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The Evolution of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Tricameral Mind

In 1976 itinerant lecturer and Princeton University psychologist Julian Jaynes published a controversial book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a used copy of which likely adorns the bookshelves of many American thinkers (if only for the aesthetic appeal of its provocative title). In this book Jaynes posits that human beings once operated under a previous mentality that he calls the Bicameral Mind, meaning ‘two-chambers’, which roughly correspond to the left and right hemispheres of the brain. He suggests that under this mentality the mind of early man was divided into an active speaking part and a docile listening part, with a cognitive chasm between them that rendered most individuals essentially unconsciousness automatons. He points to a lack of self-consciousness in the lives of early literary figures in ancient texts such as Gilgamesh, the Iliad, and parts of the the Old Testament. Instead of an internal dialogue about feelings, thoughts, and emotions, we read about people hearing voices from the sky or from gods, or from the ghosts of fallen heroes, voices that demand action and responsibility. Jaynes persuasively argues that the words of charismatic leaders once resounded in the depths of the right hemispheres of their more docile followers – echoing in their minds as commanding auditory hallucinations rather than as their own personal recollections of past speeches – words that would still be ‘heard’ long after the leaders’ death. Then, during stressful times of fight-or-flight, intuition was heard externally, an internal voice beckoning from afar. She heeds the call and begins to communicate more frequently with these disembodied voices from the ‘other side’. This is what Jaynes calls The Breakdown – the process of the two chambers of the Bicameral Mind becoming unified into a singular, reflexive self-conscious experience resembling that of modern man – an internal dialogue.

The Theory of Bicameralism has more or less been discredited as popular science, which is unfortunate because ultimately I think Jaynes was not talking about evolutionary biology or neurology. The Bicameral Mind is not a scientific theory so much as it is a theory about the development of language – specifically the use of metaphor. “The metaphors of mind are the world it perceives,” he writes. “Consciousness is the invention of an analog world on the basis of language, paralleling the behavioral world even as the world of mathematics parallels the world of quantities of things.” Jaynes does not use the Homeric Epics as case studies in individual lives. He uses them to speak about what he sees as an axial moment in history (approx. 2000 B.C) when Mankind began to think literarily, which is to say metaphorically through language. “The nub, heart, pith, kernel, core, marrow, etc. of my argument,” He playfully writes, “Which itself is a metaphor and ‘seen’ only with the mind’s ‘eye’… is a metaphor for how subjective consciousness seems to subjective consciousness.”

Speaking of metaphors, the Chinese language has the most appropriate word for ‘computer’.  It is called a 電 腦, which pictographically means ‘electric brain’. I was searching through an old external hard drive of mine recently, thinking about this interesting grapheme. I found a lot of things in there I had totally forgotten about. I found memories in there. Secrets locked in unsent love letters, long lost attempts at poems and folk songs. There were things in that hard drive I never could have remembered – unfinished novels and screenplays, endless playlists and budgets.

I guess it all got to be too much for the Bicameral Mind to remember – all those phone numbers and addresses, birthdays and names. It had other things to do, new sense kingdoms to conquer. But these devices we use today are way more than just personal memory banks. They are electric brains. Being able to know the answer to almost any question, instantly; How to get anywhere from anywhere and how long it will take you; The birthdays of friends and acquaintances, and what they ate for dinner last night. Simultaneous global communication. This is not a machine; this is a new form of Consciousness.

Let us call this digital archive of all-knowledge the Third Chamber of the Mind. And our habitual interaction with it – the instinctual checking of statuses and updates, the staring at boxes and feeds – this is the Breakdown of the Tricameral Mind.

The idea that we are in the process of merging with technology is nothing new. There has long been talk about cyborgs, and futurists like Ray Kurzweil and the ‘trans-human’ movement have been heralding the coming of a new psycho-physio-techno era for decades. Even in 1929 Freud commented that, “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent… Future ages will bring with them new and possibly unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more.”

I wanted to use the work of Julian Jaynes, however, for two of his more intriguing propositions: 1) The idea that Consciousness originates by the mind being in dialogue with itself through language; and 2) The idea that to the Bicameral Mind, the emergence of this new internal dialogue was initially perceived as being external.

What does the Tricameral Mind look like today? It is the iPhone’s knowledge navigator Seri. Or, better yet, it is Tony Stark’s Artificial Intelligence program J.A.R.V.I.S. in the Iron Man and Avengers movies. The personification of Robert Downey Jr.’s techno-ego. A mind that is constantly thinking on his behalf, that he is always engaged in dialogue with. And I have seen no better representation of the actual Breakdown of the Tricameral Mind than during the first love scene between Joaquim Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson’s characters in Spike Jonze’s Her. In fact, that entire film appears to be a meditation on the Nature of the Tricameral Mind. I make these cultural references like Jaynes refers to Homer, not as case studies in actual events, of course, but as markers of a time when we began to think, not visually but visualarily about our lives, which is to say narratively through technology.

The movement toward actual Artificial Intelligence (if it has not arrived already), it seems to me, happens from two directions. Yes, the physical rates of computation and interface techniques are paramount to the process, touch-screens being only one of many recent advances in working visualarily. But A. I. is ultimately predicated on what we think Intelligence is, or in this case what Consciousness is.

Nowadays I hear a lot of people using technological metaphors to describe the experiences of their lives. They talk about downloading information instead of reading and learning, rebooting their systems instead of relaxing, various kinds of lifehacking instead of practice. The cyborgification of the human species is happening on a cognitive level when we believe that the brain is equivalent to a central processing unit, and that the world is simply data to be processed. “The metaphors of mind are the world it perceives,” to quote Jaynes again. Artificial Intelligence is a meeting point where a Machine will be said to be as intelligent as Man because Man is only as intelligent as a Machine. Which may just be paraphrasing Alan Turing’s test for “Intelligent Machinery,” but what does it say about the nature of humanity?

There’s a lot of nostalgia right now for the Bicameral Mind. People hatin’ on the Tri-Cam. People like Louis C.K.. I know. I have friends too, always ‘Tri-Caming’ out at the table. We’ll just be sitting there, Bi-Caming, talking, you know. And then Bam! Out comes the Third Chamber. Now the dialogue is a multilogue, an infinitologue as all cameral nodes across the globe engage. But I’m used to it now. I’ve been thinking about The Breakdown so long, when I see people checking their phones I no longer see devices – I just see people thinking. Wearable technology is only helping to blur the line further between the Chambers of the Mind.

When I first starting writing this essay I was thinking of it as an emergence of a Tricameral Mind or a creation of a Third Chamber through these developments in technology. That was before I reread Jayne’s Origin of Consciousness and furthered my appreciation for this subtle notion of a breaking down. I also found that psychiatrist and Oxford literary scholar Iain McGilchrist has resurrected the idea of the dual nature of the brain in his book The Master and His Emissary (2012), and his compelling presentation The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World gives credence to some of Jaynes’ original ideas. Most notable is the fact that the ratio of the Corpus Callosum to the volume of the hemispheres has decreased in human beings over time. Since a function of the Corpus Callosum is to act as an inhibitor between the two sides of the brain, it would seem that there may have, in fact, been a ‘breakdown’ of a once divided mind.

There is a similar evolution of consciousness taking place in the Breakdown of the Tricameral Mind through our ability to access digital information as quickly as we can think. But from the first scratched images on the walls of caves to palm leaves and papyrus, there has always been a Third Chamber of the Mind, just as there were always two chambers of the Bicameral Mind, only foreign to each other. The Third Chamber is not being created, it is being revealed.

Yet to this day, Consciousness remains an elusive subject with no conclusive explanation for its origin or ontology. One could say that we are no further along on the subject than Plato or Descartes, in a way. This is true if only because whatever ‘data’ or ‘proof’ offered as explanation for what Consciousness is can only be perceived and determined valid by the very same Consciousness in question. It is something of a paradox, unless you allow for the validity of insights gained from certain altered states of consciousness through meditation or intoxication, as the Indian’s do, or the simple Zen insight that THIS IS CONSCIOUSNESS. But then again…What is that?

One Minute Film Festival – MASS MoCA

One Minute Film Festival, March 23, 2013 – January 19, 2014.
MASS MoCA, Participating Artist.

 

On Tantric Buddhism

BLUE BUDDHA
Dharma Talk on Tantric Buddhism
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From Wednesday, February 13, 2012
@ Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society

Tracking an Apocolypse

It was 5:00 a.m. in New York (the day before) when it started: December 21, 2012. I remember seeing a tweet from New Zealand around 10:00 a.m., “We’re still here!” Later that day a post on Facebook from a friend in Bali read: “It is officially the new Mayan Calendar year, the World has Not ended!”

I had been following the December 21, 2012 phenomenon for many years, since the previous ‘end of the world’ in the year 2000.  I was looking forward to tracking the latest Event in real time. I like studying these apocalyptic fervors and doomsday hysterics – from medieval Chinese Buddhist expectations of the savior Buddha Maitreya to GiorgioAgamben’s commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans -I am fascinated by eschatological anticipation.

The popularization of the idea of ‘something happening’ in the year 2012 is often attributed to the ethnobotanist philosopher Terrence McKeena from work he produced in the early 1970s. Using traditional Chinese astrology and entheogenic Amazonian shamanism, McKeena predicted that the exponential development of technology would culminate in, what he called, Time Wave Zero: a single moment toward the end of 2012 when there would cease to be a separation between thought and manifest reality, a complete union of techne(τέχνη) and episteme (ἐπίσταμα), as it were. Later, McKeena’s theories became associated with the end of a 5,125-year cycle in the Mesoamerican Mayan Calendar, which created the basis for the New Age phenomena of a coming event this year.

In preparation for the day I read all about the Return of Quetzalcoatl and thought deeply about, what Reggie Watts called, the “spiritual Y2K.” I watched all the Hollywood appropriations of the 2012 mythology and looked for references to it in pop culture. As the meme began to spread from fringe to mainstream, I wondered if something might actually happen – a self-fulfilling prophecy of collective expectation.

To be honest, I was happy to hear from my friends on-line that the world had not ended. Having recently survived superstorm Sandy, hurricane Irene and several ‘freak’ snowstorms, it was getting hard not to be pessimistic about the way things were going. “If these aren’t the End Times,” I would say, “it sure feels like it!” There were wars and rumors of war, and plenty of gnashing teeth. I searched the internet all day Thursday looking for signs of hope, but I just found the usual depression of stories.

“Where does this suspense come from?” Baudrillard asks in his essay on the Pataphysics of the Year 2000, “Where do we get the idea that what must be accomplished (Last Judgment, salvation or catastrophe) must come at the end of time and match up with some incalculable appointed term or other?” I believe this  suspense, this “fatal exigency” as he calls it, is a consequence of the way we keep time. Unlike the days of the week and months of the year, which return to us cyclically again and again, years stretch on indefinitely according to a linear dating system.

Although it was not first calculated until the early 6^th Century A.D., and not commonly used for at least four hundred years after that, the Roman Catholic (so-called ‘Gregorian’) Calendar is the de facto International Standard for dating today – and it is essentially a regnal dating system. There is an inherent teleology in this method of reckoning time, call it the inevitable end of ‘the reign’ that looms over everything. And, whether you are Christian for whom the last two millennia have been a very long interim before the promised end, or you are like everyone else, unknowing victims of ecclesiastic hegemony, there is a sense that things cannot go on like this forever.

When I woke up the next morning it was finally December 21, 2012 in New York. It was also the Winter Solstice, the astronomical event most closely associated with the conclusion of the Mayan Calendar. The actual solstice, the moment when the earth is titled the furthest away from the sun, had occurred around 6:00 a.m., while I was sleeping. I figured if 2012 was some sort of axial moment it must turn on the solstice, and I was relieved that we had made it over the hump. It was an eerily quite day that I spent away from the computer, listening to words on the street, and thinking about alternatives to the typical doomsday scenario that had come to dominate the popular imagination.

Around 6:00 p.m. I checked my Facebook again to see if anything new had come up during the day. Not seeing anything of interest I updated my status: “Worst apocalypse ever.” I was a little disappointed, actually. I was open to the possibility that something could happen, something big. Like, maybe someone would announce the existence of a new kind of technology. Something beyond teleportation or artificial intelligence, something so crazy, the very idea of it would cause a global shift in consciousness.

Or maybe we would fall off that ‘fiscal cliff’ everyone was talking about, the dollar would collapse and they would have to abolish the Federal Reserve System. The Treasury could introduce a new electronic currency, enfranchising the people in a true National Bank, making everyone equal shareholders in the world’s wealthiest enterprise (with monthly dividend cards instead of taxes!). It would be an economic jubilee.

Or maybe just a viral video. Not some Psy Gangman youtube whatever, but something truly upayic. An aesthetically resonate message of Peace so expedient that it awakens the entire world to a greater sense of loving kindness for one another.

But maybe Baudrillard was right when he said, “No event can withstand being beamed across the whole planet.” That, “every political, historical and cultural fact possesses a kinetic energy which wrenches it from its own space and propels it into a hyperspace where, since it will never turn, it loses all meaning.”

Before going to bed that night I texted some friends in Hawai’i, where there were still several more hours of December 21, 2012 to go.  I started wondering about when the day actually ends, and if Hawai’i is the furthest it goes. That idea got me googling. I learned all about the International Date Line and the Prime Meridian, and then I realized something very interesting about the day.

It had already been December 21, 2012 for eighteen hours before the day even started for me on the East Coast. It was December 21, 2012 all day in New York, and it would still be December 21, 2012 for eight more hours after that, which means that a day is actually fifty hours long.

Since 1995, the day begins at Caroline Island, an uninhabited atoll in the central Pacific Ocean with the most advanced time zone on earth – fourteen hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The day ends at Howland and Baker Islands southwest of Hawai’i, which have time twelve hours behind UTC. Due to differences between the Prime Meridian and the International Date Line, and the fact that days begin and end at midnight, each day nominally lasts for a total of fifty hours. Which I think is interesting, and perhaps more than just semantics.

I started skyping a lot last year. Like most technologized people, I first communicated by video-phone several years ago, but I never really got into it until recently. Now I skype regularly with family in California and I study with friends in Japan, often for four or five hours. When I’m being toured around someone’s apartment in Tokyo or sitting with them at a table in Kyoto, I am unarguably participating in the reality of that day, there…, then…, tomorrow. Since the advent of simultaneous global communication, it is actually possible to experience all fifty hours of the day, following it from computer to computer, country to country, time zone to time zone.

This chronological revelation (ἀποκάλυψις) of the fifty-hour day made me optimistic about the coming year for some reason. It made me think that maybe something did happen on December 21, 2012. Something so subtle (or so obvious) that it will only be realized retrospectively many years from now. Ultimately, however, I’m glad the 2012 phenomenon is behind us. There was something foreboding about the year, a certain ‘weight’ to the ‘wait’ that has since lifted, and I’m looking forward to this coming period of less significant calendrics.

Red Lotus Society, 2008 – 2012

Order of the Third Bird at MoMA

Order of the Third Bird at MoMA, October 20 and November 9, 2012. Invited participant.

On Zen Buddhism

BLUE BUDDHA
Meditation & Dharma Talk on Zen Buddhism
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From Wednesday, November 14, 2012
@ Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society

A Tuesday in September

The summer of 2001 I was working as a legal temp for a law firm located on the 56^th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I had recently been accepted to the graduate program in Religion at Princeton University and I was looking for someone to tutor me in classical Chinese, which I was expected to be familiar with when I started school in September. At the time I had already taken three years of Chinese – 6 semesters of Mandarin – and, although I could buy a bus ticket in Beijing and talk about my favorite Hong Kong cinema, I had never taken classical Chinese. Through an irretrievable series of email exchanges, forwards and CCs, I managed to get in touch with a man who agreed to teach me. He called himself Lijie, or sometimes Jie Li (also Jason Lee and, my personal favorite, Jade Lee). He cryptically told me to meet him one Tuesday evening just after 5:00 pm on the corner of 32^nd Street and 6^th Avenue in Manhattan and we would begin our lessons.

I remember sitting in one of those indistinct New York City delis drinking stale coffee from a paper cup, having left work early to make sure I would be there on time. It was raining that day, but luckily there was scaffolding on the corner. Lijie appeared out of nowhere; a stalky man that looked to be in his mid-30s. He had dark black hair cut like Moe from the Three Stooges and he greeted me with a broad, friendly smile. He spoke with a strong Chinese accent and asked me to follow him into an office building on 32^nd Street. When we got off the elevator he started searching the halls for a place for us to sit down.  I slowly realized that Lijie did not work here. He eventually settled on a small office desk wedged awkwardly in a corner with two larger computer monitors sitting on top of it, like someone was throwing them out. He offered me a seat on a small plastic chair and I explained my situation.

I asked Lijie to help me read through a Buddhist text from the Tang Dynasty, the type of thing I was going to be studying at Princeton. He told me that if I really wanted to understand classical Chinese I needed to start by reading the Tao Te Ching, the classic philosophical poem from the Zhou Dynasty. He was adamant on this point. I agreed and we started meeting twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Each time we would first meet on 32nd Street before going up to the same tiny desk in the corner.

The lessons were intense and Lijie was extremely passionate about the Tao Te Ching. He would say that we were “entering” the text, not reading it or translating – like Chinese hermits who “enter” mountains. We went through the poem character by character, and he would expound on each word at great length. I learned quickly from Lijie. Sometimes it felt like he was physically opening my mind and putting the information in. During the day I would sit at my desk at the law office in the World Trade Center, clandestinely reading the Tao Te Ching, counting the hours until 5:00 when I would jump on the subway to go study with Lijie.

As the weeks went by his exegesis of the text got wilder and wilder, and Lijie eventually told me that he was in contact with Lao Tzu, the legendary author of the Tao Te Ching. He said that the Immortal Sage was guiding our work. It was a time in my life when these types of revelations were not extraordinary to me, and I welcomed the opportunity to learn as much as I could from Jade Lee that summer.

My first day at Princeton happened to be Tuesday September 11, 2001. I can still recall the chatter at the Orientation that morning – something about an airplane – and the spatter of information that came after. As a temporary summer employee, I didn’t really get to know anyone I worked with at 1 WTC, but my proximity to the site of the event deeply affected me. I think about that day often. I suppose, had I not been accepted to Princeton, there’s a chance I would have been headed to work that day, but I try not to get hung up on hypotheticals.

My first semester I had also gotten an adjunct teaching position at Hunter College in Manhattan. One night after class, toward the end of the year, Lijie came to see me. It was the first time I had seen him since our lessons ended that summer, and it was the first time I had ever seen him anywhere other than on 32^nd and 6^th. He confessed to me that he was not a U.S. citizen and that, because of what happened, he was going to, “show my love to this remarkable free land step by step through America.” He was going on the Journey of a Lifetime, as he wrote about it; walking across the country to connect the polar time-space dimensions between ancient China and the modern USA and open the original energy of the land meridians one by one. He said the walk would be a “re-write” of the Tao Te Ching. Before he left he gave me a copy of his written translation and interpretation based on our lessons together that summer. I have never seen or heard from Lijie since.

After I saw the movie A Beautiful Mind, about a Princeton graduate student suffering from visual hallucinations, the thought did occur to me that Lijie may have never existed, and that I was just teaching myself classical Chinese alone at some abandoned desk in an office on 32^nd Street. (The incoherency of our translation may attest to that.) But I don’t think so. I’m also open to the possibility that Lijie was an inter-dimensional being, an apparition, or maybe even an actual manifestation of Lao Tzu. It all seems equally plausible to me.

I admit, every now and then I still try to find Lijie. But I know I’m looking for more than just the man. I’m looking for that time before September 11, before what happened happened, when life seemed to be more than just aftermath.

 

On Flower Garland Buddhism

BLUE BUDDHA
Meditation & Dharma Talk on Flower Gardland Buddhism
LISTEN HERE

From Wednesday, May 16, 2012
@ Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society