The Psychology, History, and Myth of our Evolving Perception
Where Reality Has Escaped Our Perception
In today’s essay, we follow an arc with different facets, not unlike a rainbow, and rather than begin at one end and sweep to the other, we will begin at both ends and meet at the arc’s zenith. This arc is temporal: one pole represents the distant genetic past of the human race; the opposite end represents more immediate developmental past of any person – as a child The middle of the arc is the present day; both ends rise toward the arc’s middle. The journey will cover some old and very familiar ground that I hope will not be too tiresome to re-examine for a few moments.
Here is a photograph of Julian Jaynes, a bold and expansive thinker to whose theory of evolution I was exposed early on in my own intellectual formation.
This image mirrors the casual yet distant air of the man, and conveys an expression of quizzical wonder that, in my view, also reflects, as I think we will see, his idiosyncratic thinking. For decades, Jaynes made copious notes exploring a line of inquiry that, at the time, was not interesting to mainstream social science: what were ancient humans like in their psychological nature? In recent articles, I have demystified something of how little babies and young children think; Piaget’s experiments made us clear on this point. But if you’re still unsure of what Piaget was revealing about how the young brain develops its understanding of causes in the physical world, then below is another example of his genius. Piaget’s greatest talent was in showing us how incomplete and fallible our own thinking is as we grow up. Our life’s journey is traced by the same task: to learn and master difficult concepts at one stage of life that, later in life, are easy to understand. This journey of growth is always about conquering misunderstandings that were not visible to us earlier.
To illustrate this transformation, let us consider the most famous of Piaget’s many simple and monumentally revealing experiments in child psychology. This one is called the liquid conservation experiment, and is very easy to administer.
In the liquid conservation experiment, a child is shown two slim, tall water glasses, or beakers, of equal height and width. Both beakers are placed on a table, empty, and each is then filled with the same amount of colored liquid. The child is then asked if both beakers contain the same amount of liquid. Observing the equal levels of liquid in each beaker, the child replies yes.
At this point, a third beaker is placed on the table. This empty container is shorter than the other two, and also wider. At this point, the liquid in one of the tall beakers is completely poured into the shorter container. Now, the child is asked whether the tall container has more liquid than the shorter one.
Watch what happens next:
Before five to seven years of age, children universally (and erroneously) believe that the taller beaker has more liquid than the shorter beaker, even though the short beaker contains the liquid from one of the tall beakers - no more, no less. This misunderstanding demonstrates that there is an early cognitive stage for all humans when the visual perception of things as they appear, rather than what affects them, forms the majority of our assumptions about what causes something to happen. Any information that is not a visually observable part of a physical object is not factored – not even known to exist – because such information is not a sensory operation, but rather, an abstract one. The child believes each beaker — the tall and the short one — contains different amounts of liquid because the level of liquid in each container is different. The level of liquid is taken literally, not in the context of the shape that contains it. The rule applied is simple: “higher liquid level = more liquid,” yet it is erroneous because the true level results not only from the quantity of liquid but also from something not in the liquid itself: the shape of the container. There are two causes for the level of the liquid, but Piaget’s experiment shows that a child younger than seven years of age can only discern one. By the age of seven, the child has found the second cause - the shape of the container.
Attributing the cause of changes in a physical object to the object itself is a case of literal thinking: the object and what causes it to change have the same source, the same nature. It’s a kind of tautology, or magic, in which things are understood to cause their own change. No outside influences are perceived. However, finding more than one cause behind observed phenomena is a case of abstract reasoning: causes are seen as separate or abstracted from the thing they act upon. Thus the conclusion that both beakers have the same amount of liquid is possible only once the child’s attention shifts from the physical, sensory existence of the containers to the dynamic qualities of the liquid.
The lesson for us as adults is the same as for children, as their minds develop: there is much information that resides outside of what we are physically observing. As I’ve stated in earlier essays, this is not a problem of the perceptual system - the eyes work perfectly well. It is not a case of failing to see, but rather failing to reason. The eyes are not where reasoning happens, eyes only inform reasoning. But around age seven, children develop what we might call “the concept of” as a separate cause. In the example above, it is the abstract concept of quantity, whereas previously, it was the more concrete idea of “the level of liquid in the container.” Quantity is a concept because it is not tied to any specific object. No object is quantity, but every object can possess a quantity of something. Piaget called this stage, at which children can differentiate objects from concepts, the Concrete Operational Stage. I have never liked the names that Piaget gave to the stages he discovered; they cause much confusion. In this stage, for example, children are thinking beyond concrete objects and considering how abstract concepts affect visible reality. Therefore, this cognitive stage should be called Concept Operational rather than Concrete Operational. But classification names are not relevant to our consideration of their importance. The point is that a view of reality in which objects appear simply as objects is not merely incomplete; it is also fundamentally wrong. For our part, what we learn from observing these experiments is that concepts are completely distinct from and independent of objects, but when seen together, objects will make concepts visible to a mind that can think abstractly. That is, children transcend their physical/material/literal worldview in order to understand the conceptual forces at work in reality.
This is exactly the kind of contrast that fascinated Jaynes, to whom we now turn. He felt sure that our brains followed a line of development across millennia that mirrored the way in which children “turned on” different parts of their own cognitive abilities, little by little. Two apparently independent strands of progression - human evolution across eons, and human development across a single life span - are, in Jaynes’s view, tracing the same trajectory of progressive complexity. Piaget went backward in children’s early lives to show what would develop in the near future, and Jaynes went backward to earlier humans, in order to show what would develop in the modern adult world. We know that Piaget’s research found these before-and-after moments in mental development; what did Jaynes find?
From his many notes, Jaynes wove together a narrative theory about how consciousness evolved in humans, and explained it fully in a book, the only one he wrote, titled “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” The title was intentionally convoluted because, in explaining it to oneself, one comes to understand Jaynes’s theory of mind.
Jaynes imagined that, in earlier stages of human civilization, human beings possessed a "bicameral mind," where thinking was divided across two separate chambers or hemispheres of the brain. One hemisphere provided auditory or verbal instructions, while the other passively received and obeyed those instructions. The integrated use of these two brain lobes, or hemispheres, meant that human consciousness resembled a form of "inner voice" or "godlike" command that is equivalent to what Jung called collective consciousness. This implies that there weren’t separate “minds” as much as one singular “Mind” that everyone shared.
However, for Jaynes, this bicameral mind gradually broke down due to various societal and cultural changes, including the emergence of written language, increased complexity of social structures, and environmental pressures. Passive obedience to inner voices diminished, and subjective consciousness, as well as a sense of individuality, replaced this unified Mind.
That is, as the benefits and function of the bicameral mind disintegrated, humans developed a substitute: a subjective inner dialogue, from which they became more self-aware and “different” from other humans. In turn, this marked the rise of human consciousness as we understand it today. Early forms of religious and mythological experiences, as well as auditory hallucinations, were, for Jaynes, manifestations of this monumental transition.
Thus, we come full circle. Piaget’s work uncovers a lack of fully integrated concept-object consciousness in children, and Jaynes finds that an integrated form of consciousness did exist in earlier human thought, but became fragmented, and led to societal and cultural disruptions. Jaynes’s suggestion is that early civilizations relied heavily on divine guidance of inner voices for decision-making and moral judgments, and was crucial to a fuller understanding of reality. The loss of this direct guidance, however, resulted in the rise of organized religion, the development of legal systems, and the emergence of subjective morality.
We don’t have access to ancient brains on which to perform the kinds of cognitive experiments that Piaget was able to do with children, and so, Jaynes’s theory of evolutionary development will remain a theory. But it is admirable that he drew on a wide range of interdisciplinary evidence, including ancient texts, archaeological findings, neurological research, and psychological experiments, to support this theory. And perhaps the most direct example of Jaynes’s theory of cognitive divergence is the Biblical parable of the Tower of Babel, found in the Old Testament (Book of Genesis 11:1–9).
In ancient times, this familiar fable tells us, the inhabitants of a region called Shinar (better known as Babylonia) spoke the same language, and decided to build a city with a tower that would reach the heavens, seeking to make a name for themselves and prevent their scattering across the earth. As they began constructing the tower, God observed their endeavor. Concerned about their ambition and the pride associated with it, God appears to have become jealous:
[11:6] And the LORD said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
[11:7] Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech." (Source: The Vatican)
The Tower of Babel (1563, large version), Peter Breugel the Elder. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, oil on panel.
As a result, the people could no longer understand one another; the ensuing language barrier led to turmoil and division among the people, preventing them from continuing their construction. The unfinished tower was then named Babel, derived from the verb balal, which means to confuse or confound in Hebrew. The people dispersed from there, spreading across the earth according to their new language groups.
Admittedly, the parable of the Tower of Babel is too narrowly interpreted as a cautionary tale about human pride, arrogance, and the limits of human achievements. It does blend two arguments nicely together: on one hand, it illustrates the consequences of excessive ambition and the importance of humility before God . On the other, it also provides an explanation of how the diversity of languages and the subsequent dispersion of humanity across different regions of the world originated. However, this parable portrays a Greater Entity as concerned more with its own protection than with enlightening or raising human consciousness from a more brutish evolutionary stage up to a more evolved and selfless level. After all, if elevating humans isn’t what God is supposed to do, then what is God’s purpose? It is clear that something is missing, and we should complete the story by speculating as to what this missing piece is.
To be sure, the Tower of Babel story has been a long-standing subject of reflection within religious, cultural, and literary traditions, and Jaynes’s theory is a similar narrative of Unity followed by Division of knowledge.
But if there is an illogical way in which a greater Deity sees fit to destroy a Universal Consciousness, depending on human pride versus humility, then the problem lies with the idea of what “pride” means in this story. It is incompatible with the idea of a people in unity, as the Bible tells us. For if pride was what disturbed God enough to destroy linguistic and cognitive unity among the people of earth, then it must have been alarming enough to have already caused division among people, in which case, the ideal of Unity was already shattered even before God’s division of languages.
What isn’t in dispute is how the theme of social hierarchy emerging from an earlier time of unity and its lasting consequences for human ignorance and suffering are common and universal to all cultural myths. What is missing is the true Unity of the Babel story - the presumed unity was, I argue, in development, and not yet fully realized. My interpretation of this arc is that humans and something greater, let us call it/them non-human entities, were once not universally united but rather well-coordinated in thought, action, and progress. Then, at some point in time, selfishness and hubris caused humans to separate from each other, condemning some to castes within superior/inferior groupings based on some kind of status. And it was at that point that our superior counterparts abandoned the covenant of unified consciousness that they had honored with humans, and consequently, humans have been groping in the dark for shreds and glimpses of unity in our perception of ourselves and reality. There is no need to blame a jealous God in this revised narrative. We should instead accept that we brought our misfortune entirely upon ourselves.
We can now sense that something has emerged to prevent the kind of thinking that we might call elevated, in which truly abstract and transcendental concepts and objects are incorporated into an enhanced understanding of reality. This expansion of understanding is what Piaget saw developing in children, and which, in mirror opposite, Jaynes saw disappearing in adults.
And so we reach the top of our arc, where both points of departure now meet. What stages of incompletion and limited understanding are we able today to find in the human race? Perhaps now is the time to uncover our own conservation experiments, so that we can reconnect with something greater than ourselves, something we do not understand because there are abstract forces at work, but which in the form of flying discs, orbs, and apparitions, is continually in our midst, on our cameras, and in our dreams.
Until next time.