Semitrance, Language and the Development of Civilization 

Matti Pitkänen 

Department of Physics, Theoretical Physics Division,
P.O. Box 9 Fin-00014, University of Helsinki, Finland
E-mail: matpitka@rock.helsinki.fi
http://www.physics.helsinki.fi/~matpitka 

Full article (PDF format):  www.emergentmind.org/PDF_files.htm/Development.pdf

Abstract:  Jaynes' book "The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind"  provides a highly original vision about the evolution of modern consciousness from the consciousness of the bicameral stone age man. The TGD version about the cosmology of human consciousness relies on the notion of semitrance. During semitrance parts of the brain entangle with some higher level (say the self associated with the social group) and are in trance - therefore unconscious. The remaining parts of the brain are however conscious and receive communications from the collective consciousness via the entangled region of the brain as sensory hallucinations, emotions and thoughts. Semitrance is absolutely essential for self narrative and establishment of long term goals: without semitrance our consciousness would consist of memory fragments lasting only a few seconds: higher-level-selves tell us where we come from and where we are going. 

The basic differences between  Jaynes and the TGD-based version of the evolution of civilization relate to the interpretation of bicamerality and what has really happened in the evolution of the individual. 

a) In the TGD framework one could see the bicameral man as a cognitive and emotional child characterized by the effective cognitive and emotional ages at which the cognitive and emotional self-organizations of her left brain hemisphere stopped in the absence of external stimuli necessary for self-organization (it would be impossible to learn to write if civilization had not discovered written language). Of course, there are several parameters differentiating modern man from the bicameral man (sensitivity for semitrance, profile of semitrance, time fraction spent in semitrance, right-left brain inhibition,...) and the identification of the bicameral individual as a cognitive and emotional child is unnecessarily strong. 

b) The ability to fall into semitrance was not lost during evolution but was transformed to a new form. Not only linguistic but also sensory regions of the right brain hemisphere of bicameral man entangled with higher level selves and the communications from right to left brain hemisphere were not inhibited as they are in the brain of modern man. As the left brain hemisphere differentiated and the memetic code gradually established itself, the guiding voice of God was transformed to internal speech and emotions. Higher-level-selves began to express their will via emotions, moods, planning and long term goals. 

c) The differences between the EEG of a normal person and that of a schizophrenic suggest that the fraction of time spent by the average modern man in semitrance is much shorter. A more general criterion of bicamerality might be based on the fraction of time spent in semitrance state, be it sensory, cognitive or emotional. It is plausible that thoughts (not all of course!) are communicated to modern man via left brain hemisphere. If this is indeed the case, some regions of left brain hemisphere of modern man should allow standing EEG waves. 

The development of  language is an absolutely essential part in the development of civilization. The syntactic structures of language emerged in parallel with the development of civilization. In TGD framework the development of language can be seen as a gradual establishment of genetic and memetic codes at a new level and the emergence of symbol function. This could be also seen as an establishment of a symbiosis between two life-forms: biological life and 'culture' having as a physical correlate electromagnetic life represented as topological quanta of em ELF fields and providing realization of the memetic code. 

Semitrance mechanism provides an extremely general communication mechanism between the levels of the self hierarchy and could explain why ant nests, beehives, flocks of birds, packs of wolves, cell societies, nuclei of brain, etc.. can behave as a single organism and still consist of apparently randomly behaving individuals. Indeed, relevant biological structures (DNA double strand, double lipid layer forming cell membrane, epithelial sheets) have binary structure analogous to two brain lobes and are ideal candidates for 'bicameral' structures. 

The vision about the development of civilization generalizes to cell level. p-Adic fractality plus the fact that the number of quantum jumps performed by selves is huge even at the cellular and elementary particle levels, inspires the hypothesis that various societies ranging from human civilization to cell societies and protein-DNA societies are characterized by universal asymptotic self-organization patterns. This provides important insights into the structure of the biological self-hierarchy and its relation to the structure and functioning of the organism and also into how semitrance might allow bio-systems to control and coordinate their behavior. Cell as a protein-DNA society together with the parallel between memetic and genetic codes provides a predictive vision about how genetic code might have established itself and semitrance suggests that new kind of control and communication mechanisms based on semitrance mechanism are at work.