5 ms·

One intriguing conjecture [0] about the difference of now compared to many thousands of years past is that human consciousness as we know it (if we know it) did

• angiosperm 3y ago
  Jaynes is certainly wrong in detail, but it is not too far-fetched to suggest that the notion of "self" was an invention, perhaps at first closely held among shamans, that then gradually spread to the wider population.
  • ransackdev 3y ago
    You’re saying the conscious or minds eye is an invention or do you mean something different. To me, everyone is born with the notion of “self”.
    • dmn322 3y ago
      Jaynes says the concept of self derived from linguistic metaphor. Until there was a concept of the “mind” as a container that could have thoughts “in” it, he says thoughts were experienced as hallucinations from the right temporal lobe, and people were essentially acting in a hypnotic state driven by those hallucinations
      • angiosperm 3y ago
        Except we don't really know enough about neuroanatomy to connect anything about lobes to anything historical. What we do know is that neuroanatomy hasn't changed in the last 50,000 years. So what did change is, necessarily, in the domain of the software, which in brains means ideas and concepts. And inventions. Inventing a theory of mind must have been mind-blowing.
        • dmn322 3y ago
          We do know that stimulating the right temporal lobe with electrodes causes auditory hallucinations. This is the same area that is responsible for actual speech processing on the left side. We also know that the left side wernicke and broca's areas are used in conscious language production while the right side does not seem to be at all (in the vast majority of people, with some exceptions where the lateralization is flipped). Where it gets interesting is his review of historical literature and cataloguing use of metaphor (or lack thereof) in ancient writing. He takes the Illiad and shows where in the original greek, there's essentially no metaphor for internal emotional or psychological states that's conclusively non-physical. Even apparent references to emotional states reference physiological responses, not specifically emotions. This was right on the cusp of when he suggests the change occured. In the Illiad when someone describes their motivation, it's almost always attributed to a god telling them to do it. Similar accounts abound in literature. There are many accounts of ancient rulers directly conversing with some hallucinated being as if they're there. As is there art depicting it. But it slows down around and stops around the time of the bronze age collapse in the region. His suggestion is that it originated with people hallucinating their dead relatives, their dead tribal leaders etc. which is why they would sort of prop them up like they're still alive and have something to say. I was very, very skeptical at first, but the neuroscience was actually pretty thorough for being written in the 80s and I couldn't find any of it that has been debunked to my knowledge.
          • angiosperm 3y ago
            Jaynes's timeline, anyway, was badly messed up. The notion of independent brain half-selves has been debunked, although brain function localized to certain places is real. It is clear that, if indeed people at that time experienced life as he describes, then by the time we got writing not everybody did. We don't need to depend on any notion of changing neuroanatomy; brain function is entirely plastic enough without such an assumption. I quizzed an ancient-Greek scholar about Jaynes, and his story about evolution of Greek language. He said there is no such phenomenon in Attic Greek, and Jaynes had confabulated it. Such confabulations have long been an occupational hazard of Classics scholarship. Modern statistical methods have proved necessary to banish them.
• ransackdev 3y ago
  Yet 12,000 years ago there existed cultures who were similar enough to have sequin ornaments for decoration. Sure, we are not the same as them, that’s fine, but also, we kinda were in terms of common societal things. We were putting sequins on stuff 12k years ago which means they had customs, traditions, ceremonies, organization, tools, knowledge retention and exchange. That’s stuff we still do today, so what caused 12k years to go by before we blasted into being an advanced species in 200 odd years? It’s interesting because every answer I get to explain it just makes me wonder why even more because the sudden progress just doesn’t plot, it should be earlier and we keep digging up more evidence we were more advanced long ago, and often before we thought too, then things seemingly just stalled and went nowhere for millennia I can’t remember what culture it was but there’s evidence of primitive batteries in pottery. Long before electric. That is odd no?
  • dmn322 3y ago
    The baghdad batteries are nothing compared to the antikythera mechanism, which comes from a similar time frame. This timeframe is after Jayne's hypothesized breakdown of the bicameral mind, though, so it's not quite the same. Jaynes suggests that a different state of mind... one of essentially hypnosis allowed civilization to expand up to a certain point. In this type of civilization... dubbed "bicameral", both the left and right hemispheres' linguistic areas were active. The right hemisphere essentially provided our "internal monologue" but in the form of auditory hallucinations. These hallucinations provided the basis for remote governance and were ultimately interpreted as gods by people, but these civilizations would fall apart beyond a certain size because the hallucinations would start to fade. The elaborate rituals that became more elaborate as time went on was attributed to these hallucinations starting to fade as the world became more crowded with these types of civilizations. The part that gave me chills was his description of depictions of gods: up until a certain time, people were always depicted conversing with gods face to face. The gods were present, and the ruler described conversations with them. Until one point in Sumeria, when a frieze was made where god was simply a dot. Depictions of god as a dot or a symbol became more and more common, as did the deference that rulers had. Rather than conversing, they were kneeling and pleading. There were recorded complaints that the voice of the gods were fading. Eventually the voices became associated with demons. The bible records systematic purges of people who heard voices like these. It's a pretty crazy yet weirdly hard to dismiss theory, and I wish there were more ways to find evidence to support it or debunk it. An alternative theory for why there were so many "false starts" so to speak, is described by Joseph Tainter in "the collapse of complex societies"... which I find pretty interesting. It's much more mainstream. Basically he turns the question on its head and says "why does civilization exist at all?" That complexity takes energy. That energy wouldn't be wasted unless there were a reason... a positive return on investment in complexity. He says societies break down when the marginal returns on that investment inevitably decrease. So for instance a Native American tribe which developed around a water-sparse area and fluorished by creating cisterns and presumably trading water for other supplies developed, but as the created more cisterns, each new cistern provided less 'bang for the buck'. Eventually they hit the point where building more cisterns was actually counterproductive. The cisterns were too close together so they were cannibalizing each other's trade, and their source of water was starting to dry up, but that's what their society was organized around. Those with influence gained more wealth by creating more, even though the net benefit to the civilization was negative, so they kept doing it. You could say the society existed by virtue of a surplus-generating algorithm. But those algorithms eventually eat through the source of the surplus, and then you need something else.