a new way of thinking about time and space ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ by Rob Bryanton
--author and research scientist David Jay Brown says: "one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered".
--science fiction author Greg Bear says: "a fascinating excursion into the multiverse - clear, elegant, personal and provocative"
One of the 26 songs I attached to this project is called "Automatic". In it, I talk about the powerful idea put forth by Julian Jaynes in his groundbreaking book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". Jaynes proposed that until about 3,000 years ago, humans lived their lives with their conscious and subconscious minds fully integrated. When the subconscious developed a plan or had an intuition, humans heard this as a "voice" inside their heads, which they often interpreted to be the voices of gods or ancestors. Then something happened: the "narrator" voice of the conscious mind assumed dominance, and the subconscious mind's processes became more submerged. Still, there are a great many activities which we perform better when we can quiet our "narrator voice": driving a car, hitting a golf ball, playing a musical instrument or typing on a keyboard all go better when we can get our narrator voice to stop conducting traffic, saying "do this, now do that", and just let things flow. And yet, despite the advantages of this mode of operation, most of us have been taught to be suspicious of those moments when we stop narrating: we're told to stop daydreaming, get our minds back in the game, and so on.
Most of us are comfortable with the idea that there is some kind of duality to our consciousness. The difference between left brain/right brain approaches to processing the data coming in from our senses is well documented. And with this project, we've often talked about the "me" that is attached to the physical body, and the other parts of our awareness that are more connected outside of space and time. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's book My Stroke of Insight is amazing to me because it blends these two ideas so beautifully - is the right brain more connected to those larger patterns that are outside of our physical reality? Dr. Taylor provides a compelling personal narrative that tells us this is so.
Here again is where we get into those more metaphysical ideas: what I call "me" is much more than the collection of memories attached to my physical body, and instinct, intuition, inspiration, creativity, and the underlying processes of life itself are part of the gigantic patterns that exist outside of our physical reality. This is a dynamic system we're talking about, with each of us assuming new patterns of awareness, discarding old ones, becoming entrained and entraining others with the wave-like interactions of constructive and destructive interference that are occurring within the extra dimensions to create our observed reality. Is it possible for these patterns to exist completely separate from a physical body? Proponents of out-of-body experiences and lucid dreaming would say yes, and anyone with a sufficiently convincing supernatural story to tell will also be much more likely to accept this possibility.
Anthony Peake's work puts a tighter focus on these ideas - in his 2008 book The Daemon, he offers evidence that each of us have a left brain/physical consciousness called the Eidolon; and we each have a right brain/metaphysical awareness called the Daemon, which has the foreknowledge of what is to come and sometimes "steers" the physical body into better outcomes. In terms of Everett's Many Worlds and my approach to visualizing the dimensions, could this Daemon be an awareness operating from the sixth dimensional phase space of all possible outcomes for our universe, traveling from conception to death with each version of a unique individual as they physically navigate the possible world lines of their fifth dimensional probability space?
I had the pleasure of being interviewed on Anthony's show last month, here's a look at that video again.
In entries like Aren't There Really Eleven Dimensions and Why Only Ten, we've talked about how there are ways in which M-Theory's 11 Dimensions are functionally equivalent to the Tenth Dimension: another duality. And of course with our base ten number system, the two "one"s beside each other create another dualistic image. You'll note that for fun, I published today's entry at 11:11 am (my time) on 11/11/11.
Last entry, in Time and Music, we looked at a brief video clip of the classic Canadian rock band Lighthouse performing live in an experimental setup where different members of the band were in different cities, and the "latency" or time lag introduced by the technology of the time (1996) resulted in them hearing each other as much as 200 milliseconds out of sync with each other. The solution was that they had to somehow re-calibrate their brains, so to speak, so that their impetus to play the notes was way ahead of when they actually wanted the notes to sound. Still, as Paul Hoffert - one of the founding members of Lighthouse who participated in this experiment - remarked in that same blog entry, there are musical instruments and musical situations where musicians regularly have to adjust their playing to compensate for a certain amount of delay, or to play ahead/behind the beat to create a certain feel - musicians use phrases like "playing in the pocket" or "finding the groove" to describe the satisfying feeling of playing with other musicians when it all falls into place, and years of practice create the ability for musicians to play with a seemingly effortless flow.
"Flow" is an interesting word. In my project, I often talk about how for us time seems to flow in only one direction, but that physics places no real restriction on which direction time should happen to occur. In recent entries like The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow and The Statistical Universe, we looked at some new scientific theories that explore what it can mean if time and causality are not limited to the entropy-driven single direction that we have traditionally believed time to occupy, and my insistence that "time" is just one of the two possible directions in the fourth spatial dimension is very much a part of all this as well.
My use of the word "flow" led a friend of mind from facebook, Jacob Wennerqvist (a talented heavy metal musician from Sweden) to ask me about the word, as he was familiar with it from a different context. Here's what I wrote back to him:
Hi Jacob,
Are you familiar with "flow" in the sense that psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi uses the term? Here's an article from wikipedia:
"In an interview with Wired magazine, Csíkszentmihályi described flow as 'being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.'"
Let me pause in my letter to Jacob and expand upon this a bit. First of all, according to wikipedia, Mihaly's last name is pronounced "cheek-sent-me-high-ee". The diagram we're looking at here relates to his seminal work, 'Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience'. It shows how a high challenge level can combine with a high skill level to allow us to enter a state of "flow". To quote further from that same wikipedia article, he states that "people are most happy when they are in a state of flow— a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. The idea of flow is identical to the feeling of being in the zone or in the groove." Now let's continue with what I had said to Jacob:
When I use the word "flow" in my writing, I'm usually using it to describe the mainstream science idea that time can flow in either direction. "Flow", in this sense, means that there are logical connections between what happens in one time-unit and the next, which means that some "next possible state" outcomes in the following time-unit are very likely, some unlikely, and some impossible to get to. That idea, physicists like Sean Carroll and many others have explained, makes just as much sense no matter what direction you are observing those slices of time - forward or backward, there is still a logical progression to the "flow".
I see that you are an excellent musician, watched a few of your clips. Using the term "flow" as it applies to time and music is very apt - whether you're writing a song or improvising a lead line, there are a great many choices for "what happens next" but the choices are not limitless - if they were then your music would become random white noise.
If you were to take a recording of your music and play it backwards, it would still have logical connections within it that make sense, and if you were to play a solo over top of that backwards recording there would be many options that make sense, that go with the musical "flow" of what's created by moving in time's opposite direction.
Does this help to illuminate what I'm thinking about?
In my book and this blog, one of the central themes has been the nature of time and how our participation in that process creates the dividing line between a sea of indeterminacy and the beautiful world we see around us. The concept of "flow" as a process that allows us with practice to do this better is an important one. It points to a real tension we feel in these modern times: how can I tell when I'm "in the zone" as opposed to "just zoning out"?
My song "Automatic" is about those moments when we stop analyzing what we're doing and just go with the flow. This song also mentions Julian Jaynes, whose challenging book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind proposed that the splitting apart of our minds into a conscious "narrator" and an underlying "just being in the moment" is a recent event, perhaps from only the last few thousand years. The fact that our narrator voice gets in the way and keeps us from doing some of our most difficult activities is also what we're talking about in this song: despite the fact that we've been taught to sometimes ridicule those moments as being a bad thing because it means our conscious minds were wandering, there is really something very useful about this state of mind. That will be just as true when a musician is trying to play 200 milliseconds ahead of the beat as it is for someone trying to hit a golf ball or even someone driving a car - removing distractions and just zeroing in on the flow helps us to do these activities better.
Life, consciousness, and creativity: these are all entwined together, different aspects of the same patterns. The idea that these processes somehow engage with spatiotemporal events in a way that embraces the proven non-locality of our universe is an important key here. Last blog we talked about imagining life and consciousness as an interlocking system which is constantly changing and revising itself throughout our lives. In his insightful book "What is Life?", Erwin Schrödinger pointed out that within our universe life is a unique process which creates pockets of "negative entropy" or increasing order: and within that context, consciousness and creativity can also be described the same way.
We've talked before about Schrödinger's Cat, the thought experiment which was originally intended to show how silly it is to apply quantum thinking to the macro world, and which instead has now become a useful jumping off point for understanding Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and the multiverse landscape. A few entries ago, in Placebos and Nocebos I mentioned that I'm listening these days to an audiobook called Spontaneous Evolution, by Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman, and one of the important points they make is that our world is now starting to move away from scientific materialism (the idea that what we observe around us is all there is to reality, and that everything about our reality is logical and predictable if only we collect enough data). Instead, we're starting to move towards a more holistic paradigm, as we see more and more evidence that in order to understand how everything fits together we need to embrace that there are hidden patterns and structures that exist "outside" of space-time, and some of those patterns are fractal or chaotic rather than linear or predictable. That's true as we see the growing acceptance that our universe is only one of many, that roughly 96% of our own universe is completely invisible and undetectable, that the way our genes are expressed and even which genes are passed on to our offspring is strongly connected to our attitude and lifestyle, and that our holographic universe comes from the fifth dimension, connected together outside of fourth-dimensional space-time in ways that boggle the mind.
So. Scientific experiments are proving that life is able to use instantaneous quantum connections to function much more efficiently, and I've been insisting that seemingly "impossible" quantum effects like entanglement and tunneling are much easier to visualize when we think of them as coming from "folds" of the fourth spatial dimension through the fifth. I reached this intuitive conclusion decades ago, and we're now coming up on the three year anniversary of the launching of the tenth dimension website which has given me the opportunity to share these ideas with people from around the world. Which leads us back to the title of this entry: "Logic vs. Intuition". Which is more useful?
Recently I came across a website called "Artificial Intuition". It talks about a new approach to the quandary of how to program computers to think, and suggests that "Artificial Intelligence" (or "AI") runs into problems because it fails to understand how the human mind really functions: while logic should work for specific problem-solving within controlled parameters, intuition and inference applied to a sometimes contradictory input set better describes our day-to-day functioning. The english language is a perfect example - drawing meaning from words on a page or spoken to each other often requires us to fill in the blanks, accept contradictions, and make intuitive leaps, and this is what makes our language extremely frustrating to learn, particularly for persons not exposed to it since birth.
I would connect this back to the discussion we're having here by saying that Artificial Intelligence represents a more scientific materialist approach, while Artificial Intuition represents a more holistic paradigm: one which embraces the idea that there is more happening here than what logic alone can describe.
Artificial Intuition is the brainchild of Monica Anderson, who has a Master's degree in Computer Science from Linköping University in Sweden, but who now works in Silicon Valley and is a US citizen. Her company Syntience is working on ways to bring her innovative approach to market (check out their Facebook Fan page here). At present they are still searching for funding sources: if you'd like to help support their independent research here's a link from the Artificial Intuition website.
Let me quote a few paragraphs from their website, this is from a page in which Logic and Intuition are compared:
Intuition and Logic are two strategies for prediction and problem solving.
We hear so much about the virtues of logic that we'd be excused to believe that logic was somehow the superior method, but a quick analysis shows that most actions we perform on a daily basis mainly use intuition.
Logic is not better, just different. Both strategies have their advantages and apply in different situations. Sometimes we need to use both. Sometimes we can use either one, because the problem is so simple it doesn't much matter how we solve it. Sometimes it matters; if we happen to choose the wrong approach, it may prevent us from solving our problem.
Computer-based intuition - "Artificial Intuition" - is quite straightforward to implement, but requires computers (a recent invention) with a lot of memory (only recently available cheaply enough).
If you look at the label cloud at the top of my blog, you'll see that intuition has been a running theme with this project since it began. This connects back to my song "Automatic", which makes the assertion that there are many times when that logical "narrator voice" of our conscious minds gets in the way, and that there are many complicated activities such as golf, playing a musical instrument, driving a car, or solving a large problem which will work better when we allow the more intuitive, less analytical part of our minds to take the forefront: in other words, when we can do these things "without thinking". This idea relates to a book I've talked about before, written by Julian Jaynes, called "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind": a challenging and fascinating work which suggests that the logical "narrator voice" of consciousness may only have developed in the last few thousand years, and that before that time all human beings operated in a mode where their conscious minds and the underlying "intuitive" parts of their minds were fully integrated. Although he died in 1997, the Julian Jaynes Society continues to promote his work, check it out.
And please spend some time over at the Artificial Intuition site learning more about this fascinating alternative methodology for making computers "smarter" in ways that more directly reflect our own strengths as human beings. This could hold immediate promise for tasks such as document understanding, speech recognition, OCR correction, and implementing the Semantic Web. In the long term, I suspect this could allow the creation of computers that develop the emergent traits of consciousness through using a huge web of tiny little processes that are running concurrently. In that sense, the Artificial Intuition approach would appear to have connections to the consciousness theories of Douglas Hofstadter, who I've talked about many times before in blogs such as You Have a Shape and a Trajectory, I Know You, You Know Me, and We're Already Dead (But That's Okay).
The fifth of the 26 songs is called "Automatic". Scroll down below the following videos for the lyrics and a brief discussion of how this song ties into the project. A blog post which lists all 26 songs, including 1 video for each song can be found by clicking here.
AUTOMATIC Music and lyrics (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)
Musta been runnin on automatic I simply can’t recall How did I get here, what was I doin? No clue at all Lost my place in the conversation What were we talking about Thought I was here, must have been dreamin Without a doubt
Automatic Automatic Automatic Musta been runnin on automatic
What was for breakfast, just this mornin I really couldn’t say Out there circlin another planet So far away Where was my head at, was I drivin Not even seein the road Was I only goin through the motions Don’t even know
Automatic…
Julian Jaynes showed me he had the answer In the bicameral mind Conciousness broken down into pieces Oh what a find We’ve all been runnin on automatic Since we were back in the trees But still we made it here on automatic How can it be
Automatic…
Something beautiful and complicated Does it ever seem strange How we could do that on automatic Hard to explain
Automatic Automatic Automatic Musta been runnin on automatic
Here are some blog entries about the ideas in this song:
In a nutshell, one of the recurring themes with this project is that there are patterns across space and time that represent ideas, beliefs, preferences for one outcome over another, and I have placed all of those concepts under the general heading of memes. I believe this is not that big of a leap from the mysteries of instinct - how does an animal have access to a huge body of behaviors and knowledge about the world? Because there are patterns that already exist across space and time that are part of that particular creature's structure. How does a goose migrating for the first time know what to do? Is it like there is a little voice inside that goose giving it instructions? As fanciful a way as that might be to describe it, that appears to be the process: when the animal needs to know what to do, some message wells up from within their genetic material and provides them with the information.
Julian Jaynes made the great intuitive leap that says it may be a very recent development for human beings to be operating as we currently do, with a conscious "narrator voice" saying "now I'm going to do this, now I'm not going to do that". In "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", Jaynes suggests (somewhat astonishingly, I admit) that as little as two thousand years ago we operated more like that migrating goose. For humans operating in that mode, decisions about what to do next might have been heard internally as the voices of gods, or ancestors, and this would not be that different from the voices of conscience or intuition that tell modern humans what to do and what not to do. The idea that it was possible for civilizations to develop while humans were operating in this "non-conscious" mode may seem impossible at first glance, but as Jaynes and this song points out, there are still many tasks that we can actually perform better when that "narrator voice" ceases its nattering and lets us perform complex actions like playing musical instruments, driving a car, or hitting a golf ball. In other words, I believe Julian Jaynes got it right.
Many of the videos for my songs are also available at YouTube, if you search for videos by 10thdim. You can audition and buy a high-quality mp3 of this song (and others by Rob Bryanton) at amiestreet.com. Included at amiestreet are 6 channel "stems" of this song and some of the others for remixing and mashups (and you can click here to play with a six-channel mixer that lets you audition and play with those stems). There is also an instrumental track of this song (and others) available from amiestreet for karaoke purposes. Finally, you can also download this song and other items from the tenthdimension digital store, and the items at that store are released under a Creative Commons license.
In Boredom and Consciousness Part Two we talked about how boredom is very much a "conscious" part of our minds. If you are driving a car properly, you are performing a constant series of checks completely automatically: your conscious and subconscious minds are working as one. The brain is entirely capable of taking you from one side of the city to the other without your "narrator voice" interfering with what you're doing. But what if that narrator voice, instead, had been telling you how boring the drive was? You would be much more likely to have had an accident through being inattentive to all of the possible danger signs that our subconscious minds deal with constantly as we drive. Even something as simple and uncomplicated as falling asleep is almost impossible to do if you can't find a way to quiet that darn narrator voice of consciousness, as anyone who has tried to find sleep when they are upset or excited knows only too well.
Do you like to garden? Some people can't stand it because it's so boring. Other people love simple repetitive activities like these because it gives them peace... in other words, gardening can be a form of meditation. And meditation, of course, is actually not that far away from boredom: because meditation is an activity that encourages us to move through and beyond our line of time with an integrated mind, quieting that nagging narrator voice that says "this is boring" and moving into the state that Julian Jaynes tells us we used to always exist within.
Here's what I say in my book about meditation:
Meditation is a particularly interesting example of how people can use the power of the mind to change their health and circumstances. Researchers analyzing the EEGs of persons in a meditative state have seen that the parietal lobe, which processes incoming data to give a person the sense of their location in time and space, becomes much less active during meditation. If the parietal lobe would be what anchors us in the first-through-fourth dimension (time and space), then, could suppressing that part of the brain be what opens the person who is meditating up to the healing paths available to them in higher dimensions?
This same Scientific American "Mind" article on boredom we were discussing in part two also talks about the rising popularity of "mindfulness" training in education, medical, and office settings, which is a form of meditation that helps people to become more in tune with the wonder of their day-to-day lives. Elsewhere in the issue is a review of a book by Jeff Warren called "The Head Trip": Jeff describes consciousness as a wheel that can be broken into twelve states from highly alert to deeply asleep. I was interested to see that what started him down the path of writing this book was exactly what we're talking about here: he was working a potentially boring job as a tree planter, and became fascinated with how his perception of time seemed completely different while doing this job. While some people would look at a menial and repetitive job such as this and find their day agonizingly slow, he found that time passed by almost without him noticing. In other words, one person's boring is another person's meditative state, or even another person's novelty.
When people who have watched my 11 minute animation or read my book say that it's "mind-blowing", my fervent wish is that I have helped to renew and expand their sense of wonder about this amazing universe we live in. There are a great many self-help books and breathing exercises and visualization techniques out there that people can use to change their way of perceiving the world. Imagining the timeless fabric that our universe and all other universes spring from is another: that's why I describe this project on the back of the book as a "mind-expanding exercise that could change the way you view this incredible universe in which we live".
In part one of this entry we talked about the quantum physics idea that it's actually possible for consciousness to change the past: an idea that hadn't occurred to me, perhaps not surprisingly since I have spent so much time thinking instead about how this way of imagining reality expands out what our possibilities from this moment forward might be. But even if the idea had occurred to me first, I suspect I would have just dismissed it as being too "out there" even for me. However, with esteemed physicists like John Wheeler pointing the way, and the research of physicists such as Rosenblum, Kuttner, Krauss and Dent (all of whom are mentioned in that previous blog entry), this idea takes on interesting resonances when we think about meditation and the integrated bicameral mind as being the mental processes where we stop being bored, and start freeing our conscious minds from our linear 4D succession of frames we call "time".
This week's poll question is about 2012, where do you stand? Could those predictions of a coming global transition be tied to McKenna's Novelty Theory (also known as Timewave Zero), or Kurzweil's approaching Singularity, or the many other impending predictions being pointed to by prophecy and ancient wisdom? Our minds, as pattern recognizing machines, have ways of connecting across the information of time and space. Our bodies, built from chemical processes that obey the laws of entropy, can only move in one direction in time, but if it really is possible for consciousness to "tune" the universe, as John Wheeler suggested, then we would have proof that our consciousness can freely move in any direction, and at any "angle" we choose. Thinking of an accelerating shift, where everyone's consciousness tilts at an ever more extreme angle to our 3D space to eventually encompass all of time, allows us to imagine the potential for our world to enter a timeless mindset. The idea that this possibility appears to be approaching at an increasingly accelerated pace is also one of the ramifications of this that is getting more and more people excited around the world. Are you interested in what happens next? I know I am!
Are you bored with your life? One of the ideas I've been promoting with this project is an all-encompassing definition of life as being "any process that is interested in what happens next".
As regular visitors to this blog will know, I have come to believe that there were certain organizing patterns and forces that can be seen to have influenced the creation of our universe right from its beginning, and that each of us is a participant in the ongoing act of creation that was set in motion back then and which continues to this day. In Boredom and Consciousness Part One, we talked about the respected physicists like John Wheeler have even suggested that the quantum observer could change not just the present or the future, but the past right back to the big bang! Still, no matter what perspective you approach this idea from, we have to recognize the name that is given to those organizing patterns and forces is contentious: and since some people are uncomfortable with words like "God", I have tended to call these the "big picture memes" that we can see were a part of the narrowing-down processes that caused our particular universe to be the one selected out of all possible universes within the multiverse.
Most of us (but not all of us!) believe that we have free will, which implies that we have some degree of control over "what happens next" as we travel down our 4D line of time, twisting and turning in the fifth dimension down at the planck length. What this means, then, is that very simple truths like "attitude affects outcome" have profound implications if in fact the parallel universes that are created by the branching choices of our actions really do exist, and we have talked in previous blogs about some of the modern cosmologists who say that this is indeed the case. Are you bored? Depressed? Ill? Then of course you will tend to make different choices than if you were excited/happy/healthy. There's nothing unscientific about simple statements like these.
In my book I talk several times about what happens when we stop being interested in what happens next:
...many of us are painfully familiar with the experience of watching a loved one who, due to illness, extreme depression, or simple old age, have had their soul material gradually dissipate or be ground away. This can reach the point where we can see that the person that used to occupy that body is no longer there, even though the body continues to function. Where did they go? Perhaps they really did lose coherence and drift away. Or, more likely, most of the meme-set that made up that person lost interest in the diseased and tired body they were in and has already freed itself from its confines. Witnessing the death of any living creature shows us one of the great mysteries of the universe: what leaves the body?
For our planet, every living thing is based on water. To quote from Paul Davies' article on alternate lifeforms on earth in the December issue of Scientific American:
...even the hardiest microorganisms have their limits. Life as we know it depends crucially on the availability of liquid water.
A couple of blog entries ago we looked at the relationship between music and creativity, and not long before that we looked at a song of mine ("Change and Renewal") which proposes that creativity and water may be more closely tied to each other than any of us realize. In a sense, this is because the opposite of creativity is death: with no water, there's no life, and therefore no creativity. So, as I say in the song: "take a drink of water and find a new idea". :-)
We could also say that the opposite of boredom is novelty. But boredom and novelty are much more subjective terms, because they are based upon the way that our conscious minds perceive reality: in other words, one person's boring is another person's novelty. In part one I talked about synchronicity: the joyous connections our brains can make from seemingly unconnected bits of information, and how that can make it feel like the universe is trying to tell you something. I had been planning last week to write about Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind, but then two magazines arrived in my mailbox the same day and I saw so many connections to what I was thinking about that I felt it was important to explore them.
The first of the two magazines is the new special issue of Scientific American "Mind": the cover story is dedicated to the study of boredom, and there are quite a few articles within that issue that relate very nicely to what we're talking about here. The other magazine was the latest issue of New Scientist magazine, which has as its cover story "The Smart, Strange World of the Subconscious".
The article in New Scientist makes the point that neurobiologists sometimes prefer to use terms like "non-conscious", "pre-conscious", or "unconscious" in these discussions about the subconscious. This is because it's much easier to define what is a conscious activity for our minds, than it is define all of those other processes which are bubbling beneath the surface, some of which are operating at much higher operations per second, and some of which are stretched out into much slower processes. We have already talked in this blog about how consciousness is thought by modern science to be a process that, for most people, operates at between thirty and ninety "bings" per second.
One of the studies discussed in the Scientific American "Mind" issue concerns persons with long-term substance abuse problems: an ongoing study of 156 addicts at a New York methadone clinic revealed that the only reliable indicator of whether an addict is about to relapse was their reported level of boredom. My song "Addictive Personality" talks about the pitfalls that can happen when people are trapped in repetitive loops that lead them to believe that "what happens next" will always be the same as "what happened before", a sure-fire recipe for boredom:
Julian Jaynes, in his epic masterwork "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", proposed that our current mode of operation, with a conscious part of the brain that is "narrating" our activities from moment to moment, and a subconscious (or non-conscious/pre-conscious/unconscious) part of the brain that is processing data "behind the scenes", is a fairly recent development. He proposed that only a couple of thousand years ago humans lived in a more integrated form of consciousness, where conscious and subconscious processes were not divided. This seems to imply that everyone existed in a semi-dreamlike state, a state which modern society has taught us to be suspicious of: which is strange, because there are still many activities that we perform much better when we are not "Thinking" about what we're doing. Athletes talk about being "in the zone": the place where they become one with their activity, rather than thinking about all of the component parts, is how they achieve success. Be it musicians, public speakers, or a teenager on their first date: the times that we become self-conscious about what we're doing or saying, we are much more likely to not be at our best. Here is another video with me in discussion with master musician Jack Semple where we touch upon some of these ideas:
About fifteen years ago I was browsing through a used bookstore when I came across a weighty tome with an equally weighty title: “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. This challenging and fascinating book by Julian Jaynes advances a theory which has continued to resonate for me: that our way of experiencing consciousness/self-awareness is a relatively recent development, perhaps from within the last few thousand years. Here’s what I say about his theory in my book:
Prior to that time, Mr. Jaynes contends, our conscious and subconscious minds were integrated, and we heard suggestions for future action from our subconscious mind as a voice or voices that we often interpreted as messages from the gods or departed loved ones. We still often exist in that more integrated state of mind, where we live within the moment rather than create an inner monologue watching and describing to ourselves what it is we’re doing. Sometimes, interestingly enough, we must exist in that more integrated state of mind because otherwise there are tasks we would find ourselves incapable of doing. This is particularly true of any complicated physical action: if we are playing a musical instrument, or driving a car, or hitting a baseball, we do these things much better when repetition and the honing of our skills allow us to perform all the tiny actions that make up the activity without having to think about each of them. This has often been shown to be true of great mental achievements as well, where some of the finest minds of our time have reported that their important breakthroughs “just came to them”, or even just “appeared in a dream”. In other words, this theory suggests that splitting our mental processes into a conscious mind which is constantly viewing our actions as if from the outside is not always a useful way to exist, and is not the way that most living organisms exist.
Although Mr. Jaynes died in 1997, there is a Julian Jaynes Society which continues to discuss and promote his unique ideas. In my last blog I mentioned my belief that voices of conscience, intuition, memories of loved ones, storytelling from previous generations, and more metaphysical manifestations such as ghosts or angels could all be possible examples of how a system of beliefs and memes work “behind the scenes”, so to speak, to help define our consensual reality. The Bicameral Mind theory, I believe, can also be used to show us a way that our minds could be processing incoming data from the upcoming fifth dimensional paths that are soon to be available to us as we create our fourth dimensional line, and such manifestations as prescience, intuition, or deja vu could be part of the ways that our minds reveal that data to our conscious minds.
Modern society teaches us to be afraid or suspicious of those moments when we operate without apparent consciousness, even though there a great many things that we do better when we find a way to quiet our “narrator voice”, and exist in the more integrated mode that Julian Jaynes tells us was the way all humans lived in ancient times and back through our evolution from the primordial soup.
My song “Automatic” talks about all these ideas, I hope you enjoy it!
AUTOMATIC - words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)
Musta been runnin on automatic I simply can’t recall How did I get here, what was I doin? No clue at all Lost my place in the conversation What were we talking about Thought I was here, must have been dreamin Without a doubt
Automatic Automatic Automatic Musta been runnin on automatic
What was for breakfast, just this mornin I really couldn’t say Out there circlin another planet So far away Where was my head at, was I drivin Not even seein the road Was I only goin through the motions Don’t even know
Automatic…
Julian Jaynes showed me he had the answer In the bicameral mind Conciousness broken down into pieces Oh what a find We’ve all been runnin on automatic Since we were back in the trees But still we made it here on automatic How can it be
Automatic…
Something beautiful and complicated Does it ever seem strange How we could do that on automatic Hard to explain
Automatic Automatic Automatic Musta been runnin on automatic
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