🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jul31.000417.1991@alf.uib.no> hlirg@alf.uib.no (Roger Greenwald) writes:
>In article <3971@cruzio.santa-cruz.ca.us> lancelot@cruzio.santa-cruz.ca.us writes:
>>
>>Not sure about the first verbalization, but Julian Jaynes has some
>>very interesting things to say about the concept in THE ORIGINS OF
>>CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (pp. 168-173 esp.).
>
>I thought this was sci.lang. Science: none. Language: atrocious.
>
>>idols of the "black virgins" in Europe, to say nothing of sloe-eyed 
>>Egyptians, Senegalize women, and bicameral southern women here in 
>>the U.S. ;@} ;@} ;@} ....
>
>Tell me about thse bicameral women: do they have hearts with only
>two chambers, or do they perhaps consist of a House and a Senate? :-)
>
>>Julian Jaynes:"...hypnosis can cause this extra enabling because it 
>>engages the general bicameral paradigm which allows a more absolute 
>>control over behavior than is possible with consciousness."                    
>
>And gobbledegook can cause this extra hypnosis because it disengages
>the general syntactical paradigm, which allows a less absolute
>control over meaning than is possible with semantics.
>("which" has no antecedent, and the lack of a comma in the original
>reverses the intended meaning, but why quibble when the whole
>thing is nonsense anyway?)
>
>Just my opinion, of course :-). (Is there an "alt.voodoo", by the way?)
>
>
>-- 
>Roger Greenwald
>Greenwald@hf.uib.no (address valid only until 10 August 1992)

I agree with the sentiments of the second poster.  Jaynes's position
is absurd.  Here is an obvious reason: if there were anything in his
hypothesis, large parts of the population of the world would _still_
be in his presumed "bicameral" state, and their psychological
differences from the rest of us would be obvious and profound (the
hypothesis would have been proposed long before the 20th century).
The shift from "bicamerality" to "consciousness" world-wide could not
be established world-wide in only a few thousand years; it would only
have occurred in the "civilized" world and nearby areas (and it is
hard to see why it would even have occurred throughout the "civilized"
world, which is not unitary, seeing that consciousness is supposed to
be younger than "civilization"!)

					--Randall

-- 
The opinions expressed		|     --Sincerely,
above are not the "official"	|     M. Randall Holmes
opinions of any person		|     Math. Dept., Boise State Univ.
or institution.			|     holmes@opal.idbsu.edu