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Bicameralism Quotes

Browse 4 quotes about Bicameralism.

Bicameralism Quotes

“He stares into the flames that devour his beloved, hoping that they will curl into a spinning fireball from which she will speak. Or even that her voice will whistle from what is left of Patroclus' lips. Nothing. She has never failed him before. Has she turned from him forever for his disobedience and sacrilege? Is he eternally alone? Terror swiftly transmutes into fury, and he rises from his crouch, hands curled, ready to throttle the old man whose son has been the cause of his lover's death and now his mother's abandonment. He takes a step forward. Priam does not move, stooped under his impossible, invisible burden. Achilles does not advance further. His hands slowly relax. Though there are no words in his head, in an inarticulable moment he sees the old man's grief as one with his own.”

“Language is the basis of culture and consciousness, so, once humans had language, they became capable of using culture to override biology (using memes to drive humanity rather than genes; using idea mutations rather than gene mutations) and thus freed humanity from animalism and instinct. The new dawn of consciousness, culture and knowledge had arrived.”

“Consciousness isn’t part of a child’s innate makeup. It has to be added. A child has to acquire consciousness, through education, something which others do to the child. Human culture operates on human infants to furnish them with a new operating system: consciousness. No other animal has a culture. No other animal can change their instinctual operating system. Children are the perfect laboratory for consciousness studies since they start off unconscious, slowly develop consciousness – for several years existing in an extraordinary liminal zone poised between the unconscious and conscious worlds – and, finally, become fully conscious. Via children, we can literally track how consciousness changes humans as we monitor the changing properties and abilities of children as their degree of consciousness increases.”

“With bicameralism, people accepted the reality of all that they experienced, and most people accepted at face value the claims of other people. People were not incredibly suspicious and immediately distrustful of others as they are now. Nietzsche believed that superstitions and religious mythologies originated in the total credulity of ancient humanity towards hallucinations. For ancient humans, they weren’t hallucinations. And if they weren’t hallucinations then they were real.”