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As mentioned below/above .. Snowcrash by Stephenson uses the concepts of the bicameral mind heavily (he mentions it in the opening acknowledgements), and China
by schemathings 5y ago
As 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 agoAlso Peter Watts' Echopraxia has bicamerals - members of order which act together as some sort of hive mind