Quotes by Julian Jaynes

Julian Jaynes

“What is the meaning of life?” This question has no answer except in the history of how it came to be asked. There is no answer because words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself. Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.

Civilization

Self

Understanding

Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.

Coins

Giving

Use

Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection. Following their twin announcements of the theory in 1858, both Darwin and Wallace struggled like Laocoöns with the serpentine problem of human evolution and its encoiling difficulty of consciousness. But where Darwin clouded the problem with his own naivete, seeing only continuity in evolution, Wallace could not do so.

Evolution

Problem

Twins

And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgement are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.

Loss

Order

Self

Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.

Art

Civilization

Doe

Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.

Echoes

Mind

World

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

Conscious

Consciousness

Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure.

Adventure

Consciousness

Play

Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

Breakdown

Jealous

Mind

For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

Consciousness

Language

Serious

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Adventure

Art

Becoming

Behavior

Breakdown

Breaking Down

Catholic

Church

Civilization

Coins

Command

Conscious

Consciousness

Divine

Doe

Echoes

Eruption

Essence

Events

Evil

Evolution

Expression

Firsts

Force

Forgotten

Function

Giving

Grows

Has Beens

Hearing

Hemisphere

Idolatry

Jealous

Justice

Kings

Knowledge

Known

Knows

Language

Learning

Legends

Logic

Long

Loss

Lying

Matter

Mediums

Memories

Men

Metaphor

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Quotes by Julian Jaynes

Julian Jaynes

Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.

Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

Consciousness is always open to many possibilities because it involves play. It is always an adventure.

Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.

For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

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