5

Auditory Hallucinations in Nonverbal {Severely Crippled Persons}

John Hamilton

141-166

"One of the interested staff was ... [a certain woman]. At a time when I was struggling to understand the residents, she was {already} communicating with them regularly. ... Her method was rapid and effective, and it was by following her example that I carried out the subsequent interviews with the residents in this study."

"The first step was to identify the "yes" and "no" signals used by each resident. These wre physical responses such as tongue, lip, or

hand movements.

{The referred-to "hand movements" would be by persons incapable of controlling the hands sufficiently well to do conventional sign-language, but capable of making a jerk in a hand of theirs.}

I then asked questions which could be answered with either "yes" or "no" responses, beginning with general categories and progressing to specific details. ... Thus I proceeded in a more[-]or[-]less systematic search for the ideas which they were trying to express. When they did not understand the question ..., they expressed their uncertainty by withholding "yes" or "no" responses altogether."

"The visible ... facial expressions ...

{such as, a resident's frowning at an ambiguously-phrased quaery}

and mannerisms served as corrective guides, making it possible to proceed rapidly, with ... modifications, until acceptable verbal reflections of the residents' thoughts were reached."

"The "voices" ... of the residents sometimes occurred in public and were accompanied by ... vocalizing, preoccuppied gazing in a fixed direction, rigidity, and a complete loss of attention to the surroundings."

"The most commonly reported experiences included the following :

The voice is heard frequently, usually on a daily basis. The experience is clearly an auditory one, ... an actual sound heard as if spoken by another in understandable and complete sentences. The direction of the voice has a specific localization from the outside -- from above and in most cases, from the left. The voice sounds as if it is a relative, living or dead, who has played an important part in the resident's life. It serves as an authoritarian conscience by telling the resident what to do, how to think and what to feel, and what is right and wrong. During periods of change ..., it comes more frequently and for longer periods of time, taking charge of new situations by offering instruction and guidance. There is compelling need to follow the dictates of the voice, not only because it is usually seen as right but also because disobedience brings sharp criticism ... . The voice is perceived as being the highest authority; ... it is thought to be the voice of God."

"Several current publications have emphasized the validity and importance of intuition and how, if accessed, intuition can give important directions and valid insights. ...

Within us ... may be an awareness of situations, long before we become consciously aware of them.

{There may be spirit-guides, guiding our thoughts from within them, guiding on the basis of foreknowledge of relevant information.}

Yet we may be able to access this valuable source of information by paying attention to our hunches, feelings, and intuitions."

{Because such spirit-guides manipulate and control of hunches, feelings, and intuitions, therefore these hunches, feelings, and intuitions may be accurate and reliable."

p. 163

"Gavin de Becker wrote The Gift of Fear, in which he interviewed case after case of survivors of dangerous ... situations, in which there had been signs and internal messages

p. 164

all along that had not been consciously attended to. He also interviewed cases where ... tragedies had been avoided by recognizing and acting on these intuitions. ...

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Blink ... supporting the thesis that we have an awareness of events and situationsjust below the surface of awareness which we can learn to access by focusing on, paying more attention to, and trusting our instincts, feelings, and intuitions. Furthermore, these signals come in an instant, not after prolonged thinking and processing, in the blink of an eye. Paying attention to these initial inuitions can help us, not just in avoiding danger, but in making wise decisions about most anything ... . He feels it ... is a source of knowledge ... about which we may be consciously unaware of except at a{n} intuitive level."

"it is not uncommon for {young} children to hear voices ... . Yet there are even some quite normal adults ... who also hear auditory voices."

6

Language and Consciousness

John Limber

169-202

p. 170

"When OC was published, critics had a field day -- everyone could find

a ... conjecture that they {he or she} disagreed with. ...

{Most conjectures, in general, indeed do have within them some vitiating fallacy.}

p. 171

My own research had shown that three-year-old children,

apparently unlike {WRONG! : read "praecisely alike unto} the characters in Jaynes ancient texts,

{FALSE! All the antient texts examined by Jaynes (such as, the Iliad, the Akkadian and As^s^urian litteratures, etc etc), do indeed employ "mental state verbs like think" -- but this conspicuous fact is deliberately (and conveniently for his hypothesis) slyly ignored by the praevaricating Jaynes.}

used those mental state verbs like think."

"Even today, people seem to think they have refuted OC by demonstrating that animals and infants have sensation, perception, memory, or awareness of contingencies.

{In all reality, they have indeed utterly refuted Jaynes's irresponsible and reactionary hypothesis by means of this irrefragable demonstration.}

Those {read "These"} complaints can safely be ignored.

{But how can they be rationally ignored when the standard definition (in every language and in every culture which hath ever existed!) of /consciousness/ is the cognitive faculty comprising these very mental qualities.}

These phenomena {read "personal experiences", not "phenomena"}, widespread across the animal kingdom, are fundamental properties of organisms ... ."

{Inasmuch as the propre definition of /organism/ is 'anything displaying organization (such as, machines)', it is a fallacy to ascribe sensation to "organisms". Instead, sensation is a mental property peculiar to consciousness.}

"Jaynes proposed that ... changes in language use ... transformed ... imagination ... creating autobiographical memories."

{Memories have always been praesent in membres of all animal species, and animals have always used such memories to instruct other animals.}

"it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems ..., but who were not conscious at all."

{What Jaynes actually is meaning to assert by this apocopated mode of expression, is that not the persons themselves, but rather deities residing within such persons, were instead doing the thinking. This is somewhat similar to that which is occurring in praesent-day while-mortal-body's-owner-be-unconscious possession-and-control-of-mortal's-body-by-deity temporary (for a few minutes or a few hours) caerimonial music-and-chant-enabled rites conducted in West Africa and throughout the West-African imported-as-slaves (Yoruba, Fo,n, etc) diaspora in Latin America.}

"it seems very implausible that we think in a specific language, such as English ... . ...

{Implausible? It is no more implausible that we think in a specific language than that we speak in a specific language. Here, Jaynes is spouting nonsense even more absurd than his usual!}

"Perhaps the most contentious aspect of J[aynesian]-con[sciousness] is his argument that

human consciousness is only a few thousand years old.

{This chronology is comparable with Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision claim that certain geological calamities happened to the Earth only a few thousand, instead of many millions, of years ago, the latter understanding being that discovered by geological science.}

Even supporters of other elements of J-con balked at the timing."

"Human proto-language" before 150,000 years ago.

"Expanding vocabulary" about 50,000 years ago.

"Personal identity" at least 40,000 years ago.

{But all animals have a strong sense of personal identity; therefore are eager to defend to defend their bodies, their property, etc etc. On any reasonable basis, this sense of personal identity must be at least hundreds of millions of years old on this planet.}

the famous "Know thyself" ... . This again was something inconceivable to Homeric heroes."

{Because verb /gno-thi/ (imperative form of) 'know' and the pronoun /se-auton/ 'oneself' was already in the vocabulary, it was indeed linguistically "conceivable"; however, those heroes are described in the Iliad (and likewise heroes in all other such epic litterature, of any nationality, whether antient or modern) as so very inflated with self-pride and arrogance as to be unwilling to examine their own doings critically. How Julian Jaynes can describe such arrogant, surly, easily-enraged aristocrats (thus depicted in the Iliad) as allegedly "unconscious", is hardly explicable -- is he seeking, at any cost to his logic, to excuse all ill-mannered behavior on the part of pampered hereditary nobilities?}

p. 187

(quoting from Jaynes, Origin of Consciousness, 1976, pp. 39, 41) "one does one's thinking before one knows what one is to think about. ... .

p. 188

the actual process of thinking ... is not conscious at all ... only ... its end result ... consciously perceived."

{This is only slightly truish; but for all practical purposes, while one is thinking one is as conscious as one is capable of being. Cogitation can hardly be performed while one is wholly unconscious (as Jaynes would seem to be rather extravagantly implying).}

7

The Self as Interiorized Social Relations

Brian J. McVeigh

203-232

"offered in support of Julian Jaynes's theory that what we experience as our own individual "introcosms" are culturally-constructed analogs of the "ouside" world :

the self, as an introspectable entity, develops from "interiorized social relations." My thinking is also inspired by G. H. Mead's notion of "participation in the other," which "requires the appearance of the other with the self, the reaching of self-consciousness through the other." ...

{True. This fact, though entirely self-evident (and is a point in metaphysics which I have independently noted), hath usually been ignored in standard conventional writings on psychology, which have usually been either wildly sensationalist or banally trivial.} {The primordial (before any social factors have entred) nature of self is simply a set of capacities -- capacity for sensation, capacity for perception, etc -- not capable of being introspected. Determined attempt (abetted, in every result-achieving case, with certain drugs) at introspection of this set of capacities can, at best, induce a profound trance -- samadhi.}

Four premises ... guide my reasoning :

(1) there are no essentialist, indissoluble selves;

{According to Bauddha metaphysics, although the notion of selfhood is treated as an illusion, the bonds connecting the components (skandha-s) of the self are considered dissoluble only under extremely peculiar circumstances, the set of which circumstances is so arduous of attainment, and yet so necessary, as to praesent an essentialist appearance.}

(2) society does not merely "influence" but constructs selves;

(3) as social constructions, selves were invented sometime in history, and

(4) cross-cultural psychological parameters configure mental models of agency."

[Leenhardt 1979, p. 61] "psychic ... aspect of man's actions are events in nature. The Canaque sees them as outside of himself, as externalized. He handles his existence similarly: he places it in an object -- a yam ... -- ... identifying himself with it."

{The kumara ('yam/sweetpotato') is the earthly body of Maori god Rongo; and the kumara brought in the legendary canoe Horo-uta came from "the cliff of Hawa-iki" (TPK, p. 116), while the basket for carrying it came from (TPK, p. 121) Mata-te-ra ('face the sun'), which is also known "as a source of the kumara" (TPK, p. 145, n. 261); another source of kumara being (MM&L, s.v. "Matatera and Waerota", p. 113b) Waero-ta (NgD /waero/ 'tail' + M-PCD /ta/ 'oblique; to dash down'). This oblique attachment to the sun might be the Tukano “penis of the sun” (LISA, pp. 93-4 -- LEWWh, cap. 10, n. 2); cf. also, for the San in the Kalahari, "the tunnel to the Sun and because it appears to come from low down they call it a penis" (AAH"XBSP") : could this -- in view of how the Mithras Liturgy hath specified it as "the origin of the ministering wind (A&CU -- AAH"SP") -- be a wind-tunnel wherethrough the possessing-spirit is hurtled?}

8

A Knowing Noos and a Slippery Psyche

Scott Greer

233-263

throughout ... culture; searching ancient literature and art ... ."

{He was rummaging about in the detritus of degenerated civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean, already some five millennia [reckoned since the earliest stone temple-architecture in neolithic Anatolia] into increasingly decrepit urbane artificiality, where oppressive hereditary nobilities had long-since gutted the remains of once-upon-a-time pristine innocency. "Judaic and Egyptian history ... was a ... dogmatic and manipulative relationship to power and beings. ... These cultures and the degenerated myths ... are imposed on a land that has no real connection to them." (MK, Bk 1, p. 23)}

p. 244 "consciousness developed through the process of generating and fitting metaphors to objects and events." (Jaynes 1976)

{More actually this ("generating and fitting metaphors") is the the relatively recent historic process of development of ornamental litterary stylistics (such as, in Norse kennings); but not "consciousness" (which is instead a matter of detection of sensation-and-perception, and in no way related to such artificial litterary devices, which devices did not reach their full development in Europe until late mediaeval and Renaissance epochs and in Baroque and Rococco styles).}

p. 244

"Jaynes offers two ... slightly different definitions of consciousness. The first ... defines it as [Jaynes 1986a] "an analog 'I' narratizing in a mind-space.""

p. 245

"Jaynes other, later definition of consciousness ... : [Jaynes 1988] consciousness is "based on metaphor, developed through language, and is an operator, not a thing.""

"in Aristotle's ... writings, psyche^ implies ... the actualizing of a body's potential for activity. ...

{The signification of /psukhe/ is likewise bodily in Neo-Platonic metaphysics; but there it is the term for that postmortem subtle body which can ascend only as far as the moon, where it must remain until the noos is ready to incarnate again : then it must accompany the noos in a return-trip to the planet Earth, so that the pair can together entre the embryo wherein they are to be reborn.}

Psyche^, according to Green and Groff [2003], ironically did not have any psychological connotations, as we would understand them today."