And you thought you knew.

Stumbled across this--

O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything and yet nothing at all--what is it?

And where did it come from?

And why?

--and now here I am. Sitting in an RV by a lake in the northwest corner of South Carolina. Speaking to myself through words I want to soon write down. The words bubbling, surfacing, wicked away by my mind, caught by my fingertips. There is the me that is typing, and there is the me that is dictating what to type. Which is the one doing the writing? Is there a difference? Or is there not?

The excerpt above comes from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The person who wrote it was Julian Jaynes, and his idea was that humans were not always conscious, that we only acquired C around 3000 years ago, and the reason we acquired it is because we stopped listening to ourselves. Let me clarify. We stopped perceiving the voices in our heads as somehow Other, and began to acknowledge them as part of ourselves. That is, what was once a call-and-response became then a monologue, a soliloquy.

That is, I am doing the dictating, and I am doing the writing, and I am doing the bubbling, and I am doing the typing. It is all one, and there is no separation.

This came up in the Times Magazine article on voices in the head, specifically in/re: that theory which posits that the condition of hearing voices in one's head is merely a matter of displaced sensory perception, or "source monitoring": the brain interprets the inner monologue as not its own--a precognitive, preemptive disavowal, if you will. That is, there's nothing wrong with them beyond the fact that they've lost the biological capacity to conceive of two as one (to put it a bit crudely)...oh fuck it; just read what the Times piece had to say about it:

In his 2003 book, “Madness Explained,” [University of Manchester professor of psychology Richard] Bentall draws on the theory that auditory hallucinations may have their roots in what psychologists call “inner speech.” All of us, every day, produce a steady stream of silent, inward-directed speech: plans, thoughts, quotations, memories. People hear voices, Bentall argues, when they make faulty judgments about whether this inner speech is the product of their own consciousness or of something alien to their consciousness. Lapses in what researchers call “source monitoring” may occur for a number of reasons...

[Editor's note: Forgive the author his argumentative clunkiness; he is just now beginning to work through the problem in his mind, and anyway this is not a Thursday, don't expect too much.]

My point is this: Just the other day I was thinking about what it meant to be conscious, whether animals were, what separated us, and now this. My contention I believe--made to myself--was that animals couldn't step outside themselves, they acted and willed, sure, but they could in no way analyze those acts, that will. And it isn't merely because they don't have the power of analysis. Rather, it is because they cannot separate, animals cannot see their selves as selves. If that makes any sense.

[Editor's note: ibid.]

I'll get to the bottom of this in a few weeks. And trust me: it matters.