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The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
- thanatos519 5y agoThis book is worth reading!
- SirensOfTitan 5y agoIt’s one of my favorite books! I have a first edition lying somewhere around my apartment. Dawkins called it: “either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius.” Janyes’s hypothesis, bicameralism, is thought provoking at its least relevant by challenging our static perceptions of what consciousness actually is. Alongside Feynmann’s autobiographies, this book made me think about not only how language and culture can deeply affect consciousness, but what consciousness actually is in the first place. My favorite part of the book explores metaphor and language as a means of perception instead of just communication: “Even such an unmetaphorical-sounding word as the verb ‘to be’ was generated from a metaphor. It comes from the Sanskrit bhu, “to grow, or make grow,” while the English forms ‘am’ and ‘is’ have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asmiy “to breathe.” It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for ‘existence’ and could only say that something ‘grows’ or that it “breathes.” And, of course, his chapter on what consciousness isn’t is really quite interesting: “Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.” (I just woke up, so bear with me for some fuzziness in this comment)
- pwdisswordfish8 5y agoWhy did Feynman’s autobiographies make you think about what consciousness actually is in the first place?
- SirensOfTitan 5y agoWhile Jaynes prompted me to think of consciousness in terms of language and culture, Feynman did the same on a micro, person-to-person scale. He detailed a challenge with his fraternity mates where they did something like: read a book and count seconds (accurately) as you're doing it. He couldn't do it, but his fraternity mate could. He realized that while he counted using inner dialogue, his frat mate counted using visual images instead (seeing 1, 2, 3 in his mind's eye). If people embedded in the same culture and circumstances could count differently, I figured, how many unspoken differences in how we process and model the world around us could there be? (story subject to deterioration by way of memory) Perhaps a mundane insight, but I feel like personal growth is paved by mundane insights, and my job is to capture and remember them as I have them, instead of letting them come and float away.
- MrYellowP 5y agoI saw an interview with him, where he told that story. I believe the other person was counting with their "hearing", while Feynmann was counting visually.
- samatman 5y agoWhich shows another inner-mind distinction, because some people hear voices when they read. I don't, with the exception of some rich dialogue. In general this is true of the fastest readers (this has been studied I believe), and what's interesting is how recent this is, the normal medieval fashion was to read out loud (at least moving lips and muttering) and those who were able to read without doing this were considered spooky.
- dalbasal 5y agoThe ability to read silently being uncommon until recent times makes the idea of the inner dialogue switching on at some point more thinkable, for me. I wonder if there was a point where people spoke to themselves out loud to reason verbally.
- quijoteuniv 5y agoThis is such a good title for a book. I bought it inmediately after it catched my attenttion while browsing a friend’s personal library. I could never really read it, too many words, did not connect.
- kbelder 5y agoIt was very influential in my development. Not that I necessarily buy into all of what Jayne is saying; but the nature of the book, and the nature of his arguments, was illuminating to me when I read his book at around eighteen years of age. Plus, yeah, possibly the best title of any book ever.
- AlbertCory 5y agoI'm thrilled if anyone rediscovers this book. Like "Snakes on a Plane" it's one of those works where the title tells you everything you need to know :) No, not really. Read the book.
- Ar-Curunir 5y agoThe etymologies for am and is are wrong. The Sanskrit equivalents, अस्मि and अत्सि, mean, well, “am” and “is”, and all the words descend from PIE roots that don’t mean “breathe”
- shadowfox 5y agoExactly. And the usage of something like "asti" (for "existence" or "being") is at least as old as the Rig Vedas.
- lioeters 5y ago> The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. I wonder how true this characterization of consciousness is. It seems to be a critique of the classic Hindu/Buddhist perspective that there is light everywhere - in fact, light is all there is. I also wonder about how relevant this might be to the role of consciousness in quantum mechanics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_int...
- mensetmanusman 5y agoWell, I think we know that we are mostly unconscious of the vast number of biological processes keeping us alive, even though we can choose to shine the light mentally on various ones and get in tune with them.
- taneq 5y ago> I also wonder about how relevant this might be to the role of consciousness in quantum mechanics. Everything about that 'theory' seems philosophical at best and total speculation at worst. If you see someone talking about quantum mechanics and consciousness in the same sentence it's a pretty good signal that what they're saying is pure woo.
- canjobear 5y agoBoth etymologies are wrong.
- jdmichal 5y agoAs others have mentioned, that etymology section is complete bunk. Sanskrit and English words have similarities because they are both Indo-European, and those specific words are descended pretty directly from PIE roots. https://www.etymonline.com/word/be https://www.etymonline.com/word/be PIE *bheue- "to be, exist, grow" https://www.etymonline.com/word/am https://www.etymonline.com/word/am PIE *esmi-, first person singular form of root *es- "to be" https://www.etymonline.com/word/was https://www.etymonline.com/word/was PIE *wes- (3) "remain, abide, live, dwell" And the merger of all these forms in English from different verbs happened around the 13th century, not because of some pre-linguistic history.
- mcguire 5y ago"It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for ‘existence’ and could only say that something ‘grows’ or that it “breathes.”" "when man had no independent word for ‘existence’"??? I take it the author has provided evidence for why he thinks proto-Indo-European was the first human language, and that it did not have a word for "existence"? Somewhere, a linguist is crying.
- dalbasal 5y agoWhy does PIE need to be the first language? The author is making a point about abstract terms (and thoughts) evolving from earlier, more concrete ones. All he needs of PIE is for it to have preceded english, or more precisely, to have origins from before 2200 BC.
- jdmichal 5y agoThere's pretty clear reconstructions for abstract terms in PIE. And there were certainly copula verbs to indicate existence. PIE was not cavemen grunting. The fact that we can reconstruct it so well from languages spanning two continents indicates it was both stable and well-featured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_copula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_copula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoFor more on metaphors as fundamental to perception and even low-level brain function (maybe), be sure to check out "Metaphors We Live By" (1980, Lakoff & Johnson) Lakoff took those ideas even further in his ideas about embodied philosophy.
- goatlover 5y agoI didn't realize how much our language relies on metaphorical thinking until I read that book. Although I think they end up making rather strong claims about philosophy and science which are questionable, to say the least.
- yesenadam 5y agoTheir later book Philosophy in the Flesh looks in detail at various philosophers and philosophical concepts and systems, analysing the conceptual metaphors in them, and showing e.g. how much whether an argument seems sensible depends on the metaphors it involves, e.g. the metaphor of knowing as seeing. I can't think of another book that shed nearly so much light on philosophy for me as this.
- ssivark 5y agoFor more on metaphors, check out Douglas Hofstadter’s fascinating talk on “Analogy as the core of cognition”: https://youtu.be/n8m7lFQ3njk https://youtu.be/n8m7lFQ3njk Ended up inspiring Melanie Mitchell, and became a driving theme of her research :-)
- fettucini 5y agoSirensOfTitan says >"It’s one of my favorite books! I have a first edition lying somewhere around my apartment."< I too, use spare copies as doorstops. It is bulky enough and has a sufficiently commanding title so that people don't kick it (likely fearing it MAY bite back).
- a1369209993 5y ago> either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius. I'd say both. It's rubbish if you assume it's talking about what it claims to be talking about, but it's actually a deeply insightful view on the things it's actually talking about. Cf the Slate Star Codex book review[0], which calls it: > a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. 0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...
- taneq 5y agoGoing off on a tangent now but I used to be a regular slatestarcodex reader and had somehow missed the fact that it was back. Thanks for cluing me in! :)
- acituan 5y ago> Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. That just sounds like a tautology but maybe I am missing something. > It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight only needs long-term memory to deduce "hey wait a second, that thing wasn't under my flashlight a second ago". (I am not including working memory to be fair to the analogy, it can already be thought as a part of, if not the consciousness).
- taneq 5y agoThe last part is tautological but explanatory, the real payload is the first part. It's like saying your unknown unknowns are much larger than your known knowns.
- Sharlin 5y agoScott Alexander's review of the book is worth reading: > Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact. So I’m going to start by reviewing a slightly different book, the one Jaynes should have written. Then I’ll talk about the more dubious one he actually wrote. [1] [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...
- misthop 5y agoIf you enjoy Stephenson (specifically Snowcrash or The Big U) you should read this book. It is formative of many of the ideas in both books.
- kimi 5y ago100% worth reading. It will blow your mind. Then you decide what is worth keeping and what not. But I'm sure you won't regret it.
- criddell 5y agoThe book is 45 years old now. How well have the ideas in it aged?
- Paul_S 5y agoThey didn't. How has Mozart aged? If you're worried that science had made this book obsolete in any way - don't. It's philosophy, not applied science.
- colechristensen 5y agoLots of philosophy ages badly too. Or, in other words, becomes science. Philosophy is full of demonstrably false ideas where science has caught up and been able to test and find the truth of something, especially in the areas of philosophy of mind.
- Paul_S 5y agoGranted, popular opinion on consciousness has changed since this was written, but what scientific finding has changed since that contradicts the book's ideas?
- Paul_S 5y agoThis book and Consciousness and the Social Brain by Graziano have changed the way I read any history book or world analysis. I see value in the viewpoint it informs even if it's not true.
- schemathings 5y agoAs mentioned below/above .. Snowcrash by Stephenson uses the concepts of the bicameral mind heavily (he mentions it in the opening acknowledgements), and China Miéville has a novel called Embassytown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassytown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassytown that doesn't cite that work specifically but feels like a similar exploration along with understandings of simile vs metaphor in the development of language/consciousness.
- oceanghost 5y agoIs THAT what was going on in this book? Thank you! I loved Stephenson but was very, very confused.
- dsr_ 5y agoSpoilers for Snow Crash follow. Snow Crash posits that there is a natural language for human brains, akin to assembly code, and that the line between pre-historic and historic humanity comes from a singular event. That natural language is/was (pre)Sumerian, and well-formed sentences in that language are indistinguishable from internal thoughts: to speak is to command belief, to hear is to believe. The singular event is the nam-shub of Enki (http://namshub.com/enki.html http://namshub.com/enki.html) which established a virally propagating firewall that cut off the ability to understand pre-Sumerian and allowed/forced the development of other languages, none of which had the interiority of pre-Sumerian. This is all codswallop, but it's entertaining.
- schemathings 5y agoI'd highly recommend Embassytown. The interpreter has to deal with a species that has two heads that communicate seemingly independently - bicameral mind indeed!
- mystickphoenix 5y agoHe also mentions it explicitly (assuming my memory isn't that faulty) in The Big U.
- n1vz3r 5y ago
- dalbasal 5y agoWestworld used a version bicameral mind for their fictional theory of robot consciousness. It was quite brilliant. This theory (also freud, IMO) demonstrates that ideas can have value regardless of being true or false. Just considering such ideas opens the mind to others. The interest so many great science and science fiction authors took in this theory is, IMO, proof. There are some interestingly elements that are interestingly parsimonious with YNH's take on human history in 'Sapiens.' YNH places a lot of emphasis on what he calls "fictions," which overlaps a lot with Jaynes' "metaphor." Also in common, is the notion that cultural memes, rather than biological genes are responsible for our humanity. The inner monologue, no doubt, deserves all the pondering it gets.
- mellosouls 5y agoWestworld (the TV series) is one of the very few serious treatments of the philosophical implications of AGI I'm aware of in the arts.
- dalbasal 5y agoIDk if "serious" is a good bar, but I feel the opposite is true. First, there are a lot more books than films... and some deal in very interesting ideas. Second, I feel like we're in a new golden age of sci-fi right now. 1950s part 2. Even in the blockbuster film/tv category, there are lot more interesting & creative ideas happening. I thought "her" was very innovative, both in film making and in ideas explored. Westworld did do a good job of building up fictional theory of conscious machines machines.
- alexyz12 5y agoThe decour in the TVA in Loki reminds me of 1950s visions of the future.
- lostmsu 5y agoIt is still trying to square AGI into human setting. I think Transcendence is the only serious movie I've seen, that actually tries to go beyond that.
- dalbasal 5y agoI'm extremely curious to get a deaf person's take on this. That introspection is an auditory hallucination makes intuitive sense to me. I experience it this way. How does it work for someone who's primary languages are non auditory? Do you think in sign or written language? Some other way?
- bgroat 5y agoI'm not deaf, but my primary thinking style is visual. Sometimes it's exactly what you'd imagine - I visualize a data model, or an algorithm implementation. Other times it's more abstract, symbolic, or analogy based
- dalbasal 5y agoCan you expand on that? How do you make visual analogies, or express abstract ideas visually?
- solipsism 5y agoI would argue that you understand the relationship between an alligator and a water buffalo immediately... Now your brain is turning it into language to come up with words like "predator/prey" or "hidden danger" or whatever. But the abstract relationship did not require language before your brain started to reason about it. I think it's the other way around.
- dalbasal 5y agoReason, perhaps. Reason via internal monologue... that's the part related to this theory.
- bgroat 5y agoSometimes when architecting something I'll imagine an elderly person with a child and that'll indicate that I'd want to utilize inheritance instead of composition
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- Wildgoose 5y agoOne of my favourite books. It contains a colossal amount of ideas, insights and suppositions. In short, it really makes you think. Even if you disagree with some of his conclusions, it is a fabulous, fascinating read. Just read it with an open mind and consider what he is suggesting. Much of what he says may well be wrong, but certainly not all - read it and come to your own conclusions.
- BeeBoBub 5y agoI concur with many other commenters here, this is a fantastic read. Though, I find the value in this book is not the discrete proposals Jaynes makes - his conclusions on schizophrenia are dubious at best. Jayne’s achievement is in his explaining of the mindset and thought patterns (what Jaynes calls consciousness) of the ancients. So often ancient man felt alien to me. Not until reading this book have I felt I understand what it was like to have lived millennia ago.
- jamilabreu 5y agoLove learning stuff like this! Adding this to my newsletter on random Wikipedia pages :) https://randomwalk.substack.com/ https://randomwalk.substack.com/
- jinpa_zangpo 5y agoThe wider question is how the nature of consciousness has changed through time and what evidence do we have that it has. The example that has stuck with me is when St. Augustine marvels in his Confessions that Bishop Ambrose of Milan could read without moving his lips, suggesting that at one time all thought was subvocalized speech. Owen Barfield thought that you could trace the evolution of consciousness through the history of language and made the argument in the book "History in English Words": "In our language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of humanity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust.... Language has preserved for us the inner, living history of our soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness"
- sumtechguy 5y ago> The example that has stuck with me is when St. Augustine marvels in his Confessions that Bishop Ambrose of Milan could read without moving his lips, suggesting that at one time all thought was subvocalized speech I would not read too much into that. That could also be the way he was taught to read. Also my wife said she had that same issue. She learned to read by reading out loud and having people read to her. She then could not contextualize anything unless she read it out loud. But she taught herself to read silently. Then add to that some people do not have an inner monolog. But function perfectly fine with everyone else. So trying to form fit a history onto that may not be a good idea.
- lou1306 5y agoFurthermore, books were much harder to read back in Ambrose's time. I think I would have a hard time dealing with handwriting on parchment without reading out loud.
- KMag 5y ago... don't forget a lack of standardized spelling, sometimes requiring phonetic processing of the characters in order to figure out what is being spelled.
- dj_mc_merlin 5y agoIt's nearly undeniable to me that the conscious mind is not the only thing that inhabits us. If you sit down and meditate, you will quickly realize that: 1. You are not in control of your thoughts without effort (what he describes as 'induction') 2. You are not necessarily the source of your thoughts By 2. I mean that when you stop having a mental narrative, you realize that thoughts and feelings still come seemingly from nowhere. Like making a sea of waves still, and now being able to see bubbles coming up from below. If you're not creating them, where are they coming from? On that note, most people behave in patterned ways and repeat patterned mistakes. If you have a conversation with them, they can sometimes show a complete understanding of their situation, how they went wrong and how to rectify. Yet, when later faced with the same decision, they make the same mistake again. Did they really make the decision or did they just think they made it, much like we believe every thought we hear is ours?
- bserge 5y agoJust my opinions: "You" are the mind/conscious self, a separate construct in the physical brain. The thoughts are coming from the brain, which is constantly doing rather massive amounts of processing on acquired data, old and new. You don't have full control of the brain, not by a long shot. You can make a decision and it can be ignored even as you think it's "gone through". Hence, the eternal struggle with "self-control" and "willpower".
- Joker_vD 5y agoOn a tangent note, Descartes famous "cogito ergo sum" ("I think therefore I am") falls into the trap of the grammar: it presupposes that the thinker, who does the act of thinking, exists. The actually undeniable empirical statement would be "cogitationes sunt", "thoughts exist", but you can't get anywhere from that without answering additional questions: for example, do the thoughts need a thinker (whatever it may be) to exist and think them, or?.. If you answer "yes", you can follow Descartes' line of reasoning. If you answer "no", no problem, there is a whole philosophical tradition of Buddhism built on that.
- curun1r 5y ago
- giardini 5y agoI read just the title and wept in despair, knowing that I could never hope to reach such heights! Oh, the power of a name!
- anigbrowl 5y agoIt's a brilliant book, whether or not you agree with its conclusion (I go back and forth, but am sympathetic to his argument). Even if he is completely wrong, exploring his model of cognition and consciousness provides the reader with a different way of seeing and thinking about the world, other people, and one's relationship to them. It's also richly textured and beautifully written.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JackFr 5y agoMy first lecture in my first class in my freshman year of college the professor taught this book. The class was mesmerized as all our minds were blown, and we all walked out thinking “College is gonna be AMAZING. We’re gonna learn so much fascinating stuff.” While the next four years weren’t bad, they never did quite live up to the feeling of that class.
- Simplicitas 5y agowere doobies passed around in that class? j/k
- rpmuller 5y agoThere was a nice article in Nautilus a few years back about this work called "Consciousness began when the gods stopped speaking": https://nautil.us/issue/54/the-unspoken/consciousness-began-when-the-gods-stopped-speaking-rp https://nautil.us/issue/54/the-unspoken/consciousness-began-...
- brandonarnold 5y agoThis book rocked my world when I was a heady hipster in college 20 years ago. It is interesting, but also mostly belongs in the "literary" category at this point with Freud's work.
- AdmiralAsshat 5y agoFor those interested, the ebook version of this book goes on sale for $1.99-$2.99 a couple times a year: https://www.ereaderiq.com/dp/B009MBTRHA/the-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-th/ https://www.ereaderiq.com/dp/B009MBTRHA/the-origin-of-consci... If you don't feel like paying the full price, I suggest setting an alert at the above website for it, and you'll probably be able to catch the next sale.
- okareaman 5y agoNothing here explains how consciousness arises out of particular arrangement of atoms in the human brain. Many convoluted explanations can be done away with if we consider that consciousness arises outside the brain and the brain is a tuned receiver. Perhaps this field of consciousness exists but we haven't developed a way to detect, test or measure it.
- michaelmrose 5y agoIf someone said that the all these convoluted explanations go can be done away with if we consider that circulation arises outside the heart and the heart is a tuned receiver for a circulation field you'd laugh them out of the room. Why is consciousness different than circulation? As an aside if you were puzzling over how a cpu works understanding the electromagnetic field works is indeed useful but it in no way obviates the need to understand the cpu in terms of the elements in front of your face because the function of the cpu is absolutely a function of those elements.
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoBecause each of us have an interior experience of consciousness which is quite different from the external world. I think that the brain is definitely associated with consciousness but we have literally no useful path from nerve impulses to the feeling of love.
- michaelmrose 5y agoIf you were exploring how a new CPU works would you assume any fields were generated by the obvious input power provided by a plug leading to the wall or would you start with the hypothesis that despite having an obvious way to conduct electricity and connection to a source of same it was likely the result of a heretofore unknown field of low energy particles that have somehow not be discovered by physicists despite centuries of looking. If you gave someone who understood electricity but not computation a CPU they wouldn't be able to explain how it works. That wouldn't provide a good reason to say that computation must be the result of something other than electricity.
- bumby 5y agoWhat would the implications be for our understanding of consciousness in other species of this hypothesis was true?
- jefftechentin 5y agoThe theory states that our consciousness is a linguistic phenomenon, produced by culturally given ideas like the metaphorical I. Maybe other mental configurations could give rise to consciousness but if an animal was to possess the type of consciousness described in this book, it would need the ability to symbolically represent pretty much everything and the ability to share those symbolic representations with others.
- goatlover 5y agoSounds ridiculous that our pre-linguistic ancestors would not have conscious experiences of colors, sounds, dreams, etc just because they couldn't put them into symbolic form. Seems like a case of putting the cart before the horse. Language is relatively recent. The parts of the brain correlated with consciousness are older.
- jefftechentin 5y agoYeah the theory seems to only explain interiority of our consciousness. But if I recall the author does seem to cover critiques like this in the first chapter where he explains what he sees as erroneous ideas about what consciousness is. He give the example of automatized actions and the lack of conscious recognition of what would normally be experiences with conscious perceptions. For example driving, you often do not consciously feel the petals, or see a lot of the road you are obviously responding too. I definitely do not buy the theory totally explains consciousness but the book makes a convincing enough case to not dismiss.
- jefftechentin 5y agoThis was a great read. The history of human cognition is obviously fascinating and there is a lot written on subject for me to devour which is great. But what about his thoughts on hypnosis? I guess it is not as sexy a topic as the history of the mind but his ideas about it are really intriguing. Been a year since I read the book, but hypnosis as painted in the book changes in form with peoples ideas about what hypnosis is, pretty much everything that people say about it is culturally determined and yet it still is real. People will themselves into into filling out these cultural forms where they are in a totally different cognitive state when in the right social context and most people just think of it as a party trick.
- candlemas 5y agoIn The World of Odysseus by Moses Finley and he throws out a line in chapter one: Homer was so far from Socrates that he was not even cognizant of man as an integrated psychic whole. The context is: One measure of man's advance from his most primitive beginnings to something we call civilization is the way in which he controls his myths, his ability to distinguish between the areas of behavior, the extent to which he can bring more and more of his activity under the rule of reason. In that advance the Greeks have been pre-eminent. Perhaps their greatest achievement lay in their discovery-more precisely, in Socrates' discovery---that man is "that being who, when asked a rational question, can give a rational answer." Homer was so far from Socrates that he was not even cognizant of man as an integrated psychic whole. I looked up that phrase to see what exactly he might be talking about. Almost all of the results concern the Greeks or Romans. From Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes, Narrators, and Characters: The critical bibliography on character monologue in Homeric epic is extensive. Scholars have been divided as to whether to see merely a convention or dramatic technique for representing a character's inner thoughts, or to take the talking thumos as a separate entity, an alter ego that represents a not-yet-integrated psychic whole. Other scholars see the Homeric monologues as evidence of Homeric psychology in general and use them to study Homeric decision making as it prefigures later Aristotelian and Stoic theories about human rationality and motivation. It sounds close to what Jaynes was saying. The Greeks of Homer were split between rational and irrational selves. Jaynes would have denied that Romans were bicameral or were not integrated psychic wholes. But the phrase is used in The Roman Gaze: Vision, Power, and the Body: To this end, the Roman incorporated others into himself or herself as witnesses and ideals. "I tell my son to look into the lives of all others as if into a mirror and to take from others a model for himself." Roman honor, then, was a way of self-regarding as well as other-regarding. Honor required self-splitting; one needed to be, at all times, both the watched and the watcher. For the Roman, there could be, finally, no integrated psychic whole, no stable notion of self. If a Roman had a sense of "integrity" it was one built, paradoxically, on the dividing of the self. Cicero speaks of the self-control needed to resist shameful reactions to pain: "I'm not exactly sure how to say it, but it is as if we were two people: one who commanded and one who obeyed.” And Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones: The provisional and contested nature of reality (including the reality of one's being) and the immediacy and particularity of experience infused all Roman ways of thinking. The Romans did not have an "integrated psychic whole," and they tended not to synthesize or carefully correlate parts to a whole. Boundaries and obligations tended to accumulate and to overlap without being codified or systematized. The Romans were slow to deduce principles or create Utopias. There is a reason that modern philosophers and political theorists ignore the Romans: though rich and complex, the thought of the Romans is not easily translated into the categories or linearities of modern Western thought, with its rigid dichotomies and principle of noncontradiction. Cicero comes right out and admits his bicamerality, but it is clearly not the same type that Jaynes wrote about. It is an artificial or voluntary version, though the second quote suggests they were different in more ways. They seemed to recognize an “animal” part of man that reacted to a stimulus and a “rational” part that was able to modulate that reaction. Jaynes says the Greeks and other ancient people understood that rational part to be gods or kings or ancestors while other authors say the Romans intentionally personified that part as a respected member of society, just to give it a little more force. But they were still split in a way we are not. They maybe had a better understanding of themselves, were able to decouple their actions and reactions from their thinking selves and analyze them. Nowadays our rational and animal parts are a jumble. People come to identify with their reactions and think any criticism of it is an attack on their self. I think that is a big cause of depression and other mental disorders. People don’t know why they react the way they do and feel out of control. They go to therapy to replace what would have been a hallucinated god three thousand years ago. The therapist walks them through their feelings because we forgot how to do that ourselves. That is how I read it anyway. It isn’t too important, the point is that these people believe the ancients had fundamentally different psyches than modern man. I don't actually know if even modern man has an integrated psychic whole.
- dang 5y agoPast related threads. Others? Bicameralism (Psychology) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20366921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20366921 - July 2019 (29 comments) Mr. Jaynes’ Wild Ride (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19122626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19122626 - Feb 2019 (9 comments) The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: A reappraisal of Jaynes’ hypothesis (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18521482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18521482 - Nov 2018 (92 comments) How Julian Jaynes’ consciousness theory is faring in the neuroscience age (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15677871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15677871 - Nov 2017 (90 comments) How Bicameralism Helps Explain Westworld - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13141112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13141112 - Dec 2016 (2 comments) “There Is Only Awe” – on Julian Jaynes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9321158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9321158 - April 2015 (14 comments) The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7799698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7799698 - May 2014 (60 comments) Origin of Consciousness (bicameral mind) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1510815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1510815 - July 2010 (7 comments)
- lordleft 5y agoThis is fascinating. So how would someone who had such a "bicameral mind" experience everyday phenomena? Like hunger, or fear? They would have a voice, not attributed to them, telling them to eat or flee?
- DerDangDerDang 5y agoGood question. It’s been a while since I read it, but iirc things like hunger or fear he says they attributed to specific organs (and provides bits of ancient text to support the idea) - personified voices he reserved for reasoning or inspiration beyond bodily sensation.
- codezero 5y agoI haven't read the book, but if you can think of a time you said "My stomach is growling" - You're communicating that you are hungry, but doing so by creating an external entity with a mind of its own - your stomach, it's growling, not that you as a full organism are hungry, yet most people will completely understand the intent of your communication. I sometimes wonder if these sorts of ways of thinking are part of why such an idea as the bicameral mind was proposed, or if it's actually part of the way we think because of the legacy of such a bicameral mind.
- vcg3rd 5y agoI know this isn't about Turing test or AI, but the origin of consciousness is life. Existence precedes essence. All the philosophy about AI developing consciousnesses ignores the fact that we have no objective knowledge or observational data of any level of thinking, let alone consciousness, from any source except the living. AI would have to live (metabolism, self-repair, reproduction at the least) before it could think. Then the proximate cause of it developing consciousness may well be the breakdown of its Bicameral Mind, should one develop, but life will come first or consciousness never will. That's why Westworld, season one, had so much potential, basically hinting at Penrose's /Emperor's New Mind/, mostly dismissed by AI folks because they want to believe mechanics not organics will do it, then Westworld went off the rails.
- Igelau 5y ago> AI would have to live (metabolism, self-repair, reproduction at the least) before it could think. I'm not sure why you think this is essential. I'll grant you metabolism (robot needs more batteries!) since nothing seems to happen for free, but it's not hard to imagine conscious minds that don't need the other parts.
- leto_ii 5y agoAn amusing coincidence makes it that these days I'm actually reading this book. I think it's the first time I can comfortably use the phrase 'thought provoking' both in its literal sense as well as a euphemism to describe something. Like most commenters here I found the core hypothesis striking enough on its own, but I have to say that so far (~200 pages in) I haven't seen anything that goes beyond hypotheses and conjectures. So far it mostly reads like an essay in speculative psychology/anthropology, not like anything that can be taken seriously. As a (layman) fan of Chomsky's scientific work I was also surprised that Jaynes never mentions him, even when discussing linguistics and the origins of language.
- alienalp 5y agoDouble slit and delayed-choice quantum eraser experiments clearly proves there is something in humans causes universe to switch statically calculating particle movements rather than statistically calculating results of their movement. I don't understand how this is still being talked meanwhile there isn't much attention to real science.
- ncmncm 5y agoThis book continues to attract attention not because it provides any insight into answers to the questions it raises, but because it raises questions nobody has got close to any answers to, but that merit solving.
- tacon 5y agoIf you want to dive deep into Jaynes' ideas and even discuss them live in a group setting, this is the perfect time for you. There is an amazingly social polymath, Shrikant, that used to run live discussion groups in New York City. With lockdown, he turned to zoom and opened the discussions to the world. Among a huge number of other deep ideas and discussions, Shrikant is especially interested in Jaynes' work and, so far, has held 22 discussions sessions, painstakingly working through the various aspects of the book.[0] The next session in the study of Jaynes' work is this Saturday, July 24, at 12pm EDT.[1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqpF1l8gdXlHzVrJjI2wDqMiA7qseJNew https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqpF1l8gdXlHzVrJjI2wD... [1] Mental Space: That which makes us Self Conscious Humans https://www.meetup.com/52LivingIdeas/events/279582843/ https://www.meetup.com/52LivingIdeas/events/279582843/
- sirtoffski 5y agoI would very much recommend Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s “Foundations of the Science of Knowledge”. It’s a dense read, nevertheless an interesting insight on consciousness. https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/science-of-knowledge.pdf https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/scienc...