"Gods"Once Spoke to Most of Us? The Bicameral Mind

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I think the modern, neuroscientific take on it is that it would have happened over a 5-10,000 year period, as language use developed increasingly sophisticated structures, vocab, etc.
But the earliest representations of gods did develop in a very small area.
The end of the last ice age, ( around 15,000 BC) apparently caused some massive changes, such as the reentry into the mediterranean basin of vast amounts of water which had not been there for tens of thousands of years.
If you relax about the 1000 year time period, what is there not to believe? That we once experienced parts of our brain talking to us as if they were god(s)? Why is that so "unbelievable"?

Actually, thinking some more about the little i know of Jaynes' theory: "god"(s) issuing instructions must have arisen at same time as language as can't hear voices without words to make sense of it.

Perhaps the arrival of language itself was like the arrival of "god(s)", as if something "alive" had got into ones head. Language seemed so mysterious, was so "alien"/powerful, seemed so separate in/of itself in the beginning that people experienced it as having a life of its own.

Maybe it seemed as independent as a strange animal, with its own logic, imperatives, and conclusions following on from its very structure. Because language does lead one in particular directions. It allows and does not allow certain thought/ideas. It has internal laws, like maths, and only certain things are "true". It creates rules.

It still does. But most of us no longer know what it feels like to live outside of its rules. It's the matrix!

I haven't been able to find Jayne' text on the net anywhere, just reviews/discussions. But to me its main interest is in suggesting possibilities, creating new perspectives on our past....... and our present...

Last edited by ouinon on 15 Mar 2008, 7:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

In fact am just thinking that to people with differences in brain structure relating to language production and comprehension, ( ) the modern world might seem to be full of matrix-like horrors, and constraining structures, like invisible but restraining bars, which other people obey unthinkingly.
Like finding yourself in that pod/capsule, seeing everybody else buzzing obediently at their little bit of the hive, directed by ... language.

Aarrggghhh!! ......

ClosetAspy; so it might be true that people with autism involving verbal/language differences/difficulties have an older brain structure, but what about many people with aspergers who are highly gifted in the area of language?

Or do even they experience something of this artificiality of language as an imposed structure, that creates its own problems and paradoxes, its own unanswerable questions unless follow the internal logic obediently right to the end.

Maybe belief in god for instance is a "balance figure" for certain brain structures; it balances up the equation created by language. Without which belief it never adds up/comes out right. !

That is a good question, as I myself am highly gifted at language. It may be that the varying degrees found on the spectrum represent varying degrees of retention (inheritance?) of this more primitive brain structure. I am not a neurologist and I don't know how much this has been studied, or even if it is a valid theory? In any rate, I cannot imagine being preverbal/non-verbal, though obviously I once was. Once, when I was a teenager I tried to imagine life through my neighbor's horses viewpoint, and ended up with my brain going silent, because how do you relate when you cannot use words to describe things like grass, trees, sky. It is a way of existing that is completely alien to those of us who do have language. Maybe those of us on the spectrum who aren't verbal are closer to that mind. But then they can't really communicate their experiences. Even the so-called talking apes couldn't describe what the differences are between the language mind and the language-less mind. Or does acquiring language so contaminate the mind that the earlier way of thinking is wiped out?

And what about people who have been born deaf? How do they acquire language? Or someone like Helen Keller who had to communicate almost entirely by touch? (She could speak, however; I once saw a video of her addressing a Lions Club convention and urging them to become Knights of the Blind) What kind of thought processes do they have, if they have never heard the sound of a word? To speak of language as being exclusively sound-based (verbal), I think, ignores the fact that there are other means of language. Even Helen Keller displayed her bias in this area when she said that she felt being deaf was a greater handicap than being born blind, because being deaf cuts you off from communication. Yet she was an accomplished writer and activist.

I read/heard that if deaf people aren't taught to express themselves with some form of language before the age of 7, ( 9?); if they are not taught that language exists, in fact , they never pick it up, because/as if their brains simply don't develop the correct wiring to think in language if they are not exposed to the idea of it.

However if a group of deaf people are put together with the plan of teaching them to communicate, having taught them that language exists, ( even without the recognised sign language, because there was no one to teach them, in one famous case), they create/develop a language of their own to talk to each other.

As if "language" is "an idea"/key/connection which has to be made in the brain in order for it to even begin "making" the wiring to do it with.

But that the wiring itself when it happens is subject to similar rules/laws the world over is fascinating. And that this internal logic directs thought in certain ways is also.

re: Keller: she may have thought that being able to dialogue with people more easily/often/widely might help to think. I find that. The to and fro of ideas/word creations is stimulating. ( And before the internet it was more difficult to dialogue with text).

Last edited by ouinon on 16 Mar 2008, 6:43 am, edited 5 times in total.

The strange thing is that these discoveries about language; that, in modern humans at least, it needs a stimulus to trigger its use and the neurone development for it, suggests language could never have happened, or is that the same error as thinking that the eye could never have evolved?!

The first "word", ( as opposed to the first expressive grunt), must have been like a revelation. Or was it like flint spear tips, as slow and gradual as that? Maybe it "happened" as a result of signs being used in cave paintings etc, in those few who had the gene to create the language system at that time. Maybe that's why the cave paintings so suddenly disappeared/stopped.

Anyway, i think that language, not so much whether is spoken or not, but simply its fundamental existence, with its laws, might have seemed like a god, who gives power but requires/"demands" the relinquishing/loss of certain freedoms ( of thought, and consequently/eventually of action).

I can speak of an experience. I have a memory of being put down for my nap at a time i could not speak. I recall looking around and nothing had a name of concept. Nor did I have a concept of discrete objects. The world just was! I was under age two. I certainly was thinking in some fashion that had no language.

I'm considered gifted with language. At the same time, I have some hearing loss and that is supposed to be a suppressive event for language. Also, I left school early. Again, a suppressive event for language use. I did not learn to read early, but i grasped it very quickly when I did.

I think that people who are most gifted with language are those that are not bound to convention. The ability to break the bonds of meaning in a novel and interesting way are the hallmarks of creative language use. The basis of a gift.

Aspergerians are able to do that because we have a weak connection to symbolics and meaning. That little break in conventional/instinctual understanding allows us to bring forth expressiveness in new ways.

Its a fine line to walk. A foot in two worlds.

I owned a small business once and after several years I had a strange urgency to rid myself of it. My feelings were very much against doing so, and my mind had no conceptualized reasons for doing so, but I couldnt shake it. I was successful in doing so and several weeks later the business was shut down as its place of residence was also closed to the public. The owners and management of the building in question had planned this and kept perfect silence. The staff there was laid off without warning. I was the only one to come out ahead.

I credit my connection to the silent world for alerting me somehow. This seems to me to be like what people are saying about a voice being silenced by language. Call it god if you will, or not. No voice spoke to me in any way that could be called language, but certainly something of the world communicated to me.


Is this like what some of you are talking about?

On two occasions in the last 10 years I remembered directly, not from hearsay, very early moments in my life. Both of them date from pre-toddling or even sitting up. There are no words.

In one my mother is holding me out in front of her and i am looking at her face, which is anxious, something i only "recognised" as such on remembering the moment, aged 35, and i knew that it is me that she is "this thing"/anxious about. The other one is of me on my own in my cot, and making some sort of wordless decision/choice/mental step which separates me from my body. I feel "it" moving away from "me".

I don't know if that's what poets or writers do. I believe that actually you might have to have more like an adoring respect for language to be a good writer, rather than a suspicious, sceptical, detached user, for whom all the meanings are slippery.

I am wondering , reading this, whether the "unconventionality" is the result of the "weak connection", and not the other way round. Whether "language" with its rules has less of of a hold on us, as a result of different wiring, and therefore we are freer in out thoughts, feelings, and actions?

Maybe. It could be. I wouldn't have put it that way. Because what i now think is that the voices that people heard and described as gods were the product of language, were what language seemed like, to the first humans to experience and use it. Rather than some remnant from a pre-language era.

But perhaps what you describe is in fact exactly what people missed after the advent of language.

Last edited by ouinon on 16 Mar 2008, 9:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

Helen Keller didn't loose her sight and hearing until she was 19 months old. She had spoken at six months (according to her autobiography), and remembered at least a few words, such as "water." Her teacher, Annie Sullivan was the one who broke through her darkness and silence. Helen wrote of the day Ms. Sullivan first came to live at the house:

"Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbor was. 'Light! give me light' was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour."

The light to which she is referring is not visual light, but instead, language. She would not have comprehended or experienced expressions of love, or God, without language. Language and god are inexorably intertwined for we humans. In the development of our brains, could one exist without the other? Without language there seems to exist an inborn, unnamed yearning that language allows humanity to name: "god."

Z

I disagree.

Now that I know that she was born able to see and hear i think it is possible/probable in fact that her suffering arose from actually having had language "switched on" in her babyhood, but no one to use and develop it with after she lost her hearing.

Like being in a foreign country unable to speak that language, with nothing to read in one's own tongue, ( without internet, or the budget for much english language material) nor people who understand it. I experienced this in the first few years in france. It was particularly painful because i love using language so much, etc. And it was painful. it was like a profound ache. Like solitary confinement is for some. I felt as if i had lost a limb, or worse.

People who are born deaf and blind do not necessarily ever know what they are missing. The emotional and cognitive development of those people if they are never taught the existence of language is simply different, and apparently there is no suffering, just a certain "absence of affect" as they say.


I think that it is likely that her suffering was chiefly the result of isolation, of total loneliness, although without people/means for her to learn concepts and ideas from she also would not have been able to think as subtly or richly as she needed to, being very sensitive and gifted.

I agree with you about god(s) and language being "entwined", but, without wishing to argue about the existence of god(s) , ( i believe in god), i don't think that belief in god existed before language developed, and definitely don't think that the evolution of language answered an "inborn unnamed yearning" .

I have not read anything which suggests that people with little or no language experience any such thing. In fact very often the less language people have the less they seem to experience such longings.

I believe that the first lines of John's Gospel might have something ; "In the beginning was the Word, .... and the Word was God".

Last edited by ouinon on 16 Mar 2008, 11:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

You should read Keller's The Story of My Life. It is fascinating because she describes her thought processes before and after she had language, the things she felt but had not been able to name.

Z

My point is that if she only went deaf and blind aged 19 months she would have heard language being used; she would have known language existed; the process would have been triggered in her brain. And also the house maid created a 60 sign code with her to express basic needs.

More proof of that is that despite the fact that Anne Sullivan only turned up to teach her sign language when she was 7 she was able to learn to communicate with language, whereas people who are not aware of the existence of language before the age of 7/9 can no longer learn it. The brain has not developed the networks/neurones/connections to do it with.

The fact that Keller could and did learn is clear evidence that she already "had" language. What she was missing was opportunities to communicate, exchange, develop language in relation to others, and to experience life with the richness of vocabulary and concept that this would have given her.

It is probably precisely because her brain had got started on understanding the world with language that she suffered so much when it was taken away from her. Which is why i also think it is interesting that John's gospel continues after saying, "In the beginning was the word, .. and the word was god", with "All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made."

Once/as soon as humans learn the idea of language they need it. Things/experiences without the language to express/communicate/encapsulate/represent them almost do not exist.

Have just read first chapters.

She had already begun to speak before her illness stopped that. Her unhappiness/frustration etc, as child was not the same as that of someone who is born deaf and blind, for whom there has never been the idea of describing life with words.

She says, when she had the breakthrough with water, that "Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten - a thrill of returning thought".

And it's weird how does not even need the name for something, just the reminder of this system of thought, in order to 'feel" something that didn't feel before. "I saw everything with the strange new sight that had come to me. On entering the house I remembered the doll I had broken. This time my eyes filled with tears, for I realised what I had done, and for the first time felt repentance and sorrow".

Language as a returning idea seems to "teach" her repentance. Is repentance one of those things which "happen" following the internal logic of language, or its sudden reconnection with the outer world? Can see how the advent of language might have felt like the old testament god.

That was the point I was trying to make - not too successfully. I am fascinated that human cultures, all cultures for the last many thousand years, have had a spiritual side. We humans seem to have an inborn spiritual need that is yearning for something bigger than ourselves, a side that creates religion. Helen Keller illustrates in her writing how powerful the idea of love and God were to her, after her teacher was able to explain those abstract concepts to her by spelling them out in her hand and likening them to the warmth of the sun. The concepts filled a void in her and gave her life richness and meaning. Language was the vehicle for that meaning. Without language, what meaning is there, what God is there? Like you said . . . In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Z

Thank you very much for picking up the thread again. I was finding Jaynes' idea very thought-creating.

Maybe before language we didn't "need" meaning in the same way. Maybe the evolution of language created the need.

Thinking about language as an immense matrix, ( a network of signs/symbols, which creates a densely knitted virtual reality), and of the other parts of us, which existed before the existence of language, ( but after we began to escape the grip of "instincts", genetically determined "instructions" which we could not ignore, just like other animals), .... and wondering how they "manifested".

If there was no language what medium did our brains use to tell us what to do, what was good, etc?

Maybe it was dreams, which, in my experience at least, are rarely ( very ) verbal.

Theist religion may be the rather clunky artificial replacement for the guidance which used to appear to us in dreams, without words, in many symbols.

OR, no, not so much a replacement as a superposed , ( and for many a necessary) , balance factor in the "equation" which is language, a bit like the discussion forums on MMORPGs, ( Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplay Games) without which people would have no outlet for their frustrations with the game, no intermediary/channel of communication between them and the creators of the gameplay.

Maybe religion is the way ( many) humans have learned to deal with the virtual reality which is (the result of) language. The way to put it in perspective, to appreciate it, to experience freedom, or safety, or personal significance in it; religion is the "discussion forum" for the virtual reality game of life created by language.

You're welcome, ouinon. I have not read Jaynes, but the thread is certainly interesting. I think you are right, that the development of language introduced certain needs that either didn't exist before language, or were there but "untriggered."



And, what is the thing that all religions have in common? To their believers, they offer (mostly) replicable emotional responses to language-based ideas and concepts, coupled with sensation-enhanced rituals. The emotional responses are powerful, they naturally gain adherents, and for centuries humans have been arguing and warring over which is the one "true" way to the emotional experience. Perhaps the "gods speaking" represented the most intensive responses of previously un- or under-developed emotions, the flood-gate of which opened through the development of language.

Z