Monday, June 05, 2006
From One Thought To One Hundred Megatons, Pt One
In our previous chapter, The Matrix - Is All In Our Heads?, we pointed out that the Matrix is everything that there is, and hinted delicately at exploring the subject of consciousness as a subset of how Matrix-stuff manifests itself in everyday life.
We'll get there eventually, but first, let us jump into the Wayback Machine and return to a scene from Yesteryear (roughly 3,000 years ago):
There's a very old Greek tale of a pretty young thing, named Helen of Troy, whose beauty was said to have "launched a thousand ships." That's just a poetic metaphor, of course, because in actuality, it was the sailors on board those ships that launched them; rather, Helen's beauty can be taken in this instance to mean the 'root cause' of the launching of those ships, and the subsequent utter destruction of an entire city, in this manner: Helen was the wife of a rich man of Greece, a certain Menelaus of Sparta. She was abducted from her home (some say she was a slut and went willingly) by Paris, a young man-about-the-Med from Ilium across the sea, and whisked away by Paris to far Troy, Paris' home town in Ilium (modern-day Turkey).
The hubby Menelaus is enraged, of course, and after a lot of running around Greece, he musters up support from all the city-states therein, and off they go in their thousand ships to besiege the city of Troy. Lots of fighting ensues, people die, Odysseus gets lost, and blind Homer gets to write the whole thing up and become the toast of a thousand fireside tall-tale-tellings.
See that? From 'root cause' (girl is accidently born a raving beauty), we leapfrog all the way to total annihilation of an entire city, including its thousands and thousands of men, women, and children. Not to mention those thousand ships getting launched.
So what the hell does this have to do with consciousness? you righteously demand. Well, consider this: somewhere, somehow, sombody (Paris) had to have a "thought," presumably along the lines of, "This girl is so outrageously beautiful that I must add her to my harem, or make her my wife," or whatever. We are assuming, of course, that there really was a "thought," and that this was not just some sort of automaton reflex, "Me see, me grab." Also, consider this: if any of these cats had actually sat down and "thought" about the situation, they could have avoided the needless deaths of thousands of innocents, and Menelaus might have gotten his wife back. In any case, Paris, no role model of self-control, had a history of abducting women, then abandoning them.
Actually, it is exactly due to a lack of truly conscious "thinking" that what happened, happened. In his book, The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes cogently argues that in fact this impulse to grab the babe and run was not "conscious," and that the mentality of all humans of that prehistoric era was "unconscious," or at best, pre-conscious - automaton-like, in other words. His argument is based in part on his deconstruction of the text of Homer's tale of the Iliad, as compared to Homer's Odyssey. Arguments about the actual authorship of these two tales aside, he argues that the two texts display a starkly different use of the personal pronoun, indicating a marked degree in the self-awareness of the two narratives and the characters therein.
Further, Jaynes argues that our hero, Paris of the Iliad, was listening to the right lobe of his bicameral brain, which is visual, irrational and bossy at the same time. The left lobe, conversly, is good at puzzles and organization, so the right brain issues the orders and the left figures out how to accomplish the deed, and off we go, stealing what isn't ours and starting wars. By way of illustration, Jaynes postulates that the pre-conscious ancients did hear their gods speaking to them. Indeed, Jaynes agrees, their gods were manifestations of the right lobe; the right brain "spoke to" (bossed) the left (Jaynes also argues that this is the origin of all the gods). This was all well and good in a civilization such as the one the Egyptian pharohs enjoyed for millenia, with the pharoh standing in for the right lobe, and almost no sufficiently organized and opposing armies to bother them, but under pressure from invading barbarian hordes (the Ionians, the Dorians, Macedonians, and more) the Greeks were forced to become more organized, more responsive to outside threats, more mentally nimble, or die.
This rapid and brutal series of invasions drove a correspondingly rapid brain evolution in the Greeks; we now know that the brain does indeed change it's neural pathways in response to physical damage to the brain, as well as in reaction to brutal learning curves. The survival benefit of self-awareness (consciousness) is the ability to "see ahead," or visualize the future, and to plan correspondingly.
To Jaynes, the Greek civilization of roughly 2000 to 600 BCE marks the breakdown in bicameralism with the fusion of left/right brain thinking. This period also, and not co-incidentally, culminates in the the so-called Classical era of Greek civilization: it is the age of Plato, Aristotle, Eurypides, Pythagoras, et al. There was, literally, a mental explosion of ideas of every sort, from architecture to civics to mechanics to nuclear physics, and virtually unparalled in human history.
Self-awareness (consciousness) in a piece of Matrix-meat had come into its own.
Next up: Consciousness - Innate or Emergent?
# posted by G. Randy Primm @ 2:22 AM 
