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JULIAN JAYNES

THE ORIGIN OF

CONSCIOUSNESS

IN THE BREAK

DOWN OF THE

BICAMERAL MIND

Julian Jaynes

THE ORIGIN OF

CONSCIOUSNESS IN

THE BREAK-

DOWN OF THE

BICAMERAL

MIND

A Mariner Book

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

B O S T O N • N E W Y O R K

First Mariner Books edition 2000

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jaynes, Julian.

The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

Includes no index. Scanned in May 2011 by LnZ.

1. Consciousness. 2. Consciousness — History. I. Title.

BF311.J36 I28‘.2 76-28748

ISBN 0-618-05707-2 (pbk.)

Printed in the United States of America

DOC 20 19 18 17 16 15 14

See last page of book for credits.

PREFACE

THE CENTRAL ideas of this inquiry were first summarized publicly in an Invited Address to the American Psychological Association in Washington in September 1969. Since then, I have been something of an itinerant lecturer, various parts of this work having been given at colloquia and lectures at various places.

The resulting attention and discussion have been very helpful.

Book I presents these ideas as I arrived at them.

Book II examines the historical evidence.

Book III makes deductions to explain some modern phenomena.

Originally, I had planned Books IV and V to complete the central positions of the theory. These will now become a separate volume, whose working title is The Consequences of Consciousness, not yet scheduled for publication.

P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y , I 9 8 2

CONTENTS

P R E F A C E V

I N T R O D U C T I O N : T H E PROBLEM O F CONSCIOUSNESS I Book I

The Mind of Man

1. The Consciousness of Consciousness 21

2. Consciousness 48

3. The Mind of Iliad 67

4. The Bicameral Mind 84

5. The Double Brain 100

6. The Origin of Civilization 126

Book II

The Witness of History

1. Gods, Graves, and Idols 149

2. Literate Bicameral Theocracies 176

3. The Causes of Consciousness 204

4. A Change of Mind in Mesopotamia 223

5. The Intellectual Consciousness of Greece 255

6. The Moral Consciousness of the Khabiru 293

Book III

Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World

1. The Quest for Authorization 317

2. Of Prophets and Possession 339

3. Of Poetry and Music 361

4. Hypnosis 379

5. Schizophrenia 404

6. The Auguries of Science 433

A F T E R W O R D 4 4 7

I N D E X 4 7 1

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

INTRODUCTION

The Problem of Consciousness

O, WHAT A WORLD of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at a l l 一

what is it?

And where did it come from?

And why?

Few questions have endured longer or traversed a more perplexing history than this, the problem of consciousness and its place in nature. Despite centuries of pondering and experiment, of trying to get together two supposed entities called mind and matter in one age, subject and object in another, or soul and body in still others, despite endless discoursing on the streams, states, or contents of consciousness, of distinguishing terms like intui-tions, sense data, the given, raw feels, the sensa, presentations and representations, the sensations, images, and affections of structuralist introspections, the evidential data of the scientific positivist, phenomenological fields, the apparitions of Hobbes, the phenomena of Kant, the appearances of the idealist, the elements of Mach, the phanera of Peirce, or the category errors of Ryle, in

Introduction

spite of all of these, the problem of consciousness is still with us.

Something about it keeps returning, not taking a solution.

It is the difference that will not go away, the difference between what others see of us and our sense of our inner selves and the deep feelings that sustain it. The difference between the you-and-me of the shared behavioral world and the unlocatable location of things thought about. Our reflections and dreams, and the imaginary conversations we have with others, in which never-to-be-known-by-anyone we excuse, defend, proclaim our hopes and regrets, our futures and our pasts, all this thick fabric of fancy is so absolutely different from handable, standable, kickable reality with its trees, grass, tables, oceans, hands, stars — even brains!

How is this possible? How do these ephemeral existences of our lonely experience fit into the ordered array of nature that somehow surrounds and engulfs this core of knowing?

Men have been conscious of the problem of consciousness almost since consciousness began. And each age has described consciousness in terms of its own theme and concerns. In the golden age of Greece, when men traveled about in freedom while slaves did the work, consciousness was as free as that. Heraclitus, in particular, called it an enormous space whose boundaries, even by traveling along every path, could never be found out.1 A millennium later, Augustine among the caverned hills of Carthage was astonished at the “mountains and hills of my high imaginations,” “the plains and caves and caverns of my memory” with its recesses of “manifold and spacious chambers, wonderfully furnished with unnumberable stores.”2 Note how the metaphors of mind are the world it perceives.

The first half of the nineteenth century was the age of the great geological discoveries in which the record of the past was written in layers of the earth’s crust. And this led to the popularization of the idea of consciousness as being in layers which 1 Diels, Fragment, 45.

2 Confessions, 9:7; 10:26, 65.

T H E P R O B L E M

recorded the past of the individual, there being deeper and deeper layers until the record could no longer be read. This emphasis on the unconscious grew until by 1875 most psychologists were insisting that consciousness was but a small part of mental life, and that unconscious sensations, unconscious ideas, and unconscious judgments made up the majority of mental processes.3

In the middle of the nineteenth century chemistry succeeded geology as the fashionable science, and consciousness from James Mill to Wundt and his students, such as Titchener, was the compound structure that could be analyzed in the laboratory into precise elements of sensations and feelings.

And as steam locomotives chugged their way into the pattern of everyday life toward the end of the nineteenth century, so they too worked their way into the consciousness of consciousness, the subconscious becoming a boiler of straining energy which demanded manifest outlets and when repressed pushed up and out into neurotic behavior and the spinning camouflaged fulfillments of going-nowhere dreams.

There is not much we can do about such metaphors except to state that that is precisely what they are.

Now originally, this search into the nature of consciousness was known as the mind-body problem, heavy with its ponderous philosophical solutions. But since the theory of evolution, it has bared itself into a more scientific question. It has become the problem of the origin of mind, or, more specifically, the origin of consciousness in evolution. Where can this subjective experience which we introspect upon, this constant companion of hosts of associations, hopes, fears, affections, knowledges, colors, smells, toothaches, thrills, tickles, pleasures, distresses, and desires —

where and how in evolution could all this wonderful tapestry of inner experience have evolved? How can we derive this inward-ness out of mere matter? And if so, when?

3 For a statement of this effect, see G. H. Lewes, The Physical Basis of Mind (London: Trübner, 1877), p. 365.

4 Introduction

This problem has been at the very center of the thinking of the twentieth century. And it will be worthwhile here to briefly look at some of the solutions that have been proposed. I shall mention the eight that I think are most important.

Consciousness as a Property of Matter

The most extensive possible solution is attractive mostly to physicists. It states that the succession of subjective states that we feel in introspection has a continuity that stretches all the way back through phylogenetic evolution and beyond into a fundamental property of interacting matter. The relationship of consciousness to what we are conscious of is not fundamentally different from the relationship of a tree to the ground in which it is rooted, or even of the gravitational relationship between two celestial bodies. This view was conspicuous in the first quarter of this century. What Alexander called compresence or Whitehead called prehension provided the groundwork of a monism that moved on into a flourishing school called Neo-Realism. If a piece of chalk is dropped on the lecture table, that interaction of chalk and table is different only in complexity from the perceptions and knowledges that fill our minds. The chalk knows the table just as the table knows the chalk. That is why the chalk stops at the table.

This is something of a caricature of a very subtly worked out position, but it nevertheless reveals that this difficult theory is answering quite the wrong question. We are not trying to explain how we interact with our environment, but rather the particular experience that we have in introspecting. The attractiveness of this kind of neo-realism was really a part of an historical epoch when the astonishing successes of particle physics were being talked of everywhere. The solidity of matter was being dissolved into mere mathematical relationships in space, and this seemed like the same unphysical quality as the relationship of individuals conscious of each other.

T H E P R O B L E M

Consciousness as a Property of Protoplasm

The next most extensive solution asserts that consciousness is not in matter per se; rather it is the fundamental property of all living things. It is the very irritability of the smallest one-celled animals that has had a continuous and glorious evolution up through coelenterates, the protochordates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals to man.

A wide variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists, including Charles Darwin and E. B. Titchener, found this thesis unquestionable, initiating in the first part of this century a great deal of excellent observation of lower organisms. The search for rudimentary consciousnesses was on. Books with titles such as The Animal Mind or The Psychic Life of Micro-Organisms were eagerly written and eagerly read.4 And anyone who observes amoebas hunting food or responding to various stimuli, or paramecia avoiding obstacles or conjugating, will know the almost passionate temptation to apply human categories to such behavior.

And this brings us to a very important part of the problem —

our sympathy and identification with other living things. Whatever conclusions we may hold on the matter, it is certainly a part of our consciousness to ‘see’ into the consciousness of others, to identify with our friends and families so as to imagine what they are thinking and feeling. And so if animals are behaving such as we would in similar situations, so well are we trained in our human sympathies that it requires a particular vigor of mind to suppress such identifications when they are not warranted. The explanation for our imputing consciousness to protozoa is simply that we make this common and misleading identification. Yet the explanation for their behavior resides entirely in physical chemistry, not in introspective psychology.

Even in animals with synaptic nervous systems, the tendency 4 By Margaret Floy Washburn, a Titchenerian, and by Alfred Binet respectively.

The real classic in the field of early evolved animals is H. S. Jennings, Behavior of the Lower Organisms (New York: Macmillan, 1906).

Introduction

to read consciousness into their behavior comes more from ourselves than from our observations. Most people will identify with a struggling worm. But as every boy who has baited a fish hook knows, if a worm is cut in two, the front half with its primitive brain seems not to mind as much as the back half, which writhes in ‘agony’.5 But surely if the worm felt pain as we do, surely it would be the part with the brain that would do the agonizing.

The agony of the tail end is our agony, not the worm’s; its writhing is a mechanical release phenomenon, the motor nerves in the tail end firing in volleys at being disconnected from their normal inhibition by the cephalic ganglion.

Consciousness as Learning

To make consciousness coextensive with protoplasm leads, of course, to a discussion of the criterion by which consciousness can be inferred. And hence a third solution, which states that consciousness began not with matter, nor at the beginning of animal life, but at some specific time after life had evolved. It seemed obvious to almost all the active investigators of the subject that the criterion of when and where in evolution consciousness began was the appearance of associative memory or learning. If an animal could modify its behavior on the basis of its experience, it must be having an experience; it must be conscious. Thus, if one wished to study the evolution of consciousness, one simply studied the evolution of learning.

This was indeed how I began my search for the origin of consciousness. My first experimental work was a youthful attempt to produce signal learning (or a conditional response) in an especially long suffering mimosa plant. The signal was an intense light; the response was the drooping of a leaf to a care-5 Since an earthworm ‘writhes’ from the tactile stimulation of simply being handled, the experiment is best performed with a razor blade as the worm is crawling over some hard ground or a board. The unbelieving and squeamish may suppress their anguish with the consciousness that they are helping the worm population (and therefore the robin population) since both ends regenerate.

T H E P R O B L E M

fully calibrated tactile stimulus where it joined the stem. After over a thousand pairings of the light and the tactile stimulus, my patient plant was as green as ever. It was not conscious.

That expected failure behind me, I moved on to protozoa, delicately running individual paramecia in a T-maze engraved in wax on black Bakelite, using direct current shock to punish the animal and spin it around if it went to the incorrect side. If paramecia could learn, I felt they had to be conscious. Moreover I was extremely interested in what would happen to the learning (and the consciousness) when the animal divided. A first suggestion of positive results was not borne out in later replications.

After other failures to find learning in the lower phyla, I moved on to species with synaptic nervous systems, flatworms, earthworms, fish, and reptiles, which could indeed learn, all on the naive assumption that I was chronicling the grand evolution of consciousness.6

Ridiculous! It was, I fear, several years before I realized that this assumption makes no sense at all. When we introspect, it is not upon any bundle of learning processes, and particularly not the types of learning denoted by conditioning and T-mazes. Why then did so many worthies in the lists of science equate consciousness and learning? And why had I been so lame of mind as to follow them?

The reason was the presence of a kind of huge historical neurosis. Psychology has many of them. And one of the reasons that the history of science is essential to the study of psychology is that it is the only way to get out of and above such intellectual disorders. The school of psychology known as Associationism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been so attractively presented and so peopled with prestigious champions that its basic error had become imbedded in common thought and lan-6 For the most recent discussion of this important but methodologically difficult problem of the evolution of learning, see M. E. Bitterman’s Thorndike Centenary Address, “The Comparative Analysis of Learning,” Science, 1975, 188:699-709.

Other references may be found in R. A. Hinde’s Animal Behavior, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), particularly pp. 658-663.

Introduction

guage. That error was, and still is, that consciousness is an actual space inhabited by elements called sensations and ideas, and the association of these elements because they are like each other, or because they have been made by the external world to occur together, is indeed what learning is and what the mind is all about. So learning and consciousness are confused and muddled up with that vaguest of terms, experience.

It is this confusion that lingered unseen behind my first struggles with the problem, as well as the huge emphasis on animal learning in the first half of the twentieth century. But it is now absolutely clear that in evolution the origin of learning and the origin of consciousness are two utterly separate problems. We shall be demonstrating this assertion with more evidence in the next chapter.

Consciousness as a Metaphysical Imposition All the theories I have so far mentioned begin in the assumption that consciousness evolved biologically by simple natural selection. But another position denies that such an assumption is even possible.

Is this consciousness, it asks, this enormous influence of ideas, principles, beliefs over our lives and actions, really derivable from animal behavior? Alone of species, all alone! we try to understand ourselves and the world. We become rebels or patriots or martyrs on the basis of ideas. We build Chartres and computers, write poems and tensor equations, play chess and quartets, sail ships to other planets and listen in to other galaxies — what have these to do with rats in mazes or the threat displays of baboons?

The continuity hypothesis of Darwin for the evolution of mind is a very suspicious totem of evolutionary mythology.7 The yearning for certainty which grails the scientist, the aching beauty 7 To demonstrate such continuity was the purpose of Darwin’s second most important work, The Descent of Man.

T H E P R O B L E M

which harasses the artist, the sweet thorn of justice which fierces the rebel from the eases of life, or the thrill of exultation with which we hear of true acts of that now difficult virtue of courage, of cheerful endurance of hopeless suffering — are these really derivable from matter? Or even continuous with the idiot hierarchies of speechless apes?

The chasm is awesome. The emotional lives of men and of other mammals are indeed marvelously similar. But to focus upon the similarity unduly is to forget that such a chasm exists at all. The intellectual life of man, his culture and history and religion and science, is different from anything else we know of in the universe. That is fact. It is as if all life evolved to a certain point, and then in ourselves turned at a right angle and simply exploded in a different direction.

The appreciation of this discontinuity between the apes and speaking civilized ethical intellectual men has led many scientists back to a metaphysical view. The interiority of consciousness just could not in any sense be evolved by natural selection out of mere assemblages of molecules and cells. There has to be more to human evolution than mere matter, chance, and survival.

Something must be added from outside of this closed system to account for something so different as consciousness.

Such thinking began with the beginning of modern evolutionary theory, particularly in the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection. Following their twin announcements of the theory in 1858, both Darwin and Wallace struggled like Laocoons with the serpentine problem of human evolution and its encoiling difficulty of consciousness.

But where Darwin clouded the problem with his own naivete, seeing only continuity in evolution, Wallace could not do so. The discontinuities were terrifying and absolute. Man’s conscious faculties, particularly, “could not possibly have been developed by means of the same laws which have determined the progressive development of the organic world in general, and also of man’s

Introduction

physical organism.”8 He felt the evidence showed that some metaphysical force had directed evolution at three different points: the beginning of life, the beginning of consciousness, and the beginning of civilized culture. Indeed, it is partly because Wallace insisted on spending the latter part of his life searching in vain among the seances of spiritualists for evidence of such metaphysical imposition that his name is not as well known as is Darwin’s as the discoverer of evolution by natural selection. Such endeavors were not acceptable to the scientific Establishment. To explain consciousness by metaphysical imposition seemed to be stepping outside the rules of natural science. And that indeed was the problem, how to explain consciousness in terms of natural science alone.

The Helpless Spectator Theory

In reaction to such metaphysical speculations, there grew up through this early period of evolutionary thinking an increasingly materialist view. It was a position more consistent with straight natural selection. It even had inherent in it that acrid pessimism that is sometimes curiously associated with really hard science.

This doctrine assures us consciousness does nothing at all, and in fact can do nothing. Many tough-minded experimentalists still agree with Herbert Spencer that such a downgrading of consciousness is the only view that is consistent with straight evolutionary theory. Animals are evolved; nervous systems and their mechanical reflexes increase in complexity; when some unspecified degree of nervous complexity is reached, consciousness appears, and so begins its futile course as a helpless spectator of cosmic events.

What we do is completely controlled by the wiring diagram of the brain and its reflexes to external stimuli. Consciousness is not 8 Darwinism, an Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection (London: Macmillan, 1889), p. 475; see also Wallace’s Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, Ch. 1o.

T H E P R O B L E M

more than the Heat given off by the wires, a mere epiphenome-non. Conscious feelings, as Hodgson put it, are mere colors laid on the surface of a mosaic which is held together by its stones, not by the colors.9 Or as Huxley insisted in a famous essay, “we are conscious automata."10 Consciousness can no more modify the working mechanism of the body or its behavior than can the whistle of a train modify its machinery or where it goes. Moan as it will, the tracks have long ago decided where the train will go.

Consciousness is the melody that floats from the harp and cannot pluck its strings, the foam struck raging from the river that cannot change its course, the shadow that loyally walks step for step beside the pedestrian, but is quite unable to influence his journey.

It is William James who has given the best discussion of the conscious automaton theory.11 His argument here is a little like Samuel Johnson’s downing philosophical idealism by kicking a stone and crying, “I refute it thus!” It is just plain inconceivable that consciousness should have nothing to do with a business which it so faithfully attends. If consciousness is the mere impotent shadow of action, why is it more intense when action is most hesitant? And why are we least conscious when doing something most habitual? Certainly this seesawing relationship between consciousness and actions is something that any theory of consciousness must explain.

Emergent Evolution

The doctrine of emergent evolution was very specifically welcomed into court to rescue consciousness from this undignified 9 Shadworth Hodgson, The Theory of Practice (London: Longmans Green, 1870), 1:416.

10 And volitions merely symbols of brain-states. T. H. Huxley, Collected Essays (New York: Appleton, 1896), Vol. 1, p. 244.

11 William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890), Vol. 1, Ch.

5), but also see William McDougall, Body and Mind (London: Methuen, 1911), Chs. 11, 12.

Introduction

position as a mere helpless spectator. It was also designed to explain scientifically the observed evolutionary discontinuities that had been the heart of the metaphysical imposition argument.

And when I first began to study it some time ago, I, too, felt with a shimmering flash how everything, the problem of consciousness and all, seemed to shiveringly fall into accurate and wonderful place.

Its main idea is a metaphor: Just as the property of wetness cannot be derived from the properties of hydrogen and oxygen alone, so consciousness emerged at some point in evolution in a way underivable from its constituent parts.

While this simple idea goes back to John Stuart Mill and G. H.

Lewes, it was Lloyd Morgan’s version in his Emergent Evolution of 1923 that really captured the cheering. This book is a thor-oughgoing scheme of emergent evolution vigorously carried all the way back into the physical realm. All the properties of matter have emerged from some unspecified forerunner. Those of complex chemical compounds have emerged from the conjunction of simpler chemical components. Properties distinctive of living things have emerged from the conjunctions of these complex molecules. And consciousness emerged from living things. New conjunctions bring about new kinds of relatedness which bring about new emergents. So the new emergent properties are in each case effectively related to the systems from which they emerge. In fact, the new relations emergent at each higher level guide and sustain the course of events distinctive of that level.

Consciousness, then, emerges as something genuinely new at a critical stage of evolutionary advance. When it has emerged, it guides the course of events in the brain and has causal efficacy in bodily behavior.

The whoop with which this antireductionist doctrine was greeted by the majority of prominent biological and comparative psychologists, frustrated dualists all, was quite undignified. Biologists called it a new Declaration of Independence from physics and chemistry. “No longer can the biologist be bullied into sup-

T H E P R O B L E M

pressing observed results because they are not discovered nor expected from work on the non-living. Biology becomes a science in its own right. Prominent neurologists agreed that now we no longer had to think of consciousness as merely dancing an as-siduous but futile attendance upon our brain processes.12 The origin of consciousness seemed to have been pointed at in such a way as to restore consciousness to its usurped throne as the governor of behavior and even to promise new and unpredictable emergents in the future.

But had it? If consciousness emerged in evolution, when? In what species? What kind of a nervous system is necessary? And as the first flush of a theoretical breakthrough waned, it was seen that nothing about the problem had really changed. It is these specifics that need to be answered. What is wrong about emergent evolution is not the doctrine, but the release back into old comfortable ways of thinking about consciousness and behavior, the license that it gives to broad and vacuous generalities.

Historically, it is of interest here to note that all this dancing in the aisles of biology over emergent evolution was going on at the same time that a stronger, less-educated doctrine with a rigorous experimental campaign was beginning its robust conquest of psychology. Certainly one way of solving the problem of consciousness and its place in nature is to deny that consciousness exists at all.

Behaviorism

It is an interesting exercise to sit down and try to be conscious of what it means to say that consciousness does not exist. History has not recorded whether or not this feat was attempted by the early behaviorists. But it has recorded everywhere and in large 12 The quote here is from H. S. Jennings and the paraphrase from C. Judson Herrick. For these and other reactions to emergent evolution, see F. Mason, Creation by Evolution (London: Duckworth, 1928) and W. McDougall, Modern Materialism and Emergent Evolution (New York: Van Nostrand, 1929).

Introduction

the enormous influence which the doctrine that consciousness does not exist has had on psychology in this century.

And this is behaviorism. Its roots rummage far back into the musty history of thought, to the so-called Epicureans of the eighteenth century and before, to attempts to generalize tropisms from plants to animals to man, to movements called Objectivism, or more particularly, Actionism. For it was Knight Dunlap’s attempt to teach the latter to an excellent but aweless animal psychologist, John B. Watson, that resulted in a new word, Behaviorism.13 At first, it was very similar to the helpless spectator theory we have already examined. Consciousness just was not important in animals. But after a World War and a little invigo-rating opposition, behaviorism charged out into the intellectual arena with the snorting assertion that consciousness is nothing at all.

What a startling doctrine! But the really surprising thing is that, starting off almost as a flying whim, it grew into a movement that occupied center stage in psychology from about 1920

to 1960. The external reasons for the sustained triumph of such a peculiar position are both fascinating and complex. Psychology at the time was trying to wriggle out of philosophy into a separate academic discipline and used behaviorism to do so. The immediate adversary of behaviorism, Titchenerian introspectionism, was a pale and effete opponent, based as it was on a false analogy between consciousness and chemistry. The toppled idealism after World War I created a revolutionary age demanding new philosophies. The intriguing successes of physics and general technology presented both a model and a means that seemed more compatible with behaviorism. The world was weary and 13 For a less ad hominem picture of the beginnings of behaviorism, see John C.

Burnham, “On the origins of behaviorism.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1968, 4: 143-151. And for a good discussion, Richard Herrnstein’s “Introduction to John B. Watson’s Comparative Psychology” in Historical Conceptions of Psychology, M. Henle, J. Jaynes, and J. J. Sullivan, eds. (New York: Springer, 1974), 98 —115.

T H E P R O B L E M

wary of subjective thought and longed for objective fact. And in America objective fact was pragmatic fact. Behaviorism provided this in psychology. It allowed a new generation to sweep aside with one impatient gesture all the worn-out complexities of the problem of consciousness and its origin. We would turn over a new leaf. We would make a fresh start.

And the fresh start was a success in one laboratory after another. But the single inherent reason for its success was not its truth, but its program. And what a truly vigorous and exciting program of research it was! with its gleaming stainless-steel promise of reducing all conduct to a handful of reflexes and conditional responses developed from them, of generalizing the spinal reflex terminology of stimulus and response and reinforcement to the puzzles of headed behavior and so seeming to solve them, of running rats through miles and miles of mazes into more fascinating mazes of objective theorems, and its pledge, its solemn pledge to reduce thought to muscle twitches and personality to the woes of Little Albert.14 In all this there was a heady excitement that is difficult to relate at this remove. Complexity would be made simple, darkness would be made light, and philosophy would be a thing of the past.

From the outside, this revolt against consciousness seemed to storm the ancient citadels of human thought and set its arrogant banners up in one university after another. But having once been a part of its major school, I confess it was not really what it seemed. Off the printed page, behaviorism was only a refusal to talk about consciousness. Nobody really believed he was not conscious. And there was a very real hypocrisy abroad, as those interested in its problems were forcibly excluded from academic psychology, as text after text tried to smother the unwanted problem from student view. In essence, behaviorism was a method, not the theory that it tried to be. And as a method, it 14 The unfortunate subject of Watson's experiments on conditioned fear.

Introduction

exorcised old ghosts. It gave psychology a thorough house clean-ing. And now the closets have been swept out and the cupboards washed and aired, and we are ready to examine the problem again.

Consciousness as the Reticular Activating System But before doing so, one final approach, a wholly different approach, and one that has occupied me most recently, the nervous system. How often in our frustrations with trying to solve the mysteries of mind do we comfort our questions with anatomy, real or fancied, and think of a thought as a particular neuron or a mood as a particular neurotransmitter! It is a temptation born of exasperation with the untestableness and vagueness of all the above solutions. Away with these verbal subtleties!

These esoteric poses of philosophy and even the paper theories of behaviorists are mere subterfuges to avoid the very material we are talking about! Here we have an animal — make him a man if you will — here he is on the table of our analysis. If he is conscious, it has to be here, right here in him, in the brain in front of us, not in the presumptuous inklings of philosophy back in the incapable past! And today we at last have the techniques to explore the nervous system directly, brain to brain. Somewhere here in a mere three-and-a-half pound lump of pinkish-gray matter, the answer has to be.

All we have to do is to find those parts of the brain that are responsible for consciousness, then trace out their anatomical evolution, and we will solve the problem of the origin of consciousness. Moreover, if we study the behavior of present-day species corresponding to various stages in the development of these neurological structures, we will be able at last to reveal with experimental exactness just what consciousness basically is.

Now this sounds like an excellent scientific program. Ever since Descartes chose the brain’s pineal body as the seat of consciousness and was roundly refuted by the physiologists of his

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day, there has been a fervent if often superficial search for where in the brain consciousness exists.15 And the search is still on.

At the present, a plausible nominee for the neural substrate of consciousness is one of the most important neurological discoveries of our time. This is that tangle of tiny internuncial neurons called the reticular formation, which has long lain hidden and unsuspected in the brainstem. It extends from the top of the spinal cord through the brainstem on up into the thalamus and hypothalamus, attracting collaterals from sensory and motor nerves, almost like a system of wire-tabs on the communication lines that pass near it. But this is not all. It also has direct lines of command to half a dozen major areas of the cortex and probably all the nuclei of the brainstem, as well as sending fibers down the spinal cord where it influences the peripheral sensory and motor systems. Its function is to sensitize or “awaken”

selected nervous circuits and desensitize others, such that those who pioneered in this work christened it “the waking brain”16

The reticular formation is also often called by its functional name, the reticular activating system. It is the place where general anesthesia produces its effect by deactivating its neurons.

Cutting it produces permanent sleep and coma. Stimulating it through an implanted electrode in most of its regions wakes up a sleeping animal. Moreover, it is capable of grading the activity of most other parts of the brain, doing this as a reflection of its own internal excitability and the titer of its neurochemistry. There are exceptions, too complicated for discussion here. But they are not such as to diminish the exciting idea that this disordered network of short neurons that connect up with the entire brain, this central transactional core between the strictly sensory and motor systems of classical neurology, is the long-sought answer to the whole problem.

* * *

15 I have discussed this at greater length in my paper, “The Problem of Animate Motion in the Seventeenth Century,”

Journal of the History of Ideas,

1970, 31: 219-234.

16 See H. W. Magoun, The Waking Brain (Springfield, Illinois: Thomas, 1958).

Introduction

If we now look at the evolution of the reticular formation, asking if it could be correlated with the evolution of consciousness, we find no encouragement whatever. It turns out to be one of the oldest parts of the nervous system. Indeed, a good case could be made that this is the very oldest part of the nervous system, around which the more orderly, more specific, and more highly evolved tracts and nuclei developed. The little that we at present know about the evolution of the reticular formation does not seem to indicate that the problem of consciousness and its origin will be solved by such a study.

Moreover, there is a delusion in such reasoning. It is one that is all too common and unspoken in our tendency to translate psychological phenomena into neuro-anatomy and chemistry.

We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first. Even if we had a complete wiring diagram of the nervous system, we still would not be able to answer our basic question. Though we knew the connections of every tickling thread of every single axon and dendrite in every species that ever existed, together with all its neurotransmitters and how they varied in its billions of synapses of every brain that ever existed, we could still never — not ever — from a knowledge of the brain alone know if that brain contained a consciousness like our own.

We first have to start from the top, from some conception of what consciousness is, from what our own introspection is. We have to be sure of that, before we can enter the nervous system and talk about its neurology.

We must therefore try to make a new beginning by stating what consciousness is. We have already seen that this is no easy matter, and that the history of the subject is an enormous confusion of metaphor with designation. In any such situation, where something is so resistant to even the beginnings of clarity, it is wisdom to begin by determining what that something is not. And that is the task of the next chapter.

BOOK ONE

The Mind of Man

C H A P T E R 1

The Consciousness

of Consciousness

WHEN ASKED the question, what is consciousness? we become conscious of consciousness. And most of us take this consciousness of consciousness to be what consciousness is. This is not true.

In being conscious of consciousness, we feel it is the most self-evident thing imaginable. We feel it is the defining attribute of all our waking states, our moods and affections, our memories, our thoughts, attentions, and volitions. We feel comfortably certain that consciousness is the basis of concepts, of learning and reasoning, of thought and judgment, and that it is so because it records and stores our experiences as they happen, allowing us to introspect on them and learn from them at will. We are also quite conscious that all this wonderful set of operations and contents that we call consciousness is located somewhere in the head.

On critical examination, all of these statements are false.

They are the costume that consciousness has been masquerading in for centuries. They are the misconceptions that have prevented a solution to the problem of the origin of consciousness.

To demonstrate these errors and show what consciousness is not, is the long but I hope adventurous task of this chapter.

The Extensiveness of Consciousness

To begin with, there are several uses of the word consciousness which we may immediately discard as incorrect. We have for

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example the phrase "to lose consciousness” after receiving a blow on the head. But if this were correct, we would then have no word for those somnambulistic states known in the clinical literature where an individual is clearly not conscious and yet is responsive to things in a way in which a knocked-out person is not.

Therefore, in the first instance we should say that the person suffering a severe blow on the head loses both consciousness and what I am calling reactivity, and they are therefore different things.

This distinction is also important in normal everyday life. We are constantly reacting to things without being conscious of them at the time. Sitting against a tree, I am always reacting to the tree and to the ground and to my own posture, since if I wish to walk, I will quite unconsciously stand up from the ground to do so.

Immersed in the ideas of this first chapter, I am rarely conscious even of where I am. In writing, I am reacting to a pencil in my hand since I hold on to it, and am reacting to my writing pad since I hold it on my knees, and to its lines since I write upon them, but I am only conscious of what I am trying to say and whether or not I am being clear to you.

If a bird bursts up from the copse nearby and flies crying to the horizon, I may turn and watch it and hear it, and then turn back to this page without being conscious that I have done so.

In other words, reactivity covers all stimuli my behavior takes account of in any way, while consciousness is something quite distinct and a far less ubiquitous phenomenon. We are conscious of what we are reacting to only from time to time. And whereas reactivity can be defined behaviorally and neurologically, consciousness at the present state of knowledge cannot.

But this distinction is much more far-reaching. We are continually reacting to things in ways that have no phenomenal component in consciousness whatever. Not at any time. In seeing any object, our eyes and therefore our retinal images are reacting to the object by shifting twenty times a second, and yet

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we see an unshifting stable object with no consciousness whatever of the succession of different inputs or of putting them together into the object. An abnormally small retinal image of something in the proper context is automatically seen as something at a distance; we are not conscious of making the correction. Color and light contrast effects, and other perceptual constancies all go on every minute of our waking and even dreaming experience without our being in the least conscious of them. And these instances are barely touching the multitude of processes which by the older definitions of consciousness one might expect to be conscious of, but which we definitely are not.

I am here thinking of Titchener’s designation of consciousness as

“the sum total of mental processes occurring now.” We are now very far from such a position.

But let us go further. Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.

The timing of consciousness is also an interesting question.

When we are awake, are we conscious all the time? We think so. In fact, we are sure so! I shut my eyes and even if I try not to think, consciousness still streams on, a great river of contents in a succession of different conditions which I have been taught to call thoughts, images, memories, interior dialogues, regrets, wishes, resolves, all interweaving with the constantly changing pageant of exterior sensations of which I am selectively aware.

Always the continuity. Certainly this is the feeling. And whatever we’re doing, we feel that our very self, our deepest of deep

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identity, is indeed this continuing flow that only ceases in sleep between remembered dreams. This is our experience. And many thinkers have taken this spirit of continuity to be the place to start from in philosophy, the very ground of certainty which no one can doubt. Cogito, ergo sum.

But what could this continuity mean? If we think of a minute as being sixty thousand milliseconds, are we conscious for every one of those milliseconds? If you still think so, go on dividing the time units, remembering that the firing of neurons is of a finite order — although we have no idea what that has to do with our sense of the continuity of consciousness. Few persons would wish to maintain that consciousness somehow floats like a mist above and about the nervous system completely ununited to any earthly necessities of neural refractory periods.

It is much more probable that the seeming continuity of consciousness is really an illusion, just as most of the other metaphors about consciousness are. In our flashlight analogy, the flashlight would be conscious of being on only when it is on.

Though huge gaps of time occurred, providing things were generally the same, it would seem to the flashlight itself that the light had been continuously on. We are thus conscious less of the time than we think, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious. And the feeling of a great uninterrupted stream of rich inner experiences, now slowly gliding through dreamy moods, now tumbling in excited torrents down gorges of precipitous insight, or surging evenly through our nobler days, is what it is on this page, a metaphor for how subjective consciousness seems to subjective consciousness.

But there is a better way to point this out. If you close your left eye and stare at the left margin of this page, you are not at all conscious of a large gap in your vision about four inches to the right. But, still staring with your right eye only, take your finger and move it along a line of print from the left margin to the right, and you will see the top of it disappear into this gap and then

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reappear on the other side. This is due to a two-millimeter gap on the nasal side of the retina where the optic nerve fibers are gathered together and leave the eye for the brain.1 The interesting thing about this gap is that it is not so much a blind spot as it is usually called; it is a non-spot. A blind man sees his darkness.2

But you cannot see any gap in your vision at all, let alone be conscious of it in any way. Just as the space around the blind spots is joined without any gap at all, so consciousness knits itself over its time gaps and gives the illusion of continuity.

Examples of how little we are conscious of our everyday behavior can be multiplied almost anywhere we look. Playing the piano is a really extraordinary example.3 Here a complex array of various tasks is accomplished all at once with scarcely any consciousness of them whatever: two different lines of near hieroglyphics to be read at once, the right hand guided to one and the left to the other; ten fingers assigned to various tasks, the fingering solving various motor problems without any awareness, and the mind interpreting sharps and flats and naturals into black and white keys, obeying the timing of whole or quarter or sixteenth notes and rests and trills, one hand perhaps in three beats to a measure while the other plays four, while the feet are softening or slurring or holding various other notes. And all this 1 A better technique of noticing- the blind spot is to take two pieces of paper about a half-inch square, and while holding- them about a foot and a half in front of you, fixate on one with one eye, and move the other piece of paper out on the same side until it disappears.

2 Except when the cause of blindness is in the brain. For example, soldiers wounded in one or the other occipital areas of the cortex, with large parts of the visual field destroyed, are not conscious of any alteration in their vision. Looking straight ahead, they have the illusion of seeing a complete visual world, as you or I do.

3 This example with similar phrasing was used by W. B. Carpenter to illustrate his "unconscious cerebration," probably the first important statement of the idea in the nineteenth century. It was first described in the fourth edition of Carpenter's Human Physiology in 1852, but more extensively in his later works, as in his influential Principles of Mental Physiology (London: Kegan Paul, 1874), Book 2, Ch. 13.

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time the performer, the conscious performer, is in a seventh heaven of artistic rapture at the results of all this tremendous business, or perchance lost in contemplation of the individual who turns the leaves of the music book, justly persuaded he is showing her his very soul! Of course consciousness usually has a role in the learning of such complex activities, but not necessarily in their performance, and that is the only point I am trying to make here.

Consciousness is often not only unnecessary; it can be quite undesirable. Our pianist suddenly conscious of his fingers during a furious set of arpeggios would have to stop playing. Nijinsky somewhere says that when he danced, it was as if he were in the orchestra pit looking back at himself; he was not conscious of every movement, but of how he was looking to others. A sprinter may be conscious of where he is relative to the others in the race, but he is certainly not conscious of putting one leg in front of the other; such consciousness might indeed cause him to trip. And anyone who plays tennis at my indifferent level knows the exasperation of having his service suddenly ‘go to pieces’ and of serving consecutive double faults! The more doubles, the more conscious one becomes of one’s motions (and of one’s disposition!) and the worse things get.4

Such phenomena of exertion are not to be explained away on the basis of physical excitement, for the same phenomena in regard to consciousness occur in less strenuous occupations.

Right at this moment, you are not conscious of how you are sitting, of where your hands are placed, of how fast you are reading, though even as I mentioned these items, you were. And as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or even of the words or even of the syntax or the sentences and punctuation, 4 The present writer improvises on the piano, and his best playing is when he is not conscious of the performance side as he invents new themes or developments, but only when he is somnambulistic about it and is conscious of his playing only as if he were another person.

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but only of their meaning. As you listen to an address, phonemes disappear into words and words into sentences and sentences disappear into what they are trying to say, into meaning. To be conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy the intention of the speech.

And also on the production side. Try speaking with a full consciousness of your articulation as you do it. You will simply stop speaking.

And so in writing, it is as if the pencil or pen or typewriter itself spells the words, spaces them, punctuates properly, goes to the next line, does not begin consecutive sentences in the same way, determines that we place a question here, an exclamation there, even as we ourselves are engrossed in what we are trying to express and the person we are addressing.

For in speaking or writing we are not really conscious of what we are actually doing at the time. Consciousness functions in the decision as to what to say, how we are to say it, and when we say it, but then the orderly and accomplished succession of phonemes or of written letters is somehow done for us.

Consciousness Not a Copy of Experience

Although the metaphor of the blank mind had been used in the writings ascribed to Aristotle, it is really only since John Locke thought of the mind as a tabula rasa in the seventeenth century that we have emphasized this recording aspect of consciousness, and thus see it crowded with memories that can be read over again in introspection. If Locke had lived in our time, he would have used the metaphor of a camera rather than a slate. But the idea is the same. And most people would protest emphatically that the chief function of consciousness is to store up experience, to copy it as a camera does, so that it can be reflected upon at some future time.

So it seems. But consider the following problems: Does the

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door of your room open from the right or the left? Which is your second longest finger? At a stoplight, is it the red or the green that is on top? How many teeth do you see when brushing your teeth? What letters are associated with what numbers on a telephone dial? If you are in a familiar room, without turning around, write down all the items on the wall just behind you, and then look.

I think you will be surprised how little you can retrospect in consciousness on the supposed images you have stored from so much previous attentive experience. If the familiar door suddenly opened the other way, if another finger suddenly grew longer, if the red light were differently placed, or you had an extra tooth, or the telephone were made differently, or a new window latch had been put on the window behind you, you would know it immediately, showing that you all along ‘ knew’, but not consciously so. Familiar to psychologists, this is the distinction between recognition and recall. What you can consciously recall is a thimbleful to the huge oceans of your actual knowledge.

Experiments of this sort demonstrate that conscious memory is not a storing up of sensory images, as is sometimes thought.

Only if you have at some time consciously noticed your finger lengths or your door, have at some time counted your teeth, though you have observed these things countless times, can you remember. Unless you have particularly noted what is on the wall or recently cleaned or painted it, you will be surprised at what you have left out. And introspect upon the matter. Did you not in each of these instances ask what must be there? Starting with ideas and reasoning, rather than with any image? Conscious retrospection is not the retrieval of images, but the retrieval of what you have been conscious of before,5 and the reworking of these elements into rational or plausible patterns.

* * *

5 See in this connection the discussion of Robert S. Wood worth in his Psychological Issues (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), Ch. 7.

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Let us demonstrate this in another way. Think, if you will, of when you entered the room you are now in and when you picked up this book. Introspect upon it and then ask the question: are the images of which you have copies the actual sensory fields as you came in and sat down and began reading? Don’t you have an image of yourself coming through one of the doors, perhaps even a bird’s-eye view of one of the entrances, and then perhaps vaguely see yourself sitting down and picking up the book?

Things which you have never experienced except in this introspection! And can you retrieve the sound fields around the event? Or the cutaneous sensations as you sat, took the pressure off your feet, and opened this book? Of course, if you go on with your thinking you can also rearrange your imaginal retrospection such that you do indeed ‘see’ entering the room just as it might have been; and ‘hear’ the sound of the chair and the book opening, and ‘feel’ the skin sensations. But I suggest that this has a large element of created imagery — what we shall call narratizing a little later — of what the experience should be like, rather than what it actually was like.

Or introspect on when you last went swimming: I suspect you have an image of a seashore, lake, or pool which is largely a retrospection, but when it comes to yourself swimming, lo! like Nijinsky in his dance, you are seeing yourself swim, something that you have never observed at all! There is precious little of the actual sensations of swimming, the particular waterline across your face, the feel of the water against your skin, or to what extent your eyes were underwater as you turned your head to breathe.6 Similarly, if you think of the last time you slept out of doors, went skating, or — if all else fails — did something that you regretted in public, you tend not to see, hear, or feel things as you actually experienced them, but rather to re-create them in objective terms, seeing yourself in the setting as if you were 6 An example taken from Donald Hebb’s provocative discussion, “ T h e mind’s eye,”

Psychology Today, 1961, 2.

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somebody else. Looking back into memory, then, is a great deal invention, seeing yourself as others see you. Memory is the medium of the must-have-been. Though I have no doubt that in any of these instances you could by inference invent a subjective view of the experience, even with the conviction that it was the actual memory.

Consciousness Not Necessary for Concepts

A further major confusion about consciousness is the belief that it is specifically and uniquely the place where concepts are formed. This is a very ancient idea: that we have various concrete conscious experiences and then put the similar ones together into a concept. This idea has even been the paradigm of a slew of experiments by psychologists who thought they were thus studying concept formation.

Max Müller, in one of his fascinating discussions in the last century, brought the problem to a point by asking, whoever saw a tree? “No one ever saw a tree, but only this or that fir tree, or oak tree, or apple tree . . . Tree, therefore, is a concept, and as such can never be seen or perceived by the senses.”7 Particular trees alone were outside in the environment, and only in consciousness did the general concept of tree exist.

Now the relation between concepts and consciousness could have an extensive discussion. But let it suffice here simply to show that there is no necessary connection between them. When Müller says no one has ever seen a tree, he is mistaking what he knows about an object for the object itself. Every weary wayfarer after miles under the hot sun has seen a tree. So has every cat, squirrel, and chipmunk when chased by a dog. The bee has a concept of a flower, the eagle a concept of a sheer-faced rocky 7 Max Müller, The Science of Thought (London: Longmans Green, 1887), 78-79.

Eugenio Rignano in his The Psychology of Reasoning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923), p. 108f., makes a similar criticism to mine.

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ledge, as a nesting thrush has a concept of a crotch of upper branch awninged with green leaves. Concepts are simply classes of behaviorally equivalent things. Root concepts are prior to experience. They are fundamental to the aptic structures that allow behavior to occur at all.8 Indeed what Müller should have said was, no one has ever been conscious of a tree. For consciousness, indeed, not only is not the repository of concepts; it does not usually work with them at all! When we consciously think of a tree, we are indeed conscious of a particular tree, of the fir or the oak or the elm that grew beside our house, and let it stand for the concept, just as we can let a concept word stand for it as well. In fact, one of the great functions of language is to let the word stand for a concept, which is exactly what we do in writing or speaking about conceptual material. And we must do this because concepts are usually not in consciousness at all.

Consciousness Not Necessary for Learning

A third important misconception of consciousness is that it is the basis for learning. Particularly for the long and illustrious series of Associationist psychologists through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, learning was a matter of ideas in consciousness being grouped by similarity, contiguity, or occasionally some other relationship. Nor did it matter whether we were speaking of a man or an animal; all learning was “profiting from experience” or ideas coming together in consciousness — as I said in the Introduction. And so contemporary common knowledge, without realizing quite why, has culturally inherited the notion that consciousness is necessary for learning.

The matter is somewhat complex. It is also unfortunately 8 Aptic structures are the neurological basis of aptitudes that are composed of an innate evolved aptic paradigm plus the results of experience in development. The term is the heart of an unpublished essay of mine and is meant to replace such problematic words as instincts. They are organizations of the brain, always partially innate, that make the organism apt to behave in a certain way under certain conditions.

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disfigured in psychology by a sometimes forbidding jargon, which is really an overgeneralization of the spinal-reflex terminology of the nineteenth century. But, for our purposes, we may consider the laboratory study of learning to have been of three central kinds, the learning of signals, skills, and solutions. Let us take up each in turn, asking the question, is consciousness necessary?

Signal learning (or classical or Pavlovian conditioning) is the simplest example. If a light signal immediately followed by a puff of air through a rubber tube is directed at a person’s eye about ten times, the eyelid, which previously blinked only to the puff of air, will begin to blink to the light signal alone, and this becomes more and more frequent as trials proceed.9 Subjects who have undergone this well-known procedure of signal learning report that it has no conscious component whatever. Indeed, consciousness, in this example the intrusion of voluntary eye blinks to try to assist the signal learning, blocks it from occurring.

In more everyday situations, the same simple associative learning can be shown to go on without any consciousness that it has occurred. If a distinct kind of music is played while you are eating a particularly delicious lunch, the next time you hear the music you will like its sounds slightly more and even have a little more saliva in your mouth. The music has become a signal for pleasure which mixes with your judgment. And the same is true for paintings.10 Subjects who have gone through this kind of test in the laboratory, when asked why they liked the music or paintings better after lunch, could not say. They were not conscious they had learned anything. But the really interesting thing here is that if you know about the phenomenon beforehand and 9 G. A. Kimble, “Conditioning as a function of the time between conditioned and unconditioned stimuli," Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1947, 37: 1-15.

10 These studies are those of Gregory Razran and are discussed on page 232 of his Mind in Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971). They are discussed critically in relation to the whole problem of unintentional learning by T. A. Ryan, Intentional Behavior (New York: Ronald Press, 1970), pp. 235-236.

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are conscious of the contingency between food and the music or painting, the learning does not occur. Again, consciousness actually reduces our learning abilities of this type, let alone not being necessary for them.

As we saw earlier in the performance of skills, so in the learning of skills, consciousness is indeed like a helpless spectator, having little to do. A simple experiment will demonstrate this fact.

Take a coin in each hand and toss them both, crossing them in the air in such a way that each coin is caught by the opposite hand. This you can learn in a dozen trials. As you do, ask, are you conscious of everything you, or Is consciousness necessary at all? I think you will find that learning is much better described as being Organic5 rather than conscious. Consciousness takes you into the task, giving you the goal to be reached. But from then on, apart perhaps from fleeting neurotic concerns about your abilities at such tasks, it is as if the learning is done for you. Yet the nineteenth century, taking consciousness to be the whole architect of behavior, would have tried to explain such a task as consciously recognizing the good and bad motions, and by free choice repeating the former and dropping out the latter!

The learning of complex skills is no different in this respect.

Typewriting has been extensively studied, it generally being agreed in the words of one experimenter “that all adaptations and short cuts in methods were unconsciously made, that is, fallen into by the learners quite unintentionally. The learners suddenly noticed that they were doing certain parts of the work in a new and better way.”11

In the coin-tossing experiment, you may have even discovered that consciousness if present impeded your learning. This is a very common finding in the learning of skills, just as we saw it was in their performance. Let the learning go on without your being too conscious of it, and it is all done more smoothly and 11 W. F. Book, The Psychology of Skill (New York: Gregg, 1925).

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efficiently. Sometimes too much so, for, in complex skills like typing, one may learn to consistently type ‘hte’ or ‘the’. The remedy is to reverse the process by consciously practicing the mistake ‘hte’, whereupon contrary to the usual idea of ‘practice makes perfect’, the mistake drops away — a phenomenon called negative practice.

In the common motor skills studied in the laboratory as well, such as complex pursuit-rotor systems or mirror-tracing, the subjects who are asked to be very conscious of their movements do worse.12 And athletic trainers whom I have interviewed are unwittingly following such laboratory-proven principles when they urge their trainees not to think so much about what they are doing. The Zen exercise of learning archery is extremely explicit on this, advising the archer not to think of himself as drawing the bow and releasing the arrow, but releasing himself from the consciousness of what he is doing by letting the bow stretch itself and the arrow release itself from the fingers at the proper time.

Solution learning (or instrumental learning or operant conditioning) is a more complex case. Usually when one is acquiring some solution to a problem or some path to a goal, consciousness plays a very considerable role in setting up the problem in a certain way. But consciousness is not necessary. Instances can be shown in which a person has no consciousness whatever of either the goal he is seeking or the solution he is finding to achieve that goal.

Another simple experiment can demonstrate this. Ask someone to sit opposite you and to say words, as many words as he can think of, pausing two or three seconds after each of them for you to write them down. If after every plural noun (or adjective, or abstract word, or whatever you choose) you say “good” or “right”

as you write it down, or simply ‘‘mmm-hmm” or smile, or repeat the plural word pleasantly, the frequency of plural nouns (or 12 H. L. Waskom, “An experimental analysis of incentive and forced application and their effect upon learning,” Journal of Psychology, 1936, 2: 393-408.

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whatever) will increase significantly as he goes on saying words.

The important thing here is that the subject is not aware that he is learning anything at all.13 He is not conscious that he is trying to find a way to make you increase your encouraging remarks, or even of his solution to that problem. Every day, in all our conversations, we are constantly training and being trained by each other in this manner, and yet we are never conscious of it.

Such unconscious learning is not confined to verbal behavior.

Members of a psychology class were asked to compliment any girl at the college wearing red. Within a week the cafeteria was a blaze of red (and friendliness), and none of the girls was aware of being influenced. Another class, a week after being told about unconscious learning and training, tried it on the professor.

Every time he moved toward the right side of the lecture hall, they paid rapt attention and roared at his jokes. It is reported that they were almost able to train him right out the door, he remaining unaware of anything unusual.14

The critical problem with most of these studies is that if the subject decided beforehand to look for such contingencies, he would of course be conscious of what he was learning to do. One way to get around this is to use a behavioral response which is imperceptible to the subject. And this has been done, using a very small muscle in the thumb whose movements are imperceptible to us and can only be detected by an electrical recording apparatus. The subjects were told that the experiments were concerned with the effect of intermittent unpleasant noise com-13 J. Greenspoon, ‘‘The reinforcing effect of two spoken sounds on the frequency of two responses," American Journal of Psychology 1955, 68: 409-416. But there is considerable controversy here, particularly in the order and wording of postexperi-mental questions. There may even be a kind of tacit contract between subject and experimenter. See Robert Rosenthal, Experimenter Effects in Behavioral Research (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966). In this controversy, I presently agree with Postman that the learning occurs before the subject becomes conscious of the reinforcement contingency, and indeed that consciousness would not occur unless this had been so. L. Postman and L. Sassenrath, “The automatic action of verbal rewards and punishment,” Journal of General Psychology, 1961, 65: 109—136.

14 W. Lambert Gardiner, Psychology: A Story of a Search (Belmont, California: Brooks/Cole, 1970), p. 76.

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bined with music upon muscle tension. Four electrodes were placed on their bodies, the only real one being the one over the small thumb muscle, the other three being dummy electrodes.

The apparatus was so arranged that whenever the imperceptible thumb-muscle twitch was electrically detected, the unpleasant noise was stopped for 15 seconds if it was already sounding, or delayed for 15 seconds if was not turned on at the time of the twitch. In all subjects, the imperceptible thumb twitch that turned off the distressing noise increased in rate without the subjects’ being the slightest bit conscious that they were learning to turn off the unpleasant noise.15

Thus, consciousness is not a necessary part of the learning process, and this is true whether it be the learning of signals, skills, or solutions. There is, of course, much more to say on this fascinating subject, for the whole thrust of contemporary research in behavior modification is along these lines. But, for the present, we have simply established that the older doctrine that conscious experience is the substrate of all learning is clearly and absolutely false. At this point, we can at least conclude that it is possible — possible I say — to conceive of human beings who are not conscious and yet can learn and solve problems.

Consciousness Not Necessary for Thinking

As we go from simple to more complicated aspects of mentality, we enter vaguer and vaguer territory, where the terms we use become more difficult to travel with. Thinking is certainly one of these. And to say that consciousness is not necessary for thinking makes us immediately bristle with protest. Surely thinking is the very heart and bone of consciousness! But let us go slowly 15 R. F. Hefferline, B. Keenan, R. A. Harford, “Escape and avoidance conditioning in human subjects without their observation of the response,” Science, 1959, 130: 1338-1339. Another study which shows unconscious solution learning" very clearly is that of J. D. Keehn: ‘‘Experimental Studies of the Unconscious: operant conditioning of unconscious eye blinking,” Behavior Research and Therapy, 1967, 5: 95-102.

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here. What we would be referring to would be that type of free associating which might be called thinking-about or thinking-of, which, indeed, always seems to be fully surrounded and immersed in the image-peopled province of consciousness. But the matter is really not that clear at all.

Let us begin with the type of thinking that ends in a result to which may be predicated the terms right or wrong. This is what is commonly referred to as making judgments, and is very similar to one extreme of solution learning that we have just discussed.

A simple experiment, so simple as to seem trivial, will bring us directly to the heart of the matter. Take any two unequal objects，

such as a pen and pencil or two unequally filled glasses of water, and place them on the desk in front of you. Then, partly closing your eyes to increase your attention to the task, pick up each one with the thumb and forefinger and judge which is heavier. Now introspect on everything you are doing. You will find yourself conscious of the feel of the objects against the skin of your fingers, conscious of the slight downward pressure as you feel the weight of each, conscious of any protuberances on the sides of the objects, and so forth. And now the actual judging of which is heavier. Where is that? Lo! the very act of judgment that one object is heavier than the other is not conscious. It is somehow just given to you by your nervous system. If we call that process of judgment thinking, we are finding that such thinking is not conscious at all. A simple experiment, yes, but extremely important. It demolishes at once the entire tradition that such thought processes are the structure of the conscious mind.

This type of experiment came to be studied extensively back at the beginning of this century in what came to be known as the Würzburg School. It all began with a study by Karl Marbe in 1901, which was very similar to the above, except that small weights were used.16 The subject was asked to lift two weights 16 K. Marbe, Experimentell-Psychologische Untersuchungen über das Urteil, eine Einleitung in die Logik (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1901).

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in front of him, and place the one that was heavier in front of the experimenter, who was facing him. And it came as a startling discovery both to the experimenter himself and to his highly trained subjects, all of them introspective psychologists, that the process of judgment itself was never conscious. Physics and psychology always show interesting contrasts, and it is one of the ironies of science that the Marbe experiment, so simple as to seem silly, was to psychology what the so-difficult-to-set-up Mi-chaelson-Morley experiment was to physics. Just as the latter proved that the ether, that substance supposed to exist throughout space, did not exist, so the weight-judgment experiment showed that judging, that supposed hallmark of consciousness, did not exist in consciousness at all.

But a complaint can be lodged here. Maybe in lifting the objects the judging was all happening so fast that we forgot it.

After all, in introspecting we always have hundreds of words to describe what happens in a few seconds. (What an astonishing fact that is!) And our memory fades as to what just happened even as we are trying to express it. Perhaps this was what was occurring in Marbe’s experiment, and that type of thinking called judging could be found in consciousness, after all, if we could only remember.

This was the problem as Watt faced it a few years after Marbe.17 To solve it, he used a different method, word associations. Nouns printed on cards were shown to the subject, who was to reply by uttering an associate word as quickly as he could.

It was not free association, but what is technically called partially constrained: in different series the subject was required to associate to the visual word a superordinate (e.g. oak-tree), co-ordinate (oak-elm), or subordinate (oak-beam); or a whole (oak-forest), a part (oak-acorn), or another part of a common whole 17 H. J. Watt, “Experimentelle Beitrage zur einer Theorie des Denkens,” Archiv für geshihte der Psychologie, 1905, 4.: 289-436.

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(oak-path). The nature of this task of constrained associations made it possible to divide the consciousness of it into four periods: the instructions as to which of the constraints it was to be (e.g., superordinate), the presentation of the stimulus noun (e.g., oak), the search for an appropriate association, and the spoken reply (e.g., tree). The introspecting observers were asked to confine themselves first to one period and then to another, and thus get a more accurate account of consciousness in each.

It was expected that the precision of this fractionation method would prove Marbe’s conclusions wrong, and that the consciousness of thinking would be found in Watt's third period, the period of the search for the word that would suit the particular constrained association. But nothing of the sort happened. It was the third period that was introspectively blank. What seemed to be happening was that thinking was automatic and not really conscious once a stimulus word had been given, and, previous to that, the particular type of association demanded had been adequately understood by the observer. This was a remarkable result. Another way of saying it is that one does one’s thinking before one knows what one is to think about. The important part of the matter is the instruction, which allows the whole business to go off automatically. This I shall shorten to the term struction, by which I mean it to have the connotation of both instruction and construction.18

Thinking, then, is not conscious. Rather, it is an automatic process following a struction and the materials on which the struction is to operate.

But we do not have to stay with verbal associations; any type of problem will do, even those closer to voluntary actions. If I say to 18 The terms set, determining tendency, and struction need to be distinguished. A set is the more inclusive term, being an engaged aptic structure which in mammals can be ordered from a general limbic component of readiness to a specific cortical component of a determining tendency, the final part of which in humans is often a struction.

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myself, I shall think about an oak in summer, that is a struction, and what I call thinking about is really a file of associated images cast up on the shores of my consciousness out of an unknown sea, just like the constrained associations in Watt's experiment.

If we have the figures 6 and 2, divided by a vertical line, 6|2, the ideas produced by such a stimulus will be eight, four, or three, according to whether the struction prescribed is addition, subtraction, or division. The important thing is that the struction itself, the process of addition, subtraction, or division, disappears into the nervous system once it is given. But it is obviously there

‘in the mind’ since the same stimulus can result in any of three different responses. And that is something we are not in the least aware of, once it is put in motion.

Suppose we have a series of figures such as the following: What is the next figure in this series? How did you arrive at your answer? Once I have given you the struction, you automatically

‘see’ that it is to be another triangle. I submit that if you try to introspect on the process by which you came up with the answer you are not truly retrieving the processes involved, but inventing what you think they must have been by giving yourself another struction to that effect. In the task itself, all you were really conscious of was the struction, the figures before you on the page, and then the solution.

Nor is this different from the case of speech which I mentioned earlier. When we speak, we are not really conscious either of the search for words, or of putting the words together into phrases, or of putting the phrases into sentences. We are only conscious of the ongoing series of structions that we give ourselves, which then, automatically, without any consciousness whatever, result in speech. The speech itself we can be conscious of as it is

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produced if we wish, thus giving some feedback to result in further structions.

So we arrive at the position that the actual process of thinking, so usually thought to be the very life of consciousness, is not conscious at all and that only its preparation, its materials, and its end result are consciously perceived.

Consciousness Not Necessary for Reason

The long tradition of man as the rational animal, the tradition that enthroned him as Homo sapiens, rests in all its pontifical generality on the gracile assumption that consciousness is the seat of reason. Any discussion of such an assumption is embarrassed by the vagueness of the term reason itself. This vagueness is the legacy we have from an older ‘faculty’ psychology that spoke of a ‘faculty’ of reason, which was of course situated ‘in’

consciousness. And this forced deposition of reason and consciousness was further confused with ideas of truth, of how we ought to reason, or logic — all quite different things. And hence logic was supposed to be the structure of conscious reason confounding generations of poor scholars who knew perfectly well that syllogisms were not what was on their side of introspection.

Reasoning and logic are to each other as health is to medicine, or — better — as conduct is to morality. Reasoning refers to a gamut of natural thought processes in the everyday world. Logic is how we ought to think if objective truth is our goal — and the everyday world is very little concerned with objective truth.

Logic is the science of the justification of conclusions we have reached by natural reasoning. My point here is that, for such natural reasoning to occur, consciousness is not necessary. The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.

Consider to begin with the many phenomena we have already established as going on without consciousness which can be

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called elementary kinds of reasoning. Choosing paths, words, notes, motions, the perceptual corrections in size and color constancies — all are primitive kinds of reasoning that go on without any prod, nudge, or even glance of consciousness.

Even the more standard types of reasoning can occur without consciousness. A boy, having observed on one or more past occasions that a particular piece of wood floats on a particular pond, will conclude directly in a new instance that another piece of wood will float on another pond. There is no collecting together of past instances in consciousness, and no necessary conscious process whatever when the new piece of wood is seen directly as floating on the new pond. This is sometimes called reasoning from particulars, and is simply expectation based on generalization. Nothing particularly extraordinary. It is an ability common to all the higher vertebrates. Such reasoning is the structure of the nervous system, not the structure of consciousness.

But more complex reasoning without consciousness is continually going on. Our minds work much faster than consciousness can keep up with. We commonly make general assertions based on our past experiences in an automatic way, and only as an afterthought are we sometimes able to retrieve any of the past experiences on which an assertion is based. How often we reach sound conclusions and are quite unable to justify them! Because reasoning is not conscious. And consider the kind of reasoning that we do about others’ feelings and character, or in reasoning out the motives of others from their actions. These are clearly the result of automatic inferences by our nervous systems in which consciousness is not only unnecessary, but, as we have seen in the performance of motor skills, would probably hinder the process.19

Surely, we exclaim, this cannot be true of the highest processes of intellectual thought! Surely there at last we will come to 19 Such instances were early recognized as not conscious and were called “automatic inference” or “common sense.” Discussions can be found in Sully, Mill, and other nineteenth-century psychologists.

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the very empire of consciousness, where all is spread out in a golden clarity and all the orderly processes of reason go on in a full publicity of awareness. But the truth has no such grandeur. The picture of a scientist sitting down with his problems and using conscious induction and deduction is as mythical as a unicorn. The greatest insights of mankind have come more mysteriously. Helmholtz had his happy thoughts which “often enough crept quietly into my thinking without my suspecting their importance . . . in other cases they arrived suddenly, without any effort on my part . . . they liked especially to make their appearance while I was taking an easy walk over wooded hills in sunny weather !"20

And Gauss, referring to an arithmetical theorem which he had unsuccessfully tried to prove for years, wrote how “like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself cannot say what was the conducting thread which connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.”21

And the brilliant mathematician Poincare was particularly interested in the manner in which he came upon his own discoveries. In a celebrated lecture at the Société de Psychologie in Paris, he described how he set out on a geologic excursion: “The incidents of the journey made me forget my mathematical work.

Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, the transformation I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry!”22

It does seem that it is in the more abstract sciences, where the materials of scrutiny are less and less interfered with by everyday 20 As quoted by Robert S. Woodworth, Experimental Psychology (New York: Holt, 1938), p. 818.

21 As quoted by Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), p. 15.

22 Henri Poincare, “Mathematical creation,” in his The Foundations of Science, G. Bruce Halsted, trans. (New York: The Science Press, 1913), p. 387.

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experience, that this business of sudden flooding insights is most obvious. A close friend of Einstein’s has told me that many of the physicist’s greatest ideas came to him so suddenly while he was shaving that he had to move the blade of the straight razor very carefully each morning, lest he cut himself with surprise. And a well-known physicist in Britain once told Wolfgang Köhler, “We often talk about the three B’s, the Bus, the Bath, and the Bed.

That is where the great discoveries are made in our science.”

The essential point here is that there are several stages of creative thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the problem is consciously worked over then a period of incubation without any conscious concentration upon the problem; and then the illumination which is later justified by logic. The parallel between these important and complex problems and the simple problems of judging weights or the circle-triangle series is obvious. The period of preparation is essentially the setting up of a complex struction together with conscious attention to the materials on which the struction is to work. But then the actual process of reasoning, the dark leap into huge discovery, just as in the simple trivial judgment of weights, has no representation in consciousness. Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.

The Location of Consciousness

The final fallacy which I wish to discuss is both important and interesting, and I have left it for the last Because I think it deals the coup de grace to the everyman theory of consciousness. Where does consciousness take place?

Everyone, or almost everyone, immediately replies, in my head. This is because when we introspect, we seem to look inward on an inner space somewhere behind our eyes. But what on earth do we mean by ‘look’? We even close our eyes sometimes to introspect even more clearly. Upon what? Its spatial

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character seems unquestionable. Moreover we seem to move or at least ‘look’ in different directions. And if we press ourselves too strongly to further characterize this space (apart from its imagined contents), we feel a vague irritation, as if there were something that did not want to be known, some quality which to question was somehow ungrateful, like rudeness in a friendly place.

We not only locate this space of consciousness inside our own heads. We also assume it is there in others’. In talking with a friend, maintaining periodic eye-to-eye contact (that remnant of our primate past when eye-to-eye contact was concerned in establishing tribal hierarchies), we are always assuming a space behind our companion’s eyes into which we are talking, similar to the space we imagine inside our own heads where we are talking from.

And this is the very heartbeat of the matter. For we know perfectly well that there is no such space in anyone’s head at all!

There is nothing inside my head or yours except physiological tissue of one sort or another. And the fact that it is predominantly neurological tissue is irrelevant.

Now this thought takes a little thinking to get used to. It means that we are continually inventing these spaces in our own and other people’s heads, knowing perfectly well that they don't exist anatomically; and the location of these ‘spaces’ is indeed quite arbitrary. The Aristotelian writings,23 for example, located consciousness or the abode of thought in and just above the heart, believing the brain to be a mere cooling organ since it was insensitive to touch or injury. And some readers will not have found this discussion valid since they locate their thinking selves somewhere in the upper chest. For most of us, however, the habit of locating consciousness in the head is so ingrained that it 23 It is so obvious that the writings ascribed to Aristotle were not written by the same hand that I prefer this designation.

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is difficult to think otherwise. But, actually, you could, as you remain where you are, just as well locate your consciousness around the corner in the next room against the wall near the floor, and do your thinking there as well as in your head. Not really just as well. For there are very good reasons why it is better to imagine your mind-space inside of you, reasons to do with volition and internal sensations, with the relationship of your body and your ‘I’ which will become apparent as we go on.

That there is no phenomenal necessity in locating consciousness in the brain is further reinforced by various abnormal instances in which consciousness seems to be outside the body. A friend who received a left frontal brain injury in the war regained consciousness in the corner of the ceiling of a hospital ward looking down euphorically at himself on the cot swathed in bandages. Those who have taken lysergic acid diethylamide commonly report similar out-of-the-body or exosomatic experiences, as they are called. Such occurrences do not demonstrate anything metaphysical whatever; simply that locating consciousness can be an arbitrary matter.

Let us not make a mistake. When I am conscious, I am always and definitely using certain parts of my brain inside my head.

But so am I when riding a bicycle, and the bicycle riding does not go on inside my head. The cases are different of course, since bicycle riding has a definite geographical location, while consciousness does not. In reality, consciousness has no location whatever except as we imagine it has.

Is Consciousness Necessary?

Let us review where we are, for we have just found our way through an enormous amount of ramous material which may have seemed more perplexing than clarifying. We have been brought to the conclusion that consciousness is not what we generally think it is. It is not to be confused with reactivity. It is

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not involved in hosts of perceptual phenomena. It is not involved in the performance of skills and often hinders their execution.

It need not be involved in speaking, writing, listening, or reading.

It does not copy down experience, as most people think. Consciousness is not at all involved in signal learning, and need not be involved in the learning of skills or solutions, which can go on without any consciousness whatever. It is not necessary for making judgments or in simple thinking. It is not the seat of reason, and indeed some of the most difficult instances of creative reasoning go on without any attending consciousness. And it has no location except an imaginary one! The immediate question therefore is, does consciousness exist at all? But that is the problem of the next chapter. Here it is only necessary to conclude that consciousness does not make all that much difference to a lot of our activities. If our reasonings have been correct, it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things that we do, but who were not conscious at all. This is the important and in some ways upsetting notion that we are forced to conclude at this point. Indeed I have begun in this fashion, and place great importance on this opening chapter, for unless you are here convinced that a civilization without consciousness is possible, you will find the discussion that follows unconvincing and paradoxical.

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Consciousness

THUS HAVING CHISELED away some of the major misconceptions about consciousness, what then have we left? If consciousness is not all these things, if it is not so extensive as we think, not a copy of experience, or the necessary locus of learning, judgment, or even thought, what is it? And as we stare into the dust and rubble of the last chapter, hoping Pygmalion-like to see consciousness newly step forth pure and pristine out of the detritus, let us ramble out and around the subject a little way as the dust settles, talking of different things.

Metaphor and Language

Let us speak of metaphor. The most fascinating property of language is its capacity to make metaphors. But what an under-statement! For metaphor is not a mere extra trick of language, as it is so often slighted in the old schoolbooks on composition; it is the very constitutive ground of language. I am using metaphor here in its most general sense: the use of a term for one thing to describe another because of some kind of similarity between them or between their relations to other things. There are thus always two terms in a metaphor, the thing to be described, which I shall call the metaphrand, and the thing or relation used to elucidate it, which I shall call the metaphier. A metaphor is always a known metaphier operating on a less known meta-

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phrand.1 I have coined these hybrid terms simply to echo multiplication where a multiplier operates on a multiplicand.

It is by metaphor that language grows. The common reply to the question “what is it?” is, when the reply is difficult or. the experience unique, “well, it is like —.” In laboratory studies, both children and adults describing nonsense objects (or metaphrands) to others who cannot see them use extended metaphiers that with repetition become contracted into labels.2 This is the major way in which the vocabulary of language is formed.

The grand and vigorous function of metaphor is the generation of new language as it is needed, as human culture becomes more and more complex.

A random glance at the etymologies of common words in a dictionary will demonstrate this assertion. Or take the naming of various fauna and flora in their Latin indicants, or even in their wonderful common English names, such as stag beetle, lady’s-slipper, darning needle, Queen Anne’s lace, or buttercup. The human body is a particularly generative metaphier, creating previously unspeakable distinctions in a throng of areas. The head of an army, table, page, bed, ship, household, or nail, or of steam or water; the face of a clock, cliff, card, or crystal; the eyes of needles, winds, storms, targets, flowers, or potatoes; the brow of a hill; the cheeks of a vise; the teeth of cogs or combs; the lips of pitchers, craters, augers; the tongues of shoes, board joints, or railway switches; the arm of a chair or the sea; the leg of a table, compass, sailor’s voyage, or cricket field; and so on and on. Or 1 This distinction is not connotatively the same as I. A. Richards’ ‘tenor’ and

‘vehicle’. See his Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 96, 120-121. Nor as Christine Brooke-Rose’s ‘proper’ and ‘metaphor’ terms, both of which make the matter too literary. See her A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1958), the first chapter of which is a good historical introduction to the subject.

2 See S. Glucksberg, R. M. Krauss, and R. Weisberg, “Referential communication in nursery school children: Method and some preliminary findings,” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1966, 3: 333-342.

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the foot of this page. Or the leaf you will soon turn. All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.

This is language moving out synchronically (or without reference to time) into the space of the world to describe it and perceive it more and more definitively. But language also moves in another and more important way, diachronically, or through time, and behind our experiences on the basis of aptic structures in our nervous systems to create abstract concepts whose referents are not observables except in a metaphorical sense. And these too are generated by metaphor. This is indeed the nub (knob), heart, pith, kernel, core, marrow, etc. of my argument, which itself is a metaphor and ‘seen’ only with the mind’s ‘eye’.

In the abstractions of human relations, the skin becomes a particularly important metaphier. We get or stay ‘in touch’ with others who may be ‘thick-’ or ‘thin-skinned’ or perhaps ‘touchy’

in which case they have to be ‘handled’ carefully lest we ‘rub’

them the wrong way; we may have a ‘feeling’ for another person with whom we may have a ‘touching’ experience.3

The concepts of science are all of this kind, abstract concepts generated by concrete metaphors. In physics, we have force, acceleration (to increase one's steps), inertia (originally an in-dolent person), impedance, resistance, fields, and now charm. In physiology, the metaphier of a machine has been at the very center of discovery. We understand the brain by metaphors to everything from batteries and telegraphy to computers and holo-grams. Medical practice is sometimes dictated by metaphor. In the eighteenth century, the heart in fever was like a boiling pot, and so bloodletting was prescribed to reduce its fuel. And even today, a great deal of medicine is based upon the military meta-3 See Ashley Montagu, Touching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971).

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phor of defense of the body against attacks of this or that. The very concept of law in Greek derives from nomos, the word for the foundations of a building. To be liable, or bound in law, comes from the Latin ligare, meaning to bind with cord.

In early times, language and its referents climbed up from the concrete to the abstract on the steps of metaphors, even, we may say, created the abstract on the bases of metaphors.

It is not always obvious that metaphor has played this all-important function. But this is because the concrete metaphiers become hidden in phonemic change, leaving the words to exist on their own. Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb 'to be' was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, “to grow, or make grow,” while the English forms

‘am’ and ‘is’ have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmiy “to breathe.” It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for ‘existence’ and could only say that something ‘grows’ or that it

“breathes.”4 Of course we are not conscious that the concept of being is thus generated from a metaphor about growing and breathing. Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the busy give-and-take of talk have worn away with use.

Because in our brief lives we catch so little of the vastnesses of history, we tend too much to think of language as being solid as a dictionary, with a granite-like permanence, rather than as the rampant restless sea of metaphor which it is. Indeed, if we consider the changes in vocabulary that have occurred over the last few millennia, and project them several millennia hence, an interesting paradox arises. For if we ever achieve a language that has the power of expressing everything, then metaphor will 4 A paraphrase of Phillip Wheelwright in his The Burning Fountain (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 1954).

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no longer be possible. I would not say, in that case, my love is like a red, red rose, for love would have exploded into terms for its thousands of nuances, and applying the correct term would leave the rose metaphorically dead.

The lexicon of language, then, is a finite set of terms that by metaphor is able to stretch out over an infinite set of circumstances, even to creating new circumstances thereby.

(Could consciousness be such a new creation?)

Understanding as Metaphor

We are trying to understand consciousness, but what are we really trying to do when we try to understand anything? Like children trying to describe nonsense objects, so in trying to understand a thing we are trying to find a metaphor for that thing. Not just any metaphor, but one with something more familiar and easy to our attention. Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor for that thing by substituting something more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding.

Generations ago we would understand thunderstorms perhaps as the roaring and rumbling about in battle of superhuman gods.

We would have reduced the racket that follows the streak of lightning to familiar battle sounds, for example. Similarly today, we reduce the storm to various supposed experiences with friction, sparks, vacuums, and the imagination of bulgeous banks of burly air smashing together to make the noise. None of these really exist as we picture them. Our images of these events of physics are as far from the actuality as fighting gods. Yet they act as the metaphor and they feel familiar and so we say we understand the thunderstorm.

So, in other areas of science, we say we understand an aspect of nature when we can say it is similar to some familiar theoretical model. The terms theory and model, incidentally, are some-

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times used interchangeably. But really they should not be. A theory is a relationship of the model to the things the model is supposed to represent. The Bohr model of the atom is that of a proton surrounded by orbiting electrons. It is something like the pattern of the solar system, and that is indeed one of its metaphoric sources. Bohr’s theory was that all atoms were similar to his model. The theory, with the more recent discovery of new particles and complicated interatomic relationships, has turned out not to be true. But the model remains. A model is neither true nor false; only the theory of its similarity to what it represents.

A theory is thus a metaphor between a model and data. And understanding in science is the feeling of similarity between complicated data and a familiar model.

If understanding a thing is arriving at a familiarizing metaphor for it, then we can see that there always will be a difficulty in understanding consciousness. For it should be immediately apparent that there is not and cannot be anything in our immediate experience that is like immediate experience itself. There is therefore a sense in which we shall never be able to understand consciousness in the same way that we can understand things that we are conscious of.

Most of the errors about consciousness that we have been studying have been errors of attempted metaphors. We spoke of the notion of consciousness being a copy of experience coming out of the explicit metaphor of a schoolboy’s slate. But of course no one really meant consciousness copies experience; it was as if it did. And we found on analysis, of course, that it did no such thing.

And even the idea behind that last phrase, that consciousness does anything at all, even that is a metaphor. It is saying that consciousness is a person behaving in physical space who does things, and this is true only if ‘does’ is a metaphor as well. For to

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do things is some kind of behavior in a physical world by a living body. And also in what Space' is the metaphorical 'doing' being done? (Some of the dust is beginning to settle.) This 'space* too must be a metaphor of real space. All of which is reminiscent of our discussion of the location of consciousness, also a metaphor.

Consciousness is being thought of as a thing, and so like other things must have a location, which, as we saw earlier, it does not actually have in the physical sense.

I realize that my argument here is becoming fairly dense. But before coming out into the clearing, I wish to describe what I shall mean by the term analog. An analog is a model, but a model of a special kind. It is not like a scientific model, whose source may be anything at all and whose purpose is to act as an hypothesis of explanation or understanding. Instead, an analog is at every point generated by the thing it is an analog of. A map is a good example. It is not a model in the scientific sense, not a hypothetical model like the Bohr atom to explain something unknown. Instead, it is constructed from something well known, if not completely known. Each region of a district of land is allot-ted a corresponding region on the map, though the materials of land and map are absolutely different and a large proportion of the features of the land have to be left out. And the relation between an analog map and its land is a metaphor. If I point to a location on a map and say, "There is Mont Blanc and from Cha-monix we can reach the east face this way," that is really a shorthand way of saying, "The relations between the point labeled

'Mont Blanc' and other points is similar to the actual Mont Blanc and its neighboring regions."

The Metaphor Language of Mind

I think it is apparent now, at least dimly, what is emerging from the debris of the previous chapter. I do not now feel myself proving my thesis to you step by step, so much as arranging in

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your mind certain notions so that, at the very least, you will not be immediately estranged from the point I am about to make. My procedure here in what I realize is a difficult and overtly diffuse part of this book is to simply state in general terms my conclusion and then clarify what it implies.

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision.

Consider the language we use to describe conscious processes.

The most prominent group of words used to describe mental events are visual. We ‘see’ solutions to problems, the best of which may be ‘brilliant’, and the person ‘brighter’ and ’clear-headed’ as opposed to 'dull', 'fuzzy-minded', or 'obscure' solutions. These words are all metaphors and the mind-space to which they apply is a metaphor of actual space. In it we can 'approach' a problem, perhaps from some 'viewpoint', and 'grapple' with its difficulties, or seize together or 'com-prehend' parts of a problem, and so on, using metaphors of behavior to invent things to do in this metaphored mind-space.

And the adjectives to describe physical behavior in real space are analogically taken over to describe mental behavior in mind-space when we speak of our minds as being 'quick,' 'slow', 'agitated' (as when we cogitate or co-agitate), 'nimble-witted',

'strong-' or 'weak-minded.' The mind-space in which these metaphorical activities go on has its own group of adjectives; we can be 'broad-minded', 'deep', 'open', or 'narrow-minded'; we can be

'occupied'; we can 'get something off our minds', 'put something out of mind', or we can 'get it', let something 'penetrate', or 'bear',

'have', 'keep', or 'hold' it in mind.

As with a real space, something can be at the 'back' of our

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mind, in its 'inner recesses', or 'beyond' our mind, or 'out' of our mind. In argument we try to 'get things through' to someone, to

'reach' their 'understanding' or find a 'common ground', or 'point out', etc., all actions in real space taken over analogically into the space of the mind.

But what is it we are making a metaphor of? We have seen that the usual function of metaphor is a wish to designate a particular aspect of a thing or to describe something for which words are not available. That thing to be designated, described, expressed, or lexically widened is what we have called the metaphrand. We operate upon this by some similar, more familiar thing, called a metaphier. Originally, of course, the purpose was intensely practical, to designate an arm of the sea as a better place for shellfish, or to put a head on a nail that it might better hold a board to a stanchion. The metaphiers here were arm and head, and the metaphrands a particular part of the sea and particular end of the nail that already existed. Now when we say mind-space is a metaphor of real space, it is the real 'external'

world that is the metaphier. But if metaphor generates consciousness rather than simply describes it, what is the metaphrand?

Paraphiers and Paraphrands

If we look more carefully at the nature of metaphor (noticing all the while the metaphorical nature of almost everything we are saying), we find (even the verb “find”!) that it is composed of more than a metaphier and a metaphrand. There are also at the bottom of most complex metaphors various associations or attributes of the metaphier which I am going to call paraphiers. And these paraphiers project back into the metaphrand as what I shall call the paraphrands of the metaphrand. Jargon, yes, but absolutely necessary if we are to be crystal clear about our referents.

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Some examples will show that the unraveling of metaphor into these four parts is really quite simple, as well as clarifying what otherwise we could not speak about.

Consider the metaphor that the snow blankets the ground.

The metaphrand is something about the completeness and even thickness with which the ground is covered by snow. The metaphier is a blanket on a bed. But the pleasing nuances of this metaphor are in the paraphiers of the metaphier, blanket. These are something about warmth, protection, and slumber until some period of awakening. These associations of blanket then automatically become the associations or paraphrands of the original metaphrand, the way the snow covers the ground. And we thus have created by this metaphor the idea of the earth sleeping and protected by the snow cover until its awakening in spring. All this is packed into the simple use of the word ‘blanket’ to pertain to the way snow covers the ground.

Not all metaphors, of course, have such generative potential.

In that often-cited one that a ship plows the sea, the metaphrand is the particular action of the bow of the ship through the water, and the metaphier is plowing action. The correspondence is exact. And that is the end of it.

But if I say the brook sings through the woods, the similarity of the metaphrand of the brook's bubbling and gurgling and the metaphier of (presumably) a child singing is not at all exact. It is the paraphiers of joy and dancingness becoming the paraphrands of the brook that are of interest.

Or in the many-poemed comparison of love to a rose, it is not the tenuous correspondence of metaphrand and metaphier but the paraphrands that engage us, that love lives in the sun, smells sweet, has thorns when grasped, and blooms for a season only.

Or suppose I say less visually and so more profoundly something quite opposite, that my love is like a tinsmith's scoop, sunk past its gleam in the meal-bin.5 The immediate correspondence here 5 From “Mossbawn (for Mary Heaney)” by Seumas Heaney, North (London: Faber, 1974).

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of metaphrand and metaphier, of being out of casual sight, is trivial. Instead, it is the paraphrands of this metaphor which create what could not possibly be there, the enduring careful shape and hidden shiningness and holdingness of a lasting love deep in the heavy manipulable softnesses of mounding time, the whole simulating (and so paraphranding) sexual intercourse from a male point of view. Love has not such properties except as we generate them by metaphor.

Of such poetry is consciousness made. This can be seen if we return to some of the metaphors of mind we have earlier looked at. Suppose we are trying to solve some simple problem such as the circle-triangle series in the previous chapter. And suppose we express the fact that we have obtained the solution by exclaiming that at last we 'see' what the answer is, namely, a triangle.

This metaphor may be analyzed just as the blanket of snow or the singing brook. The metaphrand is obtaining the solution, the metaphier is sight with the eyes, and the paraphiers are all those things associated with vision that then create paraphrands, such as the mind's 'eye', 'seeing the solution clearly’ etc., and, most important, the paraphrand of a 'space' in which the 'seeing' is going on, or what I am calling mind-space, and 'objects' to 'see.'

I do not mean this brief sketch to stand in for a real theory of how consciousness was generated in the first place. That problem we shall come to in Book II. Rather I intend only to suggest the possibility that I hope to make plausible later, that consciousness is the work of lexical metaphor. It is spun out of the concrete metaphiers of expression and their paraphiers, project-ing paraphrands that exist only in the functional sense. Moreover, it goes on generating itself, each new paraphrand capable of being a metaphrand on its own, resulting in new metaphiers with their paraphiers, and so on.

Of course this process is not and cannot be as haphazard as I am making it sound. The world is organized, highly organized,

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and the concrete metaphiers that are generating consciousness thus generate consciousness in an organized way. Hence the similarity of consciousness and the physical-behavioral world we are conscious of. And hence the structure of that world is echoed

— though with certain differences — in the structure of consciousness.

One last complication before going on. A cardinal property of an analog is that the way it is generated is not the way it is used — obviously. The map-maker and map-user are doing two different things. For the map-maker, the metaphrand is the blank piece of paper on which he operates with the metaphier of the land he knows and has surveyed. But for the map-user, it is just the other way around. The land is unknown; it is the land that is the metaphrand, while the metaphier is the map which he is using, by which he understands the land.

And so with consciousness. Consciousness is the metaphrand when it is being generated by the paraphrands of our verbal expressions. But the functioning of consciousness is, as it were, the return journey. Consciousness becomes the metaphier full of our past experience, constantly and selectively operating on such unknowns as future actions, decisions, and partly remembered pasts, on what we are and yet may be. And it is by the generated structure of consciousness that we then understand the world.

What kinds of things can we say about that structure? Here I shall briefly allude to only the most important.

The Features of Consciousness

I. Spatialization. The first and most primitive aspect of consciousness is what we already have had occasion to refer to, the paraphrand of almost every mental metaphor we can make, the mental space which we take over as the very habitat of it all. If I ask you to think of your head, then your feet, then the breakfast

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you had this morning, and then the Tower of London, and then the constellation of Orion, these things have the quality of being spatially separated; and it is this quality I am here referring to.

When we introspect (a metaphor of seeing into something), it is upon this metaphorical mind-space which we are constantly renewing and 'enlarging' with each new thing or relation consciousized.

In Chapter 1, we spoke of how we invent mind-space inside our own heads as well as the heads of others. The word invent is perhaps too strong except in the ontological sense. We rather assume these 'spaces' without question. They are a part of what it is to be conscious and what it is to assume consciousness in others.

Moreover, things that in the physical-behavioral world do not have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness.

Otherwise we cannot be conscious of them. This we shall call spatialization.

Time is an obvious example. If I ask you to think of the last hundred years, you may have a tendency to excerpt the matter in such a way that the succession of years is spread out, probably from left to right. But of course there is no left or right in time.

There is only before and after, and these do not have any spatial properties whatever — except by analog. You cannot, absolutely cannot think of time except by spatializing it. Consciousness is always a spatialization in which the diachronic is turned into the synchronic, in which what has happened in time is excerpted and seen in side-by-sideness.

This spatialization is characteristic of all conscious thought. If you are now thinking of where in all the theories of mind my particular theory fits, you are first habitually 'turning' to your mind-space where abstract things can be 'separated out' and

'put beside' each other to be 'looked at' — as could never happen physically or in actuality. You then make the metaphor of theories as concrete objects, then the metaphor of a temporal sue-

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cession of such objects as a synchronic array, and thirdly, the metaphor of the characteristics of theories as physical characteristics, all of some degree so they can be 'arranged' in a kind of order. And you then make the further expressive metaphor of

'fit'. The actual behavior of fitting, of which 'fit' here is the analog in consciousness, may vary from person to person or from culture to culture, depending on personal experience of arranging things in some kind of order, or of fitting objects into their receptacles, etc. The metaphorical substrate of thought is thus sometimes very complicated, and difficult to unravel. But every conscious thought that you are having in reading this book can by such an analysis be traced back to concrete actions in a concrete world.

2. Excerption. In consciousness, we are never 'seeing' anything in its entirety. This is because such 'seeing' is an analog of actual behavior j and in actual behavior we can only see or pay attention to a part of a thing at any one moment. And so in consciousness. We excerpt from the collection of possible attentions to a thing which comprises our knowledge of it. And this is all that it is possible to do since consciousness is a metaphor of our actual behavior.

Thus, if I ask you to think of a circus, for example, you will first have a fleeting moment of slight fuzziness, followed perhaps by a picturing of trapeze artists or possibly a clown in the center ring. Or, if you think of the city which you are now in, you will excerpt some feature, such as a particular building or tower or crossroads. Or if I ask you to think of yourself, you will make some kind of excerpts from your recent past, believing you are then thinking of yourself. In all these instances, we find no difficulty or particular paradox in the fact that these excerpts are not the things themselves, although we talk as if they were.

Actually we are never conscious of things in their true nature, only of the excerpts we make of them.

The variables controlling excerption are deserving of much

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more thought and study. For on them the person's whole consciousness of the world and the persons with whom he is interacting depend. Your excerptions of someone you know well are heavily associated with your affect toward him. If you like him, the excerpts will be the pleasant things; if not, the unpleasant.

The causation may be in either direction.

How we excerpt other people largely determines the kind of world we feel we are living in. Take for example one's relatives when one was a child. If we excerpt them as their failures, their hidden conflicts, their delusions, well, that is one thing. But if we excerpt them at their happiest, in their idiosyncratic delights, it is quite another world. Writers and artists are doing in a controlled way what happens 'in' consciousness more haphazardly.

Excerption is distinct from memory. An excerpt of a thing is in consciousness the representative of the thing or event to which memories adhere, and by which we can retrieve memories. If I wish to remember what I was doing last summer, I first have an excerption of the time concerned, which may be a fleeting image of a couple of months on the calendar, until I rest in an excerption of a particular event, such as walking along a particular riverside. And from there I associate around it and retrieve memories about last summer. This is what we mean by reminiscence, and it is a particular conscious process which no animal is capable of. Reminiscence is a succession of excerptions. Each so-called association in consciousness is an excerption, an aspect or image, if you will, something frozen in time, excerpted from the experience on the basis of personality and changing situational factors.6

3. The Analog 'I'. A most important 'feature' of this metaphor 'world' is the metaphor we have of ourselves, the analog 'I', which can 'move about' vicarially in our 'imagination', 'doing'

6 Individual differences and changes in the excerptions with age or health are an exceedingly interesting study. For example, if we are depressed or suffering, the excerptions of the world in consciousness change dramatically.

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things that we are not actually doing. There are of course many uses for such an analog 'I'. We imagine 'ourselves' 'doing' this or that, and thus 'make' decisions on the basis of imagined 'outcomes' that would be impossible if we did not have an imagined

'self' behaving in an imagined 'world'. In the example in the section on spatialization, it was not your physical behavioral self that was trying to 'see' where my theory 'fits' into the array of alternative theories. It was your analog 'I'.

If we are out walking, and two roads diverge in a wood, and we know that one of them comes back to our destination after a much more circuitous route, we can 'traverse' that longer route with our analog 'I' to see if its vistas and ponds are worth the longer time it will take. Without consciousness with its vicarial analog 'I', we could not do this.

4. The Metaphor 'Me'. The analog 'I' is, however, not simply that. It is also a metaphor 'me'. As we imagine ourselves strolling down the longer path we indeed catch 'glimpses' of 'ourselves', as we did in the exercises of Chapter 1, where we called them autoscopic images. We can both look out from within the imagined self at the imagined vistas, or we can step back a bit and see ourselves perhaps kneeling down for a drink of water at a particular brook.

There are of course quite profound problems here, particularly in the relationship of the 'I' to the 'me'. But that is another treatise.

And I am only indicating the nature of the problem.

5. Narratization. In consciousness, we are always seeing our vicarial selves as the main figures in the stories of our lives. In the above illustration, the narratization is obvious, namely, walking along a wooded path. But it is not so obvious that we are constantly doing this whenever we are being conscious, and this I call narratization. Seated where I am, I am writing a book and this fact is imbedded more or less in the center of the story of my life, time being spatialized into a journey of my days and years.

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New situations are selectively perceived as part of this ongoing story, perceptions that do not fit into it being unnoticed or at least unremembered. More important, situations are chosen which are congruent to this ongoing story, until the picture I have of myself in my life story determines how I am to act and choose in novel situations as they arise.

The assigning of causes to our behavior or saying why we did a particular thing is all a part of narratization. Such causes as reasons may be true or false, neutral or ideal. Consciousness is ever ready to explain anything we happen to find ourselves doing.

The thief narratizes his act as due to poverty, the poet his as due to beauty, and the scientist his as due to truth, purpose and cause inextricably woven into the spatialization of behavior in consciousness.

But it is not just our own analog 'I' that we are narratizing; it is everything else in consciousness. A stray fact is narratized to fit with some other stray fact. A child cries in the street and we narratize the event into a mental picture of a lost child and a parent searching for it. A cat is up in a tree and we narratize the event into a picture of a dog chasing it there. Or the facts of mind as we can understand them into a theory of consciousness.

6. Conciliation. A final aspect of consciousness I wish to mention here is modeled upon a behavioral process common to most mammals. It really springs from simple recognition, where a slightly ambiguous perceived object is made to conform to some previously learned schema, an automatic process sometimes called assimilation. We assimilate a new stimulus into our conception, or schema about it, even though it is slightly different. Since we never from moment to moment see or hear or touch things in exactly the same way, this process of assimilation into previous experience is going on all the time as we perceive our world. We are putting things together into recognizable objects on the basis of the previously learned schemes we have of them.

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Now assimilation consciousized is conciliation. A better term for it might be compatibilization, but that seems something too rococo. What I am designating by conciliation is essentially doing in mind-space what narratization does in mind-time or spatialized time. It brings things together as conscious objects just as narratization brings things together as a story. And this fitting together into a consistency or probability is done according to rules built up in experience.

In conciliation we are making excerpts or narratizations compatible with each other, just as in external perception the new stimulus and the internal conception are made to agree. If we are narratizing ourselves as walking along a wooded path, the succession of excerpts is automatically made compatible with such a journey. Or if in daydreaming two excerpts or narratizations happen to begin occurring at the same time, they are fused or conciliated.

If I ask you to think of a mountain meadow and a tower at the same time, you automatically conciliate them by having the tower rising from the meadow. But if I ask you to think of the mountain meadow and an ocean at the same time, conciliation tends not to occur and you are likely to think of one and then the other.

You can only bring them together by a narratization. Thus there are principles of compatibility that govern this process, and such principles are learned and are based on the structure of the world.

Let me summarize as a way of 'seeing' where we are and the direction in which our discussion is going. We have said that consciousness is an operation rather than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog 'I' that can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it. It operates on any reactivity, excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together in a metaphorical space where such meanings can be

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manipulated like things in space. Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts.

Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things.

Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.

This has been a difficult chapter. But I hope I have sketched out with some plausibility that the notion of consciousness as a metaphor-generated model of the world leads to some quite definite deductions, and that these deductions are testable in our own everyday conscious experience. It is only, of course, a beginning, a somewhat rough-hewn beginning, which I hope to develop in a future work. But it is enough to return now to our major inquiry of the origin of it all, saving further amplification of the nature of consciousness itself for later chapters.

If consciousness is this 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, what then can we say about its origin?

We have arrived at a very interesting point in our discussion, and one that is completely contradictory to all of the alternative solutions to the problem of the origin of consciousness which we discussed in the introductory chapter. For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of a much more recent origin than has heretofore been supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

C H A P T E R 3

The Mind of Iliad

THERE IS an awkward moment at the top of a Ferris wheel when, having come up the inside curvature, where we are facing into a firm structure of confident girders, suddenly that structure disappears, and we are thrust out into the sky for the outward curve down.

Such perhaps is the present moment. For all the scientific alternatives that we faced into in the Introduction, including my own prejudgments about the matter, all assured us that consciousness was evolved by natural selection back somewhere in mammalian evolution or before. We felt assured that at least some animals were conscious, assured that consciousness was related in some important way to the evolution of the brain and probably its cortex, assured certainly that early man was conscious as he was learning language.

These assurances have now disappeared, and we seem thrust out into the sky of a very new problem. If our impressionistic development of a theory of consciousness in the last chapter is even pointing in the right direction, then consciousness can only have arisen in the human species, and that development must have come after the development of language.

Now if human evolution were a simple continuity, our procedure at this point would normally be to study the evolution of language, dating it as best we could. We would then try to trace out human mentality thereafter until we reached the goal of our

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inquiry, where we could claim by some criterion or other that here at last is the place and the date of the origin and beginning of consciousness.

But human evolution is not a simple continuity. Into human history around 3000 B.C. comes a curious and very remarkable practice. It is a transmutation of speech into little marks on stone or clay or papyrus (or pages) so that speech can be seen rather than just heard, and seen by anybody, not just those within earshot at the time. So before pursuing the program of the preceding paragraph, we should first try to date the origin of consciousness either before or after the invention of such seen speech by examining its earliest examples. Our present question then is: what is the mentality of the earliest writings of mankind?

As soon as we go back to the first written records of man to seek evidence for the presence or absence of a subjective conscious mind, we are immediately beset with innumerable technical problems. The most profound is that of translating writings that may have issued from a mentality utterly different from our own. And this is particularly problematic in the very first human writings. These are in hieroglyphics, hieratic, and cuneiform, all — interestingly enough — beginning about 3000 B.C. None of these is entirely understood. When the subjects are concrete, there is little difficulty. But when the symbols are peculiar and undetermined by context, the amount of necessary guesswork turns this fascinating evidence of the past into a Rorschach test in which modern scholars project their own subjectivity with little awareness of the importance of their distortion. The indications here as to whether consciousness was present in the early Egyptian dynasties and in the Mesopotamian cultures are thus too ambiguous for the kind of concerned analysis which is required. We shall return to these questions in Book II.

The first writing in human history in a language of which we have enough certainty of translation to consider it in connection

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with my hypothesis is the Iliad. Modern scholarship regards this revenge story of blood, sweat, and tears to have been developed by a tradition of bards or aoidoi between about 1230 B.C. when, according to inferences from some recently found Hittite tablets,1 the events of the epic occurred and about 900 or 850

B.C., when it came to be written down. I propose here to regard the poem as a psychological document of immense importance.

And the question we are to put to it is: What is mind in the Iliad?

The Language of the Iliad

The answer is disturbingly interesting. There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad. I am saying 'in general' because I shall mention some exceptions later. And in general therefore, no words for consciousness or mental acts. The words in the Iliad that in a later age come to mean mental things have different meanings, all of them more concrete. The word psyche, which later means soul or conscious mind, is in most instances life-substances, such as blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out his psyche onto the ground or breathes it out in his last gasp. The thumos, which later comes to mean something like emotional soul, is simply motion or agitation. When a man stops moving, the thumos leaves his limbs. But it is also somehow like an organ itself, for when Glaucus prays to Apollo to alleviate his pain and to give him strength to help his friend Sarpedon, Apollo hears his prayer and "casts strength in his thumos" (Iliad, 16:529). The thumos can tell a man to eat, drink, or fight. Diomedes says in one place that Achilles will fight "when the thumos in his chest tells him to and a god rouses him" (9:702f.). But it is not really an organ and not always localized; a raging ocean has thumos. A word of somewhat similar use is phren, which is always localized anatomi-1 V. R. d'A. Desborough, The Last Mycenaeans and Their Successors: An Archeological Survey, c. 1200-c. 1000 B.C. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964).

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cally as the midriff, or sensations in the midriff, and is usually used in the plural. It is the phrenes of Hector that recognize that his brother is not near him (22:296); this means what we mean by "catching one's breath in surprise". It is only centuries later that it comes to mean mind or 'heart' in its figurative sense.

Perhaps most important is the word noos which, spelled as nous in later Greek, comes to mean conscious mind. It comes from the word noeein, to see. Its proper translation in the Iliad would be something like perception or recognition or field of vision. Zeus "holds Odysseus in his noos." He keeps watch over him.

Another important word, which perhaps comes from the doubling of the word meros (part), is mermera, meaning in two parts. This was made into a verb by adding the ending -izo, the common suffix which can turn a noun into a verb, the resulting word being mermerizein, to be put into two parts about something.

Modern translators, for the sake of a supposed literary quality in their work, often use modern terms and subjective categories which are not true to the original. Mermerizein is thus wrongly translated as to ponder, to think, to be of divided mind, to be troubled about, to try to decide. But essentially it means to be in conflict about two actions, not two thoughts. It is always behavioristic. It is said several times of Zeus (20:17, 16:647), as well as of others. The conflict is often said to go on in the thumosy or sometimes in the phrenes, but never in the noos. The eye cannot doubt or be in conflict, as the soon-to-be-invented conscious mind will be able to.

These words are in general, and with certain exceptions, the closest that anyone, authors or characters or gods, usually get to having conscious minds or thoughts. We shall be entering the meaning of these words more carefully in a later chapter.

There is also no concept of will or word for it, the concept developing curiously late in Greek thought. Thus, Iliadic men have no will of their own and certainly no notion of free will.

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Indeed, the whole problem of volition, so troubling, I think, to modern psychological theory, may have had its difficulties because the words for such phenomena were invented so late.

A similar absence from Iliadic language is a word for body in our sense. The word soma, which in the fifth century B.C. comes to mean body, is always in the plural in Homer and means dead limbs or a corpse. It is the opposite of psyche. There are several words which are used for various parts of the body, and, in Homer, it is always these parts that are referred to, and never the body as a whole.2 So, not surprisingly, the early Greek art of Mycenae and its period shows man as an assembly of strangely articulated limbs, the joints underdrawn, and the torso almost separated from the hips. It is graphically what we find again and again in Homer, who speaks of hands, lower arms, upper arms, feet, calves, and thighs as being fleet, sinewy, in speedy motion, etc., with no mention of the body as a whole.

Now this is all very peculiar. If there is no subjective consciousness, no mind, soul, or will, in Iliadic men, what then initiates behavior?

The Religion of the Early Greeks

There is an old and general idea that there was no true religion in Greece before the fourth century B.C.3 and that the gods in the Homeric poems are merely a "gay invention of poets," as it has been put by noted scholars.4 The reason for this erroneous view is that religion is being thought of as a system of ethics, as a kind 2 Bruno Snell, The Discovery of Mind, T. G. Rosenmeyer, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953). I was well along into the ideas and material of this chapter before knowing of Snell's parallel work on Homeric language. Our conclusions, however, are quite different.

3 Except E. R. Dodds in his superb book The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951).

4 For example, Maurice Bowra, Tradition and Design in the Iliad (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), p. 222.

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of bowing down to external gods in an effort to behave virtuously.

And indeed in this sense the scholars are right. But to say that the gods in the Iliad are merely the inventions of the authors of the epic is to completely misread what is going on.

The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate what it was like. When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon (I :197ff.). It is a god who then rises out of the gray sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black ships, a god who whispers low to Helen to sweep her heart with homesick longing, a god who hides Paris in a mist in front of the attacking Menelaus, a god who tells Glaucus to take bronze for gold (6:234ff.), a god who leads the armies into battle, who speaks to each soldier at the turning points, who debates and teaches Hector what he must do, who urges the soldiers on or defeats them by casting them in spells or drawing mists over their visual fields. It is the gods who start quarrels among men (4:437ff.) that really cause the war (3:164ff.), and then plan its strategy (2:56ff.). It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans, rousing in them ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness.

The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives; they are in the actions and speeches of gods. To another, a man seems to be the cause of his own behavior. But not to the man himself. When, toward the end of the war, Achilles reminds Agamemnon of how he robbed him of his mistress, the king of men declares, "Not I was the cause of this act, but Zeus, and my portion, and the Erinyes who walk in darkness:

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they it was in the assembly put wild ate upon me on that day when I arbitrarily took Achilles' prize from him, so what could I do? Gods always have their way." (19:86-90). And that this was no particular fiction of Agamemnon's to evade responsibility is clear in that this explanation is fully accepted by Achilles, for Achilles also is obedient to his gods. Scholars who in commenting on this passage say that Agamemnon's behavior has become

"alien to his ego,"5 do not go nearly far enough. For the question is indeed, what is the psychology of the Iliadic hero? And I am saying that he did not have any ego whatever.

Even the poem itself is not wrought by men in our sense. Its first three words are Menin aedie Thea, Of wrath sing, O Goddess! And the entire epic which follows is the song of the goddess which the entranced bard 'heard' and chanted to his iron-age listeners among the ruins of Agamemnon's world.

If we erase all our preconceptions about poetry and act toward the poem as if we had never heard of poetry before, the abnormal quality of the speech would immediately arrest us. We call it meter nowadays. But what a different thing, these steady hexameters of pitch stresses, from the looser jumble of accents in ordinary dialogue! The function of meter in poetry is to drive the electrical activity of the brain, and most certainly to relax the normal emotional inhibitions of both chanter and listener. A similar thing occurs when the voices of schizophrenics speak in scanning rhythms or rhyme. Except for its later accretions, then, the epic itself was neither consciously composed nor consciously remembered, but was successively and creatively changed with no more awareness than a pianist has of his improvisation.

Who then were these gods that pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips? They were voices whose speech and directions could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic 5 Among- others, Martin P. Nilsson, A History of Greek Religion (New York: Norton, 1964).

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patients, or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices. The gods were organizations of the central nervous system and can be regarded as personae in the sense of poignant consistencies through time, amalgams of parental or admonitory images. The god is a part of the man, and quite consistent with this conception is the fact that the gods never step outside of natural laws. Greek gods cannot create anything out of nothing, unlike the Hebrew god of Genesis.

In the relationship between the god and the hero in their dialectic, there are the same courtesies, emotions, persuasions as might occur between two people. The Greek god never steps forth in thunder, never begets awe or fear in the hero, and is as far from the outrageously pompous god of Job as it is possible to be. He simply leads, advises, and orders. Nor does the god occasion humility or even love, and little gratitude. Indeed, I suggest that the god-hero relationship was — by being its progenitor

— similar to the referent of the ego-superego relationship of Freud or the self-generalized other relationship of Mead. The strongest emotion which the hero feels toward a god is amaze-ment or wonder, the kind of emotion that we feel when the solution of a particularly difficult problem suddenly pops into our heads, or in the cry of eureka! from Archimedes in his bath.

The gods are what we now call hallucinations. Usually they are only seen and heard by the particular heroes they are speaking to. Sometimes they come in mists or out of the gray sea or a river, or from the sky, suggesting visual auras preceding them.

But at other times, they simply occur. Usually they come as themselves, commonly as mere voices, but sometimes as other people closely related to the hero.

Apollo's relation to Hector is particularly interesting in this regard. In Book 16, Apollo comes to Hector as his maternal uncle; then in Book 17 as one of his allied leaders; and then later in the same book as his dearest friend from abroad. The denoue-ment of the whole epic comes when it is Athene who, after telling Achilles to kill Hector, then comes to Hector as his dearest

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brother, Deiphobus. Trusting in him as his second, Hector challenges Achilles, demands of Deiphobus another spear, and turns to find nothing is there. We would say he has had an hallucination. So has Achilles. The Trojan War was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did.

The Bicameral Mind

The picture then is one of strangeness and heartlessness and emptiness. We cannot approach these heroes by inventing mind-spaces behind their fierce eyes as we do with each other. Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as do we; he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon. In distinction to our own subjective conscious minds, we can call the mentality of the Myceneans a bicameral mind. Volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness whatever and then 'told' to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or 'god', or sometimes as a voice alone. The individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not

'see' what to do by himself.

The evidence for the existence of such a mentality as I have just proposed is not meant to rest solely on the Iliad. It is rather that the Iliad suggests the hypothesis that in later chapters I shall attempt to prove or refute by examining the remains of other civilizations of antiquity. Nevertheless, it would be persuasive at this time to bring up certain objections to the preceding which will help clarify some of the issues before going on.

Objection: Is it not true that some scholars have considered the poem to be entirely the invention of one man, Homer, with no historical basis whatever, even doubting whether Troy evei: ex-

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isted at all, in spite of Schliemann's famous discoveries in the nineteenth century?

Reply: This doubt has recently been put to rest by the discovery of Hittite tablets, dating from 1300 B.C., which clearly refer to the land of the Achaeans and their king, Agamemnon. The catalogue of Greek places that send ships to Troy in Book 2

corresponds remarkably closely to the pattern of settlement which archaeology has discovered. The treasures of Mycenae, once thought to be fairy tales in the imagination of a poet, have been dug out of the silted ruins of the city. Other details mentioned in the Iliad, the manners of burial, the kinds of armor, such as the precisely described boars'-tusk helmet, have been unearthed in sites relevant to the poem. There is thus no question of its historical substrate. The Iliad is not imaginative creative literature and hence not a matter for literary discussion. It is history, webbed into the Mycenaean Aegean, to be examined by psychohistorical scientists.

The problem of single or multiple authorship of the poem has been endlessly debated by classical scholars for at least a century.

But this establishment of an historical basis, even of artifacts mentioned in the poem, must indicate that there were many intermediaries who verbally transmitted whatever happened in the thirteenth century to succeeding ages. It is thus more plausible to think of the creation of the poem as part of this verbal transmission than as the work of a single man named Homer in the ninth century B.C. Homer, if he existed, may simply have been the first aoidos to be transcribed.

Objection: Even if this is so, what basis is there to suppose that an epic poem, whose earliest manuscript that we know of is a recension from Alexandrian scholars of the fourth or third century B.C., which obviously must have existed in many forms, and as we read it today was put together out of them, how can a poem of this sort be regarded as indicative of what the actual Mycenaeans of the thirteenth century B.C. were like?

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Reply: This very serious objection is made even stronger by certain discrepancies between the descriptions in the poem and plausibility. The disappointing mounds of grassy rubble identified today by archaeologists as the city of Priam cover but a few acres, while the Iliad counts its defenders at 50,000 men. Even the trivial is sometimes moved up by hyperbole into impossibility: the shield of Ajax, if it were made of seven oxhides and a layer of metal, would have weighed almost 300 pounds. History has definitely been altered. The siege lasts ten years, an absolutely impossible duration given the problems of supply on both sides.

There are two general periods during which such alterations of the original history could have occurred: the verbal transmission period from the Trojan War to the ninth century B.C., when the Greek alphabet comes into existence and the epic is written down, and the literate period thereafter up to the time of the scholars of Alexandria in the third and second centuries B.C. whose put-together recension is the version we have today. As to the second period, there can be no doubt that there would be differences among various copies, and that extra parts and variations, even events belonging to different times and places, could have been drawn into the vortex of this one furious story. But all these additions were probably kept in check both by the transcribers'

reverence for the poem at this time, as is indicated in all other Greek literature, and by the requirements of public performances. These were held at various sites, but particularly at the Panathenaea every four years at Athens, where the Iliad was devoutly chanted along with the Odyssey to vast audiences by the so-called rhapsodes. It is probable therefore that with the exception of some episodes which contemporary scholars believe are late additions (such as the ambushing of Dolon and the references to Hades), the Iliad as we have it is very similar to what was first written down in the ninth century B.C.

But further back in the dim obscurities of earlier time stand the shadowy aoidoi. And it is they certainly who successively

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altered the original history. Oral poetry is a very different species from written poetry.6 The way we read it and judge it must be completely different. Composition and performance are not separate; they are simultaneous. And each new composing of the Iliad down the swift generations was on the basis of auditory memory and traditional bardic formulae, each aoidos with set phrases of varying lengths filling out the unremembered hexameters and with set turns of plot filling out unremembered action.

And this was over the three or four centuries following the actual war. The Iliad, then, is not so much a reflection of the social life of Troy as it is of several stages of social development from that time up to the literate period. Treated as a socio-logical document, the objection is sustained.

But as a psychological document, the case is quite different.

Whence these gods? And why their particular relationship to the individuals? My argument has stressed two things, the lack of mental language and the initiation of action by the gods.

These are not archaeological matters. Nor are they matters likely to have been invented by the aoidoi. And any theory about them has to be a psychological theory about man himself. The only other alternative is the following.

Objection: Are we not making a great deal out of what might be merely literary style? That the gods are mere poetic devices of the aoidoi to make the action vivid, devices which may indeed go back to the earliest bards of Mycenae?

Reply: This is the well-known problem of the gods and their overdetermination of the action. The gods seem to us quite unnecessary. W h y are they there? And the common solution is as above, that they are a poetic device. The divine machinery duplicates natural conscious causations simply to present them in concrete pictorial form, because the aoidoi were without the refine-ments of language to express psychological matters.

6 See Milman Parry, Collected Papers (New York, Oxford University Press, 1971). I wish to thank both Randall Warner and Judith Griessman for discussion on some of these points.

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Not only is there no reason to believe that the aoidoi had any conscious psychology they were trying to express, such a notion is quite foreign to the whole texture of the poem. The Iliad is about action and it is full of action — constant action. It really is about Achilles' acts and their consequences, not about his mind. And as for the gods, the Iliadic authors and the Iliadic characters all agree in the acceptance of this divinely managed world. To say the gods are an artistic apparatus is the same kind of thing as to say that Joan of Arc told the Inquisition about her voices merely to make it all vivid to those who were about to condemn her.

It is not that the vague general ideas of psychological causation appear first and then the poet gives them concrete pictorial form by inventing gods. It is, as I shall show later in this essay, just the other way around. And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgment are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that the truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.

Objection: If the bicameral mind existed, one might expect utter chaos, with everybody following his own private hallucinations. The only possible way in which there could be a bicameral civilization would be that of a rigid hierarchy, with lesser men hallucinating the voices of authorities over them, and those authorities hallucinating yet higher ones, and so on to the kings and their peers hallucinating gods. Yet the Iliad does not present any such picture with its concentration on the heroic individual.

Reply: This is a very telling objection that puzzled me for a long time, particularly as I studied the history of other bicameral civilizations in which there was not the freedom for individual action that there was in the social world of the Iliad.

The missing pieces in the puzzle turn out to be the well-known

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Linear B Tablets from Knossos, Mycenae, and Pylos. They were written directly in what I am calling the bicameral period. They have long been known, yet long resistant to the most arduous labors of cryptographers. Recently, however, they have been deciphered and shown to contain a syllabic script, the earliest written Greek used only for record purposes.7 And it gives us an outline picture of Mycenaean society much more in keeping with the hypothesis of a bicameral mind: hierarchies of officials, soldiers, or workers, inventories of goods, statements of goods owed to the ruler and particularly to gods. The actual world of the Trojan War, then, was in historical fact much closer to the rigid theocracy which the theory predicts than to the free individuality of the poem.

Moreover, the very structure of the Mycenaean state is profoundly different from the loose assemblage of warriors depicted in the Iliad. It is indeed quite similar to the contemporary divinely ruled kingdoms of Mesopotamia (as described later in this essay, particularly in II.2). These records in Linear B call the head of the state the wanax, a word which in later classical Greek is only used for gods. Similarly, the records call the land occupied by his state as his temenos, a word which later is used only for land sacred to the gods. The later Greek word for king is basileus, but the term in these tablets denotes a much less important person. He is more or less the first servant of the wanax, just as in Mesopotamia the human ruler was really the steward of the lands 'owned' by the god he heard in hallucination — as we shall see in II.2. The material from the Linear B tablets is difficult to piece together, but they do reveal the hierarchical and leveled nature of centralized palace civilizations which the succession of poets who composed the Iliad in the oral tradition completely ignored.

7 M. C. F. Ventris and J. Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). A summary of this material and its relationship to archaeological finds may be found in T. B. L. Webster, From Mycenae to Homer (London: Methuen, 1958).

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This loosening of the social structure in the fully developed Iliad may in part have been caused by the bringing together of other much later stories into the main theme of the Trojan War.

One of the most telling pieces of evidence that the Iliad is a composite of different compositions is the large number of inconsistencies in the poem, some in very close proximity. For example, when Hector is withdrawing from the battle, one line (6:117) says, "The black hide beat upon his neck and ankles."

This can only be the early Mycenaean body-shield. But the next line refers to "The rim which ran round the outside of the bossed shield," and this is a very different kind and a much later type of shield. Obviously, the second line was added by a later poet who in his auditory trance was not even visualizing what he was saying.

Further Qualifications

Indeed, since this is the chaotic period when the bicameral mind breaks down and consciousness begins (as we shall see in a later chapter), we might expect the poem to reflect both this breakdown of civil hierarchies as well as more subjectification side by side with the older form of mentality. As it is, I have in the previous pages omitted certain discrepancies to the theory which I regard as such incursions. These outcroppings of something close to subjective consciousness occur in parts of the Iliad regarded by scholars as later additions to the core poem.8

Book 9, for example, which was written and added to the poem only after the great migration of the Achaeans into Asia Minor, contains references to human deception unlike any in the other books. Most of these occur in the great, long rhetorical reply of Achilles to Odysseus about Agamemnon's treatment of him (9:344, 371, and 375). In particular is Achilles' slur on Agamemnon: "Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is the man who 8 I am here drawing on Walter Leaf, A Companion to the Iliad (London: Macmillan, 1892), pp. 170-173.

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hides one thing in his heart and speaks another." (9:3123f.). This is definitely an indication of subjective consciousness. So also may be the difficult-to-translate optative constructions of Helen (3:173ff.; 6:344ff.) or the apparent reminiscence of Nestor (1:26off.).

There are also two extraordinary places in the text where first Agenor (21:553) and then Hector (22:99) t0 themselves.

The fact that these two speeches occur late in the poem, in close proximity, have highly inappropriate content (they contradict the previous characterizations of the speakers), and use some identical phrases and lines, all suggest that they are formulaic insertions into the story by the same aoidos at a later time.9 But not much later. For they are sufficiently unusual to surprise even their speakers. After these soliloquies, both heroes exclaim precisely the same astonished words, "But wherefore does my life say this to me?" If, indeed, such talks to oneself were common, as they would be if their speakers were really conscious, there would be no cause for surprise. We shall have occasion to return to these instances when we discuss in more detail how consciousness arose.10

The main point of this chapter is that the earliest writing of men in a language that we can really comprehend, when looked at objectively, reveals a very different mentality from our own.

And this must, I think, be accepted as true. Such instances of narratization, analog behavior, or mind-space as occasionally occur are regarded by scholars as of later authorship. The bulk of the poem is consistent in its lack of analog consciousness and points back to a very different kind of human nature. Since we know that Greek culture very quickly became a literature of 9 Even Leaf, p. 356, regards these two passages as spurious.

10 A further analysis might be made, establishing dates for the various parts of the poem as they are thought by some scholars to have been assembled around the much shorter core poem, and then demonstrating that the frequencies of occurrence of these subjective outcroppings increase with recency.

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consciousness, we may regard the Iliad as standing at the great turning of the times, and a window back into those unsubjective times when every kingdom was in essence a theocracy and every man the slave of voices heard whenever novel situations occurred.

C H A P T E R 4

The Bicameral Mind

WE ARE conscious human beings. We are trying to understand human nature. The preposterous hypothesis we have come to in the previous chapter is that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was conscious. This is almost incomprehensible to us. And since we are conscious, and wish to understand, we wish to reduce this to something familiar in our experience, as we saw was the nature of understanding in Chapter 2. And this is what I shall attempt in the present chapter.

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Very little can be said to make the man side of it seem familiar to us, except by referring back to the first chapter, to remember all the things we do without the aid of consciousness. But how unsatisfying is a list of nots! Somehow we still wish to identify with Achilles. We still feel that there must, there absolutely must be something he feels inside. What we are trying to do is to invent a mind-space and a world of analog behaviors in him just as we do in ourselves and our contemporaries. And this invention, I say, is not valid for Greeks of this period.

Perhaps a metaphor of something close to that state might be helpful. In driving a car, I am not sitting like a back-seat driver directing myself, but rather find myself committed and engaged

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with little consciousness.1 In fact my consciousness will usually be involved in something else, in a conversation with you if you happen to be my passenger, or in thinking about the origin of consciousness perhaps. My hand, foot, and head behavior, however, are almost in a different world. In touching something, I am touched; in turning my head, the world turns to me; in seeing, I am related to a world I immediately obey in the sense of driving on the road and not on the sidewalk. And I am not conscious of any of this. And certainly not logical about it. I am caught up, unconsciously enthralled, if you will, in a total interacting reciprocity of stimulation that may be constantly threatening or comforting, appealing or repelling, responding to the changes in traffic and particular aspects of it with trepidation or confidence, trust or distrust, while my consciousness is still off on other topics.

Now simply subtract that consciousness and you have what a bicameral man would be like. The world would happen to him and his action would be an inextricable part of that happening with no consciousness whatever. And now let some brand-new situation occur, an accident up ahead, a blocked road, a flat tire, a stalled engine, and behold, our bicameral man would not do what you and I would do, that is, quickly and efficiently swivel our consciousness over to the matter and narratize out what to do.

He would have to wait for his bicameral voice which with the stored-up admonitory wisdom of his life would tell him nonconsciously what to do.

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But what were such auditory hallucinations like? Some people find it difficult to even imagine that there can be mental voices 1 owe the idea of this example to Erwin W. Straus' insightful essay, "Phenomenology of Hallucinations," in L. J. West, ed., Hallucinations (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1962), pp. 220-232.

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that are heard with the same experiential quality as externally produced voices. After all, there is no mouth or larynx in the brain!

Whatever brain areas are utilized, it is absolutely certain that such voices do exist and that experiencing them is just like hearing actual sound. Further, it is highly probable that the bicameral voices of antiquity were in quality very like such auditory hallucinations in contemporary people. They are heard by many completely normal people to varying degrees. Often it is in times of stress, when a parent's comforting voice may be heard.

Or in the midst of some persisting problem. In my late twenties, living alone on Beacon Hill in Boston, I had for about a week been studying and autistically pondering some of the problems in this book, particularly the question of what knowledge is and how we can know anything at all. My convictions and misgivings had been circling about through the sometimes precious fogs of epis-temologies, finding nowhere to land. One afternoon I lay down in intellectual despair on a couch. Suddenly, out of an absolute quiet, there came a firm, distinct loud voice from my upper right which said, "Include the knower in the known!" It lugged me to my feet absurdly exclaiming, "Hello?" looking for whoever was in the room. The voice had had an exact location. No one was there! Not even behind the wall where I sheepishly looked. I do not take this nebulous profundity as divinely inspired, but I do think that it is similar to what was heard by those who have in the past claimed such special selection.

Such voices may be heard by perfectly normal people on a more continuing basis. After giving lectures on the theory in this book, I have been surprised at members of the audience who have come up afterwards to tell me of their voices. One young biologist's wife said that almost every morning as she made the beds and did the housework, she had long, informative, and pleasant conversations with the voice of her dead grandmother in which the grandmother's voice was actually heard. This came as something of a shock to her alarmed husband, for she had never

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previously mentioned it, since "hearing voices" is generally supposed to be a sign of insanity. Which, in distressed people, of course, it is. But because of the dread surrounding this disease, the actual incidence of auditory hallucinations in normal people on such a continuing basis is not known.

The only extensive study was a poor one done in the last century in England.2 Only hallucinations of normal people when they were in good health were counted. Of 7717 men, 7.8 percent had experienced hallucinations at some time. Among 7599

women, the figure was 12 percent. Hallucinations were most frequent in subjects between twenty and twenty-nine years of age, the same age incidentally at which schizophrenia most commonly occurs. There were twice as many visual hallucinations as auditory. National differences were also found. Russians had twice as many hallucinations as the average. Brazilians had even more because of a very high incidence of auditory hallucinations.

Just why is anyone's conjecture. One of the deficiencies of this study, however, is that in a country where ghosts are exciting gossip, it is difficult to have accurate criteria of what is actually seen and heard as an hallucination. There is an important need for further and better studies of this sort.3

Hallucinations in Psychotics

It is of course in the distress of schizophrenia that auditory hallucinations similar to bicameral voices are most common and best studied. This is now a difficult matter. At a suspicion of hallucinations, distressed psychotics are given some kind of chemotherapy such as Thorazine, which specifically eliminates hallucinations. This procedure is at least questionable, and may be done not for the patient, but for the hospital which wishes to 2 Henry Sidgewick et al., "Report on the census of hallucinations," Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 1894, 34: 25-394.

3 An example of what not to do may be found in D. J. West, "A mass-observation questionnaire on hallucinations," Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1948, 34:187-196.

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eliminate this rival control over the patient. But it has never been shown that hallucinating patients are more intractable than others. Indeed, as judged by other patients, hallucinating schizophrenics are more friendly, less defensive, more likable, and have more positive expectancies toward others in the hospital than nonhallucinating patients.4 And it is possible that even when the effect is apparently negative, hallucinated voices may be helpful to the healing process.

At any rate, since the advent of chemotherapy the incidence of hallucinatory patients is much less than it once was. Recent studies have revealed a wide variation among different hospitals, ranging from 50 percent of psychotics in the Boston City Hospital, to 30 percent in a hospital in Oregon5 and even lower in hospitals with long-term patients under considerable sedation.

Thus, in what follows, I am leaning more heavily on some of the older literature in the psychoses, such as Bleuler's great classic, Dementia Praecox, in which the hallucinatory aspect of schizophrenia in particular is more clearly seen.6 This is important if we are to have an idea of the nature and range of the bicameral voices heard in the early civilizations.

The Character of the Voices

The voices in schizophrenia take any and every relationship to the individual. They converse, threaten, curse, criticize, consult, often in short sentences. They admonish, console, mock, command, or sometimes simply announce everything that's happen-4 P. M. Lewinsohn, "Characteristics of patients with hallucinations," Journal of Clinical Psychology, 1968, 24: 423.

5 P. E. Nathan, H. F. Simpson, and M. M. Audberg, "A systems analytic model of diagnosis II. The diagnostic validity of abnormal perceptual behavior," Journal of Clinical Psychology, 1969, 25: 115-136.

6 Eugen Bleuler, Dementia Praecox or The Group of Schizophrenias, Joseph Zinkin, trans. (New York: International Universities Press, 1950). Other sources for the sections to follow include my own observations and interviews with patients, works footnoted on subsequent pages, various chapters in L. J. West, and miscellaneous case reports.

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ing. They yell, whine, sneer, and vary from the slightest whisper to a thunderous shout. Often the voices take on some special peculiarity, such as speaking very slowly, scanning, rhyming, or in rhythms, or even in foreign languages. There may be one particular voice, more often a few voices, and occasionally many.

As in bicameral civilizations, they are recognized as gods, angels, devils, enemies, or a particular person or relative. Or occasionally they are ascribed to some kind of apparatus reminiscent of the statuary which we will see was important in this regard in bicameral kingdoms.

Sometimes the voices bring patients to despair, commanding them to do something and then viciously reproaching them after the command is carried out. Sometimes they are a dialogue, as of two people discussing the patient. Sometimes the roles of pro and con are taken over by the voices of different people. The voice of his daughter tells a patient: " H e is going to be burnt alive!" While his mother's voice says: " H e will not be burnt!"7

In other instances, there are several voices gabbling all at once, so that the patient cannot follow them.

Their Locality and Function

In some cases, particularly the most serious, the voices are not localized. But usually they are. They call from one side or another, from the rear, from above and below 3 only rarely do they come from directly in front of the patient. They may seem to come from walls, from the cellar and the roof, from heaven and from hell, near or far, from parts of the body or parts of the clothing. And sometimes, as one patient put it, "they assume the nature of all those objects through which they speak — whether they speak out of walls, or from ventilators, or in the woods and fields."8 In some patients there is a tendency to associate the good consoling voices with the upper right, while bad voices 7 Bleuler, p. 97f.

8 T. Hennell, The Witnesses (London: Davis, 1938), p. 182.

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come from below and to the left. In rare instances, the voices seem to the patient to come from his own mouth, sometimes feeling like foreign bodies bulging up in his mouth. Sometimes the voices are hypostasized in bizarre ways. One patient claimed that a voice was perched above each of his ears, one of which was a little larger than the other, which is reminiscent of the ka' s and the way they were depicted in the statues of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter.

Very often the voices criticize a patient's thoughts and actions.

Sometimes they forbid him to do what he was just thinking of doing. And sometimes this occurs even before the patient is aware of his intention. One intelligent paranoid who came from the Swiss canton of Thurgau harbored hostile feelings toward his personal attendant. As the latter stepped into his room, the voice said in its most reproachful tone before the patient had done anything, "There you have it! A Thurgauer beats up a perfectly decent private attendant!"9

Of immense importance here is the fact that the nervous system of a patient makes simple perceptual judgments of which the patient's 'self' is not aware. And these, as above, may then be transposed into voices that seem prophetic. A janitor coming down a hall may make a slight noise of which the patient is not conscious. But the patient hears his hallucinated voice cry out,

"Now someone is coming down the hall with a bucket of water."

Then the door opens, and the prophecy is fulfilled. Credence in the prophetic character of the voices, just as perhaps in bicameral times, is thus built up and sustained. The patient then follows his voices alone and is defenseless against them. Or else, if the voices are not clear, he waits, catatonic and mute, to be shaped by them or, alternatively, by the voices and hands of his attendants.

Usually the severity of schizophrenia oscillates during hospitalization and often the voices come and go with the undulations of the illness. Sometimes they occur only when the patients are 9 Bleuler, p. 98.

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doing certain things, or only in certain environments. And in many patients, before the present-day chemotherapy, there was no single waking moment free from them. When the illness is most severe, the voices are loudest and come from outside; when least severe, voices often tend to be internal whispers; and when internally localized, their auditory qualities are sometimes vague.

A patient might say, "They are not at all real voices but merely reproductions of the voices of dead relatives." Particularly intelligent patients in mild forms of the illness are often not sure whether they are actually hearing the voices or whether they are only compelled to think them, like "audible thoughts," or "sound-less voices," or "hallucinations of meanings."

Hallucinations must have some innate structure in the nervous system underlying them. We can see this clearly by studying the matter in those who have been profoundly deaf since birth or very early childhood. For even they can — somehow — experience auditory hallucinations. This is commonly seen in deaf schizophrenics. In one study, 16 out of 22 hallucinating, profoundly deaf schizophrenics insisted they had heard some kind of communication.10 One thirty-two-year-old woman, born deaf, who was full of self-recrimination about a therapeutic abortion, claimed she heard accusations from God. Another, a fifty-year-old congenitally deaf woman, heard supernatural voices which proclaimed her to have occult powers.

The Visual Component

Visual hallucinations in schizophrenia occur less commonly, but sometimes with extreme clarity and vividness. One of my schizophrenic subjects, a vivacious twenty-year-old writer of folk songs, had been sitting in a car for a long time, anxiously waiting for a friend. A blue car coming along the road suddenly, oddly, 10 J. D. Rainer, S. Abdullah, and J. C. Altshuler, "Phenomenology of hallucinations in the deaf" in Origin and Mechanisms of Hallucinations, Wolfram Keup, ed.

(New York: Plenum Press, 1970), pp. 449-465.

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slowed, turned rusty brown, then grew huge gray wings and slowly flapped over a hedge and disappeared. Her greater alarm, however, came when others in the street behaved as if nothing extraordinary had happened. Why? Unless all of them were somehow in league to hide their reactions from her. And why should that be? It is often the narratization of such false events by consciousness, fitting the world in around them in a rational way, that brings on other tragic symptoms.

It is interesting that profoundly deaf schizophrenics who do not have auditory hallucinations often have visual hallucinations of sign language. A sixteen-year-old girl who became deaf at the age of eight months indulged in bizarre communication with empty spaces and gesticulated to the walls. An older, congenitally deaf woman communicated with her hallucinated boyfriend in sign language. Other deaf patients may appear to be in constant communication with imaginary people using a word salad of signs and finger spelling. One thirty-five-year-old deaf woman, who lost her hearing at the age of fourteen months, lived a life of unrestrained promiscuity alternating with violent temper outbursts. On admission, she explained in sign language that every morning a spirit dressed in a white robe came to her, saying things in sign language which were at times frightening and which set the pace of her mood for the day. Another deaf patient would spit at empty space, saying that she was spitting at the angels who were lurking there. A thirty-year-old man, deaf since birth, more benignly, would see little angels and Lilliputian people around him and believed he had a magic wand with which he could achieve almost anything.

Occasionally, in what are called acute twilight states, whole scenes, often of a religious nature, may be hallucinated even in broad daylight, the heavens standing open with a god speaking to the patient. Or sometimes writing will appear before a patient as before Belshazzar. A paranoid patient saw the word poison in the air at the very moment when the attendant made him take

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his medicine. In other instances, the visual hallucinations may be fitted into the real environment, with figures walking about the ward, or standing above the doctor's head, even as I suggest Athene appeared to Achilles. More usually, when visual hallucinations occur with voices, they are merely shining light or cloudy fog, as Thetis came to Achilles or Yahweh to Moses.

The Release of the Gods

If we are correct in assuming that schizophrenic hallucinations are similar to the guidances of gods in antiquity, then there should be some common physiological instigation in both instances. This, I suggest, is simply stress. In normal people, as we have mentioned, the stress threshold for release of hallucinations is extremely high ; most of us need to be over our heads in trouble before we would hear voices. But in psychosis-prone persons, the threshold is somewhat lower; as in the girl I described, only anxious waiting in a parked car was necessary.

This is caused, I think, by the buildup in the blood of breakdown products of stress-produced adrenalin which the individual is, for genetical reasons, unable to pass through the kidneys as fast as a normal person.

During the eras of the bicameral mind, we may suppose that the stress threshold for hallucinations was much, much lower than in either normal people or schizophrenics today. The only stress necessary was that which occurs when a change in behavior is necessary because of some novelty in a situation. Anything that could not be dealt with on the basis of habit, any conflict between work and fatigue, between attack and flight, any choice between whom to obey or what to do, anything that required any decision at all was sufficient to cause an auditory hallucination.

It has now been clearly established that decision-making (and I would like to remove every trace of conscious connotation from the word 'decision') is precisely what stress is. If rats have to

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cross an electric grid each time they wish to get food and water, such rats develop ulcers.11 Just shocking the rats does not do this to them. There has to be the pause of conflict or the decision-making stress of whether to cross a grid or not to produce this effect. If two monkeys are placed in harnesses, in such a way that one of the monkeys can press a bar at least once every twenty seconds to avoid a periodic shock to both monkeys' feet, within three or four weeks the decision-making monkey will have ulcers, while the other, equally shocked monkey will not.12

It is the pause of unknowingness that is important. For if the experiment is so arranged that an animal can make an effective response and receive immediate feedback of his success, executive ulcers, as they are often called, do not occur.13

So Achilles, repulsed by Agamemnon, in decision-stress by the gray sea, hallucinates Thetis out of the mists. So Hector, faced with the decision-suffering of whether to go outside the walls of Troy to fight Achilles or stay within them, in the stress of the decision hallucinates the voice that tells him to go out. The divine voice ends the decision-stress before it has reached any considerable level. Had Achilles or Hector been modern executives, living in a culture that repressed their stress-relieving gods, they too might have collected their share of our psychosomatic diseases.

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We must not leave this subject of the hallucinatory mechanism without facing up to the more profound question of why such 11 W. L. Sawrey and J. D. Weisz, "An experimental method of producing gastric ulcers," Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1956, 49: 269—270.

12 J. V. Brady, R. W. Porter, D. G. Conrad, and J. W. Mason, "Avoidance behavior and the development of gastro-duodenal ulcers," Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1958, 1: 69-72.

13 J. M. Weiss, "Psychological Factors in Stress and Disease," Scientific American, 1972, 226: 106.

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voices are believed, why obeyed. For believed as objectively real, they are, and obeyed as objectively real in the face of all the evidence of experience and the mountains of common sense.

Indeed, the voices a patient hears are more real than the doctor's voice. He sometimes says so. " I f that is not a real voice, then I can just as well say that even you are not now really talking to me," said one schizophrenic to his physicians. And another when questioned replied:

Y e s , Sir. I hear voices distinctly, even loudly; they interrupt us at this moment. It is more easy for me to listen to them than to you. I can more easily believe in their significance and actuality, and they do not ask questions.14

That he alone hears the voices is not of much concern. Sometimes he feels he has been honored by this gift, singled out by divine forces, elected and glorified, and this even when the voice reproaches him bitterly, even when it is leading him to death. He is somehow face to face with elemental auditory powers, more real than wind or rain or fire, powers that deride and threaten and console, powers that he cannot step back from and see objectively.

One sunny afternoon not long ago, a man was lying back in a deck chair on the beach at Coney Island. Suddenly, he heard a voice so loud and clear that he looked about at his companions, certain that they too must have heard the voice. When they acted as if nothing had happened, he began to feel strange and moved his chair away from them. And then

. . . suddenly, clearer, deeper, and even louder than before, the deep voice came at me again, right in my ear this time, and getting me tight and shivery inside. " L a r r y Jayson, I told you before you weren't any good. W h y are you sitting here making believe you are as good as anyone else when you're not? W h o m are you fooling ?"

14 Hennell, pp. 181-182.

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The deep voice was so loud and so clear, everyone must have heard it. He got up and walked slowly away, down the stairs of the boardwalk to the stretch of sand below. He waited to see if the voice came back. It did, its words pounding in this time, not the way you hear any words, but deeper,

. . . as though all parts of me had become ears, with my fingers hearing the words, and my legs, and my head too. " Y o u ' r e no g o o d , " the voice said slowly, in the same deep tones. " Y o u ' v e never been any good or use on earth. T h e r e is the ocean. Y o u might just as well drown yourself. Just w a l k in, and keep w a l k -