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I was intrigued by the reputation of this book (The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind), thinking that it would be "crazy but just

• joe_the_user 8y ago
  I think you're viewing the book's thesis through a very limited, modern lens. True or false, I'd frame the hypothesis as "first came language, then came consciousness". Language was shared, something "arose" when people were together. So "the gods" were to point of origin of language. The reason that kind of hypothesis is appealing is that consciousness and modern thinking had to arise somehow. Going from animals with no language to a modern human with self-consciousness and language is a big, a huge step. We need an intermediate step between these. An "everyone is generating language but not self-consciously" period is such a hypothetical step. None of this is to claim Jaynes' thesis is true. But it's a reason it's appealing and generally not put on the level of Erich von Däniken. The way that pseudo-scientists like von Däniken fail is they explain simple phenomena with more complex, more unexplained phenomena. Jaynes, whatever his faults, is trying not to do that.
  • _nemo_ 8y ago
    My impression was very different: to me it seems that the modern fans of the book close their eyes to the blatantly silly parts that make up the vast majority of the book and pretend that it's only really about the 'consciousness as a software' idea that makes up a tiny fraction of it. This quote from Daniel Dennett is very revealing: "Now you might think that if you throw out his account of hallucinations you haven’t got much left of Jaynes theory, but in fact I think you would, although he would probably resist throwing that part away" If you throw out the hallucinations part and the stuff built on top of that then 90% of the book is gone, and he kind of admits this. This is like saying that I want to build on Darwin's work from the Origin of Species, but throwing out his account of natural selection. The Däniken comparison comes from the way in which the writer shows you some ancient painting or statue and then claims that it "obviously" depicts how the king or his servants were controlled by hallucinations. I was having flashbacks to when Däniken was doing the same thing with similar artifacts from the same era saying that it must depict "aliens". And I would argue that the theory of a society where everybody is schizophrenic and sharing a collective hallucination of the king while the king is controlled by a hallucination of the previous king, is more complex and creates more unexplained questions than what it's trying to explain - just like saying "the aliens did it".
    • joe_the_user 8y ago
      Basically, you're really still only arguing from "that's ridiculous".
  • robotresearcher 8y ago
    The need for a huge step is partly caused by your assumption that non-human animals and pre-linguistic humans don’t/didn’t have self-consciousness. Drop that assumption then only language is missing and you don’t need two new things at once.
• frabbit 8y ago
  I agree in general. However if you attempt to imagine how future/other observers might look at this current civilization's lack of attempt to deal with imminent climate change breakdown and the clinging to unreasonable belief in as-yet unmaterialized technological progress following on centuries of mass murder and species destruction then it starts to seem more plausible. Let's not forget that until very recently the claim that there was no deity was taken as evidence that the claimant was self-evidently working with a non-functioning brain.