Julian Jaynes Collection, 1-6


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1

Julian Jaynes : 1920-1997

25-27


p. 25 curriculum vitae

"JULIAN JAYNES WAS BORN IN WEST NEWTON, Massachusetts on February 27, 1920.

... he received his bachelor's degree in 1941 from McGill University. ...

He earned his master's degree from Yale University in 1948. ...

While at Princeton, Dr. Jaynes served as Research Psychologist,

then Lecturer with rank of Associate Professor, and

finally as a visiting Lecturer and Senior Fellow until his retirement ... ."


p. 25 demise

"On November 21, 1997, at the age of 77, Julian Jaynes died in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada ..., where he had spent summers since childhood at his family's summer home."


p. 25 his 1st published paper

"His first published paper, "The Function of the Cerebral Cortex" with W. C. Stanley, was published in the Psychological Review in 1949. It was an influential paper

relevant to the view that a primary function of the cortex was an inhibitory one."

{"Aldous Huxley (1954) was also prominent in promoting Henri Bergson’s (1896 ...) theory of the brain as a filter of memory and sensory experience" ("PsPs&BF").} {"our brain ... as an intricate kind of filter which limits and directs the mind's clairvoyant powers ... —Cyril Burt (1883-1971)". "Huxley, like Henri Bergson, Ferdinand Schiller, William James, and others before him, believed the brain functions as a filter, normally shutting out perceptions, memories, and thoughts that are not necessary for the survival and reproduction of the organism. Rather than producing consciousness, these observers believed the brain largely eliminates it, diminishing what consciousness is capable of revealing to us. As astrophysicist David Darling says in his book Soul Search, we are conscious not because of the brain, but despite it." (EJSH:"BAF")}

"PsPs&BF" = "Psychedelics, Psi And The Brain As A Filter". http://grahamhancock.com/phorum/read.php?8,985796,985796

EJSH:"BAF" = "The Brain as Filter : On Removing the Stuffing from the Keyhole". EXPLORE : J OF SCIENCE & HEALING 8.6 (Nov-Dec 2012):317-22. http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307(12)00175-9/fulltext


p. 26 at Princeton University

"James returned from England in 1964 ... . Fortunately ..., he recalled an open-ended invitation made nearly a decade earlier from classmate at Yale, Byron Campbell, to join his research group at Princeton. ...

He stayed at Princeton until his retirement in 1995 ... ."


p. 26 forced to accept an earned doctoral degree from Yale University

"In 1977 ..., the faculty of the Psychology Department at Yale took the extraordinary step of collating a set of Jaynes's ... papers, and submitted the bound set as his doctoral dissertation. Jaynes was simply told that he would be granted the doctoral degree whether he liked it or not."


p. 26 honorary doctorates

"He received honorary doctorates

from Rhode Island College in 1979 and

from Elizabethtown College in 1985."


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2

Memorial to Julian Jaynes

28-30


p. 28 is consciousness "culturally learned"? ... or "innate"?

"a man [J.J.] ... had set out to show how ... our being -- conscious interior experience -- was culturally learned during during a historical period ... rather than ... innate".

{"it matters a great deal whether we are willing to imagine that consciousness might exist in its own right and may well be more than a function of ... local historical and cultural processes." (ChR:"VI")}

ChR:"VI" = Jeffrey J. Kripal : "Visions of the Impossible". CHRONICLE REVIEW. http://www.chronicle.com/article/Embrace-the-Unexplained/145557/


p. 29 spirit-possession

"In his book Prof. Jaynes had discussed spirit-possession, the topic I chose for my dissertation when I entered Princeton University."


p. 29 details wrong

"About a decade after his book appeared, we was still wondering how it might have been written differently. Maybe he had gotten some of the details wrong.

Maybe the dating for the emergence of consciousness was off. {In his Origin of Consciousness, he had dated this emergence to some three millennia ago for humans; but if it could be demonstrated to exist as-of-now for other primates, then humans must have been fully conscious already millions of years ago.} Maybe the deception demonstrated by chimpanzees was more sophisticated than he thought. {If chimpanzees can be demonstrated to be (in an adequately sophisticated fashion) deceptive, then he would need to concede that they are at least "conscious"; for, he had agreed in his book that the "wily Odusseus" (so characterized in the Odusseia) must have been quite conscious (infra pp. 215, 235, 311).}

{"chimpanzees are capable of tactical deception" (S&Z:"VC", p. 204a).}

{"We report on systematic observations suggesting innovation for future deception by a captive male chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). ... The findings suggest that chimpanzees can represent the future behaviours of others while those others are not present, as well as take actions in the current situation towards such potential future behaviours. Importantly, the behaviour of the chimpanzee produced a future event, rather than merely prepared for an event that had been reliably re-occurring in the past." ("SIFDMCh")}

Maybe hypnosis did not have the significnce he thought it had."

S&Z:"VC" = Katie Slocombe & Klaus Zuberbu:hler :"Vocal Communication". In :- Elizabeth V. Lonsdorf; Stephen R. Ross; & Tetsuro Matsuzawa (edd.) : The Mind of the Chimpanzee : Ecological and Experimental Perspectives. Univ of Chicago Pr, 2010. pp. 192-207. https://books.google.com/books?id=UCbW-Y37Tp0C&pg=PA204&lpg=PA204&dq=

"SIFDMCh" = "Spontaneous Innovation For Future Deception In A Male Chimpanzee". PLoS One. 2012;7(5). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22590606


{Furthermore, "three species of great apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans—also know when someone holds a false belief, according to a new study published today in Science. The groundbreaking study suggests that this skill likely can be traced back to the last common ancestor of great apes and humans, and may be found in other species. “Testing the idea that nonhuman [animals] can have minds has been the Rubicon that skeptics have again and again said no nonhuman has ever, or will ever, cross,” says Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the study. “Well, back to the d.rawing board!”" ("HAOGARM")}

"HAOGARM" = "Humans Aren’t The Only Great Apes That Can ‘read Minds’" SCIENCE Magazine, Oct. 6, 2016. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/humans-aren-t-only-great-apes-can-read-minds


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3

Julian Jaynes : Maverick Theorizer

31-3


p. 31 dilettante

"Jaynes is a dilettante who ranges over many fields in which he lacks expertise, picking and choosing facts that can be woven into his wooly hypothesis.

Some are calling him the Velikovsky of the psychological world. Velikovsky's theories, in Worlds in Collision ..., are also wild ... ." x


p. 32 unable to fit in

"Until the ... publication of his book, Jaynes was best known at Princeton as the master of Wilson College, the home of outcasts ... who do not fit in ... ."


p. 32 affront to common sense

"Jaynes conclusions are an affront to common sense ..., but

so are most of the theories of modern physics.

{J.J., however, is in sharp disagreement against the psychological metaphysics (of universal consciousness) propounded (as he wrote, infra p. 153, "unfortunately ... in quantum physics") by metaphysicist-logicians (e.g., Alfred North Whitehead, vide infra pp. 38, 174).}


p. 32 are communications from divinities confined to a single hemisphaere of the brain? {Of course not! And J.J. and his fanatic followers are fools for conjecturing so!}

"The neurological model {read : "J.J.'s personal fantasy of a model"} of the bicameral mind could be cast into doubt if we found that schizophrenic hallucinations did not have their source {?!} in the right temporal or parietal lobe."

{Language-based communication from divinities-and-deities would need to be processed in, and therefore would arrive in, the sinistral-cerebral hemisphaire; whereas, non-language-based communication from divinities-and-deities would need to be processed in, and therefore would arrive in, the dextral-cerebral hemisphaire. (Non-language-based communication would include both visions and intuitions.)}


{What could the term \their source\ mean here? The closest possibility to anything which might be given the label "source" in the context of reception of a communication issuing from some deity (deputed to do so by authorization from internetworked sets of committees of deites) abiding in a non-material, subtle plane-of-existence, would needs be a portal-of-communicatory-ingress located within, or relative to, the mortal recipient's material brain or fraction thereof. The code-sequence of vibratory signals opening (and, perhaps in reverse-sequence, closing) such portal would be specified in terms of those familiar to the series of dimethyltryptamine-manipulating plant-spirits responsible to unlocking and re-locking such portal. This sequence of plant-spirits would needs be arranged in the order of subplanes (of the mental plane, or whatever) involved. The communication itself would tend to concern actions (by the particular mortal, or by whatever spirit-guide of the pertinent category for that mortal) whether bodily (such as in yoga), meditational, altar-prayerwork with consecrated substances, or whatever, as might be useful to the elemental spirit of the particular Earth-core's current of molten magma as might generate the appropriate geomagnetic effects on atmosphairic conditions to result in local weather-conditions useful to involved animal-controlling spirits, etc etc. [written 20 June 2017]}


p. 33 unlikely to be right

"Jaynes is unlikely to be right ... .

We can depend on scholars of discrete disciplines to conduct postmortems on the anatomy of his errors. ...

This man is a dilettante.

He delights in playing with ideas. Thinking, especially creative thinking ..., involves overstepping the facts." {We would say, instead, that he is understepping the facts, in denial as he is of any possibility of the expansion of consciousness broadly so as to include in its scope all and everything.}

{The notions which he is promoting are, however, narrowly restrictive (denying any consciousness whatsoever to animals!!) instead of broadly capacious : witness the contrast between [on the one hand] Jaynes's restrictive notion; and [on the other hand] the expansiveness of universal conscious praesent in everything, promoted by Whitehead and similar philosophers).}


p. 33 exaggerating for rhetoric (in such circumstances as this, attracting readership by entertaining with picturesque language) effect?

"And real thought, like art, involves exaggeration :

{Now, it may be possible that Julian Jaynes was intentionally exaggerating when he alleged that "bicameral minds" could obey an auditory command (from some divinity) -- without being conscious enough to hear anything, nor conscious enough to think to do anything. But, he would seem never to have admitted afterwards to anyone that he was deliberately exaggerating when he wrote this sort of entertaining poppycock. And, why would he never admit to this?}

"The road of excess excess leads to the palace of wisdom" (Blake)."



{Now, as for the book Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom, by Jeffrey J. Kripal : "A theme that runs through his writing is that the study of comparative religion almost necessarily results--in both the teacher and the students--in a kind of enlightenment about the nature of religion itself" ("MWWM").}

"MWWM" = "The Mystic as Writer, Writer as Mystic". http://tobyjohnson.com/review-kripal-roads-of-excess.html


p. 33 "metaphor"? "poetry"?

"Mind, as Jaynes points out, is metaphor,

{A chain of metaphors, when used as method of supposedly logically valid deduction generally, can instead lead wildly astray -- as it hath in J.J.'s case.

and thinking is inseparable from poetry."

{Among philosophies, only the dead and sterile system of materialism hath sought to promote itself via poe:sy (e.g., that written by Lucretius, De Rerum Natura). That is is because the restrictions of poe:sy (restrictive meter, restrictive rhyme, restrictive alliteration) lead to a self-imposed restriction from any cogent understanding, as not only to be worthless; but slso, by its hypnotic nature, tricking dimwitted dolts into engaging in social repressiveness. [written 20 June 2017]}


p. 33 "contemplate itself"?

"And, as Aristotle noted, the mind that can contemplate itself is nearly divine." {Not quite! Instead, do seek to be aware of the aspect of divinity which, by divine grace, hath been revealed through the hagioi ('saints') in order we might glory in the mal>akiym ('angels').}

{The extreme narcissist may attempt supposed "self-contemplation", to imagining egotism to be "divine" is a self-deceiving trick opposed to true authenticity. A more beneficial effort would be to contemplate the limitless potential of communism (communion of the saints), and of the mysterium tremendum (in the Unknowable Alien).}


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4

Routes of Science

37-46


p. 38 attempted unification of science

"following Mach's attempt to unify all science about "sensations," ... something called The Encyclopedia for the Unity of Science was first appearing, bluebook by bluebook from {the University of} Chicago."


p. 42 sourcebooks in psychology

"Let us first take the masterful new Source Book in the History of Psychology by Hernnstein and Boring.

[fn. 2 : Richard J. Hernnstein & Edwin G. Boring (edd.) : A Source Book in the History of Psychology. Cambridge (MA) : Harvard Univ Pr, 1955.]

There have been two previous sourcebooks, a mentalistic one by Rand in 1912, and

a much more valuable and parapposite one by Dennis in 1942."


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5

Edwin Garringues Boring

47-65


p. 47 his dream of "false awakening"

"In 1966, he awoke one night in an absolute darkness, stumbled out of bed onto some huge plain ..., when suddenly the place he had stumbled to became embathed in search lights and the whole scene turned into a carnival which somehow made him the scene of attention, at which point he awoke again, realizing that his previous awakening had been a dream, and that he was an old man ...

dying of a progressive unhealable breaking of his bones."

{This is to be treated by ingestation of magnesium-compounds. It is caused by an excess of calcium-compounds over magnesium-compounds in one's diet.}


pp. 48-9 college and graduate-school

p. 48

"In 1904, he went to Cornell ... into the study of electrical engineering. Graduating four years later with his M.[aster of]E.[ngineering degree], ... he returned to Cornell in 1909 to study physical geography".


"Madison Bentley ... encouraged Boring to enter psychology in general, and comparative psychology in particular. ... Lloyd Morgan's program of reasoning by analogy from our own introspection ... might be on the basis of similarily in ... patterns (what Romanes had earlier called ejective knowledge) had long been (and still is) unrealized by research. ...

p. 49

And all this while he was partly earning his living by preaching in various country churches around Ithaca[, NY,] ... as well as working on his thesis topic given him by Titchener."


pp. 52-3 his partial execution of a plan for a trilogy of histories of psychology

p. 52

"after finishing the first volume in 1929, he ... gave it the title of trilogy, A History of Experimental Psychology. It title should have been Men and Systems in Modern Psychology. ... It appeared the same year as Gardner Murphy's Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology. ... Murphy's book is a more complete ... critical discussion of trends; Boring's a more didactic person-focus journey through the rise of scientific psychology ... . Indeed, when Titchener died in 1927 ..., thereafter the book moved to its final shape with ... more ... breadth."


"he did complete the second volume, wqorking on it between 1935 and 1942. This is his

p. 53

Sensation and Perception in the History of Experiemental Psychology, which treates its material by topic and problem instead of by men and schools."


"to complete the grand trilogy ... The [third] volume was to be


on feeling, emotion, memory, attention, affection, and thought in the in the history of experimental psychology. But the task would ... have been ... beyond his abilities. ... The trilogy was never completed."

{Much more recently, in the 21st century, Antonio Damasio has ably written a series of books (including his Descartes' Error) along these lines, emphasizing (on the basis of more recent developements in experimental psychology) the fundamental importance of emotion in the construction of memory and in the functioning of consciousness in general.}


p. 60 his ideal of a world of helping

""Would psychology could be just friends subjectively helping each other, and change all ad hominems to ad verbums!" was a familiar pivot in his conversations."


p. 61 his method of metaphoric association of topics

"understand the role of metaphor and conceit (in the Elizabethan sense) in the sub-structure of scientific theory ... ."

"resulted ... in sparkling discussion of topics in which lights and associations glanced from all sides".


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6

The Study of the History of Psychology

66-8


p. 67 oldest science

"psychology ... as a body of insights, observatios, and hypotheses, it is the oldest science in the world. ... Current work ... on emotion and intellect, ... on the problem of consciousness -- all are ... voices in discussions which have been revererating through history ... ."


p. 68 a different science is newly burgeoning each half-century

"What geology was to the early nineteenth century,

biology to the late nineteenth century, and

physics to the the first half of the twentieth century, so

psychology is very much the central major science of the latter half of the twentieth century."


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Marcel Kuijsten : The Julian Jaynes Collection. Julian Jaynes Society, Henderson (NV), 2012.

http://julianjaynes.org