[MD] Pirsig and Jaynes in Bo's Meta-blender

[Matt Kundert]

Krimel said smartly:
Language was the primary means of extending intellectual 
patterns in time for something like 150,000 years. ...

It's like you have Pirsig and Julian Jaynes confused in your 
head. Jaynes argued that consciousness or self awareness 
began in the time you keep harping on. He made this 
argument in the late '70 and almost no one but starry eyed 
seekers have taken it seriously. You have converted an 
interesting but dubious idea into something profoundly 
goofy.

Homeric times seem striking because the work ascribed 
to him, like the Torah, spans the gap between oral 
traditions and writing. ...

... It is an example of technology enabling profound 
lifestyle changes, nothing more.

Matt:
Have I mentioned this recently?  I feel like I have--

Everything Krimel says above scans exactly right to me, 
and part of the confusion of Pirsig and Jaynes might be 
because of that Turner letter, but what I always 
mention in this regard is a paper by Dennett, the 
arch-demystifier of the mind, delivered at a conference 
on Jaynes some years ago (collected in Brainchildren), 
where he says that Jaynes points to an important 
problem-area we need to spend time on, though his 
positing of rapid biological evolution to account for his 
theory has been proven wrong.

I might not so quickly dismiss certain claims about 
"consciousness or self-awareness" beginning, Krimel, 
but they do have to clarified in very precise ways to fit 
with the Darwinian paradigm.  Dennett mentions that 
what we would need is work on the "software" side of 
humanity (as opposed to the biological hardware) to 
solve the "mystery" of consciousness, and I find it 
notable that Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy 
suggests that Jaynes' positing of rapid biological 
change isn't even needed if one simply accounts for 
the shift between an oral culture to the rise of literacy.  
The "bicameral mind" isn't exactly bullshit speculation, 
but rather a metaphor for trying to understand how an 
oral culture would perceive itself (along with 
interpreting evidence we know about these cultures, 
including notions of gods and such).

Matt
 		 	   		  
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