Citations:bicameral

English citations of bicameral

Adjective: (government) "pertaining to two legislative chambers"

					1839
ME «	15th c.	16th c.	17th c.	18th c.	19th c.	20th c.	21st c.

• 1839, Francis Lieber, Manual of Political Ethics, part 2, Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, book 6, section 14, pages 536–537:

  It is important, therefore, to have two houses, so organized that they will not be easily swayed by the same impetuosity, in other words, that the two houses be founded upon different principles. If not, as is the case in the present Belgian constitution, according to which the senate is elected by the representatives from among themselves, little more than the outward form of the bicameral system is obtained.

Adjective: (mentality)

• James E. Morriss, “Reflections on Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, first published in ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 1978, 35, 3. Reprinted in Kuijsten 2016, pages 23-37. Page 30:

  What Jaynes seems to be saying is that bicameral man, in his primitive stage of language development, did not have adequate symbolic referents to translate impinging sense data into subjective consciousness. Shackled by this dependence on the concrete, our bicameral forebears had yet to discover or consciously exploit the double level of metaphor. In the magic of make-believe, myth and reality were inextricably fused and would not emerge as distinctive features of mind in the Western world until the birth of philosophy, which interestingly enough occurred in the middle of the first millennium B.C. – well after the time Jaynes sets for the beginning of the breakdown of the bicameral mind..

• Laura Mooneyham White, "The Origin of Consciousness, Gains and Losses: Walker Percy vs. Julian Jaynes", first published in Language and Communication, 1993, 13, 3. Copyright 1993, Elsevier Ltd. Reprinted in Kuijsten 2016, pages 175-197.

  Jaynes proposes that these hallucinated voices constituted all primitive religious experience, all the gods, omens, and visions of ancient people… The voices of the gods came from the right hemisphere and told the slave-like left hemisphere what to do… The development of writing…weakened the bicameral mentality… Voices multiply, then fall silent, as we develop an interiorized consciousness to replace bicameral authority. Page 177.

  …all religious impulses are merely nostalgic vestiges of our own bicameral auditory hallucinations. Pages 182-183.

• Scott Greer, "A Knowing Noos and a Slippery Psyche:Jaynes's Recipe for an Unnatural Theory of Consciousness", in Kuijsten, 2016, page 239.

  Our mentality - whether bicameral or conscious - is thus more a function of social context, language, and forms of communication than a hard-wired neurologically-based system.

• Strachan, Graham L. “Globalism and bicameralism”, 1999. http://www.gwb.com.au/gwb/news/economic/190799.htm

  It is suggested that significant numbers of people today are actually operating in bicameral mode, some of them because they cannot be bothered thinking for themselves, others because they have never learned to, or they have been actively prevented from doing so by the modern education system.

  Bicameral man was not fully conscious in the sense of being able to reason, but he could perform most functions required for primitive tribal existence.

Adjective: (supporting a theory of the bicameral mind)

1. • 1976, 1990, Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston:

     “…Maya cities…showing the same bicameral architecture…” p.155;

     “…about A.D. 1200, [the Inca] realm was suggestive of a god-king type of bicameral kingdom.” p.158;