Scott Alexander, Book Review: Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind, Slate Star Codex, 2020 pp. 1-14.
Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact. So I’m going to start by reviewing a slightly different book, the one Jaynes should have written. Then I’ll talk about the more dubious one he actually wrote.
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Pablo López-Silva, Me and I Are Not Friends, Just Aquaintances: on Thought Insertion and Self-Awareness, , 2017 pp. 1-17.
A group of philosophers suggests that a sense of mineness intrinsically contained in the phenomenal structure of all conscious experiences is a necessary condition for a subject to become aware of himself as the subject of his experiences i.e. self-awareness. On this view, consciousness necessarily entails phenomenal self- awareness. This paper argues that cases of delusions of thought insertion undermine this claim and that such a phenomenal feature plays little role in accounting for the most minimal type of self-awareness entailed by phenomenal consciousness. First, I clarify the main view endorsing this claim i.e. the Self-Presentational View of Consciousness and formulate the challenge from thought insertion. After, I offer a systematic evalu- ation of all the strategies used by the advocates of this view to deal with this challenge. Finally, I conclude that most of these strategies are unsatisfactory for they rest in unwarranted premises, imprecisions about the agentive nature of cognitive experiences, and especially, lack of distinction between the different ways in which subjects can become aware of their own thoughts.
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Andreas Mayer, The development of our sense of self as a defense against invading thoughts: From Buddhist psychology to psychoanalysis, New Ideas In Psychology, 2020 vol. 58 p. 100775.
In interdisciplinary debates on the nature of the self, no-self accounts often refer to Buddhist psychology, arguing that the self is an illusion arising from our identification with mental content. What is often missing, however, is a developmentally, motivationally and emotionally plausible reason why this identification happens in the first place. It is argued that directing attention to our ongoing thought activities and their effect on our mind reveals their often invasive character. This is supported by psychoanalytic accounts on the ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins of thinking. On an experiential level, invading thoughts have similarities to attacks and provoke defensive reactions. The defense mechanism described as identification with the aggressor is used as a model in order to better grasp how we deal with invading thoughts, namely, by identifying with them and thus generating a sense of self as an agent of thoughts which provides an illusion of control.
(web, pdf)
Sruthi Rothenfluch, A Modified Self-Knowledge Model of Thought Insertion, , 2019 pp. 1-25.
Thought insertion is a condition characterized by the impression that one's thoughts are not one’s own and have been inserted by others. Some have explained the condition as resulting, in part, from impaired or defective self-knowledge, or knowledge of one’s mental states. I argue that such models do not shed light on the most puzzling feature of thought insertion: the patient’s experience that an introspected thought does not feel like her own. After examining ways in which existing versions of the model might address this worry, I propose a significant modification. I argue that the experience of disownership consists in a rational indifference that one feels towards one’s inserted thought. I further contend that the experience is generated by an underlying absence of an expectation of rational authority towards the inserted thought, such that the patient does not expect her thought to reflect, or be shaped by, her own rational considerations. I defend my proposal using empirical studies from cognitive and social psychology which suggest that we ordinarily have and experience an expectation of rational authority towards a certain subset of our thoughts, and direct analysis of patient reports, which strongly suggest that it is this expectation and the corresponding experience that thought insertion patients lack.
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