd say both. It's rubbish if you assume it's talking about what it claims to be talking about, but it's actually a deeply insightful view on the things it's actually talking about. Cf the Slate Star Codex book review[0], which calls it: > a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. 0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...
- taneq 5y ago
  Going off on a tangent now but I used to be a regular slatestarcodex reader and had somehow missed the fact that it was back. Thanks for cluing me in! :)
acituan 5y ago
> Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. That just sounds like a tautology but maybe I am missing something. > It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight only needs long-term memory to deduce "hey wait a second, that thing wasn't under my flashlight a second ago". (I am not including working memory to be fair to the analogy, it can already be thought as a part of, if not the consciousness).
- taneq 5y ago
  The last part is tautological but explanatory, the real payload is the first part. It's like saying your unknown unknowns are much larger than your known knowns.

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago

Why did Feynman’s autobiographies make you think about what consciousness actually is in the first place?

SirensOfTitan 5y ago
While Jaynes prompted me to think of consciousness in terms of language and culture, Feynman did the same on a micro, person-to-person scale. He detailed a challenge with his fraternity mates where they did something like: read a book and count seconds (accurately) as you're doing it. He couldn't do it, but his fraternity mate could. He realized that while he counted using inner dialogue, his frat mate counted using visual images instead (seeing 1, 2, 3 in his mind's eye). If people embedded in the same culture and circumstances could count differently, I figured, how many unspoken differences in how we process and model the world around us could there be? (story subject to deterioration by way of memory) Perhaps a mundane insight, but I feel like personal growth is paved by mundane insights, and my job is to capture and remember them as I have them, instead of letting them come and float away.
- MrYellowP 5y ago
  I saw an interview with him, where he told that story. I believe the other person was counting with their "hearing", while Feynmann was counting visually.
  - samatman 5y ago
    Which shows another inner-mind distinction, because some people hear voices when they read. I don't, with the exception of some rich dialogue. In general this is true of the fastest readers (this has been studied I believe), and what's interesting is how recent this is, the normal medieval fashion was to read out loud (at least moving lips and muttering) and those who were able to read without doing this were considered spooky.
    - dalbasal 5y ago
      The ability to read silently being uncommon until recent times makes the idea of the inner dialogue switching on at some point more thinkable, for me. I wonder if there was a point where people spoke to themselves out loud to reason verbally.
      - cheese_van 5y ago
        Reading aloud was taught as the proper way to learn the medieval Trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric, especially grammar and rhetoric. It was effective, perhaps as a mnemonic device. But it was how the Trivium was taught and learned and why reading aloud was the norm during the medieval period.
- mistermann 5y ago
  Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us? Frank Herbert
  - goatlover 5y ago

quijoteuniv 5y ago

This is such a good title for a book. I bought it inmediately after it catched my attenttion while browsing a friend’s personal library. I could never really read it, too many words, did not connect.

kbelder 5y ago

It was very influential in my development. Not that I necessarily buy into all of what Jayne is saying; but the nature of the book, and the nature of his arguments, was illuminating to me when I read his book at around eighteen years of age. Plus, yeah, possibly the best title of any book ever.

AlbertCory 5y ago

I'm thrilled if anyone rediscovers this book. Like "Snakes on a Plane" it's one of those works where the title tells you everything you need to know :) No, not really. Read the book.

Ar-Curunir 5y ago

The etymologies for am and is are wrong. The Sanskrit equivalents, अस्मि and अत्सि, mean, well, “am” and “is”, and all the words descend from PIE roots that don’t mean “breathe”

shadowfox 5y ago
Exactly. And the usage of something like "asti" (for "existence" or "being") is at least as old as the Rig Vedas.

lioeters 5y ago

> The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. I wonder how true this characterization of consciousness is. It seems to be a critique of the classic Hindu/Buddhist perspective that there is light everywhere - in fact, light is all there is. I also wonder about how relevant this might be to the role of consciousness in quantum mechanics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_int...

mensetmanusman 5y ago
Well, I think we know that we are mostly unconscious of the vast number of biological processes keeping us alive, even though we can choose to shine the light mentally on various ones and get in tune with them.
taneq 5y ago
> I also wonder about how relevant this might be to the role of consciousness in quantum mechanics. Everything about that 'theory' seems philosophical at best and total speculation at worst. If you see someone talking about quantum mechanics and consciousness in the same sentence it's a pretty good signal that what they're saying is pure woo.

canjobear 5y ago

Both etymologies are wrong.

jdmichal 5y ago

As others have mentioned, that etymology section is complete bunk. Sanskrit and English words have similarities because they are both Indo-European, and those specific words are descended pretty directly from PIE roots. https://www.etymonline.com/word/be https://www.etymonline.com/word/be PIE *bheue- "to be, exist, grow" https://www.etymonline.com/word/am https://www.etymonline.com/word/am PIE *esmi-, first person singular form of root *es- "to be" https://www.etymonline.com/word/was https://www.etymonline.com/word/was PIE *wes- (3) "remain, abide, live, dwell" And the merger of all these forms in English from different verbs happened around the 13th century, not because of some pre-linguistic history.

mcguire 5y ago
"It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for ‘existence’ and could only say that something ‘grows’ or that it “breathes.”" "when man had no independent word for ‘existence’"??? I take it the author has provided evidence for why he thinks proto-Indo-European was the first human language, and that it did not have a word for "existence"? Somewhere, a linguist is crying.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Why does PIE need to be the first language? The author is making a point about abstract terms (and thoughts) evolving from earlier, more concrete ones. All he needs of PIE is for it to have preceded english, or more precisely, to have origins from before 2200 BC.
  - jdmichal 5y ago
    There's pretty clear reconstructions for abstract terms in PIE. And there were certainly copula verbs to indicate existence. PIE was not cavemen grunting. The fact that we can reconstruct it so well from languages spanning two continents indicates it was both stable and well-featured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_copula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_copula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

For more on metaphors as fundamental to perception and even low-level brain function (maybe), be sure to check out "Metaphors We Live By" (1980, Lakoff & Johnson) Lakoff took those ideas even further in his ideas about embodied philosophy.

goatlover 5y ago
I didn't realize how much our language relies on metaphorical thinking until I read that book. Although I think they end up making rather strong claims about philosophy and science which are questionable, to say the least.
- yesenadam 5y ago
  Their later book Philosophy in the Flesh looks in detail at various philosophers and philosophical concepts and systems, analysing the conceptual metaphors in them, and showing e.g. how much whether an argument seems sensible depends on the metaphors it involves, e.g. the metaphor of knowing as seeing. I can't think of another book that shed nearly so much light on philosophy for me as this.

ssivark 5y ago

For more on metaphors, check out Douglas Hofstadter’s fascinating talk on “Analogy as the core of cognition”: https://youtu.be/n8m7lFQ3njk https://youtu.be/n8m7lFQ3njk Ended up inspiring Melanie Mitchell, and became a driving theme of her research :-)

fettucini 5y ago

SirensOfTitan says >"It’s one of my favorite books! I have a first edition lying somewhere around my apartment."< I too, use spare copies as doorstops. It is bulky enough and has a sufficiently commanding title so that people don't kick it (likely fearing it MAY bite back).

a1369209993 5y ago

> either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius. I'd say both. It's rubbish if you assume it's talking about what it claims to be talking about, but it's actually a deeply insightful view on the things it's actually talking about. Cf the Slate Star Codex book review[0], which calls it: > a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. 0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...

taneq 5y ago
Going off on a tangent now but I used to be a regular slatestarcodex reader and had somehow missed the fact that it was back. Thanks for cluing me in! :)

acituan 5y ago

> Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. That just sounds like a tautology but maybe I am missing something. > It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight only needs long-term memory to deduce "hey wait a second, that thing wasn't under my flashlight a second ago". (I am not including working memory to be fair to the analogy, it can already be thought as a part of, if not the consciousness).

taneq 5y ago
The last part is tautological but explanatory, the real payload is the first part. It's like saying your unknown unknowns are much larger than your known knowns.