A potted history of variation in everyday ontology in the conscious experience of humans

catchy title bro

(this is the fourth of a series of posts. this can be read standalone, but linking parts 1,2 and 3.)

One consequence of following behaviourism or cognitivism to their endpoint is that you end up thinking that people are people are people. Put the same set of factors around them and they’ll generally move in the same direction. You also then naturally become suspicious of anyone making big claims about cultural differences, or group traits.

Growing up in Ireland, for example, you very commonly hear variations of ‘ah well you know, because we’re Irish we always love to [insert thing that every Westerner and perhaps beyond loves just as much if not more]”. Similarly, there is a suspiciously large amount of cultures that seem to place family and meal time as a unique thing that they created and place importance on.

I don’t think behaviourism is wrong for nudging you into dismissing these things, especially without harder evidence. But I worry that numbing yourself to cultural difference across location also leads to numbing yourself to cultural differences across time. People have been people have been people.

But then you ask a question like “hey, why do cities built in the 15th centuries feel so different to those built in the 20th centuries?” or ‘“why do religious leaders in the 16th century sound so different to those today?”

And a behaviourist answers “well the factors around them are different” and then you realise that that’s the interesting part. Technological and scientific factors sure, but what about the parts of the environment that people were assembling rather than discovering, or what their goals for using those advances were?

For example, I always found it quite strange that as people weirdly got back into the pyramids in the last few years, the podcast guest is always questioning the how, as in what tech they had to move stones 500 miles. But the wayyy harder question is why even have the urge to do such a thing, and spend decades building that vision when something 90% as good could have taken a year. Why did the powerful decide to use their resources on creating that. What was going on internally? Do you relate to that person?

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To contend with the possibility that the grounding of human experience may change drastically and quickly, I think it is fair to first dance with the notion that this is something that may have already varied throughout our history.

(I try to stick with the word experience here, rather than consciousness, as I’m not convinced that where consciousness starts or ends is really that important to what we are talking about. Some people that will come up here do not make that distinction, so that word will come up nonetheless.)

In fact, one of the core incidents that caused Jung’s fracture and departure from Freud was that the varied history of human experience (that Freud’s model only targeted the tail of) was revealed to him in a dream (yes), which he recounts in detail in his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

(i’ve shortened this by a lot)

This was the dream. I was in a house which I did not know, which had two storeys. It was ‘my house’. I found myself in the upper story.

But it occurred to me that I did not know what the lower floor looked like. When I descended the stairs, there everything was much older, and I realised that this part of the house must date from about the fifteenth or sixteenth century.

Beyond a heavy door, I discovered a stone stairway leading down into the cellar. I found myself in a beautifully vaulted room, with walls built using some layers of brick, and chips of brick in the mortar. This meant they must have dated from Roman times.

Pulling a ring found on one of the stone slabs that made up the floor, I discovered another set of steps, and descended again, into a dark cave cut into the rock. I found two human skulls, half-disintegrated. Then I awoke.

…

The dream pointed out that there were further reaches to the state of consciousness. These rooms signified its past times and passed stages.

Preceding this, a question on my mind had been on what premises is Freudian psychology founded, how did its exclusive personalism relate to general historical assumptions?

And the answer was a foundation of cultural history, a history of successive layers of consciousness. My dream offered a structural diagram of the psyche, postulating its impersonal nature. This was my first inkling of a collective a priori beneath the personal.

Now this is easy enough to dismiss as both poor evidence and a crazy conclusion. External human experience throughout those eras was much different, sure. But internal experience couldn’t have changed much. There just wasn’t the time.

In that, anatomically modern homo sapiens are up to 250,000 years old. Recorded human history is no time at all, and noticeable evolutionary changes surely require more time than that. The brain has barely changed, biologically.

Such is the case that Julian Jaynes has to face up against in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

(this is a tricky book to bring up without (a) explaining too much and boring people who already know the idea already or (b) explaining too little and freaking out people who don’t know the idea already. i think it makes more sense to lean towards path (b) and allow those people to use google as they wish)

Jaynes believes consciousness as we know it is a very recent development, almost all homo sapiens through history did not have it, and we even have records from humans who quite literally had Marc Andreessen type zero instrospection.

Bicameral meaning “two chambers”, Jaynes’ view of mind is one hemisphere issuing commands, the other obeying them, with no unified conscious space joining the two. When a novel situation demanded a decision beyond habit, one hemisphere generated the answer and the other heard it as an audible hallucinated voice, usually of a god, dead king, or chief. The voice was as perceptually real as anything in the environment, so obedience was automatic, sort of in a Watson/Skinner way. He bases this off how people speak about people and Gods in ancient texts and artworks. Words we now interpret as metaphoric, or stylistic dressing, he believes were meant literally.

Jaynes thinks this mode of experience broke down around 1200–1000 BC, tied to the Bronze Age collapse (mass migration, trade contact between cultures, and writing, which all created a need for a more distinct self-consciousness). He argues you can observe the shift by noting that The Iliad contains no genuine mental language, with every significant decision being initiated by a god. But by the time of the Odyssey (~8th century BC) you see characters that are substantially conscious. Odysseus, for example, is shown to be deceiving, scheming, and self-reflecting.

Jaynes believes the bicameral mind hung around in society in smaller doses for a while (prophets/oracles, who really were ‘hearing the Gods’ in a way most people had forgotten how to).

Do I personally believe Jaynes? No, not even close. The Gods-specific stuff to one side, to say consciousness basically didn’t exist until ancient Athens is simply too extreme a position to hold unfalsifiably.

The hemispheric rhyming with Iain McGilchrist, however, is interesting (both are also based in neuroscience rather than subjective speculation btw but no time here). And it’s unsurprising that McGilchrist’s view of Jaynes is along the lines of ‘yes it’s a little extreme, but he’s probably right to suggest the brain’s hemispheres had a different balance on how they influenced attention to the world.’ He does also, of course, commonly use the term ‘the divine’ to describe the sense of wholeness the right hemisphere seems to tap into.

And two things do hang at the back of my mind about Jaynes’ analysis. One, there actually is something weird going on with the experience of reality depicted in the artworks he brings up, to the point where I can’t dismiss it. And two, why is it always ancient Athens?

In that, I used to always wonder why so many thinkers get so obsessively drawn to classical Athens as a point in history and demand we learn lessons from it. And then it kinda happened to me so I can’t really complain.

Democracy. The examined life. The Forms. Logic, biology, ethics, and rhetoric invented more or less from scratch. The Parthenon. Tragedy and comedy as art forms. The first serious analysis of power and war. The concept of the citizen. The first great confrontation between free thought and state power. Works still performed, still argued over, still shaping how we think about justice, beauty, knowledge, and how to live. That all happened in a 150 year period in a city smaller than a mid-sized town.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche gave this period its flowers, and in his analysis claims that its achievements resulted from a rare balancing of Apollonian (form, dream, individuation, plastic art) and Dionysian (intoxication, music, dissolution of individuality) drives.

Tragedy emerges in this time because it was a form of unifying them: Dionysian content given Apollonian form. The infinite brought into a finite context. This are both heavy drives to be pulled by, so in Sophocles’ time, art was their means of making existence bearable, before a decline with Euripides and Socrates, whose rationalism (promising that knowledge can correct existence) eliminated the Dionysian element and ended tragedy.

Psychologically the basis of tragedy is one being ripped from finite existence, and having it waved in front of their face teasingly by the powers they forgot were there. It’s only logical such drama would emerge at a time that Jaynes’ claimed saw the bicameral mind break down into selfhood, but still bleed through in parts before it was totally eliminated. That’s the only scenario where one could actually perceive their own powerlessness. While to the audience this serves as useful reminder and moral, to the subject it feels nauseating.

Eric Ambler describes this well in The Mask of Dimitrios:

The situation in which a person, imagining fondly that he in charge of his own destiny, is, in fact, the sport of circumstances beyond his control, is always fascinating. It is the essential element in most good theatre from the Oedipus of Sophocles to East Lynne.

When, however, that person is oneself and one in examining the situation in retrospect, the fascination becomes a trifle morbid.

Thus, when Latimer used afterwards to look back upon those two days in Smyrna, it was not so much his ignorance of the part he was playing, but the bliss that accompanied it, that so appalled him. He had gone into the business believing his eyes to be wide open, whereas actually they had been tightly shut.

The galling part was that he had failed for so long to perceive that fact, his self-esteem had been punctured; he had been transferred without his knowledge from the role of sophisticated, impersonal weigher of facts to that of active participant in melodrama.

Rationalism treats that nausea though, hence Socrates. Also, hence, the cultural output of Athens being very short lived.

McGilchrist’s interpretation of Athens is borderline identical to Nietzsche’s. He also attributes tragedy to a period of hemispheric cooperation: newly developed left-hemisphere capacities (analysis, codification, perspective, mapping, technical method) operated in service of right-hemisphere priorities (embodiment, metaphor, depth, the sacred). He goes further and attributes classical sculpture, perspective painting, and polyphony to this same combination.

He claims the balance subsequently tipped toward left-hemisphere dominance, or what Nietzsche would call the rise of Socratic Rationalism, or what Jaynes would call the origin of consciousness.

I would put it more simply as, a beginning of a strong belief in self, and a strong belief in physical reality being primary. And a loss of the sense of the infinite.

Perhaps it was then inevitable that the figurehead for the following era of geographical spread of Hellenic rationalism would be self-branded as Alexander ‘The Great’. The individual had truly arrived. Soon after came monotheism, while helped repackage and control any doubts over whether this was a good move.

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The other outlier period that everyone seems to identify as demanding explanation is the Renaissance. This feels like a big time jump from the ancient world, like we’re just ignoring everything that happened in the mean time. Funnily enough, the Renaissance started because people decided to ignore the intervening period too, as they were intentionally trying to escape it.

Ada Palmer, on Dwarkesh:

Petrarch, who lived through the Black Death, now lives in a moment when Italy is wracked by civil war and foreign mercenary troops are raiding and pillaging. Italy is wracked by bandits.

He looks around him and says, “This is an age of ash and shadow. What we need is to imitate the arts of the ancients. Let’s try to figure out how the Romans did it.”

…

When you’re living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet and you read about theseancient Roman figures, as described in the lofty biographies of someone like Livy, you read them and you say, “Wow, if only our leaders would act like that.”

Well, how were they raised? Can we raise our leaders the same way? Can we make libraries filled with what young Cicero read and what young Brutus read? What did they read? They read Plato, and they read Homer. So we need these things. Can we recreate the educational environment that produced them?

Petrarch’s students and successors embrace this idea and pour money into traveling across the Alps to look for manuscripts, traveling to Constantinople to purchase manuscripts from the wealthier East where books are common, and bringing them back to assemble these libraries. Then they raise tutors like Marsilio Ficino, who can know Greek and Latin and surround the young princes and princesses of Europe with these values in the hopes that they will act like Brutus and not like Lord Montague.

And so a key step in the Renaissance beginning was a return to classical Athens. Humanist scholars intentionally searched monastery, cathedral, and private libraries for neglected manuscripts. People learned Greek and produced new Latin translations directly from Greek originals. This allowed them to correct older translations and access authors such as Plato, Homer, and Plutarch more fully.

What Renaissance artists did was find ways to show those ideas in ways that modern eyes could take in. The ancient Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, for example, which was translated by Poliziano (Greek speaker within Medici circle), describes Aphrodite being carried across the sea by wind, arriving at Cyprus and being received and clothed by divine attendants. A narrative directly translated into Botticelli’s painting of the Birth of Venus.

That’s a painting, but the real way to get a feel of the spirit of the era is to visit its remains now. Venice and Florence are so beautiful you sort of can’t physically stand it when you’re there, and force you to reflect negatively on the cities we’ve built since.

This carries intentional links to the ancient world too, even if Renaissance architects rarely had access to major surviving Greek temples in Greece itself. They encountered Greek architectural ideas mainly through Roman adaptations of Greek columns and temple forms, and ancient buildings still standing in Italy. For example, the Villa Rotonda combines temple-front porticoes with a central domed hall, recalling Roman temple architecture and the Pantheon. So the new architecture carried a sense of the infinite, and stirs something in you when you see it, because it’s directly lifting the design from a time where that sense was primary.

(this should go without saying, but i’m not claiming there was no global intellectual progress in the mean time. for example, the output of the Islamic Golden Age, and Tang and Song dynasties seem comparable, but (i) i know less about them and (ii) it still stands that the european route was direct from athens to florence)

And so that sense returns too, and we have another short yet extraordinary period of cultural production. But what’s strange is that progress again leads to empowered individuals, and empowered individuals leads to finite beliefs, which end up closing the loop on itself.

In Nietzsche’s later work, he viewed the Renaissance as a resurgence of pagan, this-worldly, aristocratic values within Christian Europe; it approached a revaluation of Christian morality from within, only to be cut off by the Reformation, which restored ascetic values.

And similar to how Jaynes’ saw classical Athens accelerate itself into its own downfall, McGilchrist viewed life after the Renaissance with a corresponding decline into the formalism and bureaucratic rationality of the Enlightenment.

What’s curious though is the purpose it all served. Europe was ill and stagnating. Life was technically better than the ancient world but the experience of being alive felt worse. As if the world was disenchanted. Before the Renaissance re-enchants it. Henceforth, rational progress has the fuel to continue.

The more technological progress we make, the more life changes, and the quicker it changes. So if the human drama is one where we are destined to oscillate between modes of attention, each counterbalancing the other when most in need of it, perhaps it would be likely for these oscillations to be speed up over time too. What used to be a millenium was now a century. Today, we’re speeding through a century in under a decade.

So now if there are periods where things get a bit too rational, too abstract, too serious, and life is basically kinda depressing, the countercultural moment swoops in and is over a lot quicker. McGilchrist tags romanticism of the 19th century as a right-hemisphere coded reaction to the enlightenment. Before academicism takes over again, and then you get Belle Epoque as the 20th century draws near. Once we get there, we see the roaring 20s, and then 60s and 70s as reactions to a culture driven, by science, to our near extinction.

Being out of the loop makes it hard to understand what being in the loop feels like. Art Nouveau and Art Deco buildings now make me stop in my tracks. Especially in parts of Prague, Brussels or even London, where they are just casually there, and are 100x more detailed and beautiful than anything modern on the same street. You ask yourself if they knew something we don’t know now, and I think yeah … they probably did. They had a sense of something greater that our current culture has found a way to suppress. That world was more enchanted, and I think I mean that literally. The experience of being a person felt more magical, which might be a bigger deal than GDP per capita or life expectancy.

Obviously what I’m suggesting is that we are in a time of over-rationality and lack of cosmic wonder, that internal experience is nowhere near as fixed as we think it is, and that finding a way back would be advantageous. But beyond just saying those words, sometimes you really grok it, and it’s just a massive shame more than anything else. The lives that are being lost (figuratively, and I suppose literally) to the delusion of this being all there is are grim to think about.

The dominant emotional experience of adolescents is anxiety. Of course it will always be a time of insecurity, but it’s also meant to be a time of adventure. That’s what helps make the anxiety stop. But subjective observation only, that anxiety dominance is now going way beyond teenage years. I’m lucky enough to live in probably the best city in the world in my twenties, and it happens strangely often when I speak to people my age here, (it’s hard not to sound like a dick saying this) but a lot of people seem to barely be alive. They don’t really do anything, or get excited by things, or get moved by stuff. The cliche is to focus on solid job, save everything to buy the expensive house, save everything again to spend it all on the expensive wedding. And I do understand the game is the game. But if you also going to be extremely stressed and tired the whole time, I don’t really get why you’re playing it. It’s an extreme belief in narrative, and it all feels so disenchanted.

Mainstream analysis then says screens are responsible for the depression and anxiety, but I’m not being funny man, if you have 8 hours of screen time spent on empty slop, you just cannot have much desire within you in the first place. The screen just happens to be there as an efficient to past the time as you zone out for the rest of your life. I guess it’s better than alcohol, or email.

This state of disenchantment interacts with AI improvement in strange ways, and makes it quite jarring to think how quick this could all change. It just doesn’t feel like an era where magic things happen. One of the best policy proposals I’ve heard in years was the idea that new data centres should be designed as monuments. Why would they look like grey suburban office blocks, when they could look like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? But that won’t happen. Because we invented approval boards. Nice.

That’s where we are. The question, which I’m hoping justifies this essay existing to this point, is what happens next?

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final part 5 soon. full abridged version already available here.