I’ve spent the last consecutive 48 hours of my life trying to get a grasp of consciousness. I have concluded that, whatever it may be, we are certainly not born with it. It’s spooky come to think about it!
What is Consciousness?
Defining consciousness is actually exceptionally hard. Science has repeatedly failed to do so. I hope that the concept will gradually, naturally and Wittgenstein-ly reveal itself as we move through this text together. I will start off with a presentation of the split-brain experiment, the significance of which will be made clear later.
Actually, before doing that, let’s make a subtle distinction. Self-awareness and self-consciousness are not the same! Some animals recognize their idol on mirrors as being a representation of themselves. They still fail to pass the Theory of Mind test, meaning that they do recognize themselves as existing, but that they don’t exactly recognize that they’re free agents with subjective intelligence, memory, thought-construction and the like. We’ll return to that in a second.
Gazzaniga Experiments
I’m an adult, I won’t pick on his last name. Gazzaniga is a cognitive neuroscientist who studied the symptoms of the lateralization of the brain, particularly in victims of epilepsy. These patients had their corpus callosum, the bridge ‘connecting’ their two hemispheres together, cut off, effectively splitting their minds in two (not exactly accurate, but we can go on). The premise was that this operation would eliminate noisy electrical signals traveling from one place to another and would thus reduce the frequency of epileptic seizures. It was surprisingly successful!
What’s perhaps more interesting is the fact that these patients went on with their lives as usual, mostly unaffected. The brain is organized in two and each hemisphere is responsible for a distinct set of faculties. In most right-handed people it is the left hemisphere that is typically responsible for speech articulation and analytical thinking. Each hemisphere is generally in control of the opposite side of the body. In the process of habitual decision-making, the two hemispheres communicate excessively.
Both hemispheres can process and understand language, but only the left one can actually articulate proper speech.
Gazzaniga placed these split-brain patients in front of a computer. By letting them focus on a dot at the center of the screen, the scientist was able to blast images of objects and send them at precise hemispheres, at will. An image at the right side of the computer monitor was forwarded to the left hemisphere, and the patient was trivially able to name the thing successfully. By repeating the experiment on the opposite side, Gazzaniga verified what he had already inferred: The right hemisphere, not being able to speak, could not articulate the object in speech! The patient would respond that he didn’t quite catch it. The right hemisphere had indeed recognized it, but it had absolutely no means of letting the other (talking) side know!
The right hemisphere cannot talk, alright, but it does have exclusive control of the left arm. The patient, when ordered, could successfully recreate the mysterious object with his clumsy left hand, even though he was pathetically unable to do so verbally! The corpus callosum was severed, so intra-brain communication was effectively externalized on good-old ink and paper! When asked about his motivation, the patient was totally unable to justify the thing he drew. In fact, in most cases, the patient (i.e. the speaking hemisphere) would benevolently lie, it would hallucinate.
On another experiment, a female patient was shown a scary clip on her left side and she naturally felt jumpy. When asked why she was feeling that way, she verbally explained that it must have been the professor’s look, or the room’s atmosphere. Both of these were of course completely bogus.
This reminds me of when I sleep-talk. I’m having a nonsense conversation with my awoken brother (who decides to jokingly participate) while I’m still asleep. When I wake up I automatically attempt to maintain the bullshit conversation and only accept my humiliating state of confusion ten or twenty seconds in. Our brains prefer having a made up story than no story at all.
What’s more, it appears that the severed hemispheres have personalities of their own:
Another telling question asked the right hemisphere what job he would pick. He spelled out “automobile race” with his left hand, though shortly after the end of the session, he was asked the entire question out loud (so his left hemisphere heard it), and his left speaking hemisphere answered, “Oh, be a draftsman.” Each hemisphere had a separate goal. The experimental session ended after asking the right hemisphere to spell out its mood. The left hand spelled out “good.”
Footage of the fascinating experiment itself is readily available here.
In test situations, where the speechless right hemisphere is made to know the correct answer, and then hears the left dominating hemisphere making obvious verbal mistakes, the patient may frown, wince, or shake his head.
What Consciousness is Not
I genuinely hope that everything has been clear. We’ll be exploring consciousness in the context of Julian Jaynes’ controversial and ground-breaking book, ‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’. Bicameral? I will expand further on that later, let’s get the former out of the way first. Let’s begin with Julian’s flashlight analogy:
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. It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. Similarly, we have the naive illusion that we are always conscious just because we cannot be conscious of instances that we are not conscious.
In short, consciousness has the tendency to get credit where credit is not due. Julian proceeds to define consciousness by precisely what it’s not. The chapter is incredibly well-written in and of itself, but here’s the rough idea:
- It appears that consciousness is not necessary for intelligent thinking. Neuroscientists observed that the process of searching for an associate word when presented with a stimulus-word was introspectively blank.
Experiments have shown that autocomplete goes on unconsciously. So, perhaps, what you are in actuality conscious of is the preliminary window as well as the solution to that autocomplete problem, right after the brain has come up with it. Consciousness is here reduced to a mere observer.
One does one's thinking before one knows what one is to think about.
Consciousness is not involved in the process of making judgments. This has been shown to be conducted spontaneously and unconsciously (more in the book).
Consciousness is not involved in problem-solving either. Actually, 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. To understand why, simply consider the multitude of case studies of brilliant scientists throughout human history. We often reach sound conclusions and are quite unable to justify them.
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.”
What you can consciously recall is thimbleful to the huge oceans of your actual knowledge. Consciousness can, occasionally, be an obstacle! Consider the act of playing the piano, as well as the process of talking, reading, writing, driving and so forth!
Concepts do not require consciousness either. A cat, a squirrel, or even a dumb bug can identify the equivalent class of trees without being conscious.
Properties of Consciousness
The first property of consciousness is its distinct spatialization. It resides on the back of our heads (in cultures of the past, it used to be right above our chests). Concepts related to consciousness are all defined and understood through spatial metaphor (keep that in mind).
The most important feature of consciousness is the analog ‘I’. The idea of self that can shift through time and space in theoretical scenarios to help us make decisions. That is not enough in and of itself. The metaphor ‘Me’ is what allows us to get a bird’s-eye view of ourselves in a third-person perspective that is unarguably distinctive in human thought.
Another key aspect is narratization. Instead of just fulfilling our crude needs as ordinary beings do, we tend to forcefully label new experiences as episodes in the context of a wider life-long narrative. Conscious beings like feeling that they are in control and that everything revolves around their analog ‘I’. This tendency is sometimes embarrassing, in that we often find ourselves justifying facts that have already been secretly decided by our unconscious long before we ever got the chance to choose. It’s a constant, unnecessary reinforcement of our ego, of which our internal decision-maker is perhaps rightfully oblivious.
⚠️ The Revelation
Alright, ready for the revelation? Without that uncomfortably long preliminary statement, I’m more than certain that Julian Jaynes would have sounded utterly insane. Here goes: Consciousness as we know it today is a language construct. It is metaphor. Consciousness is not involved in most everyday activities. There existed a time not so long ago in history when human beings had no consciousness, but still were self-aware. In fact their mind was effectively split in two (bicameral). The left hemisphere was their ego and their right hemisphere was essentially God’s voice that guided them through life in place of the narrating self-voice that we enjoy today.
Are you… insane?
The book is fairly well-written and has been critically acclaimed. It’s science, alright? The author makes a surprisingly good argument.
All people hallucinate (hear voices) when a sufficiently large stress threshold has been reached. Schizophrenic people operate with a significantly lower threshold. The author claims that the bicameral people had a stress threshold so low, that even the most mundane divergences of ordinary life were enough to trigger a proper auditory hallucination.
Quick reminder that the right hemisphere cannot produce speech. Thus, while the divine areas would not have to be involved in speech, they would have to be involved in hearing and in understanding language. Wernicke’s primary articulation area, the most prominent brain segment involved in speech, does not have a complimentary part on the right side of the brain. In fact, removing the right hemisphere entirely has little trace over the intelligence of the adult individual. It could be the case that the brain is split into two parts: One being you, another being ‘god’.
Well, scientists have actually carried out experiments that stimulate that part of the right hemisphere, and found that such operations produced hazy internal voices on the majority of patients. Interestingly, such stimulations produced auditory scenes wherein the subject was passive and being acted upon, again reinforcing the belief that the right hemisphere is a representation of God. Again, quite informally, these voices have a distinct distance that might be attributed to the fact the they originate from opposite hemispheres compared to introspective, conscious self-dialog.
It feels totally plausible. Jaynes argues that humanity during the Trojan war must have been bicameral. I remember being taught in school that the premise of the Iliad was that all people, kings and peasants alike, were ultimately subject to the fancies of the Gods. Jaynes takes this quite literally, but I can’t protest. He observes that the original text contains no internal dialog, which is indeed fascinating. The self-conscious word for soul as we know it today simply did not exist (‘psyche’ and ‘thumos’ had rather different interpretations).
The canonical split of the brain is consistent with popular representation in media. The right side is widely considered as creative, non-verbal, imaginative and intuitive.
A Day in the Life: The Bicameral Man
Imagine yourself driving. You are not totally conscious, except for the internal monologue that you are having with your mind about an obscure topic that relates to your life. 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 non-consciously what to do.
Bicameral people had been aware of the voices in their heads, aware of the actions that they took, but were not conscious of being the authors of their actions. This is hard to visualize. They had some sort of collective identity and they couldn’t imagine themselves shifting through time and space inside their head.
Homesigners and Theory of Mind
Here’s some more evidence: Homesigners are deaf children born in hearing families that do not have access to the deaf community. These children will construct a sign language of their own, and thus will ultimately struggle to understand complicated abstract phenomena, like exact cardinality (they approximate quantities), and mind theory. In particular, they seem to consistently fail the false-belief test, a sine qua non for consciousness as we regard it today.
There is evidence that the development of Theory of Mind (full consciousness) is closely intertwined with language development in humans, and is achieved roughly around the fourth year after birth. Three-year-olds will struggle to pass this test. They still view the world as having a single collective intelligence (just like bicameral people used to, I suppose).
The existence of homesigners is also a case in favor of the language acquisition device, and the critical period of language development (another interesting topic in and of itself). Old homesigners transferred their crude piecemeal knowledge upon the young, only to see them naturally forming a complicated language of their own with an impressive grammatical system and richer foundation.
Takeaways
Julian argues that the voices diminished roughly right when written language was invented. People lost their guiding forces and had to invent internal introspection to replace their beloved God of times gone. Consciousness had been a taught linguistic skill all along.
It’s interesting to note the possibility that the bicameral mind might have led older civilizations to ‘bicameral dreams’. Consciousness, after all, plays a key role in dream formation today, so it’s hard to imagine what it would have looked like without it!
Daniel Dennett: Consciousness requires a certain kind of informational organization that does not seem to be ‘hard-wired’ in humans, but is instilled by human culture. Moreover, consciousness is not a black-or-white, all-or-nothing type of phenomenon, as is often assumed. The differences between humans and other species are so great that speculations about animal consciousness seem ungrounded.
So, to summarize: Our study of the Gazzaniga experiments revealed that the concepts of self and identity are more complicated than previously thought. We discovered that our notion of consciousness is inherently fuzzy, although we are inarguably born self-aware. We did, however, come to understand that (perhaps) consciousness is nothing but a cultural by-product of human language, a metaphor (that so happens to be accurate in reality, right?). These revelations intrigued us into considering what an alternative humanity without consciousness might have looked like. It would have been an almost alien community of a perceived shared intelligence, motivated by the antithesis of internal, introspective dialog: The reigns would be handed to the schizophrenic voice of the chief or of God, precisely originating from the right hemisphere of the brain, stimulated by the distributed presence of temples.