voluntaryXchange

Quote 12 from "The Origin of Consciousness In the Break Down of the Bicameral Mind"

Now it is time for Jaynes to introduce what he calls the bicameral mind.

By this, he means a mind that is capable of thinking, making decisions, doing, and recalling, but one that is not conscious of doing any of these.

But, it didn't "metaphorize" about how itself was thinking. A thought appeared to the bicameral mind much as it does to yours - out of the blue. But the bicameral mind didn't wonder where it came from or who it belonged to. There wasn't any self for it to belong to, so it must have come from somewhere else. From a god perhaps ...

The input to the divine hallucinatory aspect of the bicameral mind was auditory. It used cortical areas more closely connected to the auditory parts of the brain.

You could do rather a lot with this sort of mind. If it tells you to plant every spring, you do, and you would survive until the next spring. If it told you to tell others to plant every spring, you'd all survive (and you'd achieve a level of fame).

And, it isn't as if I'm claiming that humans aren't mentally superior to animals. Think of all the things you do every day that are bicameral in nature. Just to exit your car you have to hit the brake, hold the brake, sense a stop, slip the car into park, check that it is there, release the break, check again, turn the key, and open the door. You're not conscious of any of those, for the most part. And yet, could they be commands barked at you by a driving instructor? Are there in fact commands barked by your driving instructor stored somewhere in your memory? The big difference between you and a schizophrenic is that you've turned down the volume on those commands way down.

There is no reason why a bicameral mind couldn't talk or write. The latter is really interesting because of how we read - we hear the words spoken inside our head.

So, your primitive, but civilized, and someone teaches you to read and tells you that the words you see are from a god/king/overseer. It's not a stretch to then think that the voice you hear in your head is the god/king/overseer. That is the essence of the bicameral mind: the ability to recall and replay commands in the voices of people other than yourself.

You could do a lot with that. Again, think about yourself. Is there a recalled voice inside you nagging you to get away from that stupid blog and do something productive? Who exactly is that if your conscious mind is doing the reading?

But, there's a problem in running a society based on transmiting commands for the recall of bicameral minds:

And once the word of god was silent, written on dumb clay tablets or incised into speechless stone, the god's command, or the king's directives could be turned to or avoided by one's own efforts in a way that auditory hallucinations never could be. [pg. 208]

A dog probably can't stop recalling the voice of his master saying "don't dig" or "stop barking". They may not be able to carry through on that, but it isn't like they can substitute some other recalled memory like "do go ahead and dig" or "it's OK to bark now".

But you ... you can recall the voice of the driving instructor telling you not to roll through stop signs ... and you can rationalize that if you stretch that rule a little bit at this junction, maybe, just maybe, the memory of the driving instructor won't come back to haunt you.

Big Growth Revision

The real GDP growth rate for the 4th quarter got a huge downward revision (3.5 to 2.2%).

This drops my letter grade for the quarter to a C on my preferred scale, and to a B on a scale comparable to what college students are used to these days.

Anti-Porn Legislation Through a Landsburg Filter

It's going to be a crime to access porn on school computers in Utah.

School administrators - who didn't ask for this legislation - say that porn isn't much of a problem.

School computers throughout Utah have pretty tough filtering already. Having worked on an op-ed piece that required searching for pornographic terms in Google, I can assure you that someone pays way to much time learning all the slang terms for sexual behaviors in this state. I wonder who that is given that Utah's "porn czar" was eliminated.

Steven Landsburg argues in The Armchair Economist that ideas that are universally agreed up either have to be completely correct, completely useless, or both. This bill, which passed unanimously, seems to fall into the second and perhaps the third category.

FWIW: This bill started with my own local legislator, a man with many years of experience  ... um ... voting on legislative bills. He said he made the proposal based on the complaints of constituents. I'm not sure what those entailed, but I do know one local (non-school) employer who says that viewing porn on work time is the biggest cause of job termination for Mormons (it's drugs for non-Mormons).

Holman Jenkins On Health Care

Holman Jenkins took on the distortions introduced into the health care market by the tax system:

The tax code is the original hectoring mommy behind our health-care neuroses. It gives the biggest subsidy to those who need it least. It pays the affluent to buy more medical care than they would if they were spending their own money. It prompts them to launder our health spending through an insurance bureaucracy, creating endless paperwork. It prices millions of less-favored taxpayers out of the market for health insurance. It fosters a misconception that health care is free even as workers are perplexed over the failure of their wages to rise.

Pretty obvious stuff to a consequentialist, and this turn of phrase is a keeper:

The oft-mouthed goal of expanding health insurance to the poor would be far easier to achieve if we stopped subsidizing overconsumption by the non-poor.

Read the whole thing in the February 7th issue of The Wall Street Journal.

Quote 11 from "The Origin of Consciousness In the Break Down of the Bicameral Mind"

Jaynes is now building to the idea that hearing (internal) voices has some unusual features not shared by consciousness or by physically hearing the voices of others. He paraphrases the typical schizophrenic discussing his voices:

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. [pg. 95]

The last part is profoundly interesting. Think about it: a schizophrenic like Son of Sam never says his neighbor's dog asked him how he felt today, or whether it was going to rain, or what 2+2 was; rather the dog ordered him to kill.

It didn't reason, question, deduct, paraphrase, or use metaphors. It ordered.

It sounds a little like Zeus telling Hercules: "You are my son. You come to me when you've done big stuff."

Or like me saying: "You are my dog. You don't bark at this thing."

All the Problems In the World Quote

Peggy Noonan wrote "Earlier this week I heard a minister quote a spiritual genius:"

All the problems in the world are caused by man's inability to sit quietly in a room by himself.

And some people wonder why anyone would want to be a professor ...

Happy Birthday to vX

vX is 3 this morning, and this is the 1700th post.

In that time there have been about 200,000 visitors, 300,000 page views, and 2,600 comments and trackbacks. I only wish I had a better handle on how many people are picking this up through an RSS feeder.

Thanks for reading and helping out!

Oh ... and it took a while ... but vX is officially in the black over its lifetime.

Cool Freeware

PC Magazine links to several dozen useful freeware programs.

Friends wonder how I get my PC to do certain things, and a list like this is a good example. I'm already using 9 of these regularly:

• Windows Defender - to hunt for spyware
• Zone Alarm - for block malware
• Roboform - to keep track of passwords
• Tweak UI - to customize my interface
• UBCD - for an emergency boot CD
• dB Power Amp - to convert music file formats
• Irfanview - to view photos
• Picasa - to organize photos
• Winamp - as a general purpose music player
  

I'd recommend them all.

I downloaded 5 new items that might help me do something new with my PC:

• MaxMem - to reclaim memory from hogs
• AutoHotKey - to make my own scripts
• BZFlag - a game
• Cartes du Ciel - star charts for the casual user
• FreeCiv - a game

Three Falls, Two Submissions or a Knockout (On Global Warming)

Larry King Live hosted a "debate" of sorts.

In this corner, taking the position against global warming was a chaired professor from MIT.

In this corner, taking the position for global warming was ... wait for it ... Bill Nye the Science Guy.

The latter would have had a better chance if they had wrestled (see "The Wrestling Epilogue in the 2nd episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus if you missed the joke).

Read about it over at Mahalanobis.

Quote 10 from "The Origin of Consciousness In the Break Down of the Bicameral Mind"

Ah, well, you say, Jaynes is just nuts.

It is just a curiosity if the profoundly deaf have auditory hallucinations. But, Jaynes' has a fallback position:

[Those] who do not have auditory hallucinations often have visual hallucinations of sign language. [pg. 92]

What purpose could explain that? If schizophrenia is a physical problem manifesting itself mentally, why would it be expressed through something that people learn (presumably) after the physical problem exists?