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Reading in the third millennium B.C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.

Julian Jaynes

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Julian Jaynes
Age: 77 †
Born: 1920
Born: February 27
Died: 1997
Died: November 21
Psychologist
University Teacher
Newton
Massachusetts
Matter
Picture
Syllables
Speech
Millennium
Therefore
Visuals
Looking
Visual
Reading
Symbols
Rather
Third
Sense
Thirds
Cuneiform
May
Hearing
Hallucinating

More quotes by Julian Jaynes

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The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space.
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History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.
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Our sense of justice depends on our sense of time. Justice is a phenomenon only of consciousness, because time spread out in a spatial succession is its very essence. And this is possible only in a spatial metaphor of time.
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Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.
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No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist.
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Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.
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There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.
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Idolatry is still a socially cohesive force - its original function.
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Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.
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The importance of writing in the breakdown of the bicameral voices is tremendously important. What had to be spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to be taken in visually.
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Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.
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I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.
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Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
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Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.
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The very reason we need logic at all is because most reasoning is not conscious at all.
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Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.
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We know to much to command ourselves very far.
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Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.
Julian Jaynes
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For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.
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This breakdown in the bicameral mind in what is called the Intermediate Period is reminiscent at least of those periodic breakdowns of Mayan civilizations when all authority suddenly collapsed, and the population melted back into tribal living in the jungles.
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