10 ms·

The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: A reappraisal of Jaynes’ hypothesis (2007)

147 points by hliyan 8y ago

Shoop 8y ago
(2007)
techman9 8y ago
Hm.. Is Functional Neurology (the journal in which this published) related in any way to the field of functional neurology? I think the latter is a rebranding of chiropractic neurology, which some would argue purports some less than scientific ideas.
goto11 8y ago
Sounds like a crackpot theory by someone not understanding literature. Because the Illiad does not contain the word "mind" and describes events and actions but not thoughts and mental states, it follows that people at the time did not have consciousness. I guess Hemmingway did not have consciousness either?
- friendstock 8y ago
  Jaynes was a professor at Princeton University, so he must've built up enough credibility to get this appointment. I was a student at Princeton and actually sat in on his class for a few sessions.
  - goto11 8y ago
    I'm sure he was credible enough in the field of psychology, but that does not automatically make him an expert in classical literature or religion, which is where he finds the purported evidence for the theory. Therefore the theory have to be judged on its own merit, not just the academic title of the originator.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Jaynes was a professor at Princeton University, so he must've built up enough credibility to get this appointment Well, Pauling got two Nobel prizes, but still had crackpot theories about Vitamin C
    - rjplatte 8y ago
      Both Jaynes and Pauling are extremely intelligent and not gullible people. Why are we so quick to dismiss their "Crackpot" theories, simply because they don't fit with the dominant paradigm?
      - coldtea 8y ago
        Isn't the question taking what it supposed to prove for granted (that we do a facile dismissal of those theories? Who said we didn't do a thorough dismissal?) Well, is it "simply because they don't fit with the dominant paradigm" or rather because they have been discredited time and again?
      - goto11 8y ago
        It is quite possible for intelligent people to be wrong, especially when they venture outside their area of expertise. And the cliche about "dominant paradigm" ignores the actual reasons the theory is rejected. Quantum Theory shows that a theory will be accepted even if fundamentally breaks with the dominant paradigm - as long as it can be confirmed by evidence. So that is not really the issue.
- dang 8y ago
  This comment breaks two of HN's most important guidelines: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
  - goto11 8y ago
    Fair enough, I have elaborated my criticism in other comments. The reference to Hemmingway might seem flippant, but my point was that the Iliad is told in a certain genre or style where thoughts and mental states or not directly described, only events and actions. This is a particular style of narrative which is not confined to a specific stage in human development but exist throughout history, and even today is pretty popular ("show, don't tell"). Movies generally follow this form and voice-overs explaining the characters thoughts are the exception rather than the rule. So to claim that the narrative style of the Iliad shows that the people does not have a concept of mind and did not have self awareness is just not justified. The narrative style certainly does not prove that, but on the other hand it is impossible to disprove that Achilles lacked consciousness. Which puts this theory into the realm of the nonfalsifiable. This is akin to the crackpot theory that the ancient Greeks were not able to perceive the color blue, because that word does not occur in Homer. This is just an incredibly naive understanding of the connection between mind and language. While Homeric Greek might not have such a word, there is absolutely no evidence that their sensory system was different. Furthermore, taking the Iliad as face value is highly problematic. While historians generally agree that there probably was a war, there is no evidence that any of the persons actually existed or existed at the time. The characters might be legendary or mythological. Note that basically all of them descends from gods a few generations back. Achilles is literally half-god. We know that Helen was worshiped as a deity in Sparta for example. If she was actually a mythological figure, we don't really need some complicated psychological theory to explain how one mythological being could talk to another! So I think it is fair to say the theory have a naive approach to literature. The second part of the criticism is that the theory does not actually explain anything. The bicameral mind is supposed to explain how people at the time interacted with Gods. It was actually just the other half of the brain giving advice. OK, but the theory also claims that the the integration of the mind happens some time between the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey (because Odysseys clearly do have a concept of mind with first-person narrative and so on). Which means the theory can't explain the gods appearing in the Odyssey.
akvadrako 8y ago
Regardless of the historical evidence (or lack thereof) for his theory, I found his book very enlightening. It really helped me understand religion, schizophrenia and the split brain, showing why it would be so important to early human society and how it could came about, biologically and culturally.
- goto11 8y ago
  Well if the theory is bullshit then surely it does not actually help anyone understand religion? So the Gods are speaking to people in the Iliad because it was actually one half of the brain speaking to the other. But the Odyssey allegedly is composed after the watershed moment, but Gods are still speaking to people. So the theory does not actually explain anything about religion. The theory can "rationally" explain how Aphrodite speaks to Paris, but it does not explain how she teleports him from the battlefield to his chamber. So you still have to accept either supernatural events or that the story contains fictional elements. In which case the gods are much easier explained than through this theory, which have no other evidence. And the narrative style of the Iliad (describing events and actions but not thought processes and introspection) is known throughout history.
  - bloak 8y ago
    There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. The Jaynes hypothesis, as I understand it, is that in early civilisations the majority of the population heard voices and it was considered normal. If you see a reference in literature to a god speaking to someone, you can't easily tell whether that's fiction, metaphor, an exaggeration, a lie, a narrative style, or a literal description of a real experience. For me one of the biggest problems with the theory is how people's perception (whether they hear voices or not) could change en masse, presumably because of a change in culture or education, because I don't believe there can have been a biological change over that period. Therefore, if people educated in the right way could hear voices I'd expect there still to be groups of people (members of some religious sect perhaps) who hear voices. So I'd like to see a detailed description of one of those groups. Then I could perhaps believe that the phenomenon was mainstream in ancient Greece.
Apocryphon 8y ago
Like the phantom time hypothesis, bicameralism is a sort of massively revisionist theory that relies on wild interpretations of historical information. And both are pretty entertaining, regardless.
- goto11 8y ago
  And the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky. Like the bicameral mind, the theories of Velikovsky are attractive to modern lay people because they give a "rational" explanation for mythology.
  - harshreality 8y ago
    I think you're making a category error comparing quackish theories of planetary dynamics to questionable theories of mind. Nobody really knows how the modern human psychological consciousness developed. To compare a theory about that, to a theory claiming as-near-as-we-can-tell-physically-wrong things about Jupiter and Venus and Earth's rotation and physical forces, is invalid. When I read criticisms of Jaynes, they seem a lot like criticisms of Darwin's original, simplistic view of evolution. Saying the bicameral mind is not a perfect theory is uninteresting; hardly anything is a perfect theory. What matters is the specific criticism (do you have one?) leveled at it, and whether the bulk of Jaynes's ideas can be modified and extended, with another few decades or century's worth of knowledge, into something that's roughly (empirically tested to be) accurate. Nobody takes Darwin's original expression of evolutionary theory as gospel today, but it's part of the scientific canon for a reason. It was incomplete and therefore misleading in some ways, but the core ideas are essentially taken as true today. We can see evolution in action through microbiology and genome analysis, even if some specific (narrow) ideas and predictions by Darwin and early primitive evolutionary theory have been falsified. Or look how relativity developed. First people were tinkering around with ideas about electromagnetism, discovering things about light, then came special relativity, which led to a bunch of problems, which led to general relativity. And even GR is wrong, since it doesn't currently accommodate quantum theory. That doesn't make special or general relativity wrong, so much as it makes them incomplete. They may be wrong in an absolute sense, but they're still quite useful. Even special relativity, being the wrong-er of the two, has some important "first step" realizations, like speed of light being invariant. Even the ether theory, now pretty much falsified, might end up having some contribution to future physics, if it turns out that there's some substrate (in a sense, though it would probably be neither matter-like nor light-like, and instead coupled to matter and light in interesting ways) that binds things together.
nsajko 8y ago
A nice way to look at Bicameralism is as (good) science fiction. (Wikipedia calls it a "radical hypothesis".)
- goto11 8y ago
  It is also non-falsifiable since it is impossible to prove or disprove whether ancient people were conscious or not. Or for that matter whether a present-day schizophrenic is conscious or not in the same sense.
  - apk-d 8y ago
    Can we even prove whether a modern person is conscious? If so, shouldn't we be able to occasionally encounter such unconscious people, either occurring randomly by natural variation (especially given how recently the breakdown is claimed to have happened), or in people who had very little contact with language (hard but not impossible to come by)?
    - karpodiem 8y ago
      The recent NPC meme provides an interesting answer to this question.
      - Apocryphon 8y ago
        Isn't that just solipsism
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      It’s easy to imagine that somebody raised by apes or otherwise totally isolated from humans would not be conscious, but without teaching them to think consciously how could we ever know?
- gaius 8y ago
  If you like the sound of that I highly recommend the Westworld reboot, but I don’t want to spoiler it.
starbeast 8y ago
When I first read it, I felt he was trying to find a solution for a problem that doesn't exist, that of; 'given humans are conscious and animals are not, what mechanism could bring about an incredibly sudden evolution of consciousness out of nowhere?' The answer being that there was not a sudden evolution of consciousness out of nowhere. Human conscious states may be greatly more reflective that other animals, with a greater proportion of our neurons experiencing memory than sensory data, when compared to, say, a squirrel. However, the fundamental aspect of direct awareness is a shared trait, we are just directly aware of a far greater magnitude of internal states than the squirrel.
- chronolitus 8y ago
  I think it also useful to semantically separate cognitive consciousness (i.e. Knowing and expressing the existence of your thought processes through arguably higher, more abstract thought processes - which might even go on recursively - knowing that I know that i am conscious, etc) from the externally unmeasurable 'conscious experience', (i.e qualia, the awareness of sensory or thoughts at the most essential level, 'seeing' what one sees, etc). One could imagine a living being with one but not the other, for example qualia without cognitive consciousness (if I had to guess, I would imagine this experience to be similar to being drugged to the point of having no internal monologue, no complex thought process, but keeping your sensations and vision, etc, or being a barely-sentient animal in purely instictual mode of thought and action) The opposite, cognitive consciousness without qualia - a.k.a the philosophical zombie - or a computer which can argue the existence of it's thoughts without feeling them is, I gather, a more controversial state of being. What I find interesting is that in separating the two 'consciousness's, the former ends up taking almost all of the importance and the latter none - anything which can be externally measured ends up in the first category (which is a computable logic process), which leaves very little of utilitarian/evolutionary/algorithmic importance in the second. However, in much discourse about consciousness the latter takes a disproportionate role (i.e fear of losing your unmeasurable consciousness when teleporting, etc, though the cognitive consciousness, being by definition a logical and measurable process is theoretically preserved)
opless 8y ago
Someone's been watching the remake of Westworld :)
AltruisticGap 8y ago
> Jaynes recognizes that consciousness itself is only a small part of mental activity and is not necessary for sensation or perception, for concept formation, for learning, thinking or even reasoning. Thus, if major human actions and skills can function automatically and unconsciously, then it is conceivable that there were, at one time, human beings who did most of the things we do – speak, understand, perceive, solve problems – but who were without consciousness. In the spiritual teachings & traditions the wording would be different. I think they would refer to was Jaynes call "consciousness" as "self awareness"; and then assert that "consciousness" is prior to any of that. For example in the dream state we are typically not in control, nor are we aware it's a dream.. yet when we "wake up" we remember having dreamed and having "been there". In fact I'd argue that we DO many times of the day every day... speak and act without much self awareness. And yet, we remember afterwards and then claim those moments as something we did. > In short, Jaynes claims that men in the age of the Iliad learned to speak, read, and write, as well as conduct their daily lives, yet remained nonconscious throughout their lives. Maybe they were indeed much less "self-aware" as we are today, which again is not same as saying not conscious. edit: it seems to me this is the main contetion in science often times people just conflate mind activity and consciousness , as an (possibly not deliberate) attempt to chuck away the "hard problem of consciousness". pps: funny enough it is actually an hypothesis, that for human beings to recongize consciousness is also something made possible through self awareness. For example, what is called "awakening" in spiritual teachings is supposed to be the natural state, hence, whatever "spiritual" state it is thought to be, is a self-refetential acknowledhgement of a change of one's perception of self and world. That is, "self awareness" allows for human beings to acknowledge consciousness (since we have to conceive of it).. whereas a dog or cat can be consciouss, and relatively free of worry, yet will never know themselves as "free of worry" (I mean in a rational / self aware way).
- Nav_Panel 8y ago
  Jaynes addresses this critique in the revised Afterword: > The most common error which I did not emphasize sufficiently is to confuse consciousness with perception... This type of confusion was at least encouraged back in 1921 by Bertrand Russell: “We are conscious of anything that we perceive.” And as his logical atomism became fashionable in philosophy, it became difficult to see it any other way. And in a later book Russell uses as an example of consciousness “I see a table.” But Descartes, who gave us the modern idea of consciousness, would never have agreed. Nor would a radical behaviorist like Watson, who in denying consciousness existed certainly did not mean sense perception. Earlier in the book he makes a linguistic argument, claiming that his usage of "consciousness" is the only that unifies both the subjective (I am conscious) and objective (I am conscious of X) usages. Beyond Jaynes and more broadly, I'd consider comparing his theses with that of McLuhan in Gutenberg Galaxy, namely McLuhan's theories about mass literacy. There seems to be a unifying element in that the structure of one's experience (of one's interpretation of their sensory inputs) is strongly related to the sorts of media they consume and to the sorts of epistemological "channels" available. The structure of knowledge and its dissemination (collectively oral? Or privately read? Think about problems such as "atomization of society" and a lightbulb should go off) seems to determine our internal experience to a large degree: older writers such as Walter Benjamin have touched on "movie consciousness" (although not strictly in those words), while more contemporary authors like Sarah Perry discuss "Social Media Consciousness" (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/09/07/social-media-consciousness/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/09/07/social-media-conscious...).
k__ 8y ago
Better read "The Ego Tunnel"
thanatropism 8y ago
Science aside, the breakdown-of-bicameral-theory has intriguing parallels to Lacan's theory of the mirror stage. In this (nonscientific - but we're learning the limits of scientific psychology) theory, infants are born unarticulated, a mass of limbs with no wholeness to them. In the mirror stage they discover they have a body which is articulated and which is subject to the gaze of others. This begins the split between the Imaginary and the Symbolic (social reality). Under bicameral conditions, men didn't see themselves as articulated and autonomous, let alone as objects of others' (or in the case of gods, the Other, who provides the law) gaze. They didn't have imaginations split from social reality.
- theoh 8y ago
  Isn't the mirror stage really about discovering the unity of the body (as a kind of closed contour), thus permitting entry into the Imaginary? Then the Symbolic is initiated when these entities (of which the body's image is supposedly the first) start to be thought of in relation to each other, as in language. In that sense, I don't think you can have language without the Symbolic, so the analogy with Jaynes fails. Jaynes didn't claim that the bicameral phase meant undifferentiated reality without terms or objects. As I understand it, Lacan is talking about individual psychology. It doesn't make sense to talk about a person whose mind is "fused" with social reality, unless you believe that reality is some kind of solipsistic hallucination.
  - thanatropism 8y ago
    About entering the Imaginary: you're in the right. That said, there are a number of stages in the development of Lacan's thought (Malcolm Bowie counts three); he starts out ostensibly as a clinician but gradually expands his concepts outwards until they're a generalized theory of subjectivity. From this point we can argue whether societies have structures somehow resembling subjectivity - as an economist I've spent a lot of time on the clock doing this. The thing is that as a clinical theory Lacan is way out there in the sophistic hallucination scale, even for the tiny minority that wants to resurrect psychodynamic therapy. Yet that's not what draws people to him, is it?
coldtea 8y ago
>In fact, the Iliad does not seem to mention any subjective thoughts or the contents of anyone’s mind. The heroes of the Iliad were not able to make decisions, no one was introspecting or even reminiscing. Apparently, they were noble “automata” who were not aware of what they did. Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no internal mind-space to introspect upon. Some lexical oddities in the Homeric text (such as the absence of a single word translating “consciousness”, “mind”, “soul”, or even “body”) led Jaynes to formulate the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by nonconscious minds, which automatically recorded and objectively reported events, in a manner rather similar to the characters of the poem. The transition to subjective and introspective writings of the conscious mind occurred in later works, beginning with the Odyssey. The Odyssey is not that later (for any evolutionary or great developmental force to have any effect). Plus it is strongly considered to be of the same authorship and the writing style is very much the same. What's worse, unlike what the above excerpt claims, most of the Iliad deals with feelings of various kinds -- starting with the famous opening line: "Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus". Does these parts seem to have any relation to the idea that "The heroes of the Iliad were not able to make decisions, no one was introspecting or even reminiscing. Apparently, they were noble “automata” who were not aware of what they did. Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no internal mind-space to introspect upon"? > At this Jove was much troubled and answered, "I shall have trouble if you set me quarrelling with Juno, for she will provoke me with her taunting speeches; even now she is always railing at me before the other gods and accusing me of giving aid to the Trojans. Go back now, lest she should find out. I will consider the matter, and will bring it about as wish. See, I incline my head that you believe me. This is the most solemn that I can give to any god. I never recall my word, or deceive, or fail to do what I say, when I have nodded my head." > As he spoke the son of Saturn bowed his dark brows, and the ambrosial locks swayed on his immortal head, till vast Olympus reeled. > When the pair had thus laid their plans, they parted- Jove to his house, while the goddess quitted the splendour of Olympus, and plunged into the depths of the sea. The gods rose from their seats, before the coming of their sire. Not one of them dared to remain sitting, but all stood up as he came among them. There, then, he took his seat. But Juno, when she saw him, knew that he and the old merman's daughter, silver-footed Thetis, had been hatching mischief, so she at once began to upbraid him. "Trickster," she cried, "which of the gods have you been taking into your counsels now? You are always settling matters in secret behind my back, and have never yet told me, if you could help it, one word of your intentions." (...) > The old man tore his grey hair as he spoke, but he moved not the heart of Hector. His mother hard by wept and moaned aloud as she bared her bosom and pointed to the breast which had suckled him. "Hector," she cried, weeping bitterly the while, "Hector, my son, spurn not this breast, but have pity upon me too: if I have ever given you comfort from my own bosom, think on it now, dear son, and come within the wall to protect us from this man; stand not without to meet him. Should the wretch kill you, neither I nor your richly dowered wife shall ever weep, dear offshoot of myself, over the bed on which you lie, for dogs will devour you at the ships of the Achaeans." Thus did the two with many tears implore their son, but they moved not the heart of Hector, and he stood his ground awaiting huge Achilles as he drew nearer towards him. As serpent in its den upon the mountains, full fed with deadly poisons, waits for the approach of man- he is filled with fury and his eyes glare terribly as he goes writhing round his den- even so Hector leaned his shield against a tower that jutted out from the wall and stood where he was, undaunted.
drdeadringer 8y ago
If it wasn't for Robert J. Sawyer's WWW trilogy I would never have heard of "the bicameral mind". The first book in particular is brimming with it.
sandinmytea 8y ago
For anyone trying to generalize Mr. Jayne's theory from an article or set of comments - I suggest that you definitely do not. Really, don't do that with anyone's theories, but instead READ THE BOOK. The way that Jaynes "carves up consciousness" as Daniel Dennet puts it in one review, is very different than the way that a reflexive intellectual instinct would choose to. The taxonomy that Jaynes decides upon is distinctive from our mental reflexes, and not at all the same as what nearly everyone begins with. I feel that this "Bicameral" consciousness discussion keeps reappearing on Hacker News in part because it is crucial for us to create a proper distinction between these terms - AI is rapidly going to become conscious in exactly the way Julian Jaynes suggests we became "conscious" and that consciousness is very much different than what we think it is (or must be) for AI to become generally aware of itself. I suggest that anyone who is working towards AGI MUST discover the distinctions that Julian Jaynes made. That does not mean that his theory regarding our consciousness is correct, but merely that his ways of describing "self-awareness" or whatever other term could be applied is crucial to getting a grip on what the true mechanism of "the self" is in the truest engineering sense. That is to say, that if the "self" is the licensed self-aware driver of a vehicle and the engine and transmission is the remainder of cognition, than the order of development was actually from "self-driving car" into human driven vehicles - metaphorically speaking. Basically, up until recently, we just DID, and in attempting to describe WHY we were forced to invent metaphor until collectively we were able to create the language necessary to actually BE self aware. Without the language, we actually were NOT self aware. We were self-driving cars with no human drivers. The human driver only arrived after there were ways of describing "him."
- posterboy 8y ago
  Your warning is noble, but I read comments to decide whether the topic is useful. I found the negative comments convincing, so I don't mind questioning the topic further. Self-awarenes was worked out with "I know that I don't know" and again, but in positive terms with "I think therefore I am". These are the most basic forms of reflection, a y-combinator differentiating endlessly. With literarry writing, this reflection could be stretched out over generations, yielding a national identity, but oral transmission of religious teachings had been practiced before, just with a higher rate of mutation. Such verbalization is important for stability, and similarity is important for discoverability, but if verbalization hadn't happened, the perhaps because it goes without saying. PS: A single threaded cpu doesn't need to spell out distributed computing primitives, either. It still may use signals, in many cases, even if implemented completely in software. PPS: maybe there's an interesting parallel from natural language to the progression from imperative language over object oriented or declarative, to agent based programming. Bicameral Petri Nets ...
Communitivity 8y ago
I highly recommend anyone trying to understand this subject read the papers of Dr. Mica Endsley, former Chief Scientist of the US Air Force. She makes a distinction between the 3 levels of Situational Awareness and Situational Understanding. Here are the 3 levels of Situational Awareness she proposed: * Perception of Elements in Current Situation * Comprehension of Current Situation * Projection of Future Status Here is a diagram: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3044/2900713433_f295107549_o.jpg http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3044/2900713433_f295107549_o.... From: http://wikiofscience.wikidot.com/quasiscience:situational-awareness http://wikiofscience.wikidot.com/quasiscience:situational-aw... Probably the best place to start is: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/210198492_Endsley_MR_Toward_a_Theory_of_Situation_Awareness_in_Dynamic_Systems_Human_Factors_Journal_371_32-64 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/210198492_Endsley_M... I think this paper, and others of hers, should be recommended reading for any AI researcher. I also think "Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" should be recommended as well. FYSA, the research community seems split on Dr. Endsley's theories, though there seem to be a majority that view them as correct, based on my own informal experience. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mica_Endsley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mica_Endsley): * Endsley, M. R. (1995). Toward a theory of situation awareness in dynamic systems. Human Factors, 37(1), 32-64. * Endsley, M. R. (1995). Measurement of situation awareness in dynamic systems. Human Factors, 37(1), 65-84. * Endsley, M. R., & Garland, D. J. (Eds.). (2000). Situation awareness analysis and measurement. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. * Endsley, M. R., & Jones, W. M. (2001). A model of inter- and intrateam situation awareness: Implications for design, training and measurement. In M. McNeese, E. Salas & M. Endsley (Eds.), New trends in cooperative activities: Understanding system dynamics in complex environments (pp. 46-67). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. * Endsley, M. R. (2006). Expertise and Situation Awareness. In K. A. Ericsson, N. Charness, P. J. Feltovich & R. R. Hoffman (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (pp. 633-651). New York: Cambridge University Press. * Endsley, M. R., & Jones, D. G. (2012). Designing for situation awareness: An approach to human-centered design (2nd ed.). London: Taylor & Francis.

147 points by hliyan 8y ago

(2007)

Hm.. Is Functional Neurology (the journal in which this published) related in any way to the field of functional neurology? I think the latter is a rebranding of chiropractic neurology, which some would argue purports some less than scientific ideas.

goto11 8y ago

Sounds like a crackpot theory by someone not understanding literature. Because the Illiad does not contain the word "mind" and describes events and actions but not thoughts and mental states, it follows that people at the time did not have consciousness. I guess Hemmingway did not have consciousness either?

friendstock 8y ago
Jaynes was a professor at Princeton University, so he must've built up enough credibility to get this appointment. I was a student at Princeton and actually sat in on his class for a few sessions.
- goto11 8y ago
  I'm sure he was credible enough in the field of psychology, but that does not automatically make him an expert in classical literature or religion, which is where he finds the purported evidence for the theory. Therefore the theory have to be judged on its own merit, not just the academic title of the originator.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Jaynes was a professor at Princeton University, so he must've built up enough credibility to get this appointment Well, Pauling got two Nobel prizes, but still had crackpot theories about Vitamin C
  - rjplatte 8y ago
    Both Jaynes and Pauling are extremely intelligent and not gullible people. Why are we so quick to dismiss their "Crackpot" theories, simply because they don't fit with the dominant paradigm?
    - coldtea 8y ago
      Isn't the question taking what it supposed to prove for granted (that we do a facile dismissal of those theories? Who said we didn't do a thorough dismissal?) Well, is it "simply because they don't fit with the dominant paradigm" or rather because they have been discredited time and again?
    - goto11 8y ago
      It is quite possible for intelligent people to be wrong, especially when they venture outside their area of expertise. And the cliche about "dominant paradigm" ignores the actual reasons the theory is rejected. Quantum Theory shows that a theory will be accepted even if fundamentally breaks with the dominant paradigm - as long as it can be confirmed by evidence. So that is not really the issue.
dang 8y ago
This comment breaks two of HN's most important guidelines: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
- goto11 8y ago
  Fair enough, I have elaborated my criticism in other comments. The reference to Hemmingway might seem flippant, but my point was that the Iliad is told in a certain genre or style where thoughts and mental states or not directly described, only events and actions. This is a particular style of narrative which is not confined to a specific stage in human development but exist throughout history, and even today is pretty popular ("show, don't tell"). Movies generally follow this form and voice-overs explaining the characters thoughts are the exception rather than the rule. So to claim that the narrative style of the Iliad shows that the people does not have a concept of mind and did not have self awareness is just not justified. The narrative style certainly does not prove that, but on the other hand it is impossible to disprove that Achilles lacked consciousness. Which puts this theory into the realm of the nonfalsifiable. This is akin to the crackpot theory that the ancient Greeks were not able to perceive the color blue, because that word does not occur in Homer. This is just an incredibly naive understanding of the connection between mind and language. While Homeric Greek might not have such a word, there is absolutely no evidence that their sensory system was different. Furthermore, taking the Iliad as face value is highly problematic. While historians generally agree that there probably was a war, there is no evidence that any of the persons actually existed or existed at the time. The characters might be legendary or mythological. Note that basically all of them descends from gods a few generations back. Achilles is literally half-god. We know that Helen was worshiped as a deity in Sparta for example. If she was actually a mythological figure, we don't really need some complicated psychological theory to explain how one mythological being could talk to another! So I think it is fair to say the theory have a naive approach to literature. The second part of the criticism is that the theory does not actually explain anything. The bicameral mind is supposed to explain how people at the time interacted with Gods. It was actually just the other half of the brain giving advice. OK, but the theory also claims that the the integration of the mind happens some time between the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey (because Odysseys clearly do have a concept of mind with first-person narrative and so on). Which means the theory can't explain the gods appearing in the Odyssey.

akvadrako 8y ago

Regardless of the historical evidence (or lack thereof) for his theory, I found his book very enlightening. It really helped me understand religion, schizophrenia and the split brain, showing why it would be so important to early human society and how it could came about, biologically and culturally.

goto11 8y ago
Well if the theory is bullshit then surely it does not actually help anyone understand religion? So the Gods are speaking to people in the Iliad because it was actually one half of the brain speaking to the other. But the Odyssey allegedly is composed after the watershed moment, but Gods are still speaking to people. So the theory does not actually explain anything about religion. The theory can "rationally" explain how Aphrodite speaks to Paris, but it does not explain how she teleports him from the battlefield to his chamber. So you still have to accept either supernatural events or that the story contains fictional elements. In which case the gods are much easier explained than through this theory, which have no other evidence. And the narrative style of the Iliad (describing events and actions but not thought processes and introspection) is known throughout history.
- bloak 8y ago
  There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. The Jaynes hypothesis, as I understand it, is that in early civilisations the majority of the population heard voices and it was considered normal. If you see a reference in literature to a god speaking to someone, you can't easily tell whether that's fiction, metaphor, an exaggeration, a lie, a narrative style, or a literal description of a real experience. For me one of the biggest problems with the theory is how people's perception (whether they hear voices or not) could change en masse, presumably because of a change in culture or education, because I don't believe there can have been a biological change over that period. Therefore, if people educated in the right way could hear voices I'd expect there still to be groups of people (members of some religious sect perhaps) who hear voices. So I'd like to see a detailed description of one of those groups. Then I could perhaps believe that the phenomenon was mainstream in ancient Greece.

Apocryphon 8y ago

Like the phantom time hypothesis, bicameralism is a sort of massively revisionist theory that relies on wild interpretations of historical information. And both are pretty entertaining, regardless.

goto11 8y ago
And the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky. Like the bicameral mind, the theories of Velikovsky are attractive to modern lay people because they give a "rational" explanation for mythology.
- harshreality 8y ago
  I think you're making a category error comparing quackish theories of planetary dynamics to questionable theories of mind. Nobody really knows how the modern human psychological consciousness developed. To compare a theory about that, to a theory claiming as-near-as-we-can-tell-physically-wrong things about Jupiter and Venus and Earth's rotation and physical forces, is invalid. When I read criticisms of Jaynes, they seem a lot like criticisms of Darwin's original, simplistic view of evolution. Saying the bicameral mind is not a perfect theory is uninteresting; hardly anything is a perfect theory. What matters is the specific criticism (do you have one?) leveled at it, and whether the bulk of Jaynes's ideas can be modified and extended, with another few decades or century's worth of knowledge, into something that's roughly (empirically tested to be) accurate. Nobody takes Darwin's original expression of evolutionary theory as gospel today, but it's part of the scientific canon for a reason. It was incomplete and therefore misleading in some ways, but the core ideas are essentially taken as true today. We can see evolution in action through microbiology and genome analysis, even if some specific (narrow) ideas and predictions by Darwin and early primitive evolutionary theory have been falsified. Or look how relativity developed. First people were tinkering around with ideas about electromagnetism, discovering things about light, then came special relativity, which led to a bunch of problems, which led to general relativity. And even GR is wrong, since it doesn't currently accommodate quantum theory. That doesn't make special or general relativity wrong, so much as it makes them incomplete. They may be wrong in an absolute sense, but they're still quite useful. Even special relativity, being the wrong-er of the two, has some important "first step" realizations, like speed of light being invariant. Even the ether theory, now pretty much falsified, might end up having some contribution to future physics, if it turns out that there's some substrate (in a sense, though it would probably be neither matter-like nor light-like, and instead coupled to matter and light in interesting ways) that binds things together.

nsajko 8y ago

A nice way to look at Bicameralism is as (good) science fiction. (Wikipedia calls it a "radical hypothesis".)

goto11 8y ago
It is also non-falsifiable since it is impossible to prove or disprove whether ancient people were conscious or not. Or for that matter whether a present-day schizophrenic is conscious or not in the same sense.
- apk-d 8y ago
  Can we even prove whether a modern person is conscious? If so, shouldn't we be able to occasionally encounter such unconscious people, either occurring randomly by natural variation (especially given how recently the breakdown is claimed to have happened), or in people who had very little contact with language (hard but not impossible to come by)?
  - karpodiem 8y ago
    The recent NPC meme provides an interesting answer to this question.
    - Apocryphon 8y ago
      Isn't that just solipsism
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    It’s easy to imagine that somebody raised by apes or otherwise totally isolated from humans would not be conscious, but without teaching them to think consciously how could we ever know?
gaius 8y ago
If you like the sound of that I highly recommend the Westworld reboot, but I don’t want to spoiler it.

starbeast 8y ago

When I first read it, I felt he was trying to find a solution for a problem that doesn't exist, that of; 'given humans are conscious and animals are not, what mechanism could bring about an incredibly sudden evolution of consciousness out of nowhere?' The answer being that there was not a sudden evolution of consciousness out of nowhere. Human conscious states may be greatly more reflective that other animals, with a greater proportion of our neurons experiencing memory than sensory data, when compared to, say, a squirrel. However, the fundamental aspect of direct awareness is a shared trait, we are just directly aware of a far greater magnitude of internal states than the squirrel.

chronolitus 8y ago
I think it also useful to semantically separate cognitive consciousness (i.e. Knowing and expressing the existence of your thought processes through arguably higher, more abstract thought processes - which might even go on recursively - knowing that I know that i am conscious, etc) from the externally unmeasurable 'conscious experience', (i.e qualia, the awareness of sensory or thoughts at the most essential level, 'seeing' what one sees, etc). One could imagine a living being with one but not the other, for example qualia without cognitive consciousness (if I had to guess, I would imagine this experience to be similar to being drugged to the point of having no internal monologue, no complex thought process, but keeping your sensations and vision, etc, or being a barely-sentient animal in purely instictual mode of thought and action) The opposite, cognitive consciousness without qualia - a.k.a the philosophical zombie - or a computer which can argue the existence of it's thoughts without feeling them is, I gather, a more controversial state of being. What I find interesting is that in separating the two 'consciousness's, the former ends up taking almost all of the importance and the latter none - anything which can be externally measured ends up in the first category (which is a computable logic process), which leaves very little of utilitarian/evolutionary/algorithmic importance in the second. However, in much discourse about consciousness the latter takes a disproportionate role (i.e fear of losing your unmeasurable consciousness when teleporting, etc, though the cognitive consciousness, being by definition a logical and measurable process is theoretically preserved)

opless 8y ago

Someone's been watching the remake of Westworld :)

AltruisticGap 8y ago

> Jaynes recognizes that consciousness itself is only a small part of mental activity and is not necessary for sensation or perception, for concept formation, for learning, thinking or even reasoning. Thus, if major human actions and skills can function automatically and unconsciously, then it is conceivable that there were, at one time, human beings who did most of the things we do – speak, understand, perceive, solve problems – but who were without consciousness. In the spiritual teachings & traditions the wording would be different. I think they would refer to was Jaynes call "consciousness" as "self awareness"; and then assert that "consciousness" is prior to any of that. For example in the dream state we are typically not in control, nor are we aware it's a dream.. yet when we "wake up" we remember having dreamed and having "been there". In fact I'd argue that we DO many times of the day every day... speak and act without much self awareness. And yet, we remember afterwards and then claim those moments as something we did. > In short, Jaynes claims that men in the age of the Iliad learned to speak, read, and write, as well as conduct their daily lives, yet remained nonconscious throughout their lives. Maybe they were indeed much less "self-aware" as we are today, which again is not same as saying not conscious. edit: it seems to me this is the main contetion in science often times people just conflate mind activity and consciousness , as an (possibly not deliberate) attempt to chuck away the "hard problem of consciousness". pps: funny enough it is actually an hypothesis, that for human beings to recongize consciousness is also something made possible through self awareness. For example, what is called "awakening" in spiritual teachings is supposed to be the natural state, hence, whatever "spiritual" state it is thought to be, is a self-refetential acknowledhgement of a change of one's perception of self and world. That is, "self awareness" allows for human beings to acknowledge consciousness (since we have to conceive of it).. whereas a dog or cat can be consciouss, and relatively free of worry, yet will never know themselves as "free of worry" (I mean in a rational / self aware way).

Nav_Panel 8y ago
Jaynes addresses this critique in the revised Afterword: > The most common error which I did not emphasize sufficiently is to confuse consciousness with perception... This type of confusion was at least encouraged back in 1921 by Bertrand Russell: “We are conscious of anything that we perceive.” And as his logical atomism became fashionable in philosophy, it became difficult to see it any other way. And in a later book Russell uses as an example of consciousness “I see a table.” But Descartes, who gave us the modern idea of consciousness, would never have agreed. Nor would a radical behaviorist like Watson, who in denying consciousness existed certainly did not mean sense perception. Earlier in the book he makes a linguistic argument, claiming that his usage of "consciousness" is the only that unifies both the subjective (I am conscious) and objective (I am conscious of X) usages. Beyond Jaynes and more broadly, I'd consider comparing his theses with that of McLuhan in Gutenberg Galaxy, namely McLuhan's theories about mass literacy. There seems to be a unifying element in that the structure of one's experience (of one's interpretation of their sensory inputs) is strongly related to the sorts of media they consume and to the sorts of epistemological "channels" available. The structure of knowledge and its dissemination (collectively oral? Or privately read? Think about problems such as "atomization of society" and a lightbulb should go off) seems to determine our internal experience to a large degree: older writers such as Walter Benjamin have touched on "movie consciousness" (although not strictly in those words), while more contemporary authors like Sarah Perry discuss "Social Media Consciousness" (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/09/07/social-media-consciousness/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/09/07/social-media-conscious...).

k__ 8y ago

Better read "The Ego Tunnel"

thanatropism 8y ago

Science aside, the breakdown-of-bicameral-theory has intriguing parallels to Lacan's theory of the mirror stage. In this (nonscientific - but we're learning the limits of scientific psychology) theory, infants are born unarticulated, a mass of limbs with no wholeness to them. In the mirror stage they discover they have a body which is articulated and which is subject to the gaze of others. This begins the split between the Imaginary and the Symbolic (social reality). Under bicameral conditions, men didn't see themselves as articulated and autonomous, let alone as objects of others' (or in the case of gods, the Other, who provides the law) gaze. They didn't have imaginations split from social reality.

theoh 8y ago
Isn't the mirror stage really about discovering the unity of the body (as a kind of closed contour), thus permitting entry into the Imaginary? Then the Symbolic is initiated when these entities (of which the body's image is supposedly the first) start to be thought of in relation to each other, as in language. In that sense, I don't think you can have language without the Symbolic, so the analogy with Jaynes fails. Jaynes didn't claim that the bicameral phase meant undifferentiated reality without terms or objects. As I understand it, Lacan is talking about individual psychology. It doesn't make sense to talk about a person whose mind is "fused" with social reality, unless you believe that reality is some kind of solipsistic hallucination.
- thanatropism 8y ago
  About entering the Imaginary: you're in the right. That said, there are a number of stages in the development of Lacan's thought (Malcolm Bowie counts three); he starts out ostensibly as a clinician but gradually expands his concepts outwards until they're a generalized theory of subjectivity. From this point we can argue whether societies have structures somehow resembling subjectivity - as an economist I've spent a lot of time on the clock doing this. The thing is that as a clinical theory Lacan is way out there in the sophistic hallucination scale, even for the tiny minority that wants to resurrect psychodynamic therapy. Yet that's not what draws people to him, is it?

coldtea 8y ago

>In fact, the Iliad does not seem to mention any subjective thoughts or the contents of anyone’s mind. The heroes of the Iliad were not able to make decisions, no one was introspecting or even reminiscing. Apparently, they were noble “automata” who were not aware of what they did. Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no internal mind-space to introspect upon. Some lexical oddities in the Homeric text (such as the absence of a single word translating “consciousness”, “mind”, “soul”, or even “body”) led Jaynes to formulate the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by nonconscious minds, which automatically recorded and objectively reported events, in a manner rather similar to the characters of the poem. The transition to subjective and introspective writings of the conscious mind occurred in later works, beginning with the Odyssey. The Odyssey is not that later (for any evolutionary or great developmental force to have any effect). Plus it is strongly considered to be of the same authorship and the writing style is very much the same. What's worse, unlike what the above excerpt claims, most of the Iliad deals with feelings of various kinds -- starting with the famous opening line: "Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus". Does these parts seem to have any relation to the idea that "The heroes of the Iliad were not able to make decisions, no one was introspecting or even reminiscing. Apparently, they were noble “automata” who were not aware of what they did. Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no internal mind-space to introspect upon"? > At this Jove was much troubled and answered, "I shall have trouble if you set me quarrelling with Juno, for she will provoke me with her taunting speeches; even now she is always railing at me before the other gods and accusing me of giving aid to the Trojans. Go back now, lest she should find out. I will consider the matter, and will bring it about as wish. See, I incline my head that you believe me. This is the most solemn that I can give to any god. I never recall my word, or deceive, or fail to do what I say, when I have nodded my head." > As he spoke the son of Saturn bowed his dark brows, and the ambrosial locks swayed on his immortal head, till vast Olympus reeled. > When the pair had thus laid their plans, they parted- Jove to his house, while the goddess quitted the splendour of Olympus, and plunged into the depths of the sea. The gods rose from their seats, before the coming of their sire. Not one of them dared to remain sitting, but all stood up as he came among them. There, then, he took his seat. But Juno, when she saw him, knew that he and the old merman's daughter, silver-footed Thetis, had been hatching mischief, so she at once began to upbraid him. "Trickster," she cried, "which of the gods have you been taking into your counsels now? You are always settling matters in secret behind my back, and have never yet told me, if you could help it, one word of your intentions." (...) > The old man tore his grey hair as he spoke, but he moved not the heart of Hector. His mother hard by wept and moaned aloud as she bared her bosom and pointed to the breast which had suckled him. "Hector," she cried, weeping bitterly the while, "Hector, my son, spurn not this breast, but have pity upon me too: if I have ever given you comfort from my own bosom, think on it now, dear son, and come within the wall to protect us from this man; stand not without to meet him. Should the wretch kill you, neither I nor your richly dowered wife shall ever weep, dear offshoot of myself, over the bed on which you lie, for dogs will devour you at the ships of the Achaeans." Thus did the two with many tears implore their son, but they moved not the heart of Hector, and he stood his ground awaiting huge Achilles as he drew nearer towards him. As serpent in its den upon the mountains, full fed with deadly poisons, waits for the approach of man- he is filled with fury and his eyes glare terribly as he goes writhing round his den- even so Hector leaned his shield against a tower that jutted out from the wall and stood where he was, undaunted.

drdeadringer 8y ago

If it wasn't for Robert J. Sawyer's WWW trilogy I would never have heard of "the bicameral mind". The first book in particular is brimming with it.

sandinmytea 8y ago

For anyone trying to generalize Mr. Jayne's theory from an article or set of comments - I suggest that you definitely do not. Really, don't do that with anyone's theories, but instead READ THE BOOK. The way that Jaynes "carves up consciousness" as Daniel Dennet puts it in one review, is very different than the way that a reflexive intellectual instinct would choose to. The taxonomy that Jaynes decides upon is distinctive from our mental reflexes, and not at all the same as what nearly everyone begins with. I feel that this "Bicameral" consciousness discussion keeps reappearing on Hacker News in part because it is crucial for us to create a proper distinction between these terms - AI is rapidly going to become conscious in exactly the way Julian Jaynes suggests we became "conscious" and that consciousness is very much different than what we think it is (or must be) for AI to become generally aware of itself. I suggest that anyone who is working towards AGI MUST discover the distinctions that Julian Jaynes made. That does not mean that his theory regarding our consciousness is correct, but merely that his ways of describing "self-awareness" or whatever other term could be applied is crucial to getting a grip on what the true mechanism of "the self" is in the truest engineering sense. That is to say, that if the "self" is the licensed self-aware driver of a vehicle and the engine and transmission is the remainder of cognition, than the order of development was actually from "self-driving car" into human driven vehicles - metaphorically speaking. Basically, up until recently, we just DID, and in attempting to describe WHY we were forced to invent metaphor until collectively we were able to create the language necessary to actually BE self aware. Without the language, we actually were NOT self aware. We were self-driving cars with no human drivers. The human driver only arrived after there were ways of describing "him."

posterboy 8y ago
Your warning is noble, but I read comments to decide whether the topic is useful. I found the negative comments convincing, so I don't mind questioning the topic further. Self-awarenes was worked out with "I know that I don't know" and again, but in positive terms with "I think therefore I am". These are the most basic forms of reflection, a y-combinator differentiating endlessly. With literarry writing, this reflection could be stretched out over generations, yielding a national identity, but oral transmission of religious teachings had been practiced before, just with a higher rate of mutation. Such verbalization is important for stability, and similarity is important for discoverability, but if verbalization hadn't happened, the perhaps because it goes without saying. PS: A single threaded cpu doesn't need to spell out distributed computing primitives, either. It still may use signals, in many cases, even if implemented completely in software. PPS: maybe there's an interesting parallel from natural language to the progression from imperative language over object oriented or declarative, to agent based programming. Bicameral Petri Nets ...

Communitivity 8y ago

I highly recommend anyone trying to understand this subject read the papers of Dr. Mica Endsley, former Chief Scientist of the US Air Force. She makes a distinction between the 3 levels of Situational Awareness and Situational Understanding. Here are the 3 levels of Situational Awareness she proposed: * Perception of Elements in Current Situation * Comprehension of Current Situation * Projection of Future Status Here is a diagram: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3044/2900713433_f295107549_o.jpg http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3044/2900713433_f295107549_o.... From: http://wikiofscience.wikidot.com/quasiscience:situational-awareness http://wikiofscience.wikidot.com/quasiscience:situational-aw... Probably the best place to start is: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/210198492_Endsley_MR_Toward_a_Theory_of_Situation_Awareness_in_Dynamic_Systems_Human_Factors_Journal_371_32-64 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/210198492_Endsley_M... I think this paper, and others of hers, should be recommended reading for any AI researcher. I also think "Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" should be recommended as well. FYSA, the research community seems split on Dr. Endsley's theories, though there seem to be a majority that view them as correct, based on my own informal experience. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mica_Endsley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mica_Endsley): * Endsley, M. R. (1995). Toward a theory of situation awareness in dynamic systems. Human Factors, 37(1), 32-64. * Endsley, M. R. (1995). Measurement of situation awareness in dynamic systems. Human Factors, 37(1), 65-84. * Endsley, M. R., & Garland, D. J. (Eds.). (2000). Situation awareness analysis and measurement. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. * Endsley, M. R., & Jones, W. M. (2001). A model of inter- and intrateam situation awareness: Implications for design, training and measurement. In M. McNeese, E. Salas & M. Endsley (Eds.), New trends in cooperative activities: Understanding system dynamics in complex environments (pp. 46-67). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. * Endsley, M. R. (2006). Expertise and Situation Awareness. In K. A. Ericsson, N. Charness, P. J. Feltovich & R. R. Hoffman (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (pp. 633-651). New York: Cambridge University Press. * Endsley, M. R., & Jones, D. G. (2012). Designing for situation awareness: An approach to human-centered design (2nd ed.). London: Taylor & Francis.