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by angiosperm
1026 days ago
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Jaynes's timeline, anyway, was badly messed up. The notion of independent brain half-selves has been debunked, although brain function localized to certain places is real. It is clear that, if indeed people at that time experienced life as he describes, then by the time we got writing not everybody did. We don't need to depend on any notion of changing neuroanatomy; brain function is entirely plastic enough without such an assumption. I quizzed an ancient-Greek scholar about Jaynes, and his story about evolution of Greek language. He said there is no such phenomenon in Attic Greek, and Jaynes had confabulated it. Such confabulations have long been an occupational hazard of Classics scholarship. Modern statistical methods have proved necessary to banish them. |
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> It is clear that, if indeed people at that time experienced life as he describes, then by the time we got writing not everybody did.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that this is clear. The phenomenon he describes about writing is something one can easily experience by simply reading ancient texts. It feels different. There is no self reflection.
As for the ancient-Greek scholar you mention... I guess I'd need to see some specifics. Just hearing 2nd-hand that an anonymous scholar said he made it up isn't very compelling evidence. I'm curious about these modern statistical methods you've mentioned... how did they address Jaynes' theory?
"there is no such phenomenon in Attic Greek"... I didn't get the impression of a singular phenomenon other than a lack of metaphoric references to the self in early writing. The timeline for Attic Greek seems to start at 500BC which seems to be on the end side of his hypothesized breakdown of the bicameral mind and 300 years after the Illiad was apparently written. Jaynes suggested it may even be older, passed down through oral history. I'm not sure that we have any evidence to truly debunk that.
Of course once the mental metaphors were established, they would quickly spread through the language, so it would be no surprise to see plenty of examples of Greek that did have more mental metaphors, especially a few hundred years later.
If you can point me to some writing from before 1500 BC or so that clearly shows a mental metaphor of a self which contains or otherwise is connected to thoughts (i.e. "the thoughts in my head"), then I'll have to take that as solid evidence against his theory.
I studied cognitive linguistics in undergrad, so this is an interesting topic to me. His theory definitely goes completely counter to what I'd previously believed which is the we've probably been far more advanced for far longer than is normally assumed. For instance the idea that the clovis people were the first in North America always seemed ridiculous to me. The thing is, even though Jaynes' idea is sort of against that general sensibility, it doesn't really directly contradict it. Anyway, I'd be curious whatever details you know about it. I thought about trying to make a serious rebuttal essay to it to find the evidence against