Humans
PUBLISHED
Human consciousness remains a big, weird, sometimes beautiful and often terrifying, unfathomable mystery.
As much as we have created models of how it works - making genuine progress on this - we have not solved the hard problem of consciousness: how physical processes in the brain create subjective, conscious experiences.
Assuming, of course, that it does.
Fear not, we won't to tackle that problem today. Instead, we're looking at one of the more "out there" ideas on how our current human-style consciousness emerged.
The most controversial part of this idea? It proposes that consciousness emerged only around 4,000 years ago, long after humans had evolved, created art and civilization, and had been using language.
Consciousness as a "mind-space"
The idea comes from American psychologist Julian Jaynes writing in the 1970s. Consciousness is often used to refer to the inner experience of an external world, which we can perfectly well extend to other creatures. For example, it doesn't take much to imagine other animals having this experience, too (maybe think about a pug, as a treat).
But Jaynes was concerned with a very specific type of human consciousness. This focused on the introspective, self-reflective consciousness.
In his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (which may ring bells with the fans of both consciousness and Westworld), Jaynes argues that this type of consciousness is the result of language and culture, and so by its very nature had to develop in humans after the invention of language.
In doing so, he separated consciousness from cognition, claiming that humans were capable of cognition before we became conscious in the way we think of it today.
Specifically, Jaynes argued that human consciousness arose from our ability to make metaphors and analogies.
"Metaphors of 'me' and analogous models of 'I' allow consciousness to function through introspection and self-visualization," a paper on the topic hosted by the Julian Jaynes Society explains. "According to this view, consciousness is a conceptual, metaphor-generated inner world that parallels the actual world and is intimately bound with volition and decision."
"Homo sapiens, therefore, could not experience consciousness until he developed a language sophisticated enough to produce metaphors and analogical models."
This then begs the question of when, exactly, we developed language sophisticated enough for this type of consciousness to emerge.
When did consciousness appear?
Studying the Ancient Greek epic poem the Iliad, Jaynes suggested that it contained no signs of human consciousness at all. He argued that there are no references to subjective thoughts, and that all the people act at the whims of gods rather than making their own conscious decisions.
"Some lexical oddities in the Homeric text (such as the absence of a single word translating 'consciousness', 'mind', 'soul', or even 'body') led Jaynes to formulate the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by nonconscious minds, which automatically recorded and objectively reported events, in a manner rather similar to the characters of the poem," the paper continues.
"The transition to subjective and introspective writings of the conscious mind occurred in later works, beginning with the Odyssey."
Later studies have attempted to quantify this (not everybody's favorite way of evaluating literature), with one finding that there is a significant shift in language between the two texts, with the Odyssey containing far more language describing familiar human experiences of conscious thought, such as words denoting mental planning (knowing, pondering, cunning, decision, etc).
According to Jaynes, the human mind back then was "bicameral", with the hemispheres of the brain operating more independently. He suggests that one hemisphere would "hear" the other not as themselves, but as a command from a god, ancestor, or other ruler. This would explain why in the Iliad characters perform the will of the gods, while in the Odyssey they are instead planning for themselves.
Take it with a pinch of salt
It's pretty out there, but then again so again is a lot of work on consciousness.
For what it's worth, Richard Dawkins described it as "either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius", which pretty much covers all bases. Either way, it is genuinely interesting and intriguing how different the writing of the Iliad is compared to that of the Odyssey.
"The earliest writing of men in a language that we can really comprehend, when looked at objectively, reveals a very different mentality from our own," Jaynes wrote in his 1972 book.
"And this must, I think, be accepted as true. Such instances of narratization, analog behavior, or mind-space as occasionally occur are regarded by scholars as of later authorship."
Ultimately, Jaynes suggested that consciousness as we understand it emerged around the 2nd millennium BCE. If this is correct (and again, we refer you to the Dawkins quote), it would mean that for the hundreds of thousands of years humans had some form of language, we didn't have the same kind of conscious experience that we enjoy (or despise?) today.
