6 ms·

Regardless of the historical evidence (or lack thereof) for his theory, I found his book very enlightening. It really helped me understand religion, schizophren

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.
  - david_ar 8y ago
    In some sense you could say the vast majority of people hear voices, it's just that we conceptualise this as the "inner voice". It seems somewhat plausible that people could conceptualise this differently if there were a sufficiently strong cultural pressure. Perhaps when we hear words in our heads that we describe as talking to ourselves, ancient people would describe the same experience as gods speaking to them?
    - phylomortis 8y ago
      Not only ancient people. The concept of a “foreign” inner voice exists in islam and is called vesvese in Turkish. It is commonly attributed to being deceit from satan and as a child you get taught to actively repress it.
      - posterboy 8y ago
        I tried to record myself, to capture my inner monologue, and found it really painful to listen to. I'm also not very good at role play or impersonation. But a professional performer, like a priest or entertainer, has to do it more than just habitually, and their manners become adapted and people might affect a whole dialectic. Whereas children rather randomly babel and come up with unique manerism that are uncommon and consequently deemed unfit. Further, if you grant that deus ex machina could be a bodyless voice in plays and earlier temple ceremonies, it stands to reason that people would consequently spin these messages further and reanalyse their inner monologue as word of god, not the least to shift responsibility, e.g. to the uber-ich, in Freud's terms.
  - bencollier49 8y ago
    I'd be willing to bet that if you took a sample of people who'd trained themselves to lucid dream, you'd find a high proportion of people who heard voices. Specifically upon sleeping and waking.
    - hliyan 8y ago
      I'd be a counter-example. I frequently dream lucidly. But I never hear voice or see anything even remotely resembling hallucinations. I'm also one of those individuals who are not susceptible to hypnosis (I've had a professional try and fail repeatedly).
- akvadrako 8y ago
  I get that the analysis of the Iliad doesn't prove anything and it could just be a stylistic thing, but that doesn't mean the general story he lays out if totally wrong. The theory is valuable because it's a good explanation for a lot of things and it doesn't disagree with the evidence. That's the purpose of all scientific theories, in Popper's philosophy of science, which is still the most relevant. I haven't heard anything even half as compelling for a plausible evolution of social cohesion or the origin of consciousness, by which Jayne's means inner life.
  - goto11 8y ago
    So what could theoretically disprove the theory?
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      I'm sure you can think of some things, but as long as it agrees with the available evidence and is the "best explanation", which includes some subjective and objective criteria, it's a valuable theory.
      - goto11 8y ago
        You specifically mention Popper. Poppers criteria of falsification states that it is not enough that a theory can explain everything. He observed that a lot of pseudoscience (astrology, marxism, freudian psychology at the time) really could be used to explain everything and couldn't really be disproved by any observation. Real scientific theories on the other hand could be used to make predictions which could be verified or shown to be wrong.
        akvadrako 8y ago
        I mentioned Popper because of his emphasis on good explanations. It’s a lot more than falsifiability.
- freeflight 8y ago
  > Well if the theory is bullshit then surely it does not actually help anyone understand religion? Just because something might be "wrong" in its final conclusion, does not mean that it can't offer unique insights on its way of getting there.
hliyan 8y ago
I read this over 20 years ago as a teenager. Looking back, now I feel the evidence for the bicameral mind is sketchy (evidence for the bicameral brain, i.e. left-brain/right-brain even more so). However, I'm still enamored by the idea that consciousness is somehow related to (if not generated by) a mental model of the real world: while animals can only contemplate things that are within their senses and in the present, our mental model allows us to bring far away things (and things in the past or future) to immediate awareness, and thereby be able to contemplate them.
- unstyledcontent 8y ago
  I only read the article so my understanding of Jayne is limited to that, but he doesn't seen to be saying that a mental model of the world is what gives us consciousness. I think many animals have a mental model of the world, with some of the most intelligent animals having a very sophisticated model. My understanding (of Jayne) is that humans have consciousness because they are able to use language to further contemplate and analyze a mental model of the world using metaphors and analogies. One of the things that actually struck me about this theory was that it really boosts the idea that we should respect the minds of non-human animal mind because they may not experience the world differently than we do.
  - angstrom 8y ago
    The bias about intelligence modeling on human intelligence is certainly one of familiarity. Other intelligence models that we can observe like cephalopods are about as foreign as you can imagine on the animalia tree of life. Who can say if some cephalopod aren't capable of more diverse communication via color fluctuations/rhythms and postures than we are with our vocal cords and body language? At some point a human form of self awareness could have formed, but I think the key is not triggered by physiology alone. Feral humans exist and it's important to understand that there is an observed malleability of the mind which tapers with age. Such individuals have been found and in some cases rehabilitated into what we consider functioning, self-aware, cognitively capable humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child#Documented_cases_of_feral_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child#Documented_cases_o... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period Edit: It reminded me of this story I saw recently about a girl neglected until age 7. Today she is like a 2 year-old in a 20 year-old's body. Keep in mind there is nothing physically wrong with her other than neglect. Consciousness is emergent behavior. Having the physical elements alone is not enough. http://www.tampabay.com/projects/girl-in-the-window/neglect-feral-child-ten-years-later/ http://www.tampabay.com/projects/girl-in-the-window/neglect-...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

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.
- david_ar 8y ago
  In some sense you could say the vast majority of people hear voices, it's just that we conceptualise this as the "inner voice". It seems somewhat plausible that people could conceptualise this differently if there were a sufficiently strong cultural pressure. Perhaps when we hear words in our heads that we describe as talking to ourselves, ancient people would describe the same experience as gods speaking to them?
  - phylomortis 8y ago
    Not only ancient people. The concept of a “foreign” inner voice exists in islam and is called vesvese in Turkish. It is commonly attributed to being deceit from satan and as a child you get taught to actively repress it.
    - posterboy 8y ago
      I tried to record myself, to capture my inner monologue, and found it really painful to listen to. I'm also not very good at role play or impersonation. But a professional performer, like a priest or entertainer, has to do it more than just habitually, and their manners become adapted and people might affect a whole dialectic. Whereas children rather randomly babel and come up with unique manerism that are uncommon and consequently deemed unfit. Further, if you grant that deus ex machina could be a bodyless voice in plays and earlier temple ceremonies, it stands to reason that people would consequently spin these messages further and reanalyse their inner monologue as word of god, not the least to shift responsibility, e.g. to the uber-ich, in Freud's terms.
- bencollier49 8y ago
  I'd be willing to bet that if you took a sample of people who'd trained themselves to lucid dream, you'd find a high proportion of people who heard voices. Specifically upon sleeping and waking.
  - hliyan 8y ago
    I'd be a counter-example. I frequently dream lucidly. But I never hear voice or see anything even remotely resembling hallucinations. I'm also one of those individuals who are not susceptible to hypnosis (I've had a professional try and fail repeatedly).
akvadrako 8y ago
I get that the analysis of the Iliad doesn't prove anything and it could just be a stylistic thing, but that doesn't mean the general story he lays out if totally wrong. The theory is valuable because it's a good explanation for a lot of things and it doesn't disagree with the evidence. That's the purpose of all scientific theories, in Popper's philosophy of science, which is still the most relevant. I haven't heard anything even half as compelling for a plausible evolution of social cohesion or the origin of consciousness, by which Jayne's means inner life.
- goto11 8y ago
  So what could theoretically disprove the theory?
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    I'm sure you can think of some things, but as long as it agrees with the available evidence and is the "best explanation", which includes some subjective and objective criteria, it's a valuable theory.
    - goto11 8y ago
      You specifically mention Popper. Poppers criteria of falsification states that it is not enough that a theory can explain everything. He observed that a lot of pseudoscience (astrology, marxism, freudian psychology at the time) really could be used to explain everything and couldn't really be disproved by any observation. Real scientific theories on the other hand could be used to make predictions which could be verified or shown to be wrong.
      - akvadrako 8y ago
        I mentioned Popper because of his emphasis on good explanations. It’s a lot more than falsifiability.
freeflight 8y ago
> Well if the theory is bullshit then surely it does not actually help anyone understand religion? Just because something might be "wrong" in its final conclusion, does not mean that it can't offer unique insights on its way of getting there.

hliyan 8y ago

I read this over 20 years ago as a teenager. Looking back, now I feel the evidence for the bicameral mind is sketchy (evidence for the bicameral brain, i.e. left-brain/right-brain even more so). However, I'm still enamored by the idea that consciousness is somehow related to (if not generated by) a mental model of the real world: while animals can only contemplate things that are within their senses and in the present, our mental model allows us to bring far away things (and things in the past or future) to immediate awareness, and thereby be able to contemplate them.

unstyledcontent 8y ago
I only read the article so my understanding of Jayne is limited to that, but he doesn't seen to be saying that a mental model of the world is what gives us consciousness. I think many animals have a mental model of the world, with some of the most intelligent animals having a very sophisticated model. My understanding (of Jayne) is that humans have consciousness because they are able to use language to further contemplate and analyze a mental model of the world using metaphors and analogies. One of the things that actually struck me about this theory was that it really boosts the idea that we should respect the minds of non-human animal mind because they may not experience the world differently than we do.
- angstrom 8y ago
  The bias about intelligence modeling on human intelligence is certainly one of familiarity. Other intelligence models that we can observe like cephalopods are about as foreign as you can imagine on the animalia tree of life. Who can say if some cephalopod aren't capable of more diverse communication via color fluctuations/rhythms and postures than we are with our vocal cords and body language? At some point a human form of self awareness could have formed, but I think the key is not triggered by physiology alone. Feral humans exist and it's important to understand that there is an observed malleability of the mind which tapers with age. Such individuals have been found and in some cases rehabilitated into what we consider functioning, self-aware, cognitively capable humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child#Documented_cases_of_feral_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child#Documented_cases_o... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period Edit: It reminded me of this story I saw recently about a girl neglected until age 7. Today she is like a 2 year-old in a 20 year-old's body. Keep in mind there is nothing physically wrong with her other than neglect. Consciousness is emergent behavior. Having the physical elements alone is not enough. http://www.tampabay.com/projects/girl-in-the-window/neglect-feral-child-ten-years-later/ http://www.tampabay.com/projects/girl-in-the-window/neglect-...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]