Doubt, the Catalyst for Consciousness

“I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am” is one of the most simple, but significant philosophical statements of all time. Hidden within that simplicity is the foundation for all knowledge. Only by doubting can one be certain of one’s own existence, because the process of doubting requires a subject capable of introspection. As Dr. Julian Jaynes said in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, “The eye cannot doubt or be in conflict, as the soon-to-be-invented conscious mind will be able to.” (pg 70)[1] Before modern consciousness existed, while man was transitioning from a bicameral (‘two-chambered’) state of mind, he didn’t have the ability to introspect, reflect on the past, or imagine any possible future– he was controlled by his environment, acting in a stimulus-response manner (if you’re not familiar with the Bicameral Theory of Mind please read the short summary here: https://manicmatter.com/origin-consciousness-bicameral-mind/). During this time period, there were what Dr. Jaynes referred to as the preconscious hypostases, these were physiological responses which instigated behavior, as in the way someone’s breathing might increase as an enemy force charges onto a battlefield and this leads them to fight or flee. In the Iliad, these respiratory changes were referred to as phrenes, and they could cause a cascade of physical reactions in the body that would lead a person to commit to a certain action. Or, as Jaynes says, “The preconscious hypostases are the assumed causes of action when other causes are no longer apparent. In any novel situation, when there are no gods, it is not a man who acts, but one of the preconscious hypostases [bodily sensations] which causes him to act. They are thus seats of reaction and responsibility which occur in the transition from the bicameral mind to subjective consciousness.” (pg 259)[1]

Although not a physiological response, doubt, likely caused by an interruption in a signal being sent from one area of the brain to another, could be one of the most powerful internal sensations which Dr. Jaynes referred to as the preconcious hypostases. When a message is sent from one area of the brain to another, but it never arrives because of a signaling issue there is a feeling of doubt which is not easy to overcome– it makes one question whatever has entered their mind. If someone is able to question what they see, hear, or feel, then that displays more than a simple sense, it demonstrates that their senses are being interpreted. In this way, neurological doubt, as opposed to Descartes’ hyperbolical/metaphysical doubt, may have preceded consciousness, and in fact be the primary cause of consciousness as we know it. It’s important to state here that I use the definition of consciousness which was put forth by Dr. Julian Jaynes, and Descartes, in its simplest terms it would be “that which is introspectable.”

If Jaynes is correct, and consciousness emerged in the Middle East sometime around 1000 B.C. then the literature from that time period should reflect this, and indeed it does. While examining the Old Testament, Dr. Jaynes stated that “it is possible to look upon it [the Fall of Man] as a myth of the breakdown of the bicameral mind. The Hebrew arum, meaning crafty or deceitful, surely a conscious subjective word, is only used three or four times throughout the entire Old Testament. It is here used to describe the source of the temptation. The ability to deceive, we remember, is one of the hallmarks of consciousness. The serpent promises that “you shall be like the elohim [Gods] themselves, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5), qualities that only subjective conscious man is capable of. And when these first humans had eaten of the tree of knowledge, suddenly “the eyes of them both were opened,” their analog eyes in their metaphored mind-space, “and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7), or had autoscopic visions and were narratizing, seeing themselves as others see them. And so is their sorrow “greatly multiplied” (Genesis 3:16) and they are cast out from the garden where He-who-is could be seen and talked with like another man.” (pg 299)[1]

I believe that within the Biblical tale of the fall of man lies the biological cause of increased doubt, which led to subjectivity– the Forbidden Fruit. Many scholars think that the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is merely a metaphor, but this doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a biological basis for it. In the Garden of Eden God commanded Adam, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Genesis 2:16-17), but why would this be? It seems apparent to me that the myth details not just the acquisition of consciousness, but also of man’s change from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agrarian one. This is most evident in Genesis 3:17-19:

In the narrative, Adam, which is derived from the Hebrew word for soil (adama) as he was created from the earth, was exiled from the garden where he was forced to work the fields in order to eat for the remainder of his life. The name Chava (Eve’s name in the original text) is derived from the Hebrew root chayah meaning life– this is very interesting because she is the first being made from another living creature as all other organisms before her had been formed out of the ground. As you can see, the writers of the Old Testament were very careful with their words, so it’s no coincidence that the Hebrew name of the forbidden fruit is a pun on sin; khet is the Hebrew word for sin, and some Rabbinic traditions regard khitah, or wheat, to be a pun on sin. Thus, the story of the Fall of Man explains not just the acquisition of consciousness, but also of man’s change to an agrarian lifestyle because both events were precipitated by the ingestion of wheat.

What did Ancient Hebrew sources say the forbidden fruit was? Rabbi Yehuda/Judah, a 2nd Century wise man who is the most frequently mentioned sage in the Mishnah, the first written compendium of Judaism’s Oral Law, proposed that the fruit was wheat because “a babe does not know to call its mother and father until it tastes the taste of grain.”[2] The first book of the Kabbalah, the Sefer Yetzirah (the Book of Formation) which was said to be written by the patriarch Abraham, says that the forbidden fruit was wheat,[3] this teaching is also found in the Talmud, a collection of the opinions of thousands of rabbis on an assortment of subjects which is second only to the Torah. Many people would question how wheat could be considered a fruit, or a tree; the Talmud says that wheat is a fruit because of the way in which it grows.[4] Sages in the Midrash, an early commentary on Biblical texts, said that wheat once grew as tall as a palm tree, but its height was reduced after mankind had sinned.[5]

While viewing the Garden of Eden myth as a metaphor for the change in ancient man’s way of life, this brings us to the question of why ancient man was not “supposed” to eat wheat. I believe that the simplest, and most logical explanation would be that man has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to eat vegetation in its natural form; wheat, and most other cereal grains (grass seeds), require mechanical processing and baking before consumption so this is something which man didn’t eat until the point when civilization had advanced to a sufficient degree several thousand years ago in the Levant and Iraq. But, on a physiological level, why was wheat so different from the foods which man was adapted to? Before anatomically modern humans (from approximately 30,000 years ago) began adopting agriculture, their diet consisted of meat, fruits, nuts, legumes, roots and tubers, consumption of cereal seeds hadn’t begun to increase until the end of the Pleistocene around 10,000 years ago. (Constantini 1989)[6] Around this time-period, according to Loren Cordain, “hunter-gatherers occasionally consumed cereal grains; however these foods were apparently not major dietary components for most of the year.”(1999)[7, 8] As the climate in much of the world was becoming more hospitable for humans, large game became more and more depleted, and new sources of food were required for humankind’s ever-increasing numbers– it was at this time that gathered plants were becoming more and more important for survival. Despite their nutritional shortcomings cereal grains have several advantages related primarily to ease of storage and planting, but the major change which grains allowed for was a much greater population density.

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

The development of large, agricultural societies allowed for the specialization of labor since only a relatively small portion of the population would be required to farm this would leave time for the others to focus on a particular trade like tool-making, cloth-making, and building. This new way of life led not only to social stratification, but also to the exchange of ideas, and the development of organized governments to properly plan and manage surpluses. Looking back, it’s interesting to note that

In the bicameral era man would experience hallucinations in novel/stressful situations so that an individual would know what to do, in this sense every man had a god that walked with him and could be experienced face to face; after man began eating wheat this increased various by-products of stress in the body so that the voices would appear intermittently or perhaps almost continuously in some people. Thus you can see how it could be said that ancient man walked with god and spoke with him face to face, because god was always there for him and he provided assistance in times of need; after eating the forbidden fruit man was separated from god because the voices began to be experienced randomly so they would no longer provide helpful commands. The people who were living at the time of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, the first people who had consciousness as we know it, left records of their interactions with god. As god receded from the mind of man like a tide which would never return, the words of the prophets of the Old Testament acted like a bridge which would allow others to cross the chasm which lay under the lost sea. The word of god had replaced the voice of god, but the ebbing tide left behind a hollow space for a new kind of mentality, one which would allow mankind to deal with complex societies which led to much more novelty than they’d ever been exposed to before. Thus, as the hallucinated voice had changed from producing commands distilled from stored-up, admonitory wisdom to what was probably a steady stream of matter-of-fact statements, musings, and reproachful rants, suddenly this voice was a stimuli which one could react to. Not only could the voice provide sudden verbal insight, or “inspiration” (as the now-changing god-side of the mind “breathed into” man), but one could also speak to it in the sense that as the voice (I want to specify here that as the voice occurred more often it would likely be perceived as less and less of an auditory hallucination which was “heard” and more as the god-side of the mind speaking to the man-side in an internal space which was still developing) says something like “look at that drawing, that’s not what the tower looked like” then the man could say “yes, the tower was not round.” So, in effect, we could bounce ideas off of this new structure as if it were another person– it has been said that two heads are better than one, and what amounts to two brains is perhaps the best. Over time, with an adjustment to the diet, the acquisition of new metaphorical language, and a changing social structure, the god-side of the mind became more of an analog space, a mind-space, where narratization occurred.