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?
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