Jaynes and Hoagland findings related??

Ted Holden (medved@access4.digex.net)
14 Jan 1995 09:50:58 -0500

>From sci.skeptic here recently, two seemingly unrelated posts:

From: HALAN@whqvax.picker.com (JOHN HALAN)
Subject: Re: Is NASA covering up anything on Mars?

>In <D1v121.3pv@news.hawaii.edu> tholen@galileo.ifa.hawaii.edu writes:
>
>> David Barber writes:
>>
>> > This is not flame bait.
>> >
>> > This is not any attempt to turn this group into alt.conspiracy.everything.
>> >
>> > This is only a question to the serious astromony people on the net, does
>> > anybody _seriously_ believe that NASA is covering up evidence of intelligent
>> > activity on Mars? Is it even possible that they could cover such a
>> > thing up?
>>
>> Well, Richard Hoagland, the person pushing the coverup story, lets on that
>> he is serious, but he could just be doing so to make a buck. After all,
>> sensationalism sells (hence the existence of the supermarket tabloids).
>> Outside of him and his cohorts, and maybe some gullible lay persons, I
>> know of nobody who believes in his wild claims.

>Well, I suppose by Mr/s. tholen's definition I must fall into his category
>of "some gullible lay person". I am not saying that I outright believe all
>of Hoagland's "wild claims", but I am certainly saying that his claims
>deserve serious investigation. I have found that most of the people who
>make statements like Mr/s. tholen's have never actually read Hoagland's
>book (The Monuments of Mars), or any of the other books on the same subject.
>I would suggest that you read the book and examine the images. Then pull up
>the raw image data for yourself, off of the InterNet. Play with it yourself.
>
>I believe that Hoagland documents one of NASA's coverup's or attempted cover-
>up, fairly well. When NASA first released the image with the "FACE", I
>believe the person releasing it made a statement to the press that said
>something like, .. there is a weird object on this one that looks something
>like a face ... but before you jump to conclusions... pictures taken of the
>same area, on later orbits do not show the face.... so it is only the way
>the light is hitting the rocks that makes it look like a face.
>
>Later, when researcher went looking for the "other images", they couldn't
>find them. finally, an additional image of the area was found... it had
>apparently been purposefully mis-filed out of place and out of sequence!
>Hidden amongst other images.
>
>In fact, NASA had outright lied. There are only two high resolution images
>of the Cydonia region of Mars. They were taken at slightly different sun
>angles, and the "FACE" is visible in both of them.
>
>I personally do not believe that NASA is the perpetrator of the lies and
>disinformation. This is certainly opposed to their public charter. I
>believe that they are doing what they are being told to do by higher
>authority. If you want the answer as to WHY... you'll have to try to
>get a hold of a copy of the so called "Brooking's Report". Hoagland made
>this public in his lecture at OSU this past summer.
>
> JohnBouy
>_____________________________________________________________________
>The opinions expressed here are my own, and not those of my employer.

From: tbev@parcplace.com
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,sci.misc,sci.anthropology
Subject: Julian Jaynes
Date: Fri, 30 Dec 94 11:50:25 PDT

>Hello,
>
>I've recently read Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the
>Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" for the 3rd time and am more intrigued
>than ever. I think he may really be onto something. That being said,
>I'd like to learn what other information affirming/falsifying others may
>have regarding Bicameral Hypothesis.
>
>Prof. Jaynes' hypothesis includes the following:
>
>1) Consciousness as we think of it today is a relatively recent
> phenomenon, approximately 2-3 thousand years.
>
>2) The people who built most of the ancient cultures we have evidence
> of were unconscious and more akin to modern schitzophrenics, i.e.
> they frequently, if not continually, heard and obeyed auditory
> and visual hallucinations in one side of their brain that had
> originated in the other. Dr. Jaynes calls this mentality Bicameral.
>
>3) A necessary condition for the emergence of consciousness is language and
> that the emergence of consciousness is not due to new biological
> underpinnings.
>
>
>Jayne's realizes how counter-intuitive his thesis is so he begins slowly by
>clearly and systematically showing what consciousness IS NOT. He then
>assembles evidence from many disciplines with an emphasis on the earliest
>written records we have in order to detect the transition between the BICAMERAL
>mentality and modern mentality.
>
>In the interest of brevity I have necessarily omitted dozens of equally
>important features of Dr. Jaynes hypothesis as well as what appears to be
>remarkable evidence in their favor. My goal is to learn what current work
>if any is going on in this area, amass more data pro and con, and to hopefully
>at some point start a thread and/or newsgroup on the topic.
>
>Happy New Year to All!
>
>Tom Bevington

The two topics are two of what I see as four big anomalies which are
inexplicable with anything like standard origin theories. The other two
would be antediluvian megafauna, and the former supercontinent.

Those who might be inclined to doubt Hoagland, in particular those like
my buddy Walter who might have figured Hoagland's "enhanced" images to
represent anything other or more than images cleaned up via digital
signal processing techniques, might wish to check out the images on:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery/PhotoGallery-Mars.html

These include official government "enhanced" images, which show the same
things Hoagland's images show: a monument something like a mile and a
half long and 1500 feet high with a humanoid face on it, one gigantic
five sided pyramid with clear buttressing on the corners, the long sides
being over a mile in length, a complex of pyramids about 15 km to the
Northwest of the face, and one more complex structure with a triangular
enclosed space surrounded by two straight walls, and a curved wall.

Other, higher resolution images elsewhere on the net show traces of
rectangles in the sand in the surrounding area, basically foundations of
more ordinary buildings which got blown away by whatever happened. The
more massive structures, of course, survive.

The chances of all of that being "natural" formations or tricks of
sunlight, as astronomers would have us believe, is about the same as the
chance of hell freezing over tonight.

Astronomers are denying what their eyes obviously tell them because it blows
their cosmology. You can't build something like that with space-suits on;
the planet must be habitable before you build Cydonia. There being no
way to picture Mars inhabitable in anything like present circumstances,
they first try to use the time magic-wand again and picture the whole
thing being 200M years ago, but that creates an even bigger problem.

The face on the monument is obviously not one of us, but a recent
relative, from the look of it, one of Jay Matterness' reconstructions of
Neanderthals with an Egyptian haircut. But putting the entire business
back even 2M, much less 200M years, would force the face to be that of
homo-erectus or some such, basically a monkey. It then gets worse.

Aside from the monkeys getting to Mars before we did (since the odds of
simians developing on Mars as a separate evolutionary strain by
coincidence are overwhelming), there is the question of why we do not
find any evidence of the technical infrostructure which such a feat
would have entailed, here on Earth. You'd have to believe that
something like the biblical flood erased all traces of the former
advanced simian society, all of their Cape Canaverals etc.

The astronomers therefore prefer to deny the entire thing, but those
pictures are making them look like idiots.

If we can get the votes for it, there will shortly be a new group called
talk.catastrophism, a major part of which will be discussing a new model
of solar system history within the confines of which, the
impossibilities presented by Cydonia will cease to look so impossible.
This will be a moderated group, populated by serious scholars
who have devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to the study
of the antediluvian world and its characteristics.

Back to Julian Jaynes, however. How is his work related to any of this?

Amongst the things which have to be viewed as anomalies if standard
kinds of origins theories are excepted, none is any more strange than
the total non-relatedness of Indo-European and Semitic languages.

Given standard theories, man should have been language capable hundreds
of thousands of years ago, and the division of the Indo-European and
Semitic groups cannot be more than a few thousand; there is no racial
difference worth talking about. The Indo-European and Semitic groups
should have had a common language just a few thousand years back and the
languages should still be roughly as close to eachother as, say, English
and Russian, or Greek and Sanscrit/Hindi. Nonetheless, there appears to be no
relationship between Indo-European and Semitic languages beyond the
straw-grasping of the Nostradic crowd, which according to some sources is
no more than might be expected due to chance, there being only so many
sounds the human vocal system can make.

The whole thing behaves exactly like what you would expect if human
communications had been of some other sort, possibly telepathic, prior
to some event within the last ten thousand years which destroyed the
antediluvian electromagnetic nature of the world and its ability to
support such phenomena, and our present languages simply were devised at
that time. In particular, all that would then be required for
Indo-European and Semitic languages not to be related would be for the
two groups to have been separated by geographical barriers (The caucasus
mountains) during the 100 - 200 year stretch during which language was
being developed.

Jaynes then has discovered the basis for antediluvian communications, and
the true nature of the story of the Tower of Babel. He has also
discovered the reason why languages appear to DEVOLVE rather than evolve,
as creationists claim; they were simply developed and thus stood in a
pristine state within the last 10,000 years, and have been simplified
since.

And, of course, without knowing it, he has discovered the reason for
heiroglyphics in our oldest languages; without spoken speech, the idea
of a pheonetic alphabet could not possibly have occurred to anybody.

Jaynes noted that in very ancient literature,
from the older sections of the Iliad and on back, we search in vain
for any sort of a reference to anything which we would call decision
making; at every turn at which you or I would have to stop and think
about how to proceed, the men and women of the Iliad are guided by the
voices of gods and goddesses. This appears universally true of earlier
literature as well, and there are positive references in the literature
of Assyria and other lands that there was a definite time at which this
guidence by inner voices broke down, and men first came to feel
deserted by the gods which had previously sustained them.

Jaynes notes that the Wernicke's area of the left brain, primarily
responsible for speech capabilities has an unused analog on the right
side, and a bridge crossover between them and that, when this right side
analog is stimulated electrically, as has been done with epileptic
patients, the patients in many cases claim to hear voices, as real as if
you or I were to be speaking to them.

Jaynes argues that the entire manner in which the human brain and mind
work today, is fundamentally different from the way in which they worked
just a few thousand years ago, and the evidence appears to entirely
support him. And yet, the thesis he presents, that men were then guided
by auditory hallucinations which had somehow evolved to a functional
"group-think" kind of condition, is clearly unworkable. A village
populated by 200 people all heading inner voices would amount to 200
Sons of Sam running around. Jaynes was viewing evidence of a long
twilight period during which the old modality died out.

The old manner of mental function did not, of course, die out on a
single day. A long period followed during which the old modality died
out or was ground out of the race by a process of attrition as it became
increasingly disfunctional, voices of gods and goddesses directing
people to fight wars etc., until, as Jaynes notes, you had Jewish
prophets actually telling parents to kill children who "yet prophecied",
i.e. persisted in the old modality:

ZEC 13:2
And it shall come to pass in
that day, saith the LORD of hosts, that
I will cut off the names of the idols out
of the land, and they shall no more
be remembered: and also I will cause
the prophets and the unclean spirit to
pass out of the land.

ZEC 13:3
And it shall come to pass, that when any
shall yet prophesy, then his
father and his mother that begat him shall
say unto him, Thou shalt not live;
for thou speakest lies in the name of the
LORD: and his father and his mother
that begat him shall thrust him through
when he prophesieth.