Whisperers

by J H Brennan

  With the passage of the years, even the priests and priestesses could no longer hear the spirits unless they underwent a prolonged period of training and embarked on special ceremonies to persuade the discarnate entities to speak. At this point, however, the priesthood still listened to the gods and passed on their words.

  Somewhere around the fifth century BCE, Jaynes believed, the situation changed again. The priests and priestesses could no longer simply listen. They had to allow themselves to be possessed by the spirit in order for communication to take place. This involved even more elaborate training and was hard on the medium, who would often foam and convulse under the strain. The process did, however, have the benefit of allowing people once again to hear the words of the god directly, albeit spoken through the mouth of a human host.

  Unfortunately this benefit eventually disappeared as the words of the god became more and more garbled so that the utterings of a possessed medium had to be interpreted by a skilled expert and experienced in the process. This marked the split between priest and prophet, priestess and sibyl. In essence, some people trained as mediums and entered on careers as convulsive ecstatics while others became interpreters of the divine word. With the split came a shift in the power structure, giving the (interpretative) priest a special authority still claimed to the present day.

  Jaynes believed the final step in this six-stage process came when the abilities of the sibyl grew so erratic that interpretation became impossible. At this point, the ancient oracles died out altogether. Delphi survived longer than most, but only, in Jaynes’s view, because of a cultural nostalgia for the good old days when the gods walked and talked with men.

  But who or what were these “gods” who were responsible for the establishment of our earliest civilizations? The descriptions that have come down to us make it quite clear they were not the high moral and spiritual beings associated with our modern ideas of divinity. As many scholars have pointed out, the antics of the Olympians were a catalog of lust, greed, envy, and aggression— characteristics depressingly comparable to the worst traits of humanity.

  Even more striking from our present-day viewpoint is that they were described as beings who walked and talked with humanity like physical kings. This has led to conjecture among less orthodox students of ancient history that the gods might not have been gods at all, but visiting aliens from some distant planet whose advanced technology was mistaken for magic and miracles. Jaynes too believed the gods were not real gods, but he has no time for the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Instead, he stated bluntly:

  The gods are what we now call hallucinations. Usually they are only seen and heard by the particular heroes they are speaking to. Sometimes they come in mists … suggesting visual auras preceding them. But at other times they simply occur. Usually they come as themselves, commonly as mere voices, but sometimes as other people closely related to the hero.1

  The idea that spirit voices were hallucinations is intimately associated in Jaynes’s thesis with another premise. Jaynes was convinced that human consciousness is a relatively recent acquisition. It is, he believed, an evolutionary development not much more than three thousand years old.

  On the face of it, this seems unlikely. The earliest known civilization—the Sumerian—dates back to around 4500 BCE. Dynastic Egypt was established around 2925 BCE. The middle of the third millennium BCE saw flourishing metal-using cultures in Crete, the Cycladic islands, and the southern part of the Aegean mainland. Even the relatively recent civilizations of South America, generally dated no earlier than 1500 BCE, still arose at a time when, according to Jaynes, no human on the planet was capable of conscious thought. But Jaynes, a professor of psychology, argues that consciousness is not necessary even for the most complex of tasks. Although consciousness often plays a part in such activities as perception, judgment, thinking, reasoning, learning, and the assimilation of experience, it is not actually necessary for any of them.

  If, for example, you close your left eye and focus with your right on the left-hand, left page margin of this book, you will still be fully conscious of the sweep of type across the two open pages. But if you then place your index finger at the start of any line and move it slowly right across the open pages, you will discover that there is an area in which the fingertip vanishes, only to reappear again a little farther on. This conjuring trick is related to the physical structure of the human eye, which has a blind spot in its field of vision. Since we dislike blind spots, we fill it in where it occurs, through a process analogous to a computer filling in a missing part of a picture by deduction from the rest. Once “filled in,” the former blank spot becomes part of your perception. Nor is it illusionary. While the perception does not come about through the usual process of light striking the retina, it is still a valid analogy of what is there on the printed page. Sweep your eye across and you will be able to read it, without having to worry about any blank. But while valid, this is a perception in which consciousness plays no part at all. You do not, in other words, notice the blank spot and think to yourself that it is something you must fill in. The process is entirely unconscious. So consciousness is not always necessary for perception.

  The notion that judgment is a conscious function was demolished by the psychologist Karl Marbe as long ago as 1901, using a simple experiment. Marbe had an assistant hand him two small objects, and handed back the lighter of the two after carefully examining how he made the judgment. He realized he was aware of a great many things about the two objects: their feel against his skin, the downward pressure on his hands as they reacted to gravity, any irregularities in their shape, and so on. But when it came to making the judgment, he found that the answer was simply there, apparently inherent in the objects themselves. Actually, the judgment was made by the central nervous system at a wholly unconscious level.

  It was an attempt by another scientist, H. J. Watt, to punch holes in Marbe’s experiment that led to the truly astonishing discovery that thinking, apparently the most obviously conscious of all human activities, is not a conscious process either. Watt suspected that the whole business of weight judgment was not actually unconscious but a conscious decision that happened so quickly that Marbe’s subjects simply forgot what they had done.

  To try to prove this theory, he set up a series of word-association experiments that allowed the process to be broken down and examined in four constituent parts. The results of these experiments showed that, provided the subject understood in advance what was required, thinking became entirely automatic. It arose, of its own accord, once the stimulus word was given. As Jaynes says, one thinks before knowing what they’re supposed to think about. In other words, thoughts are not conscious. Consequently, in this instance, as in many others, consciousness is not necessary for one to think.

  It is apparently unnecessary for reasoning also. The celebrated French mathematician Jules-Henri Poincaré told the Société de Psychologie of Paris how, on a trip, he had solved one of his most difficult problems:

  The incidents of the journey made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus … At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformation I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry.2

  The process by which Poincaré reached this conclusion did not require consciousness. Nor did the processes by which the structures of the atom and the benzene molecule were discovered or the solution to the mechanical problem of how to construct a viable sewing machine. In all three instances the solutions came through dreams.

  Learning does not require consciousness either. Indeed, in some types of learning, the intrusion of consciousness actually blocks the process. This is particularly true of what is called “signal learning,” sometimes referred to as conditioning or, less pejoratively, learning by experience. When a puff of air is blown into someone’s eye, they blink—
the reflex is involuntary. If a light is shone into the eye immediately before blowing and the process is repeated several times, the eye begins to blink at the light, before the puff of air. The subject’s body has learned that the stimulus is about to come and anticipates it by blinking. But there is no consciousness involved in this learning process. So far as the subject is concerned, it simply happens. Furthermore, if the subjects tries to speed up the process by blinking consciously after every flash of the light, the reflex will arise much more slowly, if at all.

  A great deal more than reflex actions can be learned without the intervention of consciousness. A charming case study reported by Lambert Gardiner in Psychology: A Study of a Search tells of a psychology class that decided to teach their professor that they preferred him to stand at the right of the lecture hall. Each time he moved to the right, they paid closer attention to what he was saying and laughed more heartily at his jokes. While he remained completely unconscious of what was going on, he was soon delivering his lectures so far to the right of the hall that he was almost out the door.

  Assimilation of experience is often associated with consciousness—indeed there was a time when psychologists defined consciousness as the assimilation of experience. That time has long gone. It is fairly likely that you use a telephone frequently and apply the full light of consciousness to the various numbers you dial. But could you say now, without looking, what letters are associated with what figures on the dial? You brush your teeth each morning: how many are on view in the bathroom mirror as you do so? Could you list, again without looking, the ornaments on your mantelpiece? A few attempts like these quickly indicate how poor a vehicle consciousness is in assimilating your daily experiences.

  Most people will notice instantly when a familiar clock stops, even though the sound if its tick may not have impinged on their consciousness for years. Not hearing the clock tick until it stops is a familiar cliché, but one that demonstrates clearly that assimilation of experience (the clock stopping) can be carried out very efficiently without consciousness. This is even more clearly demonstrated by the use of hypnosis in situations like the loss of car keys. In a trance, people can often be persuaded to recall where they left them, even though consciously they have no awareness of their location whatsoever. The experience of leaving the keys was not consciously recorded, but it was accurately recorded all the same.

  It is now clear that consciousness is unnecessary to survive even the busiest day. Indeed, it is observable that consciousness is not only unnecessary in daily life, but also unexpectedly absent from much of it. When driving a car, for example, the driver is no longer aware of the various complexities involved. He or she does not think consciously of applying the brake, changing the gear, or moving the wheel so many inches clockwise. These things, so far as consciousness is concerned, simply happen—although consciousness can override any one or all of them at will. The same applies to activities like riding a bicycle, skiing, using a typewriter, or operating machinery, however complex, with which one is really familiar. It is as if, during waking hours, we are accompanied by an invisible robot to whom we can hand over control of those functions with which we do not personally wish to be bothered.

  There is strong survival pressure toward handing over as much as possible to the robot, since it can often do the job a great deal better than the individual concerned. Anyone may cast their mind back to the time when they were learning to drive a car. Every operation had to be carried out consciously, at a substantial investment of memory and attention. One had to remember to depress the clutch before engaging a gear. One had to estimate (or read off a dial) the precise engine revs that would allow this to be done comfortably. One had to judge distances and the width of the vehicle accurately and continuously. The whole process was a nightmare; and while it remained conscious, one drove badly and with difficulty.

  The same process is evident in a baby learning how to walk. It is a pitiful process, full of stumbling and heavy falls. But every adult was like that once, a bipedal animal who could crawl but not walk. With instinct and encouragement we learned, but learning—in this, as in so many things—meant turning over control to the robot. When it came to walking, we manage this so effectively that, unlike car driving, consciousness no longer has a veto over how it is done. The curious fact is that adults no longer have the least idea how to walk. They decide where you want to go, of course, and when, but the process that establishes their balance, contracts their muscles, and initiates subtle, continuous feedback controls is as far beyond reach as the surface of the moon.

  Clearly, if there are things like driving a car that the robot can do better, there are also things like walking that the robot can do perfectly and the individual cannot do at all. This fact encourages us to hand over more and more tasks to robot control. Sometimes this is done quite consciously. Zen Buddhism, when applied to tasks like archery, is a case in point. The Zen practitioner is encouraged not to aim at the target but to “become one with it” and allow the target to “attract the arrow.”3 This is really a process of giving the bow to the robot, which shoots a great deal more accurately than the archer. More modern sports systems, such as Inner Tennis—which allows players to rehearse their technique imaginally before putting it into physical practice—aim at substantially the same result. Athletes everywhere readily accept that they reach their peak when they cease to think—and worry—about their game.

  So long as we are discussing motor skills, this situation is acceptable. Indeed, it is absolutely necessary. But the trouble arises when the robot starts to do the thinking. Robotic thinking is by no means uncommon. Crass examples abound in the oratory of politics and religion, where enthusiastic practitioners chant slogans at one another, under the comfortable impression that they are engaging in a debate. They are, in fact, merely sitting on the sidelines of a robot war.

  Other examples are more subtle, consequently more dangerous. How often have any of us found ourselves parroting an opinion that actually belonged to the newspaper read that morning? How often have words reflected a mindless reaction to some stimulus that effected individuals in ways they did not really begin to comprehend? How often has one passed the time of day with a neighbor, discussing the weather, or even the garden, with no more conscious input than pressing the playback button of a tape recorder? In all of these familiar situations, it is the robot that is actually speaking.

  Sad to say, the robot is an eminently helpful creature, eager to take more and more of the burden from conscious shoulders. It will breathe, walk, drive, speak, even think for us, and, unless we are very, very careful, psychoanalysts claim, it will live our lives for us. But to Professor Jaynes, this slipping back into unconscious, robotic living is an evolutionary regression, a personal mirroring of the way things used to be for the whole of humanity. Prior to about 1000 BCE, everyone left their lives entirely to the robot and had no hope at all of waking up and taking charge. Consciousness as we know it simply did not exist.

  In this curious psychological state, humanity moved from its primitive hunter-gatherer existence to develop agriculture, establish villages, then towns, and, eventually, city civilizations … all without a single conscious thought. But not without help. According to Jaynes:

  Volition, planning, initiative (was) organised with no consciousness whatsoever and then “told” to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or “god” or sometimes as a voice alone. The individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not “see” what to do himself.4

  This is an exciting concept and one that might go some way toward solving the dilemma of the voices heard by so many people across the sweep of history. But is there really evidence to underpin it?

  Jaynes used the 1959 excavation of a Mesolithic site at Eynan, twelve miles north of the Sea of Galilee in Israel, as an important foundation of his conclusions. The remains discovered belonged to the Natufian culture (itself nam
ed for another Israeli site) but were like nothing ever seen before. The Natufians were hunter-gatherers who up to then were believed to have used flint weapons and lived in cave mouths. But the excavations unearthed evidence that changed the picture completely. What the archaeologists found was no nomadic site but a permanent town—the first of three to be discovered—of circular stone-built houses. Among the structures in this primeval community was what Jaynes believed to be the earliest known example of a king’s tomb. There are suspicions that this structure may have been constructed in stages, with each stage marking some form of religious development. Within the innermost, hence earliest, chamber were two skeletons. One was of a woman wearing a shell headdress. The other was of an adult male. Archaeologists looked to the elaborate nature of the tomb and decided the individuals buried inside must have been the world’s first king and his consort.

  Jaynes himself went further. He argued this was not simply the world’s first king, but the world’s first god-king. To understand why he reached this conclusion, we must put it into the context of his theory that at the time the Natufian culture flourished, humanity did not possess consciousness.

  What was such a state actually like? We have already examined how easily any one of us might slip back into robotic function, but today this is always a temporary condition. We wake up often enough to accept wakefulness as our natural state. Indeed for many of us it seems to be our only state since the bouts of robotic behavior tend to get forgotten. Furthermore, a robot take-over does not rob us of consciousness completely—only of a consciousness of the task the robot happens to be performing. The searchlight inside our head simply turns elsewhere, to think about a different problem, plan our day at the office, fantasize about a loved one. It does not switch off altogether. But when the robot took over completely, as Jaynes believed it did for most of human history, things were very different.