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/lit/ - Literature

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11374217 No.11374217 [Reply] [Original]

Why come it took 400 years for novels to come up with the innovation of writing a character's thoughts?

>> No.11374226

Humans only developed an internal monologue in the last 150 years.

>> No.11374228

James Joyce invented consciousness.

>> No.11374230

Joyce invented thoughts, before Joyce people didn't think about anything at all

>> No.11374232

>>11374226
>>11374228
>>11374230
/thread

>> No.11374238

>>11374217
It didn't.

>> No.11374245

>>11374226
>Humans only developed an internal monologue in the last 150 years.
explain.

>> No.11374255

>>11374245
Around the 1870s people developed actual internal thought, prior to this, humans were like any other animal, just kinda moving around trying to fuck and find food.

>> No.11374493

>>11374255
How does this explain the dialogues of our found fathers? Or the teachings of Jesus? Or Plato?

>> No.11374501

>>11374230
you're still stuck in that era lol

>> No.11374503

>>11374493
how come parrots speak?

>> No.11374504

>>11374255
No, the bicameral mind became ubiquitous around the 6th century BC

>> No.11374519

>>11374255
Don't be stupid, 1870s was still only a pre-conscious period, better known as the "false consciousness".

>> No.11374526

>>11374493
Nothing matters prior to Darwinist thought. Prior to that people were simply pheromone interpreting-machines.

>> No.11374527

this thread is golden

>> No.11374533
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11374533

>>11374519
>>11374504
>>11374255
>implying there were conscious humans before 2007

>> No.11374536

Best thread I've seen in a while

>> No.11374546

>>11374493
Well they actually did it to attempt to find a mate, They would scrawl all these strange markings onto various objects in hopes that their scrawlings would attract the opposite sex. We base modern written languages on these scrawlings which is why they appear to have meaning.

>> No.11374547

people didn't have the type of subjectivities that you take for granted today........this includd how theythought

>> No.11374572

I never bought this. The prime example is Shakespeare--didn't Hamlet think? Leontes? Or even Chaucer. The Wife of Bath sounds dead to rights like dozens of women I've known. You can sense interiority even in Homer though, even in Aeschylus.

>> No.11374595

>>11374572
Hell you see it in the Bhagavad Gita

>> No.11374597

>>11374493
Everyone who has responded to this has misinterpreted the idea they are mimicking from some pseudo-intellectual. What they are trying to say is that persons such as Plato were not stating their own thoughts. Their thoughts and ideas did not come from them, but to them from somewhere else. Because of this, they are functionally just repeating the auditory/ visual hallucinations which have appeared in their mind-sense-experience (their lifeworld) as the conscious (not machines or mechanistic in any way as some anons wrongly stated) beings they were. Where these thoughts came from is up in the air. The Hellenistic gods, the Logos, etc. are all hypothesized origins of these hallucinations from that era.

Hopefully this clears things up and try to dodge all the misinformation being spewed.

>> No.11374606

>>11374597
That is bullshit though. The Vedic philosophers were exploring consciousness through written works since at least the 6th century BC

>> No.11374618

>>11374597
Please kill yourself.

>> No.11374620

>>11374597
Why suppose the muses etc. are anything more than metaphors that the ancients recognized as such no less than we do?

>> No.11374626

>>11374606
Very true. I was referring specifically to Plato and other philosophers from the Hellenistic period. I think it's fair to say this shift in the understanding of consciousness happened at different times around the globe.

>> No.11374631

>>11374620
The ancients didn't understand the internal monologue as we do. Our understanding only came about with the rise of empiricism. Our ancestors regarded the thoughts in their heads as the voices of the gods - hence the idea of muses or divine inspiration.

>> No.11374639
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11374639

>>11374618
:^)

>> No.11374660

>>11374631
Does that change the subjective experience of consciousness though? And to what degree?

>> No.11374690

>>11374660
It would mean that they would not regard their thoughts to be original to themselves but coming from some divine inspiration. Even your emotions were not your own but manifestations of gods in your mind (Anger, Jealousy, Greed were all spirits that hopped from mind to mind rather than self-generated emotional responses). This would certainly affect the concept of thought as a subjective experience. If you don't believe your thoughts to be your own you will not believe you have control over your thoughts. Only those with the highest degree of intellectual fortitude became philosophers.

>> No.11374700

>>11374660
Yes, in a couple ways. One is cultural (an externalization of collective Mind), as the language we use to interpret and communicate thought and experience is structured by the syntax and vocabulary of any particular verbal language. This change in how we understand Mind changes how we experience Mind, as all experience is Mind (in the way that all experience is subjective, even empirical observations). I personally believe it is the evolution of language which has propelled the capabilities of Mind to the heights we have reached so quickly. The unprecedented phenomenon of the human brain doubling over the last 2 million years I attribute to the advancement of language and by extension Mind. Language is the single greatest invention by Humanity and (hopefully) we will continue to improve.

>> No.11374733

>>11374700
Any literature you would recommend on this subject? I do like what Nietzsche has to say in Birth of Tragedy, using comp philology (if this is the correct term) to talk about this sort of thing, albeit in a different way

>> No.11374903

>>11374733
Regarding the language and human evolution, here is a quick read of the empirical research on the topic
http://www.indiana.edu/~brainevo/publications/LEB-lang-relevant-brain-evo.pdf

Try not to misinterpret this in some sort of materialist framework. This is not just about the brain evolving with language following after. It's about the phenomenon of language within the experience of Mind changing the (supposedly) material brain. Consciousness molds the brain, not the other way around. This is what the new-darwinists (not Darwin himself) got wrong with their strict materialist evolution of unconscious material which doesn't account for the phenomenon of Mind (which we experience at all times). It's a shame so many people misinterpret this empirical data to support some archaic and regressive ideology.

>> No.11374991
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11374991

Adding to other anon's very intelligent reflections, I also attribute it to the invention of language in year 1600. Before that people didn't know how to speak, so they didn't understand what the voice in their head meant. When societys language caught up to the monologue language, finally people could make sense of their own thoughts.

>> No.11375024

>Nobody wrote thoughts before Ulysses
>What is Don Quixote

>> No.11375033

all you guys, a stupid question to your brilliant minds. how differently thinks a brain who’s not literate? i don’t remember much from when i was a kid

>> No.11375039

>>11375024
more like bouts of monologues

>> No.11375073

>>11374597
what book explores this idea?

>> No.11375079

best thread ever

>> No.11375097

>>11375033
I'll tell you anecdotically, while I am very literate I had a neurotic episode when I was depressed a while ago. Most of my "human skills" were very weakened and walking normally and social interaction and even speaking was very difficult, I seemed to have great trouble to properly vocalize what I was thinking. I was still smart and had good thoughts but never in any language, just abstract. The type of thought maybe when you think of where your adress is located in your city, it's just an understanding and not something that you form words about in your mind. That's how most of my thoughts are, often only when I'm imagining a conversation do I have the voice in my head and think with words.

>> No.11375112

>>11375097
i had something similar after i once dissociated badly during a ptsd trigger. i blanked, i was in my bed and i could see images floating and words forming randomly on some sort of internal screen, for a lot of time later i was always a bit disconnected or glitched

>> No.11375123

>>11375097
interesting as fuck

>> No.11375128

>>11374493
The reason that Plato's work is written in the dialogue format is because that was literally what they needed to do to think back then. This is why Socrates places such importance on the dialectic between two people to find the truth—it was actually the genesis of thought, albeit in a primitive form. It would take a long time until we would develop the means to hold a dialectic with ourselves in our head, and Joyce was a part of the first generation capable of doing so. There are even some evolutionary remnants around today who haven't developed an internal monologue.

>> No.11375136

>>11375097
i’m starting to remember. when i was a kid i was constantly imagining my life in terms of video clips, i can see the development to logographic alphabet. what brought people to the phonetic?

>> No.11375148

>>11375128
i always think something like this while reading some of my friends facebook posts. they articulate words in such a rudimental manner that i wonder what they have going on inside

>> No.11375153

>>11374217
Shakespeare did it first. Joyce definitely made it exacting.

>> No.11375171
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11375171

Reminder that those who can't code will be considered non-sentient, unconscious illiterates by future generations

Reminder that the next Ulysses is going to be written in assembly

Reminder that the patterns of human consciousness are inextricably tied with machinery

Reminder that those who shrink from the glorious future are damned to ignorance and ignominy

>> No.11375179

>>11375171
where do i start with programming? i’m mad serious

>> No.11375182
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11375182

>>11375171
>written in assembly

>> No.11375215

Shakespeare invented the human

>> No.11375223

>>11375123
Yeah, and over this stuff I got in bad standing with my swedish teacher, in part because I disagreed with his adamant notion that the complexity of our language defines the complexity of our thoughts. It seemed so outlandish to me, because I think in pure idea most often and he must obviously think only in language.

Of course I see for example that generally a better language will lead to more educated folks and smarter thoughts for example, but trust me his view was infantile and I tried to supply him with a few examples of non-language thought. And of course if I was more charismatic I could have managed to frame my stance as friendly discussion which was my intention but I suck at socials so our little exchange was detrimental

>> No.11375266

>>11375179
I think most intro to CS classes begin with Java

>> No.11375313

>>11375097
I am similar in a way. I'm convinced we see our thoughts before we translate them into language, and I don't mean images or internal video of what the thoughts represent, but the thoughts themselves. When I concentrate hard, a huge thing appears in my mind. Looking at it is like looking at the sky so open and huge. It is colorful too. I can just stare at this thing and it feels like words are summoned into my mind and at the same time mimicked with my lips as I speak. I don't know if anyone else can relate but it definitely is strange.

>> No.11375330
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11375330

>>11374597
Is this based Hegel’s teachings?

>> No.11375351

>>11375171
>patterns of human consciousness are inextricably tied with machinery
Preach your nonsense materialist dogma somewhere else.

>> No.11375363

>>11375313
yall need freud

>> No.11375376

>>11374526

Annnndddddd
that's a heresy.

Please keep that to yourself anon.

>> No.11375866

>>11375363
Freud needs me.

>> No.11376039

>>11375097
That sums up my last 2 or 3 years pretty well. Couldn’t speak at times, wildly abstracts thoughts but nothing I could ever put into words (it was like “seeing” things in my minds eye and yet somehow the connections were an emotion), bizarre pattern making and mental connections forming a new narrative of reality, plus deep spiritual revelation, profound dreams etc. Still not quite out of it yet but I’m going to go backpacking through some foreign wilderness in hopes that I can integrate everything.

>> No.11376057

>>11374700
what are you saying mate

>> No.11376099

I think is not just a literature phenomena. At 1917 the surrealism began. Psychic automatism was one the surrealistics ways of art-making, and is like the analogue of thought writing but in painting. Probably the structure of academic art made difficult to achieve that.

>> No.11376117

man just jerked off and i feel dizzy as FUCK ... you guys think a stroke is imminent?

>> No.11376124

>>11374217
>>11374255

Are you assuming people were not formulating thoughts into words in their minds before Joyce? Because Plato defined thought as the dialogue of the soul with itself, therefore at least him must have been thinking.

>> No.11376128

>>11374620

Which they did by the way. Allegorical interpretations of the gods have been popular since the presocratics.

>> No.11376135

>>11375313
Language is Just symbols created to express thought to each other more precisely. The perception occurs on an instinctual, individual level, which is beyond language (though the instinctive understanding is in some ways a collective/epigenetica/environmentally constructed response).

>> No.11376140

>>11374217

It didn't. Third person indirect was around for a long time, it was just around 1900 that the experiments with it became deliberate, refined, discussed, and theorized. The depiction of thoughts was also around in various forms but also only really became literary/academic around that time too.

>> No.11376152

You should all read Julian Jaynes' the Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It's arguing that people in the ancient world weren't really conscious and that this is proved by the illiad.

>> No.11376162

>>11376135
It might even be more accurate to say that the instinctual understanding is a hallucination/imagination that is attempting to construct reality, via sense perception, in line with the collective consensus. It would make sense for this to feel connected to visual sensory paths, despite the abstractness/non visual quality of ideas.

>> No.11376198

>>11376162
So in line with the posts before about losing touch with “human skills” it could seem that there is some form of schizo function where ego collapses and thus instinctual response becomes defunct vs reason, making it difficult to act instinctually as each moment contains limitless possibility of action. IMO it is probably due to a confrontation with the shadow and a loss of trust in the instincts to act in a manner that is accepted collectively, due to a long term disconnect between self and ego. Thus the necessity to recreate/be reborn into new ego of awareness that is integrated.
/schizoposting

>> No.11376460
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11376460

>>11375223 I agree, that's a ridiculous notion to believe.
I experience the same thing, and haven't thought in words for quite a long time.
Whenever I attempt to put my thoughts into words, I come up with something that doesn't quite describe what it is I'm thinking about.
>even speaking was very difficult
fucking this too
I'm always stuttering, and even when typing, I have to constantly backspace and reorganize sentences, I usually write each sentence twice.

maybe I'm just illiterate

>> No.11376467

>>11374217
All the absolute plebs in this thread who think that consciousness originated with some modernist fag and not with Virgil's Aeneid

>> No.11376475

>>11375171
Fuck no dude

>> No.11376479

>>11375223 I can only imagine what his perspective of life is like if it's limited by words.
Has he not been wondering about, idk solipsism, or absurdism or any belief at all before it was explained to him in words?

>> No.11376544

>>11374536
s*mefag bump

>> No.11376553

>>11375179
Read SICP

>> No.11376643

>>11374255
kkek

>> No.11376655

>>11374226
>>11374228
>>11374230
these posts and the ones responding to them were obviously sarcastic at first but it is interesting to thing about what it would be like if these were true.

>> No.11376658

>>11375171
sweet man I love assemblies
best thing is to get to math class and find out there's an assembly that day

>> No.11376851

>>11374572
>didn't Hamlet think?
He didn't, though. There's no interior monologue in the play, only exterior monologue. That's the way people did the equivalent of thought back then.

>> No.11377371

>>11376655
I wouldn't dismiss them as sarcasm. There weren't any famous psychologists prior to Joyce iirc

>> No.11377419

>>11377371
Psychology as a science Was founded in 1879, APA was established in 1894 if I'm not mistaken and Freud wrote his most important works prior to Ulysses or even Dubliners. But Dostoevsky, for instance, wasn't precursed by any psychologists which I find impressive.

>> No.11377435

Gargantua and Pantagruel?

>> No.11377472

>>11375179
>>11376553

Don't forget the cozy SICP lecture series on youtube done by the authors, "MIT 6.001 Structure and Interpretation, 1986"

>> No.11377560

>>11375128
Havelock's Preface to Plato expands on this point in an interesting way. Writing had been invented before Plato's time but was still not fully integrated into society, so the main medium of cultural transmission was still the memorization and repetition of poetry. This meant that notions of what constituted authority in knowledge were structured around the performance of monologues: whoever could recite at length and with the greatest rhetorical skill fragments of poetry (Homer being the most significant) was considered the greatest authority in knowledge. Havelock contends that the dialectic was a way to deliberately interrupt the sonorous enchantment of poetry with its halting style whose form was dictated by logical analysis rather than artistic prosody. This is why Plato shows such a hatred towards poetry in the Republic: for him, it was a cultural institution that demanded obedience and left no room for an "individual" to self-reflect and make decisions. So Havelock would likely agree that Greeks before Socrates were not "conscious" in the way we understand it--their intellectual ability to reflect on the world was limited to applying the epithets of former poets to the specific situations of their lives. In this framework, nothing but specific situations exist: there might be wars, but no "idea" of war "in itself," there might be good things, but no "definition" of "the good as it is." Through the dialectic, Socrates was able to introduce the concept of concepts. At each questioning he reiterates the question in myriad forms: what IS it that makes what you're talking about what it IS? And this conceptual dimension that he uncovered was only achievable through philosophical reflection, a constant dissection and paring away of language whose task would never be completed.

>> No.11377605

>>11376039
What led you to this experience? Were you depressed/traumatized/etc before your language broke down? Were you religious before this experience?

At times I feel like this could happen to me soon, but strangely enough my language abilities have never been better. It's kind of a paradox, but I feel that the meaninglessness of all language lets me say things in a way that's more meaningful than meaning itself, but at any time I could stray too far into nonsense and abstraction and completely lose my ability to communicate with others. Like language straddles the void between meaning and non-meaning and sometimes we can arrange it in such a way to gesture beyond meaning, but any attempt to take it too literally by breaking it down into definitions or discrete units of information will reduce its potential to only repeating what has already been understood, instead of actually creating thought like it does when it confronts the nothingness outside of it. Some of you will say I'm soft in the head and haven't said anything here, but if at least one person knows what I mean, that skepticism will kind of prove my point. But at the same time I think it's completely possible that someday I'll wake up and say the same words I have my whole life ("Good morning, how are you? Is it going to rain today?") and there will have occurred a semantic break that makes everything I say appear as nonsense to the listener. And henceforth I'll only be able to conjure wide-eyed grimaces with my words.

>> No.11377622

>>11374503
A parrot has to hear something first before it can repeat it

>> No.11377625

>>11374226
No, that was 2 months ago,
Idiot

>> No.11377670

>>11377419
There's some interesting research on the early modernists' reactions to psychoanalysis. Woolf was a strange case by claiming that she never read Freud and thought that his influence was detrimental, yet her Hogarth Press published some of the first English translations of his works. I think a lot of it comes down to competition between different schools of towards the same discovery. While Woolf sought to explore consciousness through capturing its inner workings in life as it's lived, Freud wanted to categorize and dissect the unconscious so as to control it for society's and the individual's needs.

>> No.11378205

>>11374217
Consciousness actually didn’t exist until the publication of Thomas Pynchon's 1996 novel 'Infinite Jest'

>> No.11378677

What about Descartes's famous "cogito ergo sum"? Didn't he spend his time in bed just thinking?

>> No.11378874

Joyce was schizophrenic. So says Woolf, say says we all.

>> No.11378877

>>11378205
>Pychon's 'finite Jest'

Lol, it was Heller's 'Pale King' you feeble airhead

>> No.11378887
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11378887

>>11374533
>implying humans were ever or will ever be conscious

>> No.11378962

Socrates invented the question, prior to that people only interacted only through opposing statements, which were settled with through combat if needed be

>> No.11379762

>>11378874
This.

>> No.11379788

>>11376655
>it is interesting to thing about what it would be like if these were true

>>>/fit/

>> No.11379793

>>11374217
It didn't, stream of consciousness was a stylistic development not a methodological one. Fight me.

>> No.11380055

Also colour didn't exist until 1939, the entire world was just greyscale (or sepia tone when it was really dry out)

and everyone was black until the 19th century when photography became common

>> No.11380060

>>11374217
>Why come
That's why.

>> No.11380099

>>11375136
Work.

>> No.11380138

People didn't have appendices until the 1700s when appendicitis was discovered. We evolved them because of that

>> No.11381114

>>11380138
Makes sense to me.

>> No.11381532

>>11375171
>the next Ulysses
>implying this is possible

>> No.11382105

I know you guys are all having fun in this thread but it does make me wonder. Fiction written before the modern period (I'm speaking with experience in English language literature and a smattering of Japanese works) generally don't delve into character psychology. Could the absence of the fields of psychoanalysis and later psychology have such a big impact on the way people saw the world that they didn't experience psychological turmoil or at least didn't see it as an important part of the human condition?

>> No.11382123
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11382123

>>11375128
>mfw all my thoughts are a dialogue with another me or future potential person

>> No.11382158

>>11376851
he does an exterior monologue because it was impossible to represent internal thought in any other way on the stage, its not like they could play a recording as a voiceover or something

>> No.11382175

>>11376099
wouldn't breton be equivalent to this?

>> No.11383151

>>11375171
shut the fuck up

>> No.11383167

>>11378887
>implying consciousness won't come about once we get rid of the shackles of gendered thought

>> No.11383192

>>11374255
>People took this seriously
Kek

>> No.11384578

>>11383192
That are the people who didn't start with the greeks.

>> No.11384601
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11384601

>>11376851
>There's no interior monologue in the play...
I'll take "idiots who don't know what (aside) means" for 500, Alex.

>> No.11384621

damn i want a /lit/ manga
Anyway joyce doesn't just have inner monologue but he rather shows a realistic version of it. See, the brain is chaotic, and can swap from one topic to another like it's jumping down a repeated chain or rabbit hole which it can jump back out of in any moment. for example in one part of the book he talks about trains, life, death and pigeons at the same time

>> No.11384892

>>11375033
instantiations and impressions, rooted by a symbolic ontology is my guess: causality and other rudimentary empiricist thinking most likely are still present, as it seems to be at least a requisite for most intelligent life, but with much less capacity to connect particulars to general theories of cause, along with reduced capacity of other general abilities associated with human intelligence. Basically much more "animal-like" is my guess

>> No.11385259

>>11377605
It was an existential/identity thing. I was depressed for a couple of years after getting home from Afghanistan and going to uni, I started seeing through the falseness of the facade we live in (originally perceived as external before shifting focus to my internal false reality) I ended up going fairly deep in what I suppose is a psychosis after I realised that I wasn’t in control of my life given that things happened regularly that I never intended (e.g breaking up with gf randomly a few times and then barely remembering it happening). It turned into a complete collapse of ego and everything lost meaning including language etc and I felt like everything that came out of my mouth was a lie. It was paradoxical in a way though because at times, and prior to this, I could be so perceptive of people and incredibly charming etc. I got into jung through JBP fortunately and it led me deep down a path of knowing myself. It was as though everything that I perceived became symbolic of deeper reality and I think that made it difficult to function because it required reasoned effort to understand what was happening in the present. I ended up meeting my shadow in a dream a few weeks ago as he was abou to blow up a dam and attempt to kill me, my ex, and my sisters, but instead I recognised him as the conspirator against me and wasn’t afraid, instead I told him that I know why he was doing all this stuff and that it was OK, he didn’t need to do it anymore. It’s been a crazy journey and I hope I can sit down and write it all out at some point. Fucking exhausting to go through though. I hope that all makes some sense I’m wrecked atm.

>> No.11385284

>>11385259
When I realised that things were happening that I never meant to happen, I consciously decided to follow the path as far as I needed to understand it. I think it has to be a conscious choice to go into the madness and just be awareness as you watch everything unfold, otherwise you will get stuck in the madness if you don’t truly believe that beneath it all, you are still sane, and that you will come out the other side whole. I was very apocalypse now style.

>> No.11386082

>>11377622
It was the voice of god