Up from Dreamtime

We are just learning how to survive in infinity. ~ Aboriginal saying.

Julian Jaynes (Psychologist, Princeton) speculated the conscious mind (subjective self-awareness) originated in the last three thousand years, as illustrated in the lack of subjective self-awareness in Homer’s Iliad and the early books of the Bible. I would agree the conscious mind is a new addition to the human brain, but do not agree with his timing.

Toba, one of ten super-volcanoes in the world, exploded 74,000 years ago, ejecting 1000 times the material into the atmosphere as Mt. St. Helens in 1980. The climatic stress reduced worldwide population of Homo sapiens to as little as 2000, and certainly fewer than 10,000. This is evident from the variations in man's current mitochondrial DNA. It also explains the reason for a second exodus from Africa approximately 50,000 years ago that repopulated the world. The movement to the east went quickly, populating Australia by 40,000 years ago, but took longer to populate Europe probably because of the ice age in progress and perhaps because of competition from Neanderthals already there.

The Australian Aboriginals and the Homo sapiens remaining in Africa do not lack consciousness, or subjective self-awareness, indicating it developed prior to leaving Africa. Not finding it in Homer or the early Bible may merely be similar to not finding perspective in art until the Renaissance.

Life without consciousness would be, in my mind, like driving a car while thinking of something else—except one isn’t thinking of something else or anything at all. Driving happens just fine, and may be even better since the subconscious mind has reaction timing around 1/10th of a second vs. the conscious mind being ½ second or more—then lying about it (really! see Benjamin Libet).

The conscious mind is certainly newer than the subconscious mind as indicated by the conscious mind's lesser capabilities. For example, the conscious mind can only readily remember 7 plus-or-minus 2 items; the subconscious is virtually unlimited. The subconscious apparently remembers everything using all sense tracks plus an emotional track. It’s retrieval that is the problem.

Wilder Penfield illustrated this in the 1920s and 1930s when probing open-brained epileptics caused them to relive earlier life experiences by stimulating a particular point. The relived experience repeated if the same point was again stimulated, even when the person was told a different point would be stimulated. At the time, it was thought the brain's memory method had been uncovered, but it turned out this does not work on non-epileptics.

The oldest continuous social structure of Homo sapiens, the Australian Aborigines, have a creation myth of coming out of Dreamtime, which parallels, if you would, coming out of Eden after gaining the knowledge of right and wrong. Are these both mythical memories of life prior to the evolution of the conscious mind? Possibly so. Perhaps the conscious mind developed in the challenging period following Toba, and the subsequent leaving Africa to repopulate the world is the coming out of Eden. This gives these two myths similar meaning.

The conscious mind also provides inductive reasoning vs. deductive reasoning of the subconscious. This may be true or not, but the subconscious being older seems to be more brilliant than the conscious, meaning merely it has access to greater concentrations of neurons available for task assignment.

The subconscious also appears to be self-programming and is best assigned a task without instruction on how to accomplish it. Just what the reason is that the more-brilliant subconscious should work for the less brilliant conscious mind is basically unknown, but it obviously is successful judging from the climb of mankind in terms of civilization, knowledge and organizational striving. We’ve all had the experience of working for a boss less intelligent than we—and much less intelligent then he thought he was.

Perhaps this also offers us an understanding of enlightenment as being the melding the conscious and subconscious to functioning in concert and as one. The Aborigines also speak of returning to Dreamtime, after all.