For Jaynes, this period occurred sometime between the creation of The Iliad and The Odyssey, which he suggests were not composed by a single author (i.e., Homer) but rather the result of collective composition over time. (You have to give Morley credit.In Julian Jaynes' book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind ( Jaynes, 1977), 1 he presented an ambitious theory that turned to the historical record in an attempt to pinpoint the period of human history in which consciousness emerged. Here like the solitary soul seated, a remote uplifted Teufelsdrockh, in the pineal gland of the brain" (101). The phrase was also dropped into novels, often in nonsensical ways, as when the hero of Morley Robert's minor 1899 novel, The Colossus, "felt like a conscious automaton. To indicate how widespread these debates were, conscious automatism not only was the subject of scholarly inquiry but also entered into the cultural vocabulary, so Fraser's Magazine in 1875 ran a satirical poem that announces, "Conscious Automata, we nothing can" (2). Lilly charges that Huxley's theory destroys not only morality but also the unity of the self the new naturalist psychology "reeks of the brothel, the latrine, and the torture trough" (581). Lilly's strident article "Materialism and Morality," appearing in the Fortnightly over ten years after Huxley's paper, can stand as representative of other near-hysterical responses. Carpenter, the Victorian psychologist known for originating the phrase "unconscious cerebration," objected to the view primarily because he was unwilling to give up conscious volitional agency and personal responsibility, considerations central to much Victorian psychological theory. Carpenter, George Romanes, and William James. Clifford, the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, the psychologist Henry Maudsley, and the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, among others, and critiqued by the psychologists G.H. Huxley's theory was admired by the mathematician W.K. Huxley gave such publicity in his Belfast address" (1). William James notes the paper's notoriety when he begins his 1879 Mind piece, "Are We Automata?" with the assertion that "everyone is now acquainted with the Conscious-Automaton theory to which Prof. Huxley's paper occasioned hundreds of discussions in books and articles, which continued to appear into the 1890s. But the topic also, to borrow some of the article's own terminology, hit a nerve with the Victorian public. He was also a talented publicist, and he arranged for his paper to be published simultaneously in three separate journals, including the influential Fortnightly Review and Nature, after he presented it at the 1874 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where it was read alongside John Tyndall's infamous "Belfast Address" supporting scientific materialism. Huxley was a beautiful stylist, so his presentation may have contributed to his article's impact. The theory took a profound hold on the Victorian cultural imagination, despite the unlikelihood that such a view would have broad appeal, since it denies the efficacy of what many take to be the most significant aspect of human life. It is a dualist conception of mind, but one that limits consciousness to registering the private, the "what it feels like to me." As Huxley puts it, consciousness has no influence on the physical world just "as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery" (575). The body carries on by reflex action, without any interference from thought and emotions, and, most significantly, entirely apart from volition. There is a one-way causal relation between body and mind: the physical affects the mental, but the mental has no effect on the physical. According to that view, consciousness is epiphenomenal, a by-product of neural processes. Huxley powerfully develops in his article one influential response to the problem: the theory that humans are conscious automata. To use Victorian terms, it had been well established that molecular changes in the brain were accompanied by changes in consciousness, but how to account for that association remained unclear. Consciousness and its relation to the body became a topic of acute interest in the nineteenth century as physiology and neurology revealed increasingly detailed connections between brain processes and conscious experience. It may be surprising to find Thomas Huxley's somewhat misleadingly titled article "On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata" identified as a keynote text of the Victorian period, but it is a piece that crucially impacted late Victorian literature and culture in ways that have now become invisible to us.
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