It was an old photo, too. So I didn't notice until I checked my stats and found nearly 2000 hits to that particular picture.

Cashmere - what tommyrot said.

IOMoreUnrelatedN, has anyone read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind?

The author posits that human consciousness developed less than 3000 years ago. Before that people were all automata, unaware of themselves.

Doesn't seem like that could be right to me....

Forgive me, Amy, but this...

Stephen likes to make it old-school every once in a while.

made my inner twelve-year old giggle.

I have a slight fever, chills, and the beginnings of a sore throat and cough. Seriously? It's only been a month since the last time I was sick. Bah. I'm going to say this will be gone after a good night's sleep and a restful day tomorrow. Who's with me?

ETA: Jesus, Cash, that's horrifying.

Ugh, Cash. I've been looking at a lot of pictures of people's kids along with with all the others, and I can't imagine the bind. Say you have a blog so family can come by and see how you guys are doing--but then you find out someone's copied your pics and has them on their own website for some strange reason--how disturbing.

I've seen people whose profiles had explicit "if you favourite my kids and look even slightly skeevy I ban you" warnings in them, but how much can you do?

On the dcp site I linked to above, I came across this lovely pic...and sure enough people mention being a bit disturbed with it in the comments, but both the mother and daughter are dismissive because she's fully clothed.

Then again, that print is for sale by the mother, so that's a whole different level of comfort.

That's kind of a creepy looking picture, honestly. Not sexually creepy, just...I find it weird and unsettling.

Of course, by linking to it, we're upping the hits...assuming anyone clicks on ita's links anymore...

I enjoy sharing my kids' photos with buffistas (and yeah, I know there are lurkers I don't know). And flickr made it easy to link for my untechy family members who have slow dial up connections to view photos without emailing them. They just never wanted to sign up for accounts so I kept most of my photos public.

I was only alerted once or twice before to this--one photo of Liv last summer and one of my broken toe. But finding the actual website where this photo link was posted made me fucking ill.

A friend of ours is a cop. He said once he had to protect a guy who was on trial for child molesting from vigilantes. He said the guy had some perfectly innocent child photos (like child models in Gap ads) taped to his wall surrounded by the most vile pieces of porno my friend had had ever seen. It was the mixture that was most disturbing. So this thought is running through my brain right now.

Ugh, Cashmere.

The author posits that human consciousness developed less than 3000 years ago.

Less than 3000? But...the pyramids are over 4000 years old, right? Designing and building those seems pretty self-aware to me. Of course, so do cave paintings and the like, and those are more like 30,000 years old.

This link has a good explanation of the guy's theories: [link]

Jaynes adduces evidence for this astonishing hypothesis from several sources. One is the "voices" heard by schizophrenic patients, which Jaynes interprets as a throwback to the bicameral mind of ancient times. Another is evidence from neurosurgery, where patients hear "voices" upon having their brains electrically stimulated. Another is the polytheistic gods of ancient civilizations, which spoke directly and intimately to individuals:

"Who then were these gods who pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips? They were voices whose speech and directions could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients...The gods were organizations of the central nervous system"(73-4).

Jaynes suggests that each person had his own individual "god", which always told them what to do. The theory further accounts for why the gods were so naturalistic and anthropomorphic, rather than supernatural and otherworldly.

Where did the gods go, then? Jaynes proposes that a series of unprecedented environmental stresses in the second millennium B.C. forced the two halves of the brain to merge into unicamerality. (This was a cultural, rather than a biological, transformation, Jaynes notes.) The stresses might have included natural disasters (the story of the Flood comes to mind), population growth, forced migrations, warfare, trade, and the development of writing. A common denominator among all these is the introduction of complexity and difference, things the bicameral mind deals with only with difficulty. Jaynes suggests, among other things, that traders in contact with other cultures might have been forced to develop a "protosubjective consciousness" to cope with the gods of unfamiliar people.

...

To establish the gods' disappearance, Jaynes cites a number of illustrations and cuneiform tablets dating from Sumerian times. He shows a stone-carven image of the King of Assyria kneeling in supplication before an empty throne, from which his god is conspicuously absent. The accompanying cuneiform script reads, "One who has no god, as he walks along the street,/ Headache envelopes him like a garment." Another tablet reads,

My god has forsaken me and disappeared,

My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance.

The good angel who walked beside me has departed.

Jaynes interprets this as evidence of a new subjectivity in Mesopotamia. The bicameral mind has begun to collapse into the modern unicameral mind of the self-willed, self-aware "I", and as a consequence the gods no longer speak to people, as they did in the days of old (223).

Interesting. But unprovable (I think, without having read the book).

"One who has no god, as he walks along the street,/ Headache envelopes him like a garment."

Maybe if we got ita a god, her head would hurt less....