Jaynes’s reliance on the Iliad and the consciousness of the warrior who does not take thought but acts out of his training and established virtue begs the question. The hero’s ‘arete’ is simply to fight, to engage his valour, his thumos, in a righteous cause. The counsel of Krishna to Arjuna who is dithering and unable to act is likewise to follow his dharma which is to be a warrior and engage an unrighteous enemy even if some of them are relations and respected elders. Excessive reflexion leads to a fall from dharma in the case of the Kshatriya. The spirit of a warrior is no indication of a general state of consciousness.
Friday 15 December 2017
Julian Jaynes and Self-Awareness
Jaynes’s reliance on the Iliad and the consciousness of the warrior who does not take thought but acts out of his training and established virtue begs the question. The hero’s ‘arete’ is simply to fight, to engage his valour, his thumos, in a righteous cause. The counsel of Krishna to Arjuna who is dithering and unable to act is likewise to follow his dharma which is to be a warrior and engage an unrighteous enemy even if some of them are relations and respected elders. Excessive reflexion leads to a fall from dharma in the case of the Kshatriya. The spirit of a warrior is no indication of a general state of consciousness.
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3 comments:
Have you watched the Westworld TV series, Michael?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8HQoMyu-iQ
I watched a little of it but A.I. is unconvincing as a theme for a show because of its innate limitations. When they go awry there is no tragedy in that, its a mechanical failure merely. We have no feeling that they are evil. Here maladjustment is the correct word. ‘Back to the shop with you’.
About Jaynes: Is he epistemology’s Von Daniken?
Certainly the Westworld take on Jaynes is Von Danikenesque, inasmuch as the AIs' creators are the ones speaking to them in their godvoice hemispheres. Not surprisingly, Westworld over the course of season one traces a Pygmalion-Frankenstein humanization of the AIs, in which they transcend their sapience with self-awareness. It's a kind of cool move to invoke bicameral mind logic in the show, which is based on a movie that originally came out around the time that Jaynes was formulating his theory.
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