If we look at Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind through a lens of Wittgenstein’s quote “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." it make more sense and give me a deeper understanding of human intelligence over time as for the dates it is a type of archaeological and is behavioral modernity that is a slow, cumulative cultural process rather than a sudden archaeological milestone.
Language and particularly the lexical metaphor, which is sort of like the foundational operation of language in Jaynes’ view, it does not just describe things, it actually generates new conceptions of things. Generating new viewpoints. Jaynes wrote "Each new stage of words literally created new perceptions and attentions, and such new perceptions and attentions resulted in important cultural changes, which are reflected in the archaeological record.”
I don’t either, but I can see, reading his paper, how his approach could be confusing. When he says “consciousness” he’s referring to reflectivity, that is, the aspect of consciousness that is grounded in a linguistically founded subjectivity mediated through a transcendental “I”—a view from nowhere where the nowhere is the critical link that founds self-identity. He brackets this out from other forms of awareness that can get on very well reactively, i.e. without reflection, and makes a good point with regard to the largely reactive nature of communication, which is kind of counter-intuitive and worth stressing. But he dives in, in the paper at least, in a way that almost presumes the kind of orientation to the problem he wants to establish through argument. And I think there are better ways of explaining the distinctions he wants to make.
Anyway, interesting so far. It would take a lot to convince me his bicameral mind thesis holds up, especially given the necessary thinness of evidence, but I think he’s more or less going the right way about things by establishing a potential developmental distinction that allows for a story about how language could scaffold its way into creating subjectivity.
Does language create perception, or does perception create language.
One cross-cultural study that speaks to that is Berlin and Kaye’s Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution.
The researchers took 180 “color chips” (I’m guessing at the number) and showed them to Native Speakers of almost every known language. They used statistical methods to determine which color terms native speakers could agree on. The number of color terms “basic” to a language varied between 3 and 11 (American women had 17 or so, but when men were added in the number reduced to 11).
The spectrum was not always divided vertically. Those languages with 3 basic terms had “dark”, “beige”, and “light” as the translations.
The interesting bit: every language that had the same number of basic color terms divided the spectrum almost exactly the same way. Those languages that agree on 3, 5, 7 or 9 basic color terms, had the same 3. 5,7. or 9. This would seem to suggest that perception has a tyranny on language instead of (as Sapir-Whorf suggested) language having a tyranny on thought.
Of course this is not definitive. Language structures (tenses, etc.) may still affect how we see the world.
Language and perception feed into each other in a continuous, interactive loop.
Humans are born with pre-verbal sensory systems and biological baselines. Infants can categorize colors and shapes before they learn any words for them.
Lera Boroditsky is famous for her extensive research showing that the languages we speak don’t just express our thoughts—they actively shape how we perceive reality, time, space, and color. She frequently describes this relationship not as a one-way street, but as an active, continuous feedback loop where cultural language shapes our sensory attention, and our sensory experiences in turn shape how language evolves.
Can’t recall if Jaynes puts it like that, but anyway I would put it more like “when did we start thinking that thinking in first person is a thing we do?”. And I guess the answer must be, as soon as we started doing what we actually do, which is a thing demanding a better description.
I would offer: rehearsing likely dialogue (plus random heckling) between ourselves and others. Which might not seem very different, but is hopefully true enough but less pregnant with phenomenological complexity. (Be it Cartesian subjectivity or godly communion.)
I recall (probably falsely, but vividly, the road I was walking along e.g.) wondering about this as a child. If thoughts are words in the head, what would be an example? Let’s examine a thought as soon as I have it, then. But of course as soon as I tried to, I was aware of several possible commentary-thoughts about the process of trying, and the clear impossibility (or inaccuracy) of identifying actual thoughts or comments in the stream.
That’s perhaps a problem with looking too closely, though. Introspecting at arm’s length, as an adult, I’ve become aware that a large proportion of my verbal ‘thoughts’ are in other people’s voices.
I use other people’s voices also. When I was studying naval architecture, engineering and designing a sailboat. I had a boat in my head and in the boat were different scientist and designers. If one of them became worthless and just added deadweight to the product I would make them walk the plank. aargh
Here I did a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci to help me with my portrait drawing. I gave him a Mona Lisa smile and his eyes track you as you change your view from side to side.
