Neurociencia

The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind
Julian Jaynes (1976)

Lectori Benevolo,
It was my intention to provide an in depth summary for each chapter that will help the reader during this somewhat long journey. Most of what follows is a summary of each chapter with as little interpretation as possible. In some cases I have added an example or two. If you found thishelpful or have any comments please let me know.

Introduction
The problem of consciousness
A few basic theories on the nature of consciousness
1.Consciousness could be a property of all matter. This is also called panpsychism and is a view held by various spiritual traditions.
2. Consciousness could be a property of living things as opposed to lifeless matter. When amoebas are hunting forfood or retreating from pain this could indicate consciousness.
3. Consciousness may only be associated with animals that learn. Jaynes believed that consciousness may be dependant upon learning, however, he later dropped this idea. (B.Baars asked a better question. Is learning and consciousness correlated ?)
[Evolution and consciousness. Wallace thought that some metaphysical force came into playat least 3 times, at the creation of life, at consciousness and at culture. ]
Is consciousness an epiphenomenon?
William James makes a good argument against this. Why is consciousness most intense when we need to make decisions and least intense when action is habitual? Why would consciousness vary in this fashion is it was just an epiphenomenon?
Consciousness and the Reticular ActivatingSystem. Jaynes feels that is it is a waste of time to associate the RAS with consciousness because it is one of the oldest structures in the evolution of the nervous system. This is in contrast to Baars. Baars suggests that the RAS may be one of the most important and necessary brain areas associated with consciousness. Because many animals possess a RAS, Baars argues that they are actually conscious.The argument can be resolved if we focus on what Jaynes vs. Baars mean by consciousness. Many individuals hold consciousness to mean qualitative subjective states such as pain or our inner experience while looking at the color red. This version of consciousness is sometimes referred to as qualia. This simple level of sensory consciousness is clearly not what Jaynes is referring to. Jaynes’s viewof consciousness seems to indicate a higher abstract level of ego or self-consciousness. However this abstraction is still totally dependent upon basic sensory processes.
Book 1 The Mind of Man
The consciousness of consciousness.
This chapter is about how consciousness can fool us into believing it has properties that it does not.
1) Consciousness is not the sum of all mental activity.Titchener and Descartes were both wrong to believe that we were aware of the sum total of mental processes occurring now.
Consciousness is a much smaller part of the our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. (pg. 23)
I can provide an example with vision. We assume that we perceive the entire span of our visual field with equal clarity whenin fact only a small fraction of our visual field is in clear focus. This can be easily demonstrated by focusing on any single letter and asking yourself how far off to the side are the letters still clear? If one becomes aware of the small part of vision that is actually clear to us, we become aware of how unconscious processes fill in the rest of the field with an image of equal clarity.However, in this example it would be more precise to say that we cannot become conscious of what we are not conscious of without effort.
This can also be applied to how long during the day we are conscious that we are conscious.
We are thus conscious less of the time than we think, because we cannot be conscious of when we are not conscious (Pg. 24)
Consciousness can be deceptive in the sense that...