11 ms·

The “bicameral mind” 30 years on (2007)

163 points by evo_9 4y ago

throwaway81523 4y ago
From 2007 (please fix headline). Abstract asks "has the bicameral model withstood the test of time?" and describes the types of studies they did to address this question. The abstract doesn't give or really hint at the answer. At least from a 2022 perspective, that is clickbait, lol. I'll take a look at the article but would rather have the abstract actually summarize the paper, as abstracts are supposed to do.
- svnt 4y ago
  The space between the concept of a recently evolved bicameral mind and the last sentence: “Finally, the concept of a non-unitary Self is presented as one of the most relevant contemporary legacies of the bicameral mind.” should give you a pretty good hint where they end up — quite some distance away.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  And by now it's a full 45 years since the book came out, the 30 years was back in 2007.
superb-owl 4y ago
Scott Alexander's review summarizes my take on this book incredibly well > 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. It's really a great read if you enjoy thinking about the mind. It's full of little insights and novel ways of thinking. So long as you don't take Jaynes too seriously. 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-...
- flenserboy 4y ago
  Agreed. But it is an example of the sort of book that we don't get a chance to see too often these days — a book built from a combination of knowledge and imagination, driving down and through territory most everyone else avoids or doesn't even notice. For the purpose of pushing the boundaries of thought, and charting unknown territory, it truly doesn't matter when such people turn out to be mistaken or wrong; what matters is that they've opened ground for others to cover and investigate. Our siloed, narrow-to-a-mathematical-point graduate education system does everything it can to keep people from building such thought edifices, and from true, organic cross-discipline/category work. We need more like Jaynes.
  - JackFr 4y ago
    I would rather read Jaynes for the breadth of his knowledge and novel ideas than one hundred “scientists identify the location of bad taste” fMRI papers.
    - jamiek88 4y ago
      Within a few years there will be a grand reckoning with fMRI. The fallout will be huge.
      - hprotagonist 4y ago
        yeah well we’ve been waiting for that for about 15 years so any day now …
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    David Graeber,RIP. Both 'Debt' and 'The Dawn of Everything' are wildly ambitious and brimming with ideas.
greggsy 4y ago
Notwithstanding the legitimacy of the model from a scientific perspective, I do like the model as a lens or perspective for understanding consciousness. Similarly, the ‘triune brain’ model is great for understanding and explaining our behaviour. I also like the server-client aspect of the bicameral model, and wonder what type of APIs might be used. What happens when either side fails to conform to the others’ API spec? Does it use TCP or UDP?
- ncmncm 4y ago
  By the way, neuroscientists say the triune brain model is wrong. Just like the left/right brain. Both are grasping at a simplicity they don't find when they look carefully. So, things like Jaynes posits might have happened, but you cannot get support for it from neuroanatomy.
  - axlprose 4y ago
    > Just like the left/right brain. To clarify, popularized over-simplified descriptions of the left hemisphere being "analytical" and the right hemisphere being "creative" are inaccurate, but left/right hemisphere differences do exist and appear to exhibit consistently different approaches to things. The book 'The Master and His Emissary' covers the more recent research in that area, and is at least as interesting of a read as 'The Bicameral Mind' was.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Neuroscientists have not been kind to "The Master and His Emissary.
      - axlprose 4y ago
        Unless you have a specific set of scathing reviews in mind, the reviews of it in the literature don't really appear to match up with that characterization very much: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13546805.2010.537945 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13546805.2010.5... https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2011.11010053 https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2011.1... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2828853/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2828853/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11097-011-9235-x https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11097-011-9235-x > it is worth noting that the book has been much praised by neuro-scientists as diverse as Ramachandran, Panksepp, Hellige, Kesselring, Schore, Bynum, Zeman, Feinberg, Trimble and Lishman. It'd be surprising if it were poorly received regardless, because the book itself is little more than a review of the relevant literature on the topic, packed with references, and some added philosophy about it's implications sprinkled on top. Not that much different from one of Michael Gazzaniga's popular books, and certainly not as out there as Julian Jaynes.
mjh2539 4y ago
I think that Jaynes' hypothesis does not hold up the scrutiny. We have too many records of regular folks from antiquity that are counterexamples. Somewhat relatedly, as late as the 13th century, the late Averroes held a substantial philosophical following that claimed that there was only one mind (the agent intellect, or the active intellect), and we all shared it. Its purpose was to explain the congruence of our thoughts, meanings, concepts, etc.
- thechao 4y ago
  When I'm feeling moody, I sometimes think that no human is sentient by themselves: we are only sentient (conscious?) as a group; and, specifically, as a group we're "supersentient" with a shared "IQ" in the hundreds, or higher. When you're alone, your sentience (and consciousness) will continue on residually — perhaps decaying over time; possibly for the remainder of your life, but you stop being truly sentient.
  - syntaxfree 4y ago
    Google “Dasein”
  - psyc 4y ago
    This made me smile a little. As a hermit-by-choice, this has long been one of my theories about the rest of you talking monkeys when I'm feeling uncharitable.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      Well, you're active here on HN, so you're not exactly a hermit in any traditional sense of the word.
      - psyc 4y ago
        Uhuh. Because traditionally, the Web existed
ncmncm 4y ago
Everybody agrees Jaynes was wrong. I asked a classical-greek scholar about his linguistic observations. He read the book, and then said there was no pattern such as Jaynes had perceived. The perception was probably a product of confirmation bias. But the questions Jaynes raised have not been answered. So, the book is still worth talking about. (BTW, I could not see a way to get the text of the paper. Sci-hub was no help. Clue?)
- bookofjoe 4y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.funct...
- kordlessagain 4y ago
  Jaynes asserted a global recession of audio consciousness generating voices over time. If you experience aphantasia and are reading this, your visual consciousness state (a retraction of creating in mind visual objects) may be related to a mind devoid of echoic recall (a retraction of in mind audio objects). Today this is estimated to be nearly 60% of sampled individuals for audio and <2% for images.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway81523 4y ago
    What do you mean about echoic recall? Do you mean 60% of sampled individuals can't remember sounds that they hear, or imaginging them? That sounds unbelievable to me: people can remember songs and voices. If you ask someone to imagine Donald Trump's voice saying "I like dealing with the Ferengi--they are sharp traders", they can probably do it, even without Trump having to ever actually have said that.
    - varjag 4y ago
      I can remember songs just fine, and certainly can mimic voices aloud but I struggle replaying someone's voice mentally.
jorgesborges 4y ago
I don’t know why but the veracity of Jaynes’ hypothesis was never important to me. It’s such a creative and extraordinary leap. It challenged me to think critically about assumptions I might make about our humanity and its history, kinda like a great sci-fi novel.
- defrost 4y ago
  It was recommended reading in my undergraduate mathematics class in 1980, we had a lot of serious math texts on the core list and a wealth of periphiral material that pushed various edges. The rationale was that "this is probably bullshit, but it's exactly the kind of BS that you need to read closely and argue for or against various aspects". At the time, of course, fractals were vogue, AI was just around the corner, and we had exercises on robotic algorithms, speech recognition, distributed text searching and indexing, read on neural nets and so on. It was a great read - I never bought the 'recent' evolutionary arguments but I enjoyed the discussions of what constituted 'intelligence', a section still worth reading today.
  - alisonkisk 4y ago
- ghaff 4y ago
  And the Westworld TV series adopted it to some degree. I don't know either the theory or remember its use in the TV series well enough to seriously comment but it was brought in at one point.
- helpfulclippy 4y ago
  It's true. I've enjoyed reading ancient sources a LOT more since reading Jaynes. I don't think he's right, but that book really uncovered a lot of unchecked assumptions of mine about how people think. One of my favorites. I need to give it a re-read sometime.
- kimi 4y ago
  I believe you are right: read this as a great sci-fi (in the literal, not Asimovian sense) book, and then you'll get some ideas. YMMV, but you won't mind the time spent reading it.
eckmLJE 4y ago
"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." - Richard Dawkins I think the theory's genius lies in its radical approach to what primitive consciousness might have been like to experience subjectively, however wildly off the mark the theory may be. That experience is likely to have been so different from the modern mind that imaginative hypotheses like Jaynes's should be welcome food for thought.
- svnt 4y ago
  Richard Dawkins is probably not the best perspective on this — it’s not exactly surprising that he would try to force this speculative yet carefully considered work into a binary choice.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  I don't think that's necessarily true. There could be an in-between. My guess is `The Bicameral Mind` is a nice hypothesis that's likely pushed too far but still quite useful. It assumes "the gods speaking through you" and personal self-talk/self-awareness are something fundamentally distinct but it seems plausible to me that this "talk of the gods" could shade into personal self-awareness.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kordlessagain 4y ago
    I don’t do audio or visual recall. I’m sure someone here has heard voices in mind before. It’s not typically shared publicly, due to stigma. Either way, I bet how we think individually is likely to affect are awareness capabilities. It would be nice to hear my dads voice now and again.
  - axlprose 4y ago
    Yes, I'm inclined to believe such an "in-between" might possibly arise from Iain McGilchrist's line of research into the difference between the brain hemispheres and the relatively recent dominance of left-hemispheric thinking in society. I always highly recommend his book 'The Master and His Emissary' as a follow up to anyone interested in Jaynes' ideas. While it doesn't necessarily imply the full spectrum of schizophrenic-like symptoms in early peoples the way 'The Bicameral Mind' did, it's presentation of right-hemisphere driven societies of the past isn't a far leap from what Jaynes seemed to be grasping at.
deleted 4y ago
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nyc_pizzadev 4y ago
I really enjoyed this theory when I was introduced to it about 10 years ago. A lot of ancient literature talks about voices and gods in a way where this seems plausible. But then there is the idea that the bicameral mind completely disappeared across the world in a somewhat uniform fashion.. that was hard to swallow. We simply don’t evolve like that.
- alisonkisk 4y ago
- Zanni 4y ago
  Jaynes claims it wasn't physical evolution but an adaptation to changing social conditions, i.e. the hardware (brain) remained the same but the software (mind) changed.
  - fuzzfactor 4y ago
    To me it's the references. Can raise awareness of the likelihood that when right-handed people learn to read & write from other right-handed people, that a certain amount of verbal concentration can be made exclusively to the left side of the brain in some kind of a self-perpetuating pattern. The numerical predominance of right-handed people makes this into an underlying mainstream development. Going back quite a ways but who knows how far? OTOH those who are left-handed often do not seem to conform as uniformly in this respect, and those having a tradition of large vocabularies but without reading or writing might even have the advantage of some verbal or other skills handled by both sides of the brain simultaneously far differently than the mainstream. Some types of thinking may or may not be accomplished in a relatively verbal way at all.
  - naasking 4y ago
    There are plenty of isolated tribes this old and they don't seem to be much different from modern humans, behaviourally.
- limbicsystem 4y ago
  My bet would be 'reading'. Reading is essentially a type of synesthesia that we force onto children which turns external symbols into sound (at least initially). My interpretation of Jaynes is that he posits a direct 'voice' from the fast pattern matching systems of the brain (this, in turn possibly a maladaptation to the emergence of language earlier in our rescent evolution). Perhaps reading disrupts this pathway or teaches us to regulate it much more tightly? A prediction of this might be that voice hearing could be far more prevelant in illiterate people that we suspect.
shusaku 4y ago
So has the journal this was published in disappeared off the face of the earth? It seems like you could give a better link than the pubmed entry. Maybe I’m missing something on mobile?
- bscphil 4y ago
  You raise a good question. Actually, it's interesting that the article doesn't have a DOI number at all it seems, which is usually how it would be linked to the definitive source. IMO that's a bad sign and I'd treat this with some skepticism as a result.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.funct...
  - shusaku 4y ago
    Thanks!
moonchild 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.funct...
- kensai 4y ago
  Not all heroes wear capes! :)
- vinceguidry 4y ago
  > According to Jaynes, the earliest Greek text of sufficient size to test the question of whether there is any evidence of consciousness is the Iliad. In fact, the Iliad does not seem to mention any subjective thoughts or the contents of anyone’s mind. The heroes of the Iliad were not able to make decisions, no one was introspecting or even reminiscing. Apparently, they were noble “automata” who were not aware of what they did. Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no internal mind-space to introspect upon. Some lexical oddities in the Homeric text (such as the absence of a single word translating “consciousness”, “mind”, “soul”, or even “body”) led Jaynes to formulate the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by nonconscious minds, which automatically recorded and objectively reported events, in a manner rather similar to the characters of the poem. The transition to subjective and introspective writings of the conscious mind occurred in later works, beginning with the Odyssey. I was speaking with an actor friend of mine recently, and the topic of novels came up. I asked him when the first novel was written, and he cited some book I'd never heard of written in England hundreds of years ago. The definition he gave was that the piece of literature, in order to be a novel, must spend a good bit of time dwelling on character's introspection. Next time we speak I'm going to have to mention this conclusion of Jayne's for him.
  - hasmanean 4y ago
    That might be due to literary/aural poetic conventions. Films don’t usually show anyone shitting. That is not proof that nobody had to go to the bathroom.
    - 4y ago
ggm 4y ago
I think I see a pattern here: 1) find the earliest proof of written communication 2) posit that since there is no evidence of communication before this time, there is an implication no communication took place 3) in the light of more finds, revise the date of 2) to posit a date before which there is arguably no communcation, because none has been found. I tend to a view that any artifact is evidence of mind, and that the further back we see intentionality expressed in inanimate objects remains, be it as simple as the pressing of weaving into clay, or regular interval cutmarks on bone, the more we can argue mind and communication existed. And I do see a linkage from one to the other. Being able to cut bone implies being able to teach people to form tools to cut bone with. There is no need for the missing IKEA instruction cartoons and a hex key, the marks themselves "speak" to the necessity for communication.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  I don't think this pattern quite fits Jaynes. In his book, he suggests that early literary works like the Iliad and the Epic of Gilgamesh were written by bicameral authors. So the transition he posits occurs after the earliest written communications; the discovery of earlier literary works wouldn't necessarily have him revise his date unless those earlier works contained the sort of introspection or subjective consciousness which Jaynes says is present in the Odyssey but not the Iliad. In his view, bicameral minds can certainly write fiction, but the fiction they write carries some evidence of their bicameralism. It all seems far fetched to me, but I don't know ancient Greek so I can hardly evaluate his claims myself.
  - ggm 4y ago
    So "because there are no detective stories in the illiad there was no crime" ? Certainly yes, a hypothesis of a rich interior model is explicit in fiction, it's tempting to theorise but to theorise a rich interior model doesn't exist is to deny the kinds of abstraction needed to eg teach somebody how to do a thing. It's weighting fiction as proof of theory of mind above all other things. Construct an internal model where an old, blind Neanderthal explains to a young child how to hunt a bison they have never yet seen, which does not presuppose exactly the same narrative structural necessities in the legend of gilgamesh: imagined time, third party views of acts done, if this then that.. it beggars belief that Jaynes can argue otherwise and be taken seriously. All Jaynes really does is establish a time terminus ante quem so to speak. He cannot establish terminus post quem at all.
1MachineElf 4y ago
I feel embarrassed to ask - on this site, how does one read the actual article and not just the abstract?
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Don't be embarrassed. I was stuck too. Sci-hub was no help. The below probably was found by googling a key line from the abstract. https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.funct...
- acscott314 4y ago
  moonchild supplied a link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.funct...
- greazy 4y ago
  In general, if you'd like to read research publications on ncbi pubmed use sci-hub. While mostly for medical literature it should have this and similar publication.
henriquemaia 4y ago
Just recently I wrote about this book on my dissertation. I was thinking about Socrates and his daemon, and that reminded me Jaynes' theory. His is a fascinating book. I read it a long time ago, so I'm missing most details. But I remember how thrilled I was upon reading it, for how much it drove me to think outside the box. I still find it fascinating, a mixture of 'this can't be right', and, at the same time, 'makes so much sense'. As I have no dog on this race, I really don't care what is the right answer. I will still recommend Jaynes' book in a heartbeat to anyone interested in the topic of consciousness and its history.
- brudgers 4y ago
  I read it almost thirty years ago and its appearances on HN was one of the reasons HN resonated with me in my early days here. Today’s comments brought my thinking about Jaynes forward. I don’t think it’s important that his detailed exposition is correct, because his important idea is that the ordinary explanations of consciousness are off the mark in the kind of ways he says they are off the mark. As one of my bosses used to smugly say, the important thing isn’t that I am right. The important thing is that you are wrong. From a philosophical standpoint, and that’s the context in which I heard of Jaynes, what matters is his skepticism. It’s the skepticism that sticks with the people Jaynes sticks to, and it sticks because it is not inconsistent with their beliefs of epistemic fallibility. To approach his work with the epistemological presumptions of the scientist or historian, necessarily precludes philosophical skepticism. And for me, miss the important point.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    > To approach his work with the epistemological presumptions of the scientist or historian, necessarily precludes philosophical skepticism. Yes, and that doesn't just exclude dyed-in-the-wool "scientists". Quite extremist forms of positivism prevalent today cast-out valuable works more widely. Certainly such works are filled with speculation, imagination, half-bakery, and emotional polemics, as has been the vernacular writing style for thousands of years. By scientific standards they are 90 percent rubbish. The baby lost in this bathwater is the ten percent of absolute genius that more patient, curious and open minds can digest and drive science forward at a different level. Another difficult book that complements bicameralism, again by a discredited researcher R.D. Laing, is "The Divided Self" It approaches the experiential modularity of mind from a different perspective, a top-down descent into mental illness, namely schizophrenia. Laing's methods were, to say the least, controversial. Taken with J. Jaynes' bottom-up genealogical/developmental analysis Laing's is another piece of the jigsaw of the mind. Moreover, it is interesting just how many psychologists and philosophers who challenge the "unified" individual hypothesis, Freud included, are deemed "discredited" in our milieu. Works like those of G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspenski, which roams into mysticism, seem entirely lost today. Surely the problem is this way of thinking conflicts with modernity and capitalism, whose atomic unit is the singular rational individual.
gok 4y ago
People watching Westworld again?
- choonway 4y ago
  there wasn’t enough time to change the script before alphago beat lee sedol. they did manage to add some alphago references in s2 though.
georgia_peach 4y ago
The question I have is: was Jaynes a closet anthroposophist, or is "bicameral mind" an independent corroboration? If we look at this evolution from the far-distant past, when the ego was hidden within its sheaths as though in the darkness of a mother's womb, we find that although the ego had no knowledge of itself, it was all the closer to those spiritual beings who worked on our bodily vehicles and were related to the human ego, but of incomparably greater perfection. Clairvoyant insight thus looks back to a far-distant past when man had not yet acquired ego-consciousness, for he was embedded in spiritual life itself, and when his soul-life, too, was different, for it was much closer to the soul-forces from which the ego has emerged. In those times, also, we find in man a primal clairvoyant consciousness which functioned dimly and dreamily, for it was not illumined by the light of an ego; and it was from this mode of consciousness that the ego first came forth. The faculty that man in the future will acquire with his ego was present in the primeval past without the ego. Clairvoyant consciousness entails that spiritual beings and spiritual facts are seen in the environment, and this applies to early man, although his clairvoyance was dreamlike and he beheld the spiritual world as though in a dream. Since he was not yet shone through by an ego, he was not obliged to remain within himself when he wished to behold the spiritual. He beheld the spiritual around him and looked on himself as part of the spiritual world; and whatever he did was imbued, for him, with a spiritual character. When he thought of something, he could not have said to himself, “I am thinking”, as a man might do today; his thought stood before his clairvoyant vision. And to experience a feeling he had no need to look into himself; his feeling radiated from him and united him with his whole spiritual environment. - Rudolf Steiner, May 1910 https://rsarchive.org/Medicine/GA059/English/RSP1983/19100505p01.html https://rsarchive.org/Medicine/GA059/English/RSP1983/1910050...
- the_af 4y ago
  Two things: > is "bicameral mind" an independent corroboration? Fascinating as it is, Jaynes' Bicameral Mind cannot be a corroboration of anything. The book posits and theorizes, but it doesn't really show, much less demonstrate. I loved reading it, but it's more a (pseudoscientific) theory in search of confirmation, rather than confirmation itself. > [Steiner's paragraph you quoted] Aside from key words of ego and consciousness, why do you think it relates to Jaynes? Steiner seems to take the spiritual seriously, at least in this paragraph, but to Jaynes religion and spirituality were an hallucination, and artifact of biological processes with the brain. There were was nothing supernatural about it; there were no actual gods or higher powers involved, just a trick of the brain.
sharmin123 4y ago
drdeadringer 4y ago
The first I heard of this book was when I read “WWW: Wake” by Robert J. Sawyer, which regards an emergent global AI out of the Internet. “WWW: Wake” also tries to demonstrate the emergent global AI's development into having a bicameral mind through China temporarily severing their [post global AI emergence] Internet from the rest of the world.
totetsu 4y ago
the stuff you should know podcast just did an episode on this last week. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-26940277/episode/thrill-to-the-stunning-bicameral-mind-100493186/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-269... Coincidentally I also just finished reading Murakami's Hardboiled wonderland and the end of the world. I think it was playing with these ideas a bit also.
oxff 4y ago
It might not be true but that doesn't stop me from applying it to myself and go into third-person mode
srcreigh 4y ago
In the first few episodes of this podcast, [0] there's some stories / explanations which are consistent with what I've read of the Bicameral mind theory on Wikipedia. [1] The wikipedia page describes that somewhere mid-OT (old testament in the Bible) where there was some type of cognitive shift away from obedience to gods. In the podcast, the relevant story has to do with the period in the OT where ancient Israelites are going around killing people from the other nations. The explanation given in the podcast is that the gods of those people were very real. Even as far as that the people were half-god half-human; it's described 3-person sex rituals where there's one man, one woman, and a god who is possessing the man and the child is considered to have 2 fathers (the man and the god) and one mother. So when the ancient Israelites were killing those other nations, it was to exterminate those other gods. And what happened was that the God of Abraham made a deal with all those gods, that a small number of them could stay and perform helpful chaotic actions which the God of Abraham permits, while the others were banished permanently. However, this stay would be temporary, and there was a time in the future when that small remnant would too become banished. The above story is given as an explanation for why, in the NT (new testament in the Bible), some possessed people say to Jesus "Why have you come when it is not yet the time?" The spirit(s) who are possessing the man are referring to the pre-agreed upon time when the remainder of the gods will be banished from the Earth. > And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time? (matthew 8:29, KJV) I'm sure there's a billion reasons why this doesn't hold up to anything resembling scientific scrutiny, like, in any way. Still kinda badass imo. [0]: https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordofspirits https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordofspirits [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
- axlprose 4y ago
  HN is probably the last place I expected to run into a LoS reference, so I'm pleasantly surprised. In keeping with that topic, 'The Unseen Realm' by Michael Heiser (OT and ancient language scholar) is also worth checking out for learning about how ancient near eastern culture viewed things.
iroh2727 4y ago
Haven't gotten past the first couple of chapters so I don't have strong opinions on whether the theory is "true" or not. But one thing I don't see mentioned enough is that it's just a brilliant piece of literature. So poetic and clear at the same time. And just rich with interesting tidbits and philosophies... very refreshing.
- jayp1418 4y ago
  Like WestWorld
krmboya 4y ago
For anyone who would like a summary and discussion of the idea here's an 80 min audio recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgnMyF-o0sQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgnMyF-o0sQ
gtsnexp 4y ago
I am curious about the actual text from this article. Only abstract seems visible.
- bookofjoe 4y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.funct...
- pfortuny 4y ago
  See below.
Barrin92 4y ago
My personal favorite piece of writing on the Bicameral mind is Dennett's relatively short essay, also a good introduction for people unfamiliar with it. https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-archeology.pdf https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-arc...
dalbasal 4y ago
Westworld (season 1) based their fictional theory of robot consciousness on Bicameral Mind. I thought it was brilliant, and honestly can't shake the feeling that it might work. It kind of got me fired up about chatbots as a basis for consciousness. We're typically concerned that chatbots can't be interrogated. They don't know why they said X or Y. We don't know why either. Why we did or said something. We can reason about the why, finding rational reasons and adopt them as beliefs ex post. Well... Chatbots can do this too. They just need to get better at it... or maybe we just need to get better at engineering them creatively. What's cool about robotics is that we don't have to prove it theoretically. We need to build it, and then study what we built. Jaynes is a workable model for a dialectical mind. And once we're trying to build a dialectical mind, we'll probably imagine more models to try. "Technology Science" like much of CS is, weirdly, a good fit for Jaynes-like pseudoscience... using that term sans negative connotations. It does not fit into a scientifically rigorous framework. That approach is excellent for creative ideas, which we need. OTOH, pseudoscience doesn't have built-in reality checks... making it a poor method for discovering narrow and/or abstract truths. To a technology scientist, this doesn't necessarily matter. Technologists need good ideas to try. What you build doesn't need to prove or disprove your priors. It just needs to work, or do something interesting. At that point you can study it and bring everything full circle.
- garblegarble 4y ago
  >we don't have to prove it theoretically. We need to build it, and then study what we built. Doesn't that raise some serious ethical concerns if at some point what you might end up having built is human-like consciousness? Staying with Westworld, it also explores the possible reactions of those consciousnesses to that ethical issue being ignored
  - sam0x17 4y ago
    I would guess that we will have created, tortured, and deleted millions of conscious AIs before we even come close to recognizing their rights or, even, the fact of their consciousness.
    - 4y ago
schemathings 4y ago
People generally mention Snowcrash when Bicameral Mind is mentioned, for a good reason - they explore bicameralism in humans and computers. Not usually mentioned is China Mieville who wrote Embassytown where an alien species with literally two heads that speak independently in similes evolve to use metaphor.
- arise 4y ago
  It also plays into Bruce Sterling's Distraction, albeit as a minor element. Same generation of cyberpunk author.

163 points by evo_9 4y ago

From 2007 (please fix headline). Abstract asks "has the bicameral model withstood the test of time?" and describes the types of studies they did to address this question. The abstract doesn't give or really hint at the answer. At least from a 2022 perspective, that is clickbait, lol. I'll take a look at the article but would rather have the abstract actually summarize the paper, as abstracts are supposed to do.

svnt 4y ago
The space between the concept of a recently evolved bicameral mind and the last sentence: “Finally, the concept of a non-unitary Self is presented as one of the most relevant contemporary legacies of the bicameral mind.” should give you a pretty good hint where they end up — quite some distance away.
fuzzfactor 4y ago
And by now it's a full 45 years since the book came out, the 30 years was back in 2007.

superb-owl 4y ago

Scott Alexander's review summarizes my take on this book incredibly well > 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. It's really a great read if you enjoy thinking about the mind. It's full of little insights and novel ways of thinking. So long as you don't take Jaynes too seriously. 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-...

flenserboy 4y ago
Agreed. But it is an example of the sort of book that we don't get a chance to see too often these days — a book built from a combination of knowledge and imagination, driving down and through territory most everyone else avoids or doesn't even notice. For the purpose of pushing the boundaries of thought, and charting unknown territory, it truly doesn't matter when such people turn out to be mistaken or wrong; what matters is that they've opened ground for others to cover and investigate. Our siloed, narrow-to-a-mathematical-point graduate education system does everything it can to keep people from building such thought edifices, and from true, organic cross-discipline/category work. We need more like Jaynes.
- JackFr 4y ago
  I would rather read Jaynes for the breadth of his knowledge and novel ideas than one hundred “scientists identify the location of bad taste” fMRI papers.
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    Within a few years there will be a grand reckoning with fMRI. The fallout will be huge.
    - hprotagonist 4y ago
      yeah well we’ve been waiting for that for about 15 years so any day now …
- sdenton4 4y ago
  David Graeber,RIP. Both 'Debt' and 'The Dawn of Everything' are wildly ambitious and brimming with ideas.

greggsy 4y ago

Notwithstanding the legitimacy of the model from a scientific perspective, I do like the model as a lens or perspective for understanding consciousness. Similarly, the ‘triune brain’ model is great for understanding and explaining our behaviour. I also like the server-client aspect of the bicameral model, and wonder what type of APIs might be used. What happens when either side fails to conform to the others’ API spec? Does it use TCP or UDP?

ncmncm 4y ago
By the way, neuroscientists say the triune brain model is wrong. Just like the left/right brain. Both are grasping at a simplicity they don't find when they look carefully. So, things like Jaynes posits might have happened, but you cannot get support for it from neuroanatomy.
- axlprose 4y ago
  > Just like the left/right brain. To clarify, popularized over-simplified descriptions of the left hemisphere being "analytical" and the right hemisphere being "creative" are inaccurate, but left/right hemisphere differences do exist and appear to exhibit consistently different approaches to things. The book 'The Master and His Emissary' covers the more recent research in that area, and is at least as interesting of a read as 'The Bicameral Mind' was.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Neuroscientists have not been kind to "The Master and His Emissary.
    - axlprose 4y ago
      Unless you have a specific set of scathing reviews in mind, the reviews of it in the literature don't really appear to match up with that characterization very much: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13546805.2010.537945 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13546805.2010.5... https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2011.11010053 https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2011.1... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2828853/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2828853/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11097-011-9235-x https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11097-011-9235-x > it is worth noting that the book has been much praised by neuro-scientists as diverse as Ramachandran, Panksepp, Hellige, Kesselring, Schore, Bynum, Zeman, Feinberg, Trimble and Lishman. It'd be surprising if it were poorly received regardless, because the book itself is little more than a review of the relevant literature on the topic, packed with references, and some added philosophy about it's implications sprinkled on top. Not that much different from one of Michael Gazzaniga's popular books, and certainly not as out there as Julian Jaynes.

mjh2539 4y ago

I think that Jaynes' hypothesis does not hold up the scrutiny. We have too many records of regular folks from antiquity that are counterexamples. Somewhat relatedly, as late as the 13th century, the late Averroes held a substantial philosophical following that claimed that there was only one mind (the agent intellect, or the active intellect), and we all shared it. Its purpose was to explain the congruence of our thoughts, meanings, concepts, etc.

thechao 4y ago
When I'm feeling moody, I sometimes think that no human is sentient by themselves: we are only sentient (conscious?) as a group; and, specifically, as a group we're "supersentient" with a shared "IQ" in the hundreds, or higher. When you're alone, your sentience (and consciousness) will continue on residually — perhaps decaying over time; possibly for the remainder of your life, but you stop being truly sentient.
- syntaxfree 4y ago
  Google “Dasein”
- psyc 4y ago
  This made me smile a little. As a hermit-by-choice, this has long been one of my theories about the rest of you talking monkeys when I'm feeling uncharitable.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Well, you're active here on HN, so you're not exactly a hermit in any traditional sense of the word.
    - psyc 4y ago
      Uhuh. Because traditionally, the Web existed

ncmncm 4y ago

Everybody agrees Jaynes was wrong. I asked a classical-greek scholar about his linguistic observations. He read the book, and then said there was no pattern such as Jaynes had perceived. The perception was probably a product of confirmation bias. But the questions Jaynes raised have not been answered. So, the book is still worth talking about. (BTW, I could not see a way to get the text of the paper. Sci-hub was no help. Clue?)

bookofjoe 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.funct...
kordlessagain 4y ago
Jaynes asserted a global recession of audio consciousness generating voices over time. If you experience aphantasia and are reading this, your visual consciousness state (a retraction of creating in mind visual objects) may be related to a mind devoid of echoic recall (a retraction of in mind audio objects). Today this is estimated to be nearly 60% of sampled individuals for audio and <2% for images.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway81523 4y ago
  What do you mean about echoic recall? Do you mean 60% of sampled individuals can't remember sounds that they hear, or imaginging them? That sounds unbelievable to me: people can remember songs and voices. If you ask someone to imagine Donald Trump's voice saying "I like dealing with the Ferengi--they are sharp traders", they can probably do it, even without Trump having to ever actually have said that.
  - varjag 4y ago
    I can remember songs just fine, and certainly can mimic voices aloud but I struggle replaying someone's voice mentally.

jorgesborges 4y ago

I don’t know why but the veracity of Jaynes’ hypothesis was never important to me. It’s such a creative and extraordinary leap. It challenged me to think critically about assumptions I might make about our humanity and its history, kinda like a great sci-fi novel.

defrost 4y ago
It was recommended reading in my undergraduate mathematics class in 1980, we had a lot of serious math texts on the core list and a wealth of periphiral material that pushed various edges. The rationale was that "this is probably bullshit, but it's exactly the kind of BS that you need to read closely and argue for or against various aspects". At the time, of course, fractals were vogue, AI was just around the corner, and we had exercises on robotic algorithms, speech recognition, distributed text searching and indexing, read on neural nets and so on. It was a great read - I never bought the 'recent' evolutionary arguments but I enjoyed the discussions of what constituted 'intelligence', a section still worth reading today.
- alisonkisk 4y ago
ghaff 4y ago
And the Westworld TV series adopted it to some degree. I don't know either the theory or remember its use in the TV series well enough to seriously comment but it was brought in at one point.
helpfulclippy 4y ago
It's true. I've enjoyed reading ancient sources a LOT more since reading Jaynes. I don't think he's right, but that book really uncovered a lot of unchecked assumptions of mine about how people think. One of my favorites. I need to give it a re-read sometime.
kimi 4y ago
I believe you are right: read this as a great sci-fi (in the literal, not Asimovian sense) book, and then you'll get some ideas. YMMV, but you won't mind the time spent reading it.

eckmLJE 4y ago

"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." - Richard Dawkins I think the theory's genius lies in its radical approach to what primitive consciousness might have been like to experience subjectively, however wildly off the mark the theory may be. That experience is likely to have been so different from the modern mind that imaginative hypotheses like Jaynes's should be welcome food for thought.

svnt 4y ago
Richard Dawkins is probably not the best perspective on this — it’s not exactly surprising that he would try to force this speculative yet carefully considered work into a binary choice.
joe_the_user 4y ago
I don't think that's necessarily true. There could be an in-between. My guess is `The Bicameral Mind` is a nice hypothesis that's likely pushed too far but still quite useful. It assumes "the gods speaking through you" and personal self-talk/self-awareness are something fundamentally distinct but it seems plausible to me that this "talk of the gods" could shade into personal self-awareness.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kordlessagain 4y ago
  I don’t do audio or visual recall. I’m sure someone here has heard voices in mind before. It’s not typically shared publicly, due to stigma. Either way, I bet how we think individually is likely to affect are awareness capabilities. It would be nice to hear my dads voice now and again.
- axlprose 4y ago
  Yes, I'm inclined to believe such an "in-between" might possibly arise from Iain McGilchrist's line of research into the difference between the brain hemispheres and the relatively recent dominance of left-hemispheric thinking in society. I always highly recommend his book 'The Master and His Emissary' as a follow up to anyone interested in Jaynes' ideas. While it doesn't necessarily imply the full spectrum of schizophrenic-like symptoms in early peoples the way 'The Bicameral Mind' did, it's presentation of right-hemisphere driven societies of the past isn't a far leap from what Jaynes seemed to be grasping at.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nyc_pizzadev 4y ago

I really enjoyed this theory when I was introduced to it about 10 years ago. A lot of ancient literature talks about voices and gods in a way where this seems plausible. But then there is the idea that the bicameral mind completely disappeared across the world in a somewhat uniform fashion.. that was hard to swallow. We simply don’t evolve like that.

alisonkisk 4y ago
Zanni 4y ago
Jaynes claims it wasn't physical evolution but an adaptation to changing social conditions, i.e. the hardware (brain) remained the same but the software (mind) changed.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  To me it's the references. Can raise awareness of the likelihood that when right-handed people learn to read & write from other right-handed people, that a certain amount of verbal concentration can be made exclusively to the left side of the brain in some kind of a self-perpetuating pattern. The numerical predominance of right-handed people makes this into an underlying mainstream development. Going back quite a ways but who knows how far? OTOH those who are left-handed often do not seem to conform as uniformly in this respect, and those having a tradition of large vocabularies but without reading or writing might even have the advantage of some verbal or other skills handled by both sides of the brain simultaneously far differently than the mainstream. Some types of thinking may or may not be accomplished in a relatively verbal way at all.
- naasking 4y ago
  There are plenty of isolated tribes this old and they don't seem to be much different from modern humans, behaviourally.
limbicsystem 4y ago
My bet would be 'reading'. Reading is essentially a type of synesthesia that we force onto children which turns external symbols into sound (at least initially). My interpretation of Jaynes is that he posits a direct 'voice' from the fast pattern matching systems of the brain (this, in turn possibly a maladaptation to the emergence of language earlier in our rescent evolution). Perhaps reading disrupts this pathway or teaches us to regulate it much more tightly? A prediction of this might be that voice hearing could be far more prevelant in illiterate people that we suspect.

shusaku 4y ago

So has the journal this was published in disappeared off the face of the earth? It seems like you could give a better link than the pubmed entry. Maybe I’m missing something on mobile?

bscphil 4y ago
You raise a good question. Actually, it's interesting that the article doesn't have a DOI number at all it seems, which is usually how it would be linked to the definitive source. IMO that's a bad sign and I'd treat this with some skepticism as a result.
ncmncm 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.funct...
- shusaku 4y ago
  Thanks!

moonchild 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.funct...

kensai 4y ago
Not all heroes wear capes! :)
vinceguidry 4y ago
> According to Jaynes, the earliest Greek text of sufficient size to test the question of whether there is any evidence of consciousness is the Iliad. In fact, the Iliad does not seem to mention any subjective thoughts or the contents of anyone’s mind. The heroes of the Iliad were not able to make decisions, no one was introspecting or even reminiscing. Apparently, they were noble “automata” who were not aware of what they did. Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no internal mind-space to introspect upon. Some lexical oddities in the Homeric text (such as the absence of a single word translating “consciousness”, “mind”, “soul”, or even “body”) led Jaynes to formulate the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by nonconscious minds, which automatically recorded and objectively reported events, in a manner rather similar to the characters of the poem. The transition to subjective and introspective writings of the conscious mind occurred in later works, beginning with the Odyssey. I was speaking with an actor friend of mine recently, and the topic of novels came up. I asked him when the first novel was written, and he cited some book I'd never heard of written in England hundreds of years ago. The definition he gave was that the piece of literature, in order to be a novel, must spend a good bit of time dwelling on character's introspection. Next time we speak I'm going to have to mention this conclusion of Jayne's for him.
- hasmanean 4y ago
  That might be due to literary/aural poetic conventions. Films don’t usually show anyone shitting. That is not proof that nobody had to go to the bathroom.
  - 4y ago

ggm 4y ago

I think I see a pattern here: 1) find the earliest proof of written communication 2) posit that since there is no evidence of communication before this time, there is an implication no communication took place 3) in the light of more finds, revise the date of 2) to posit a date before which there is arguably no communcation, because none has been found. I tend to a view that any artifact is evidence of mind, and that the further back we see intentionality expressed in inanimate objects remains, be it as simple as the pressing of weaving into clay, or regular interval cutmarks on bone, the more we can argue mind and communication existed. And I do see a linkage from one to the other. Being able to cut bone implies being able to teach people to form tools to cut bone with. There is no need for the missing IKEA instruction cartoons and a hex key, the marks themselves "speak" to the necessity for communication.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
I don't think this pattern quite fits Jaynes. In his book, he suggests that early literary works like the Iliad and the Epic of Gilgamesh were written by bicameral authors. So the transition he posits occurs after the earliest written communications; the discovery of earlier literary works wouldn't necessarily have him revise his date unless those earlier works contained the sort of introspection or subjective consciousness which Jaynes says is present in the Odyssey but not the Iliad. In his view, bicameral minds can certainly write fiction, but the fiction they write carries some evidence of their bicameralism. It all seems far fetched to me, but I don't know ancient Greek so I can hardly evaluate his claims myself.
- ggm 4y ago
  So "because there are no detective stories in the illiad there was no crime" ? Certainly yes, a hypothesis of a rich interior model is explicit in fiction, it's tempting to theorise but to theorise a rich interior model doesn't exist is to deny the kinds of abstraction needed to eg teach somebody how to do a thing. It's weighting fiction as proof of theory of mind above all other things. Construct an internal model where an old, blind Neanderthal explains to a young child how to hunt a bison they have never yet seen, which does not presuppose exactly the same narrative structural necessities in the legend of gilgamesh: imagined time, third party views of acts done, if this then that.. it beggars belief that Jaynes can argue otherwise and be taken seriously. All Jaynes really does is establish a time terminus ante quem so to speak. He cannot establish terminus post quem at all.

1MachineElf 4y ago

I feel embarrassed to ask - on this site, how does one read the actual article and not just the abstract?

ncmncm 4y ago
Don't be embarrassed. I was stuck too. Sci-hub was no help. The below probably was found by googling a key line from the abstract. https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.funct...
acscott314 4y ago
moonchild supplied a link: https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.funct...
greazy 4y ago
In general, if you'd like to read research publications on ncbi pubmed use sci-hub. While mostly for medical literature it should have this and similar publication.

henriquemaia 4y ago

Just recently I wrote about this book on my dissertation. I was thinking about Socrates and his daemon, and that reminded me Jaynes' theory. His is a fascinating book. I read it a long time ago, so I'm missing most details. But I remember how thrilled I was upon reading it, for how much it drove me to think outside the box. I still find it fascinating, a mixture of 'this can't be right', and, at the same time, 'makes so much sense'. As I have no dog on this race, I really don't care what is the right answer. I will still recommend Jaynes' book in a heartbeat to anyone interested in the topic of consciousness and its history.

brudgers 4y ago
I read it almost thirty years ago and its appearances on HN was one of the reasons HN resonated with me in my early days here. Today’s comments brought my thinking about Jaynes forward. I don’t think it’s important that his detailed exposition is correct, because his important idea is that the ordinary explanations of consciousness are off the mark in the kind of ways he says they are off the mark. As one of my bosses used to smugly say, the important thing isn’t that I am right. The important thing is that you are wrong. From a philosophical standpoint, and that’s the context in which I heard of Jaynes, what matters is his skepticism. It’s the skepticism that sticks with the people Jaynes sticks to, and it sticks because it is not inconsistent with their beliefs of epistemic fallibility. To approach his work with the epistemological presumptions of the scientist or historian, necessarily precludes philosophical skepticism. And for me, miss the important point.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > To approach his work with the epistemological presumptions of the scientist or historian, necessarily precludes philosophical skepticism. Yes, and that doesn't just exclude dyed-in-the-wool "scientists". Quite extremist forms of positivism prevalent today cast-out valuable works more widely. Certainly such works are filled with speculation, imagination, half-bakery, and emotional polemics, as has been the vernacular writing style for thousands of years. By scientific standards they are 90 percent rubbish. The baby lost in this bathwater is the ten percent of absolute genius that more patient, curious and open minds can digest and drive science forward at a different level. Another difficult book that complements bicameralism, again by a discredited researcher R.D. Laing, is "The Divided Self" It approaches the experiential modularity of mind from a different perspective, a top-down descent into mental illness, namely schizophrenia. Laing's methods were, to say the least, controversial. Taken with J. Jaynes' bottom-up genealogical/developmental analysis Laing's is another piece of the jigsaw of the mind. Moreover, it is interesting just how many psychologists and philosophers who challenge the "unified" individual hypothesis, Freud included, are deemed "discredited" in our milieu. Works like those of G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspenski, which roams into mysticism, seem entirely lost today. Surely the problem is this way of thinking conflicts with modernity and capitalism, whose atomic unit is the singular rational individual.

gok 4y ago

People watching Westworld again?

choonway 4y ago
there wasn’t enough time to change the script before alphago beat lee sedol. they did manage to add some alphago references in s2 though.

georgia_peach 4y ago

The question I have is: was Jaynes a closet anthroposophist, or is "bicameral mind" an independent corroboration? If we look at this evolution from the far-distant past, when the ego was hidden within its sheaths as though in the darkness of a mother's womb, we find that although the ego had no knowledge of itself, it was all the closer to those spiritual beings who worked on our bodily vehicles and were related to the human ego, but of incomparably greater perfection. Clairvoyant insight thus looks back to a far-distant past when man had not yet acquired ego-consciousness, for he was embedded in spiritual life itself, and when his soul-life, too, was different, for it was much closer to the soul-forces from which the ego has emerged. In those times, also, we find in man a primal clairvoyant consciousness which functioned dimly and dreamily, for it was not illumined by the light of an ego; and it was from this mode of consciousness that the ego first came forth. The faculty that man in the future will acquire with his ego was present in the primeval past without the ego. Clairvoyant consciousness entails that spiritual beings and spiritual facts are seen in the environment, and this applies to early man, although his clairvoyance was dreamlike and he beheld the spiritual world as though in a dream. Since he was not yet shone through by an ego, he was not obliged to remain within himself when he wished to behold the spiritual. He beheld the spiritual around him and looked on himself as part of the spiritual world; and whatever he did was imbued, for him, with a spiritual character. When he thought of something, he could not have said to himself, “I am thinking”, as a man might do today; his thought stood before his clairvoyant vision. And to experience a feeling he had no need to look into himself; his feeling radiated from him and united him with his whole spiritual environment. - Rudolf Steiner, May 1910 https://rsarchive.org/Medicine/GA059/English/RSP1983/19100505p01.html https://rsarchive.org/Medicine/GA059/English/RSP1983/1910050...

the_af 4y ago
Two things: > is "bicameral mind" an independent corroboration? Fascinating as it is, Jaynes' Bicameral Mind cannot be a corroboration of anything. The book posits and theorizes, but it doesn't really show, much less demonstrate. I loved reading it, but it's more a (pseudoscientific) theory in search of confirmation, rather than confirmation itself. > [Steiner's paragraph you quoted] Aside from key words of ego and consciousness, why do you think it relates to Jaynes? Steiner seems to take the spiritual seriously, at least in this paragraph, but to Jaynes religion and spirituality were an hallucination, and artifact of biological processes with the brain. There were was nothing supernatural about it; there were no actual gods or higher powers involved, just a trick of the brain.

sharmin123 4y ago

drdeadringer 4y ago

The first I heard of this book was when I read “WWW: Wake” by Robert J. Sawyer, which regards an emergent global AI out of the Internet. “WWW: Wake” also tries to demonstrate the emergent global AI's development into having a bicameral mind through China temporarily severing their [post global AI emergence] Internet from the rest of the world.

totetsu 4y ago

the stuff you should know podcast just did an episode on this last week. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-26940277/episode/thrill-to-the-stunning-bicameral-mind-100493186/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-269... Coincidentally I also just finished reading Murakami's Hardboiled wonderland and the end of the world. I think it was playing with these ideas a bit also.

oxff 4y ago

It might not be true but that doesn't stop me from applying it to myself and go into third-person mode

srcreigh 4y ago

In the first few episodes of this podcast, [0] there's some stories / explanations which are consistent with what I've read of the Bicameral mind theory on Wikipedia. [1] The wikipedia page describes that somewhere mid-OT (old testament in the Bible) where there was some type of cognitive shift away from obedience to gods. In the podcast, the relevant story has to do with the period in the OT where ancient Israelites are going around killing people from the other nations. The explanation given in the podcast is that the gods of those people were very real. Even as far as that the people were half-god half-human; it's described 3-person sex rituals where there's one man, one woman, and a god who is possessing the man and the child is considered to have 2 fathers (the man and the god) and one mother. So when the ancient Israelites were killing those other nations, it was to exterminate those other gods. And what happened was that the God of Abraham made a deal with all those gods, that a small number of them could stay and perform helpful chaotic actions which the God of Abraham permits, while the others were banished permanently. However, this stay would be temporary, and there was a time in the future when that small remnant would too become banished. The above story is given as an explanation for why, in the NT (new testament in the Bible), some possessed people say to Jesus "Why have you come when it is not yet the time?" The spirit(s) who are possessing the man are referring to the pre-agreed upon time when the remainder of the gods will be banished from the Earth. > And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time? (matthew 8:29, KJV) I'm sure there's a billion reasons why this doesn't hold up to anything resembling scientific scrutiny, like, in any way. Still kinda badass imo. [0]: https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordofspirits https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordofspirits [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

axlprose 4y ago
HN is probably the last place I expected to run into a LoS reference, so I'm pleasantly surprised. In keeping with that topic, 'The Unseen Realm' by Michael Heiser (OT and ancient language scholar) is also worth checking out for learning about how ancient near eastern culture viewed things.

iroh2727 4y ago

Haven't gotten past the first couple of chapters so I don't have strong opinions on whether the theory is "true" or not. But one thing I don't see mentioned enough is that it's just a brilliant piece of literature. So poetic and clear at the same time. And just rich with interesting tidbits and philosophies... very refreshing.

jayp1418 4y ago
Like WestWorld

krmboya 4y ago

For anyone who would like a summary and discussion of the idea here's an 80 min audio recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgnMyF-o0sQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgnMyF-o0sQ

gtsnexp 4y ago

I am curious about the actual text from this article. Only abstract seems visible.

bookofjoe 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.funct...
pfortuny 4y ago
See below.

Barrin92 4y ago

My personal favorite piece of writing on the Bicameral mind is Dennett's relatively short essay, also a good introduction for people unfamiliar with it. https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-archeology.pdf https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-arc...

dalbasal 4y ago

Westworld (season 1) based their fictional theory of robot consciousness on Bicameral Mind. I thought it was brilliant, and honestly can't shake the feeling that it might work. It kind of got me fired up about chatbots as a basis for consciousness. We're typically concerned that chatbots can't be interrogated. They don't know why they said X or Y. We don't know why either. Why we did or said something. We can reason about the why, finding rational reasons and adopt them as beliefs ex post. Well... Chatbots can do this too. They just need to get better at it... or maybe we just need to get better at engineering them creatively. What's cool about robotics is that we don't have to prove it theoretically. We need to build it, and then study what we built. Jaynes is a workable model for a dialectical mind. And once we're trying to build a dialectical mind, we'll probably imagine more models to try. "Technology Science" like much of CS is, weirdly, a good fit for Jaynes-like pseudoscience... using that term sans negative connotations. It does not fit into a scientifically rigorous framework. That approach is excellent for creative ideas, which we need. OTOH, pseudoscience doesn't have built-in reality checks... making it a poor method for discovering narrow and/or abstract truths. To a technology scientist, this doesn't necessarily matter. Technologists need good ideas to try. What you build doesn't need to prove or disprove your priors. It just needs to work, or do something interesting. At that point you can study it and bring everything full circle.

garblegarble 4y ago
>we don't have to prove it theoretically. We need to build it, and then study what we built. Doesn't that raise some serious ethical concerns if at some point what you might end up having built is human-like consciousness? Staying with Westworld, it also explores the possible reactions of those consciousnesses to that ethical issue being ignored
- sam0x17 4y ago
  I would guess that we will have created, tortured, and deleted millions of conscious AIs before we even come close to recognizing their rights or, even, the fact of their consciousness.
  - 4y ago

schemathings 4y ago

People generally mention Snowcrash when Bicameral Mind is mentioned, for a good reason - they explore bicameralism in humans and computers. Not usually mentioned is China Mieville who wrote Embassytown where an alien species with literally two heads that speak independently in similes evolve to use metaphor.

arise 4y ago
It also plays into Bruce Sterling's Distraction, albeit as a minor element. Same generation of cyberpunk author.