Julian Jaynes - Sense Quotes

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Our sense of justice depends on our sense of time. Justice is a phenomenon only of consciousness, because time spread out in a spatial succession is its very essence.

Julian Jaynes

Such trade was not, however, a true market. There were no prices under the pressures of supply and demand, no buying and selling, and no money. It was trade in the sense of equivalences established by divine decree. There is a complete lack of reference to business profits or loss in any of the cuneiform tablets that have been so far translated.

Julian Jaynes

And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgement are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.

Julian Jaynes

Reading in the third millennium B. C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.

Julian Jaynes