Word: jayneses
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Julian Jaynes was six years old and staring at a yellow forsythia bush when the problem first entered his mind: "I thought, 'How do I know that other people see the same yellow I see?' I had the idea that there was a space in everyone else'...
Jaynes, 55, a research psychologist at Princeton, now knows that what he was trying to comprehend was consciousness-and how it arose from mere matter. Indeed, he thinks he finally has the answer: consciousness arose from language in two evolutionary steps and appeared for the first time in human history...
How can an entire civilization be unconscious? Jaynes' answer: much the same way that sleepwalkers and hypnotized people function without awareness. According to Jaynes, humans began to develop language around 100,000 B.C., but lived with virtually no inner life until about 10,000 B.C. Like rats in a...
Jaynes thinks that man developed the inner voices to solve problems. Without consciousness, he was guided mostly by habit. Thus new situations produced stress, which resulted in unconscious decisions in the form of inner, audible commands. These voices-a side effect of language and a primitive form of will-enabled...
Social Chaos. Bicameral civilization began to break down between 2000 and 1000 B.C., Jaynes believes, because society grew too intricate to be directed by the simple commands of the voices. The growing use of the written word helped undermine the unquestioned authority of the godlike voices. Some of the last...