Marcel Kuijsten interviewed on Julian Jaynes’s theory and his book Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind by George Monty for the TrueLife podcast.
From the description:
Marcel Kuijsten is Founder and Executive Director of the Julian Jaynes Society. He is editor of four books on Jaynes’s theory: Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind, Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind, The Julian Jaynes Collection, and Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness. He is co-editor (with Brian McVeigh) of and regular contributor to The Jaynesian, the newsletter of the Julian Jaynes Society. He co-chaired and helped organize (with Rabbi James Cohn) The Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies, where he was also a speaker. He had also spoken on Jaynes’s theory at the Julian Jaynes Conference on Consciousness at the University of Prince Edward Island and the Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, Arizona. Interviews with Marcel Kuijsten on Jaynes’s theory have appeared on the BBC, the Evolution Institute/This View of Life podcast, Red Ice Radio, Astraea Magazine & podcast, among others, and in the book Blood Rites by Jimmy Lee Shreeve and New Therapistmagazine.
Published June 3, 2022.
Transcript Excerpt:
George Monty: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the True Life podcast. We are here with an incredible author, who’s written multiple books. He’s also the founder of the Julian Jaynes Society, of which we’re going to be talking about the Society and a new book coming out today. Jis name is Marcel Kuijsten. And let’s go ahead and introduce them, Marcel could you talk a little bit about who you are, what you got, and and what’s happening today?
Marcel Kuijsten: Sure, and thanks for having me on. I founded the Julian Jaynes Society way back in 1997, just after Jaynes passed away, and things kind of grew from a web-based community to publishing our first edited volume in 2006. And I followed that up with a book called the Julian Jaynes Collection in 2012, which brought together all of Jaynes’s articles that were somewhat hard to find, unless you were affiliated with a university library, as well as unpublished interviews, and a lot of question and answer sessions from discussions after lectures he gave — that really answer a lot of the questions that people have about Jaynes’s theory after they read his original The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
We did a big conference over three days in 2013, that brought together people from all over the world. And some of that material, as well as some others, was published in 2016 in the third book, Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind. And we’re just getting ready to publish our fourth book, called Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind.
George Monty: It’s exciting. For those who may not know Julian Jaynes’s theory, do you think you can maybe kind of give us a little bit of background on it?
Marcel Kuijsten: Sure, and so one of the things Jaynes started to do shortly after his book was published, was he started to present his theory as four key hypotheses. And this makes it, I think, much easier for people to understand. And so that’s the same approach I take in the new book — breaking it into these four areas. And the first is that consciousness is based on language. The second is his idea of what came before we learned consciousness — relatively recently in human history, according to Jaynes — and that was what he called the “bicameral mentality.” The third is when did this transition take place? So, dating this transition from bicameral mentality to consciousness. And the fourth is his neurological model for what might be happening in the brain.
So those are the four key ideas, and we can kind of delve into those, but I think one of the most important things to understand about Jaynes’s theory is that he hit on this idea that consciousness is something that we learn based on metaphorical language, and it’s not biologically based — it’s not innate. It’s not something — you know we’ve all more or less inherited this idea from Darwin’s theory of evolution that consciousness emerges at some point in evolutionary history as brains get more complex. And some people date it to 50,000 years ago, or 100,000 years ago, or in primates before the origin of homo sapiens, and there’s a lot of speculation about these things, but there’s not a lot of evidence.
And what Jaynes did was, looking back through the historical record, he discovered that introspection and this inner mind-space kind of disappears in the most ancient texts such as the Iliad, and then it begins to emerge, and we can track its development through ancient texts and other sources of evidence.
George Monty: On the idea of language and consciousness — when I think of language and consciousness, and the ability to think or introspect, if that comes with the addition of language, doesn’t that kind of make our world made of language? Like we can only begin to see the world a certain way when we have the language built in us or when we come to the idea of language? And I was just curious to get your thoughts on that? Like what do you mean, can you flesh that out a little bit more? Like when you say language it’s not only it’s conscious is not possible without language, like what does that mean?
Marcel Kuijsten: Right, what Jaynes does in his book, and that we elaborate in this follow-up book, is really slice away at all of the things that people have misconceptions about in terms of what consciousness is what how it’s defined. And because we are only conscious of what we’re conscious of, it’s very hard for us to wrap our mind around this idea that consciousness is only a very narrow part of our total mentality. And so Jaynes explains in great detail how things like learning and reactivity — all of these things happen outside of consciousness. So all animals can learn, they can solve complex problems, and they learn through stimulus and response, and they also have instincts and they can accomplish a tremendous amount of interesting things — all without this introspectible mind-space that Jaynes describes. And so by stripping away all these layers of what consciousness is not, we can suddenly see this profound transition that was previously overlooked, that happened just 3,000 years ago …