imagine no one told you what a brain was and you had no concept of being located somewhere in your body
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Replying to @turtlekiosk
According to this book pre-homeric ancient Greeks didn’t even have a concept of the body or “self” as an entity (they saw ppl as a collection of coordinated body parts) https://www.amazon.com/Discovery-Mind-Bruno-Snell/dp/0486242641 …
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Replying to @tobyshorin @turtlekiosk
Jaynes discusses Greek theories of self including thymos/phrenes/noos/etc and its unification in great detail in "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" but to summarize his discussion would require me summarizing the entire book, basically
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Replying to @turtlekiosk @tobyshorin
ok. See image. Jaynes claims Greek consciousness incl idea of self developed in stages 1 = others have body feels 2 = we ourselves have body feels 3 = our body feels have psychological meanings 4 = these meanings unify into an "internal" self "analogous" to our physical presencepic.twitter.com/bOLcivncZD
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thumos/phrenes/kradie/etor/noos/psyche refer to separate physical sensations in the Iliad that bicameral Gods used as "containers" (put vigor into thumos) usage of physical sensations as psychological metaphor increases over time, culminating w Pythagoras: psyche as unified soul
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supposedly Pythagoras nicked this idea of soul from the Egyptian idea of "ba" (bodies of dead relatives speaking to you as gods), and this dualism concept lived on through Plato, Descartes, onward to today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_concept_of_the_soul#B%C3%A2_(personality) …
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but interestingly at the beginning of Jaynes' book, before he discusses the Greeks in any detail, a motivating question is "why do we look into peoples' head? as if that's where their consciousness lives?" and he uses this to redefine consciousness in metaphorical terms
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apparently the eyes have hallucinogenic properties, ancient ppl would keep the heads of their dead relatives around and "use" them (by looking at them) in times of decision-making, which would cause them to hear their dead relative's voices telling them what to do
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Plato's Alcibiades has a major point built around this; only through gazing into the eyes of someone and seeing you therein can you attain knowledge of "the itself in itself" and thus of the divine, by gazing into your own soul through your contact with the other.
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