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Quickly scanned through the references and didn’t see one interesting perspective: Julian Jaynes’ theory of the “breakdown of the bicameral mind” in response to

Quickly scanned through the references and didn’t see one interesting perspective: Julian Jaynes’ theory of the “breakdown of the bicameral mind” in response to increasing societal complexity. His idea is that the voices of “gods” in premodern societies were literal command hallucinations experienced by members of these societies, in the place of having self-identified conscious thought. In a way, he argues, premodern peoples could be considered to be “not conscious”, as they had no inner locus to consider or contradict the voices they heard. This contrasts with the “conscious” experience, in which we personally identify with a sort of homunculus inside our heads that is watching and judging its surroundings. Jaynes argues that societal upheaval and complexity led to changes (maybe cultural, maybe biological) that caused the “voices” to disappear, becoming absorbed into a new “conscious” stream of self-identified thought. From the perspective of societies experiencing this change, their inner gods would have been thought to have gone silent, leading to greater identification with (and societal organizing need for) externalized, idolized god figures.

thatoneuser 8y ago
So basically while the conscious mind was evolving, people originally took that mind to be an external voice? Is it not totally automatic that people can control their conscious mind?
- homungulous 8y ago
  Well, consider maybe that it has to do with a couple of factors, not just learning, but opportunities to learn, as artificial environments (homes) become more refined, and there's more opportunity to contemplate upon abstractions. Not only that, but capacity to contemplate, that is to say, relative intellect has likely been augmented by our capacity to self domesticate within such environs. On the on hand, you have the mirror test for self awareness. But it's tough to construct a comparable structured assessment for self awareness that measures up to the mirror test for self awareness. On the one hand, operating mirrors is an acquired skill. Sentient beings need exposure to a mirror for some time, before they learn to reconcile how to use it for self examination. But without a mirror, other stand-ins, like shadows, masks and palm prints start to reveal an awareness of identity. So we can look to those sorts of artifacts to resolve whether a remote indigenous society has begun to self recognize, in general, for all neary all healthy adult members at large. But, also consider our evolutionary effect on how smart dogs are. Dogs are pretty smart, in possession of emotion, highly attentive to mood, cooperative, and recognize their own identity according to name. They recognize their own scent, and prioritize that factor of self above their appearance in mirrors, which they eventually learn is not another dog. They also dream, which probably means some dogs have vivid internal processes, even if they don't have an internal monologue. Human societies have writing though, and it's probably writing that leads to complex societies, and of course, writing enables artifacts that record oral traditions, and eventually theology and mythology. Really, though, look at it this way. Oral traditions are about entertaining an audience, but eventually, the written word descends into virtue signalling, as intellectuals paint each other into corners. Ever get caught by the wrong person with a diary entry that spills your guts, telling all about what you think of everyone? How many times did you make that mistake? That's what this reveals. That the intelligensia gains a collective recognition that failure to moralize is a form of checkmate in the court of public opinion, and virtue signaling in text is the race toward a limit (race to the top, race to the bottom, whatever). Intellectuals start to notice how blackmail works, and stop writing about the evil deeds they (may or may not) understand.
  - AlotOfReading 8y ago
    Not all human societies have had writing and even fewer had it in any significant way. Secondly, oral traditions are not always about entertainment nor are they only recorded by writing. There's a very common trap when considering the past to look for "logical causation". It's almost always incorrect to do so and leads to this sort of wild speculation.
- MR4D 8y ago
  A key component of Jaynes' definition of "conscious" is introspection. You could still learn and do other things normally, but that little voice that tells you things like "don't do this" was attributed to the gods instead of introspection.
devoply 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)#Issues_with_Jaynes'_proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)#Issu...
- Symmetry 8y ago
  Huh, published in 1976. Somehow I'd assumed that this sort of hypothesis would have been proposed back in the 1930s when it's assumptions would have been a lot more credible.
  - geofft 8y ago
    As Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion, "It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets."
    - Symmetry 8y ago
      I'm really surprised that he and Dennet are so positive on the idea. In the humans running around today we can do experiments on we can clearly see that it's the same process that allows us to serialize experiences for to speak about them and serialize them to remember them. But I suppose before fMRI that work might not have been as convincing. And I suppose, as someone who does a lot of thinking without an internal narrative I feel a bit attacked by the whole idea.
      - knolax 8y ago
        >And I suppose, as someone who does a lot of thinking without an internal narrative I feel a bit attacked by the whole idea. When ideas like this and Sapir-Whorf pop up it really makes me wonder if maybe the social "sciences" are studied exclusively by some subset of the population that thinks entirely different from me. How else would they come to the conclusion that thoughts take the form of articulated monologues? Maybe I'm the outlier but it takes deliberate effort for me to serialize my thoughts into anything articulate. I mean do other people just hear "I didn't give the correct arguments to this function" in their head when they code?
raducu 8y ago
So everybody used to be schizophrenic? I know the bad connotations of schizophrenia are more present in modern societies, but still, I can't see how a primitive group of schizophrenics would be able to thrive. Is there any proof or actual need for this bicameral mind other than trying to explain the religious phenomenon?
- Taylor_OD 8y ago
  I understood it to be less like schizophrenia and more like early peoples who were not aware of their internal monologue. Their own thoughts were perceived as the command or voice of Gods because how else would they be able to, "hear" words that were not said by another around them?
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    It's beyond me how you could ever show evidence for that, beyond reading between the lines of ancient text (which we know is one of the least reliable forms of historical evidence ever invented).
    - nitrogen 8y ago
      This isn't evidence, but I used to be religious and there was a certain religious mindset in which the internal monologue became more like an internal dialogue. Given this, and that IIRC there is a part of the brain that has been associated with religious experience, the bicameral mind seems at least plausible, though maybe not exactly as originally posited.
      - photojosh 8y ago
        I posted a similar comment above on how religious approaches give bicameral theory some plausibility: people genuinely do think God talks to them, even today. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567926
  - ionised 8y ago
richardhod 8y ago
This is an idea which has been popularized by the new TV series Westworld. It is interesting, however it is not the topic of this paper, which does look instead into sociological perspectives rather than an internal psychological theory which is difficult to be approved. Jaynes' theory may have merit, but it isn't that relevant to this paper, which is an empirical research paper on social data and theories.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  I've been skipping Westworld, but the fact that bicameralism plays a plot point is going to pop it to near the top of my queue now.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
msamwald 8y ago
The hypothesis is completely implausible, and it is quite irritating that it keeps popping up in discussions in the 'hacker' sphere. There is simply no way that bicameralism would be the dominant phenotype only a few thousand years ago, and be completely absent in any present-day population, anywhere. We would still see it in isolated populations.
- pmalynin 8y ago
  But there are people now that hear voices...
- conskdkdo 8y ago
  What I find interesting about this hypothesis is that consciousness is just a stream of thoughts which we do not control. Like whenever you think something it just arrives to your mind. Often we experience thought as spoken words in our mind but we don't know where they come from. They come from the subconscious but we are not aware of that part of ourselves. In dreams we have information expressed to us from the subconscious through symbolic representations. What if we could talk to our subconscious mind? When thinking about this I allways remember how John Nash described his paranoic ideas comming from the same voice his mathematical ideas came from.
  - sajid 8y ago
    Nash said "the same way", not the "the same voice": “the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.” - Sylvia Nasar, "A Beautiful Mind"
    - conskdkdo 8y ago
      Thanks. Fair enough, but he did say "they came". And if you think about it he does not specify "the way". I remember that he heard voices. Because he said that to get cured he just stop listening to the voice or voices.
  - visarga 8y ago
trentlott 8y ago
If everyone had 'gods' instead of an internal monologue, why would anybody care if Moses said Jehovah spoke to him? "Who cares?" God revealed to Levi, "It happens to all of us."

thatoneuser 8y ago

So basically while the conscious mind was evolving, people originally took that mind to be an external voice? Is it not totally automatic that people can control their conscious mind?

homungulous 8y ago
Well, consider maybe that it has to do with a couple of factors, not just learning, but opportunities to learn, as artificial environments (homes) become more refined, and there's more opportunity to contemplate upon abstractions. Not only that, but capacity to contemplate, that is to say, relative intellect has likely been augmented by our capacity to self domesticate within such environs. On the on hand, you have the mirror test for self awareness. But it's tough to construct a comparable structured assessment for self awareness that measures up to the mirror test for self awareness. On the one hand, operating mirrors is an acquired skill. Sentient beings need exposure to a mirror for some time, before they learn to reconcile how to use it for self examination. But without a mirror, other stand-ins, like shadows, masks and palm prints start to reveal an awareness of identity. So we can look to those sorts of artifacts to resolve whether a remote indigenous society has begun to self recognize, in general, for all neary all healthy adult members at large. But, also consider our evolutionary effect on how smart dogs are. Dogs are pretty smart, in possession of emotion, highly attentive to mood, cooperative, and recognize their own identity according to name. They recognize their own scent, and prioritize that factor of self above their appearance in mirrors, which they eventually learn is not another dog. They also dream, which probably means some dogs have vivid internal processes, even if they don't have an internal monologue. Human societies have writing though, and it's probably writing that leads to complex societies, and of course, writing enables artifacts that record oral traditions, and eventually theology and mythology. Really, though, look at it this way. Oral traditions are about entertaining an audience, but eventually, the written word descends into virtue signalling, as intellectuals paint each other into corners. Ever get caught by the wrong person with a diary entry that spills your guts, telling all about what you think of everyone? How many times did you make that mistake? That's what this reveals. That the intelligensia gains a collective recognition that failure to moralize is a form of checkmate in the court of public opinion, and virtue signaling in text is the race toward a limit (race to the top, race to the bottom, whatever). Intellectuals start to notice how blackmail works, and stop writing about the evil deeds they (may or may not) understand.
- AlotOfReading 8y ago
  Not all human societies have had writing and even fewer had it in any significant way. Secondly, oral traditions are not always about entertainment nor are they only recorded by writing. There's a very common trap when considering the past to look for "logical causation". It's almost always incorrect to do so and leads to this sort of wild speculation.
MR4D 8y ago
A key component of Jaynes' definition of "conscious" is introspection. You could still learn and do other things normally, but that little voice that tells you things like "don't do this" was attributed to the gods instead of introspection.

devoply 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)#Issues_with_Jaynes'_proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)#Issu...

Symmetry 8y ago
Huh, published in 1976. Somehow I'd assumed that this sort of hypothesis would have been proposed back in the 1930s when it's assumptions would have been a lot more credible.
- geofft 8y ago
  As Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion, "It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets."
  - Symmetry 8y ago
    I'm really surprised that he and Dennet are so positive on the idea. In the humans running around today we can do experiments on we can clearly see that it's the same process that allows us to serialize experiences for to speak about them and serialize them to remember them. But I suppose before fMRI that work might not have been as convincing. And I suppose, as someone who does a lot of thinking without an internal narrative I feel a bit attacked by the whole idea.
    - knolax 8y ago
      >And I suppose, as someone who does a lot of thinking without an internal narrative I feel a bit attacked by the whole idea. When ideas like this and Sapir-Whorf pop up it really makes me wonder if maybe the social "sciences" are studied exclusively by some subset of the population that thinks entirely different from me. How else would they come to the conclusion that thoughts take the form of articulated monologues? Maybe I'm the outlier but it takes deliberate effort for me to serialize my thoughts into anything articulate. I mean do other people just hear "I didn't give the correct arguments to this function" in their head when they code?

raducu 8y ago

So everybody used to be schizophrenic? I know the bad connotations of schizophrenia are more present in modern societies, but still, I can't see how a primitive group of schizophrenics would be able to thrive. Is there any proof or actual need for this bicameral mind other than trying to explain the religious phenomenon?

Taylor_OD 8y ago
I understood it to be less like schizophrenia and more like early peoples who were not aware of their internal monologue. Their own thoughts were perceived as the command or voice of Gods because how else would they be able to, "hear" words that were not said by another around them?
- whatshisface 8y ago
  It's beyond me how you could ever show evidence for that, beyond reading between the lines of ancient text (which we know is one of the least reliable forms of historical evidence ever invented).
  - nitrogen 8y ago
    This isn't evidence, but I used to be religious and there was a certain religious mindset in which the internal monologue became more like an internal dialogue. Given this, and that IIRC there is a part of the brain that has been associated with religious experience, the bicameral mind seems at least plausible, though maybe not exactly as originally posited.
    - photojosh 8y ago
      I posted a similar comment above on how religious approaches give bicameral theory some plausibility: people genuinely do think God talks to them, even today. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567926
- ionised 8y ago

richardhod 8y ago

This is an idea which has been popularized by the new TV series Westworld. It is interesting, however it is not the topic of this paper, which does look instead into sociological perspectives rather than an internal psychological theory which is difficult to be approved. Jaynes' theory may have merit, but it isn't that relevant to this paper, which is an empirical research paper on social data and theories.

pavel_lishin 8y ago
I've been skipping Westworld, but the fact that bicameralism plays a plot point is going to pop it to near the top of my queue now.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

msamwald 8y ago

The hypothesis is completely implausible, and it is quite irritating that it keeps popping up in discussions in the 'hacker' sphere. There is simply no way that bicameralism would be the dominant phenotype only a few thousand years ago, and be completely absent in any present-day population, anywhere. We would still see it in isolated populations.

pmalynin 8y ago
But there are people now that hear voices...
conskdkdo 8y ago
What I find interesting about this hypothesis is that consciousness is just a stream of thoughts which we do not control. Like whenever you think something it just arrives to your mind. Often we experience thought as spoken words in our mind but we don't know where they come from. They come from the subconscious but we are not aware of that part of ourselves. In dreams we have information expressed to us from the subconscious through symbolic representations. What if we could talk to our subconscious mind? When thinking about this I allways remember how John Nash described his paranoic ideas comming from the same voice his mathematical ideas came from.
- sajid 8y ago
  Nash said "the same way", not the "the same voice": “the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.” - Sylvia Nasar, "A Beautiful Mind"
  - conskdkdo 8y ago
    Thanks. Fair enough, but he did say "they came". And if you think about it he does not specify "the way". I remember that he heard voices. Because he said that to get cured he just stop listening to the voice or voices.
- visarga 8y ago

trentlott 8y ago

If everyone had 'gods' instead of an internal monologue, why would anybody care if Moses said Jehovah spoke to him? "Who cares?" God revealed to Levi, "It happens to all of us."