Homo Roboticus: The Inner Human Robot Revealed By Sleepwalking and Hypnosis

By Rob Armstrong

Before you get to Homo sapiens, you must first deal with Homo roboticus. Inside all of us is the strangest thing, a biological robot. You notice it during sleepwalking and hypnosis, but in fact it’s there all the time. Most people have had the experience of driving from A to B and then realizing they have no memory of actually having done the driving. It just seemed to happen, almost by itself. The robot in fact did the driving. It’s the human autopilot and it handles most things. Most people are conscious very little of the time. They are usually in autopilot mode.

Thousands of years ago, the autopilot human was all that existed. How we got from the robotic human mode to human consciousness is one of the greatest tales the cosmos has to tell.

How did biological robots turn into human beings with free will? And why has no other animal on earth managed the same trick? Come inside and discover the answer to this greatest of all mysteries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781447830269

Rob Armstrong

Rob Armstrong researches all things paranormal.

Book preview

Homo Roboticus

The Inner Human Robot Revealed

By Sleepwalking and Hypnosis

Rob Armstrong

Copyright © Rob Armstrong 2023

All rights reserved.

978-1-4478-3026-9

Imprint: Lulu.com

Table of Contents

Homo Roboticus

Sleepwalking to Gnosis

The Sleepwalker

The Evolution of Dreams

Perspective

Do Animals Dream?

Father Gassner, the Exorcist

The Great Accident

The Rise of the Left Brain

Two Ways

The Two Signals

The Gospel of McKenna

The God Hemisphere?

The Stupid Ones

The Brain Bridge

The False Self

The Threefold Soul

PKD’s Metaphysics

The Armageddon Conspiracy

Is the USA Rome?

The Mystery

Gnosis

The Barkers

Eternal?

The Amazing Experiment

Neglect

Antimemes

Right and Left Hemispheres

Life As Mind

B-Cognition

The Mana Personality

The Self

Do You Have a Poltergeist Mind?

Magic Talk

Conclusion

Sleepwalking to Gnosis

There is no birth of consciousness without pain. – Jung

What’s the difference between the human being who walks during the day and the same human being who sleepwalks during the night? They are physically identical, of course, yet the first is conscious and the second isn’t. They are not mentally identical. This is the most remarkable phenomenon. We have the same human being engaged in the same activity – walking – and yet in one case he knows he is walking and in the other he doesn’t.

How can a sleeping person walk? How can a person walk without being conscious of it? If consciousness is not directing them, what is? Has the person manifested some kind of internal robot? This robot can do anything the human does, but without consciousness. The robot is the autopilot human.

Did the whole human race once comprise these robotic humans, doing things in the absence of consciousness? Did humanity once sleepwalk during the day? Was Homo sapiens preceded by Homo roboticus? And is Homo sapiens actually just a cloak that Homo roboticus wears, i.e., Homo roboticus remains the core human? If you remove the wise cloak, you go straight back to the robot. All humans are robots underneath, and the controllers of modern society are much more interested in the robot than the person. The robot is programmable. Programmers with diseased minds can infect the robots with their own mental illnesses and create robopaths – robotic human sociopaths, doing dreadful things without any glimmer of human consciousness or conscience.

In 1972, Lewis Yablonsky published Robopaths: People As Machines. He wrote, The robopaths are the people who pull the triggers at My Lai, Kent State, and Attica, make policy in Washington, and live next door. Dehumanized by regimentation, bureaucratization, and indiscriminate violence, they are growing more numerous in today’s society.

Yablonsky argued that the rise of technology is making people more and more like technological appliances. Technology is turning them into robots. Things are enormously worse today than in 1972 when Yablonsky wrote his book. Do people own smartphones, or do smartphones own people? If you can’t do without your smartphone, if you’re addicted to it, in what way are you not now a robot? You are just another gadget in a world of gadgets. You are just something else to be programmed, and the Big Tech masters of the universe – George Orwell’s true dystopian Big Brothers – know exactly how to press all your buttons and make the monkey dance for the organ grinder any time of the day.

You are not a person, you are an app. The purpose of the human app is to make the Big Tech gods even richer and more powerful.

However, our theme in this book is not the inner robot as a product of technological society. Instead, we are interested in the ancient human robot, the human that existed before humans became a conscious species, and which can be glimpsed in sleepwalking, and accessed via hypnosis.

It was from Homo roboticus that Homo sapiens evolved, and that unlikely outcome constitutes one of the most momentous phase transitions in the history of the universe.

Humanity will never understand itself until it understands where it came from: the robotic human, the sleepwalker, the hidden human. You cannot comprehend human consciousness until you comprehend what preceded it. What was the human psyche like before it admitted consciousness?

Somnambulism (sleepwalking) is a sleep disorder that affects around 4% of the adult population, and is much more common in children. Most people can be put into an induced sleep that resembles somnambulism. This artificial somnambulism is better known as hypnotism. A hypnotized subject is like a sleepwalker waiting to be instructed regarding what sleepwalking action to perform. In an actual sleepwalker, the instruction is spontaneously generated, according to whatever is on the sleepwalker’s mind at the time. In artificial sleepwalking (hypnotism) the commands of the hypnotist, an external person, replace the inner motivation (internal command) of the natural sleepwalker.

Sleepwalking and the hypnotic state are remarkable. Is there anything stranger than that you can be awake and yet not conscious? You can be doing things, yet have no idea you are doing them. Animals do things all the time, but they don’t know they’re doing them; they’re simply doing them. They’re acting exclusively through instinct, not through any reflective choices, such as consciousness affords. Humans were once like that: doing things without self-awareness. You don’t need to be self-aware to live a life. Humans don’t need to be conscious. If you flicked a switch and removed human consciousness, humanity would continue. Humans would become like Stone Age people again. Humans wouldn’t perish, but they would straight away become just like animals.

Human toddlers aren’t conscious. They are purely instinctual. Consciousness is an acquired programming language – which we get via education – which humans can then use to override instinct. Without consciousness, we would all go back to being instinctual. We would have no means to circumvent instincts, just as animals don’t.

Consciousness, because of the many different ways in which it is (poorly) defined, is one of the most confusing concepts of all. Perhaps it is the least understood concept there has ever been. Science can’t get any handle on it. Scientists say such things as that consciousness is an emergent property of the organization of the material human brain. For example, physicist Max Tegmark said, "…can something as complicated as consciousness possibly be explained by something as simple as particles? I think it’s because consciousness is a phenomenon that has properties above and beyond the properties of its particles. We physicists call phenomena that have properties above and beyond those over their parts: emergent phenomena." If you can’t explain something on the basis of the properties of things, but have to invoke unprecedented (miraculous) properties that don’t reside in the things but in the relations of things, which are impossible to predict, then you are in serious trouble in an explanatory sense. You might as well say that God exists – as an emergent property of the material universe. That would be a perfectly coherent view for anyone who advocated materialist emergentism to promote. If, on the human scale, consciousness can emerge from the relations of a bunch of brain cells, why, on the cosmic scale, shouldn’t God emerge from the relations of a bunch of stars or galaxies? If what emerges from the relations of things can never be predicted, then anything is possible, and reality is rendered miraculous. Each emergent property is a miracle because no one would ever have anticipated its existence given the properties of its constituent parts before they were brought into a particular set of relations with each other.

Tegmark would have to argue that even though a sleepwalker is physically identical to the same person as an awake walker, and a hypnotized subject is physically identical to the unhypnotized person, something prevents the emergence of consciousness in sleepwalkers and the hypnotized. Typically, though, scientists don’t consider sleepwalking at all, and dismiss hypnotism as a performative act associated with charlatans and the gullible. It would never occur to Tegmark and his ilk to ask why consciousness doesn’t emerge in the sleepwalker.

Tegmark said, From my physics perspective, a conscious person is simply food rearranged. Does that shed any light on anything? By implication, Tegmark is suggesting that if we could take some fruit and vegetables and organize their matter in just the right way, they would be conscious! Who knew?

Tegmark could just as easily have said, From my physics perspective, a sleepwalking person is simply food rearranged. Or, From my physics perspective, an unconscious person is simply food rearranged. Or, From my physics perspective, any animal is simply food rearranged. Whatever meaning can be attached to such statements, they certainly aren’t explaining what consciousness is. Or the unconscious for that matter.

Tegmark said, I think that consciousness is the way information feels when it’s been processed in certain complex ways. According to this view, a sleepwalking human must be processing information in a very different way from a walking human, even though each is performing the exact same activity (walking). Information feels differently for the conscious walker than for the unconscious sleepwalker. Why should that be? Don’t ask Tegmark. He has played all his cards. There’s nothing else he can turn to to shed any light on what’s going on.

Tegmark, like all scientists, never says anything of value regarding the nature of consciousness. In reality, he has no clue why a walking human is conscious of the act of walking while a sleepwalking human (the same human!) is not, even though they’re performing the same activity, hence must be using the same parts of the brain. Self-evidently something extra is involved with the conscious human being (the walker), or something is suppressed or inhibited in the case of the unconscious human being (the sleepwalker). This is what we need to discover.

The fact that sleepwalkers can do much more than merely walk in the somnambulist state – for example, some can ride motorcycles for hours on end! – raises a profound question: who needs consciousness?! Could the whole of human existence unfold without consciousness? In fact, according to the psychologist Julian Jaynes, the vast majority of human history took place without the benefit of consciousness.

In Jaynes’ theory, consciousness is all about language – advanced language – and humanity wasn’t conscious before it attained language of sufficient complexity. Jaynes wrote, For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness comes after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious. They certainly are. Jaynes’ position is one of the most revolutionary ever proposed.

Humans – i.e., anyone who belongs to the genus Homo (Latin for man) – are thought to have emerged in Africa around two million years ago. Primitive Homo sapiens first appeared in Africa around 300,000 years ago. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appeared some 200,000 years ago, and the modern brain is thought to be around 100,000 years old. According to Jaynes, consciousness is only about 3,000 years old. This means that humanity existed in one form or another for some two million years without consciousness. This would certainly explain why humanity accomplished very little for most of its history, and then achieved countless wonders and miracles in the last few thousand years. Something radical had changed, and that turned out to be the acquisition of consciousness, the supreme gamechanger.

Before that, all humans were like sleepwalkers: they were walking around and doing things – even some complex things – but no one was at home. They were unaware of their existence, exactly as animals are unaware of their existence. Animals exist. They don’t reflect on their existence.

Jaynes argued that in the period just prior to the dawn of consciousness, humanity had a different psyche – a bicameral rather than conscious psyche. He wrote, … at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was conscious. This two-chambered (bicameral) psyche involved the right hemisphere giving commands to the left hemisphere, with the left hemisphere serving as our human aspect, and the right hemisphere being interpreted by the human as a powerful, authoritative alien entity … a god.

Jaynes wrote, This is almost incomprehensible to us. And since we are conscious, and wish to understand, we wish to reduce this to something familiar in our experience…

Jaynes used the concept of hallucination (as something familiar in the human experience) to explain his system. In effect, the right hemisphere hallucinated auditory commands, which the left hemisphere heard and associated with an external god who must be obeyed.

Jaynes wrote, The Trojan War was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did.

The idea here is that the great warriors of the siege of Troy were bicameral humans who hallucinated the orders of their gods. They simply unthinkingly carried out whatever their hallucinations commanded them to do. They themselves had no agency. The voices had all the agency. A more modern example would be someone like Joan of Arc, who acted with utter conviction while she heard the voices of higher beings, but who was then plunged into absolute uncertainty in the absence of these voices. Joan of Arc would, in the Jaynesian worldview, be someone who had reverted to the bicameral psyche, and was lost without it.

Jaynes wrote, Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. This is a crucial point. Our psyche could be utterly vast and doing incredible things, but how would we know if we are not conscious of what it’s doing? Dr. C. D. Broad said, Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

It’s an astounding thing that a human being can safely ride a motorcycle for hours without conscious awareness. Perhaps humans built Stonehenge and the Pyramids without any conscious awareness. How would we know? We just assume that they were conscious because we are. But were they? Perhaps the bicameral psyche is much better suited to building pyramids than modern consciousness is. Modern humans, with all their technological advances, would struggle to do as good a job as the ancient Egyptians did of their awesome pyramids.

If we assume that bicameralism wasn’t continuous – i.e., no one heard a constant monologue conducted by a god – then it involved only intermittent commands from the god, presumably when humans were in a state of extreme stress or crisis and needed some decision-making entity to tell them what to do since they had no conscious ability to take decisions. They couldn’t authorize themselves, hence needed something else to perform this critical function. The stress they were under led to a stress-induced hallucinated command by someone they couldn’t disobey (a god), and thus they had a simple neurological means to make a decision in a crisis.

When they weren’t hallucinating the gods, we can imagine they were effectively in a sleepwalking state where they could do quite complex tasks, but without conscious awareness. They could even converse, but at a basic level – like toddlers chatting – and no one would ever remember much of what was said. That’s why writing was so important in the development of consciousness. Once something was written down, it could be referred to over and over again. Even when the written text wasn’t present to them, people could more or less picture the text and recall what it said.

Humanity probably began as just another ape (the Fifth Ape) – unconscious and instinctual. Something then changed. Dramatically. Perhaps humans became experts in the use of tools, which made them much more intelligent; perhaps they discovered how to make fire and so could cook food and this enormous change in their diet made them able to support much bigger and more efficient brains; perhaps they became killer apes who became more intelligent via hunting animals (and each other); perhaps they were stoned apes that developed a taste for psychedelics and indulged in magic mushrooms, for example; perhaps they experienced an incredible genetic mutation (a God mutation!) that completely altered how their psyche functioned; perhaps they spontaneously started to hallucinate whenever they reached a certain threshold of stress. Hallucination, one way or another, was the way out of the instinctual logjam. Hallucinations were themselves initially instinctual, albeit a higher kind of instinctual response, involving a mental rather than physical response to a serious situation (or, to be more exact, they provided a mental cause for a subsequent physical action).

Normally, animals engage in simple fight or flight behaviors, or simple behaviors associated with their particular evolutionary niche (for example, creatures that hunt will have a host of instincts associated with identifying, stalking and chasing down the most promising prey, i.e., the most likely to be caught and not fight back). But what do you do when you have entered a more complex type of society which has moved out of a simple evolutionary niche such as living in the trees or in caves? Your biological instincts haven’t had the chance to catch up. They can’t help. You need something else. What about an intuition? If you are facing such and such a problem, an intuition might tell you how to solve it. But how would the intuition actually communicate itself to you? One way would be for your intuition to literally make a characteristic sound to you (inside your head) – the same sound every time you encountered that problem, and that sound would need to convey a meaning, or some physical instruction. Eventually, you would have a set of sounds associated with a set of situations, events, problems, actions, animals, objects, and the appropriate behavioral responses. Thus you would have a prototype language.

Your intuition could then start adding these simple words together to formulate more complex language-based instructions (commands, orders). Over time, this would allow humans to use their intuition to escape from mere biology, from basic instincts and robotic responses. They could produce more complex, tailored responses.

In terms of Jaynes’ bicameralism, intuition – operating through hallucinated sounds experienced as voices – was interpreted as a distant, alien thing, an all-powerful thing, a thing essential to telling you what to do in a crisis and saving your life. In other words, archetypal intuition was interpreted and personified as a god giving divine orders.

The god was a creature of other-reference, i.e., a bicameral person experienced their own intuition as the Other, not as themselves. No human could alter what their intuition told them to do. For example, when Abraham was disobeyed and disrespected by his son Isaac, his intuition, which he called God, ordered him to end the problem by killing his son. Just as he was about to do so, his intuition realized he was going way over the top and ordered him not to, so he didn’t. Abraham had no say in what was going on. He could not enter into any debate with his intuition, his God. This was obviously a severe limitation, so it was inevitable that evolution would offer something more effective than bicameralism. What it came up with was, of course, consciousness. The key to understanding consciousness is that it enables Self-reference and thus escapes from Other-reference.

With other-reference (bicameralism), the left hemisphere regards the right hemisphere as other, so a voice originating in the right hemisphere is heard by the left hemisphere as an alien voice, over which it has no control. With self-reference (consciousness), the left hemisphere hears a voice originating in the same hemisphere. It doesn’t regard it as alien and it reacts to it, edits it, gives it suggestions, directs it, owns it … everything it couldn’t do with the voice in the right hemisphere. So, consciousness simply involved the migration of the dominant voice from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere. This was brought about by the increasing power and complexity of language, especially as writing was introduced. Advanced language made the left hemisphere the dominant hemisphere, and may well have made humanity right-handed.

The Bible tells the tale of bicameral Abraham being given orders by his God that he could not challenge or disobey. There was no mechanism within the bicameral paradigm for the man in the left hemisphere to question the hallucinated voice of the god in the right hemisphere. The voice had to be obeyed, no matter what it commanded, including killing your own son.

We can refer to the god as the production mind, i.e., the mind that produces the executive command. We can refer to the man as the consumption mind, i.e., the mind that hears, consumes and carries out the executive command of the production mind. In this system, the production mind is other, while the consumption mind is self, so the bicameral psyche comprises the self (man) subject to the numinous other (god). The self and the other inhabit different domains. The self is in the left hemisphere and the other is in the right hemisphere.

Can you see what needs to be done to improve this system? How do you get rid of the other in order to exert self-control, in order to become autonomous, reliant only on yourself?

Nature silenced the talking production mind in the right hemisphere and instead made the production mind in the left hemisphere the only voice heard.

The production mind, it must be stressed, is an unconscious mind, which is to say that it does not consciously decide what to say. Rather, it says things, and then our consciousness (which is actually our consumption mind), hears what the production mind says, and then suggests to it what it should say, what content it should serve up. The production mind accepts the suggestion and tries to produce content that the consumption mind likes. To that extent, it becomes the ventriloquist’s dummy of consciousness. It mouths what the consumption mind (consciousness) is interested in, hence is the effective voice of consciousness, despite not being conscious itself.

The unconscious, it must also be stressed, exists in both hemispheres, not just the right hemisphere. When we are born, our whole brain is unconscious. As we acquire language, consciousness adds itself to the unconsciousness of the left hemisphere.

If we associate the right hemisphere with non-locality, with the intuitive mind that’s not bound by space and time, and the left hemisphere with locality, with the sensing mind that is wholly bound by sensory things in space and time, then the numinous (transcendent, sacred) godlike mind had its voice suppressed while the mundane (immanent, profane) mind acquired a continuous voice based on the language centers of the left hemisphere. (The corresponding centers in the right hemisphere are those associated with intermittent hallucinations, whether visual or auditory.)

The consumption mind in the left hemisphere now experienced the production mind, in the same hemisphere, as its own voice, not that of an alien entity (god). This meant that it could question the voice, edit the voice, make it come up with alternative ideas. It could engage with it, refine it, instruct it.

Imagine if Abraham in the Bible had been conscious and had heard his own inner voice (rather than that of an outer God), saying, Kill the boy. He has disrespected you once too often. End this problem, this thorn in your side. We have all had thoughts like this, where we literally wish to kill people getting in our way, but of course nearly all of us then move on to more practical and sensible thoughts. Some serial killers stick with the original plan, though, and get on with the killing game.

Conscious Abraham would have briefly entertained the thought of lashing out against his own son, but would then have controlled himself and chosen a less extreme way to discipline his child. That’s because he could interact with his inner voice and amend its advice. He could change his mind. Bicameral Abraham could not. He heard what he took to be an external voice that could not be disobeyed. He could never do anything to make the external voice change its mind. He simply had to carry out its commands, regardless of what they were. (Even today, most people are on the Abraham spectrum. In his notorious Obedience to Authority experiment, Stanley Milgram demonstrated that some two-thirds of people could be converted into killers by a suitable authority figure, a substitute God.)

This is the difference between other-reference and self-reference. You cannot do anything about a voice that isn’t yours (that’s other, and judged to be all-powerful). You can, however, automatically change your own voice, your own thoughts. You are simply referring to yourself.

Schizophrenics are so tormented because the voices they hear come to them from their right hemisphere, so cannot be argued with. To cure schizophrenia, all you have to do is suppress the right hemisphere. That’s how you stop the voices.

A person who can change his mind is obviously much better able to respond to his environment than someone who cannot. The first type of person – the conscious person – can engage with the reality principle on a real-time, continuous basis. The second type of person – the bicameral person – waits for a discontinuous, discarnate voice to tell him what to do. If that advice is poor, or rapidly made redundant by critical new information, the person is in serious trouble.

We can get a glimpse of how the bicameral mind fared against the conscious mind in the cataclysmic struggles of the Aztecs and Incas against the Spanish Conquistadores. A tiny number of determined, conscious soldiers were able to destroy mighty empires of millions of people simply because they could think much faster on their feet and never had to wait for the gods to tell them what to do.

This was what it was like in the ancient world. Small warbands of conscious people laid waste to vast bicameral populations and seized control. In a short time, nearly everyone was conscious since consciousness was a vastly superior operating system for the psyche. People had no option but to get with the programme. Only a few people carved out an atavistic bicameral niche for themselves. These were the prophets, the oracles, the shamans, the psychics, the mediums, the clairvoyants, the sensitives, the gurus, the intuitives. Only bicamerals could convince others they were in touch with the gods (because they were!).

Christianity later started burning most of these people at the stake as witches. They burned Joan of Arc, unconvinced by her voices.

Bicameralism involved a hemispheric separation between the main production mind (in the right hemisphere) and the main consumption mind (in the left hemisphere). This system was all about the Other – the god, in the right hemisphere. That was the controlling agent.

Consciousness established the main production mind in the left hemisphere rather than the right, and the production mind and consumption mind then operated together as a single, self-referential feedback system in the same hemisphere. This system was all about the Self – the human, rather than the god communicating with the human.

With consciousness, humans didn’t have to wait on the gods for orders. They could work things out for themselves. However, the loss of bicameralism meant they no longer had the numinous in their life. They became uncertain and fearful. Life wasn’t nearly as meaningful. So, humans ended up becoming more religious than ever in order to fill the hole that the departure of bicameralism had caused. They longed for the return of the gods, for the Second Coming.

Humans have a God-shaped hole in them. They crave the return of the numinous. They can’t do without it. They’re addicted to it. That’s why so much conscious activity is devoted to the primary concerns of bicameralism: religion and spirituality.

Even today, most people are largely bicameral. They can’t solve problems. They look to demagogues, influencers, preachers, gurus, and holy texts to tell them what to do.

Just as bicameralism has its amazing properties, so does consciousness. Phenomena such as sleepwalking and hypnosis are possible purely because of the extraordinarily strange properties of consciousness, especially its capacity to be deactivated.

Julian Jaynes gave a critical definition when he said, …consciousness is an operation rather than a thing...

Imagine if consciousness were a thing. Imagine if it were in fact the brain, as most scientists say. Then it could never be removed. But it’s not a thing.

Jaynes wrote, [Consciousness] operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog ‘I’ that can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it. It operates on any reactivity, excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together in a metaphorical space where such meanings can be manipulated like things in space.

To grasp what this means, think of any animal. An animal takes in sensory data then reacts to that data, via its instincts. An animal never has any agency. It does not have free will. All it can ever do is what its instincts tell it do. Nothing else is available to it. Just as the bicameral human obeyed whatever its god ordered it to do, so the animal obeys whatever its instincts command it do. It can’t defy its instincts and do something else. There isn’t anything else. An animal does not have a non-instinctual mode it can go to where it can override instincts. Similarly, a bicameral human could never override the gods and choose to ignore them and do something else. There was nothing outside of the bicameral paradigm to which to resort. Not until humans became conscious could they override bicameralism. Sadly, even consciousness hasn’t freed humanity from bicameral primitivism. Look at the billions of people who pray and meditate. They are still frantically seeking their lost gods. They still obey prophets and