> On 18 Jan 2019, at 12:59 pm, Gunnar Swanson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> On Jan 17, 2019, at 6:00 PM, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> one of my favourite speculations on the subject see:
>>
>> Jaynes J. The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston, MA; Houghton Mifflin 1976
>
>
> David,
>
> I loved it when I read it but that was when the book was new. I was frustrated at the time because it’s so broad and eclectic and I couldn’t find people who knew a lot about any of the fields it touched on who had read the book so I didn’t have any way of assessing whether his speculations held water. I suspect that little that was written about, say, brain science forty years ago is without strange mistakes and/or gaps today. Have you read it in recent years?
Gunnar,
Sorry for taking so long to reply. Heat and stuff!
Yes, I returned to it twice. Once in the 1980s and more recently in the 2000s. If I do a new edition of my work on semiotics, I’ll go back a third time. As I recall, the speculation on neurology was just that. It got caught up in the fashionable preoccupation with right/left brain. That never struck me as worth following. Like most speculation on the locus of particular mental functions it seemed doomed for philosophical reasons. But what struck me as valuable and important, and still does, were his speculations on the origins of lying: the idea that people could develop an ‘inner’ life to cope with the difference between what they had experienced before an invasion by a different culture, and what they ‘shared’ with the invaders to stay alive.
At the same time as I ‘discovered’ Jaynes speculations, I also read Frances Yates’ Art of Memory. What intrigued me about both was the capacity of people to invent useful and quite elaborate mental processes that could be refined and developed into art forms and practical tools of reasoning. This is, of course, something we continue to do today.
One of my colleagues, Elizabeth Orna, is working on a book on this subject as it relates to information design. I’m not sure when it will be published but could be worth looking out for. The prepublication title I saw was: 'The long road to the
conscious mind: A short guide for the information professional’
What fascinates me is the interaction between people, externalised instruments of communication, reasoning and imagination, and our internalised ways of reflecting on these and manipulating them. At the heart of these activities is a kind of lying, making one thing stand for another and seeing the consequences that flow from this.
As Umberto Eco observes
[Semiotics]…is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. (Eco, 1976).
I gave an overview the consequences of this in one of my papers:
https://communication.org.au/inside-communication-research
These ideas are well worth exploring much further, with or without science or neurology.
David
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