5 ms·

The Return on the Bicameral Mind

19 points by Bluestein 2y ago

PaulHoule 2y ago
I can't think of any bad book which has had the enduring influence of that by Julian Jaynes. If we've gotten anything out of Derrida it is just how easy it is to get away with making trash like that, much like Carlos Castenada's works of fiction that earned him a PhD in sociology. (... at least people seem to have forgotten Velikovsky completely but boy the word "consciousness" still sucks people in today )
- Bluestein 2y ago
  > much like Carlos Castenada's works of fiction that earned him a PhD in sociology How on Earth ...
  - JJMcJ 2y ago
    His degree was for work that the books used, not for the books themselves. That doesn't mean that the books might well have been half nonsense.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  I am hoping that "AI", via providing multiple direct experiences, will tend to make commonplace the knowledge that just because something syntactically looks like scholarship, it isn't necessarily so semantically.
  - Bluestein 2y ago
    A good use of the liar's dividend.-
    - I_complete_me 2y ago
      What's the liar's dividend? I mean, is it used in common parlance?; it's new to me.
      - Bluestein 2y ago
        AFAIUI the Liar's Dividend: - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/watch-out-for-false-claims-of-deepfakes-and-actual-deepfakes-this-election-year/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/watch-out-for-false-claim... ... basically, the mere existence of fakes, of lies, allows people to claim truths to be lies.- PS. The case above is kind of like an inversion of that.-
        082349872349872 2y ago
        in the uninverted sense, compare Huey "Kingfish" Long: > Now a resolute critic of the "lying" press, Long established his own newspaper in March 1930... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long#:~:text=Now%20a%20resolute,in%20March%201930%3A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long#:~:text=Now%20a%20re...
        gradschoolfail 2y ago
        Careful, now.. “liar’s dividend” comes close to “Dionysian profiteering”, which might trigger one of us ;) Want to add that I like Rao’s syndromes better as he highlights the asymmetry — the weird are, from “intuition”/“experience”, outnumbered by the hypernormal. A bit like the apparent asymmetry between insurance & gambling. But I’m not sure that asymmetry helps to characterize the Cultural conflicts any better than the Apollonian/Dionysian split. Caveat to the caveat, there was a HN post, almost claiming that everyone is weird. Should that be weakened to, “everyone could aspire to be Wojak”? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41293505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41293505
        gradschoolfail 2y ago
        Belated lagniappe (for those no longer familiar with the folkways of the old country) https://youtu.be/okJtUACFmcA https://youtu.be/okJtUACFmcA (Underrated channel, btw)
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  This is one that you have to look seriously at the references, not the speculative content. You can surely come up with something more grandiose than this from the same source material ;)
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    I've said before that Ancient Aliens ought to be required watching in elementary schools, because episodes usually start from a basis to which perfectly reasonable people would concur, and gradually spiral out into full on "Aliens"; it's a non-trivial exercise to note where the shift occurs. (furthermore, by non-trivial use of language they usually manage to imply things they do not actually claim; one also sees this sophistry frequently among the better sort of politician)
- niemandhier 2y ago
  Jaynes has some value, in that his work shows the result of a brilliant mind going totally orthogonal to what we today assume to be correct. It’s like reading the works of the mediaeval scholars, but we share mor social context with him.
  - Bluestein 2y ago
    That's a good way to put it.-
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      If either of you two enjoy reading the works of the mediaeval scholars and share some of my post-1945 abstract nonsensical mathematical context, a thought that was too orthogonal for HN's taste might could be of interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41258636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41258636
      - Bluestein 2y ago
        Appreciated. Pity I could not leave a vote.- PS. "Algebraic Theology" now that sounds peculiar.-
        082349872349872 2y ago
        It may sound (and be) peculiar, but isn't completely out of any relation; after all, if one goes back far enough on https://mathgenealogy.org https://mathgenealogy.org one tends to find the ur-advisors themselves were DDs. Example: https://mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=21235 https://mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=21235
        Bluestein 2y ago
        Oh, indeed. You are on to something with that neologism. Totally on point. Math has always been the "language" of "God" ... ... why not express DD-aproved concepts in "His" notation? Perfect sense.-
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  Just today I found a precursor of Velikovsky (fl.1950) in the Timeaus (ca.360 BC): > the truth of [Phaeton] lies in the occurrence of a shifting of the bodies in the heavens which move round the earth, and a destruction of the things on the earth by fierce fire, which recurs at long intervals. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Tim.+22 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Tim.+22 Tangent: “O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children: there is not such a thing as an old Greek.” — can we think of any nations to which this stereotype is applied in our time?
- jbaber 2y ago
  I do like the definition of consciousness as that thing that kicks in to handle novel situations. The thing we can do that ants can't.
pavel_lishin 2y ago
I like the analogy with pet ownership, especially, as it relates to how we deal with AI. If my cats suddenly tense up and look somewhere, I'll look with them - did something fall in another room that I didn't hear, did someone come into the house? But they're fallible. If I turn on the vacuum and they tense up, I know there's nothing to worry about, the same way I know to second-guess an AI's output, or a GPS's directions that are steering me towards a boat ramp.
ryandv 2y ago
One of the key takeaways from Jaynes' work for me is the idea that our minds and "selves" are not singular but in fact a constellation of subsystems all working in concert with one another to form the totality of our phenomenological experience. Not all of these subsystems are always within the focus of the center of our attention, hence the development of ideas such as the {sub,un}conscious, various triadic models such as the id/ego/superego and the Platonic rational man/lion/monster model described by Vervaeke in his "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" [0] series, which also bears relations to (and shares Greek terminology with) the Iliadic models of the self and language of nous/thumos/phrenes/psyche that Jaynes discusses in Book I of his 1976 work. Most crucially is the language of Hermetic Qabalah outlined by Aleister Crowley which sought to unify these varying languages and models of the self into a single glyph, a "Rosetta Stone" of the world's spiritual/psychological traditions inspired by the cultural crossover of ancient Hellenistic society and Greco-Egyptian syncretism. From the Hermetic Tree of Life it becomes possible to translate the language of the Abrahamic traditions to the Hindu, Buddhist, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian pantheons and vice-versa. In a similar way to how the ancient Greeks had far more nuanced and granular language to refer to different types of love (as in agape, eros, philia), systems such as the Hermetic Qabalah offer a far richer and more expressive vocabulary with which to describe the landscape of the self and its component subsystems of unconscious, dreamlike content; emotion; rationality; egoic, "self-conscious" drive; morality; and archetypal influence that is part of our cultural and psychological inheritance as human beings. The general project of all the world's spiritual traditions is the orchestration of all these component subsystems into a unified whole capable of functioning in symphony as opposed to dissonance and discord; where all the component drives, sub-goals, and motivations of the human can be directed at a singular purpose instead of being at odds with one another and running off into different (or even diametrically opposed) directions. The opening of a dialogue with these dormant, "unconscious" aspects and subsystems of man's psychology, the co-creation of an inner mind which we develop into one capable of wisdom, is precisely the object of the spiritual quest; heavens and angels in the sky are simplistic misinterpretations of what is fundamentally a psychological operation taking place in one's mind. The fundamental schism that Jaynes describes between modern, egoic (self-)consciousness and the archetypal forces of gods who dispensed wisdom and guided man's every action in antiquity is that which is repaired by the spiritual quest, the alchemical magnum opus of "solve et coagula," the "union with God" which man has laboured for centuries to attain and developed innumerable divinatory and ritualistic practices to achieve: the washing of the mouths of idols and statues so that the auditory hallucinations that ancient man attributed to "gods" could be more clearly heard; the hypnotic induction of the oracles (at Delphi); the reading of omens, and the practice of augury and sortilege. The crying out for answers in the Psalms is a plea for long dormant aspects of the psyche, which once spoke to man and gave him comfort and inspiration and advice during the trials and tribulations of his life, to awaken again and guide his hand, for the fallibility and vulnerability of egoic man was found lacking in the face of a threatening and astronomically large world beyond his comprehension. [0] https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-5-plato-and-the-cave/ https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-5-plato-and-the-cave/

19 points by Bluestein 2y ago

I can't think of any bad book which has had the enduring influence of that by Julian Jaynes. If we've gotten anything out of Derrida it is just how easy it is to get away with making trash like that, much like Carlos Castenada's works of fiction that earned him a PhD in sociology. (... at least people seem to have forgotten Velikovsky completely but boy the word "consciousness" still sucks people in today )

Bluestein 2y ago
> much like Carlos Castenada's works of fiction that earned him a PhD in sociology How on Earth ...
- JJMcJ 2y ago
  His degree was for work that the books used, not for the books themselves. That doesn't mean that the books might well have been half nonsense.
082349872349872 2y ago
I am hoping that "AI", via providing multiple direct experiences, will tend to make commonplace the knowledge that just because something syntactically looks like scholarship, it isn't necessarily so semantically.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  A good use of the liar's dividend.-
  - I_complete_me 2y ago
    What's the liar's dividend? I mean, is it used in common parlance?; it's new to me.
    - Bluestein 2y ago
      AFAIUI the Liar's Dividend: - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/watch-out-for-false-claims-of-deepfakes-and-actual-deepfakes-this-election-year/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/watch-out-for-false-claim... ... basically, the mere existence of fakes, of lies, allows people to claim truths to be lies.- PS. The case above is kind of like an inversion of that.-
      - 082349872349872 2y ago
        in the uninverted sense, compare Huey "Kingfish" Long: > Now a resolute critic of the "lying" press, Long established his own newspaper in March 1930... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long#:~:text=Now%20a%20resolute,in%20March%201930%3A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long#:~:text=Now%20a%20re...
      - gradschoolfail 2y ago
        Careful, now.. “liar’s dividend” comes close to “Dionysian profiteering”, which might trigger one of us ;) Want to add that I like Rao’s syndromes better as he highlights the asymmetry — the weird are, from “intuition”/“experience”, outnumbered by the hypernormal. A bit like the apparent asymmetry between insurance & gambling. But I’m not sure that asymmetry helps to characterize the Cultural conflicts any better than the Apollonian/Dionysian split. Caveat to the caveat, there was a HN post, almost claiming that everyone is weird. Should that be weakened to, “everyone could aspire to be Wojak”? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41293505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41293505
      - gradschoolfail 2y ago
        Belated lagniappe (for those no longer familiar with the folkways of the old country) https://youtu.be/okJtUACFmcA https://youtu.be/okJtUACFmcA (Underrated channel, btw)
fuzzfactor 2y ago
This is one that you have to look seriously at the references, not the speculative content. You can surely come up with something more grandiose than this from the same source material ;)
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  I've said before that Ancient Aliens ought to be required watching in elementary schools, because episodes usually start from a basis to which perfectly reasonable people would concur, and gradually spiral out into full on "Aliens"; it's a non-trivial exercise to note where the shift occurs. (furthermore, by non-trivial use of language they usually manage to imply things they do not actually claim; one also sees this sophistry frequently among the better sort of politician)
niemandhier 2y ago
Jaynes has some value, in that his work shows the result of a brilliant mind going totally orthogonal to what we today assume to be correct. It’s like reading the works of the mediaeval scholars, but we share mor social context with him.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  That's a good way to put it.-
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    If either of you two enjoy reading the works of the mediaeval scholars and share some of my post-1945 abstract nonsensical mathematical context, a thought that was too orthogonal for HN's taste might could be of interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41258636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41258636
    - Bluestein 2y ago
      Appreciated. Pity I could not leave a vote.- PS. "Algebraic Theology" now that sounds peculiar.-
      - 082349872349872 2y ago
        It may sound (and be) peculiar, but isn't completely out of any relation; after all, if one goes back far enough on https://mathgenealogy.org https://mathgenealogy.org one tends to find the ur-advisors themselves were DDs. Example: https://mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=21235 https://mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=21235
        Bluestein 2y ago
        Oh, indeed. You are on to something with that neologism. Totally on point. Math has always been the "language" of "God" ... ... why not express DD-aproved concepts in "His" notation? Perfect sense.-
082349872349872 2y ago
Just today I found a precursor of Velikovsky (fl.1950) in the Timeaus (ca.360 BC): > the truth of [Phaeton] lies in the occurrence of a shifting of the bodies in the heavens which move round the earth, and a destruction of the things on the earth by fierce fire, which recurs at long intervals. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Tim.+22 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Tim.+22 Tangent: “O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children: there is not such a thing as an old Greek.” — can we think of any nations to which this stereotype is applied in our time?
jbaber 2y ago
I do like the definition of consciousness as that thing that kicks in to handle novel situations. The thing we can do that ants can't.

pavel_lishin 2y ago

I like the analogy with pet ownership, especially, as it relates to how we deal with AI. If my cats suddenly tense up and look somewhere, I'll look with them - did something fall in another room that I didn't hear, did someone come into the house? But they're fallible. If I turn on the vacuum and they tense up, I know there's nothing to worry about, the same way I know to second-guess an AI's output, or a GPS's directions that are steering me towards a boat ramp.

ryandv 2y ago

One of the key takeaways from Jaynes' work for me is the idea that our minds and "selves" are not singular but in fact a constellation of subsystems all working in concert with one another to form the totality of our phenomenological experience. Not all of these subsystems are always within the focus of the center of our attention, hence the development of ideas such as the {sub,un}conscious, various triadic models such as the id/ego/superego and the Platonic rational man/lion/monster model described by Vervaeke in his "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" [0] series, which also bears relations to (and shares Greek terminology with) the Iliadic models of the self and language of nous/thumos/phrenes/psyche that Jaynes discusses in Book I of his 1976 work. Most crucially is the language of Hermetic Qabalah outlined by Aleister Crowley which sought to unify these varying languages and models of the self into a single glyph, a "Rosetta Stone" of the world's spiritual/psychological traditions inspired by the cultural crossover of ancient Hellenistic society and Greco-Egyptian syncretism. From the Hermetic Tree of Life it becomes possible to translate the language of the Abrahamic traditions to the Hindu, Buddhist, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian pantheons and vice-versa. In a similar way to how the ancient Greeks had far more nuanced and granular language to refer to different types of love (as in agape, eros, philia), systems such as the Hermetic Qabalah offer a far richer and more expressive vocabulary with which to describe the landscape of the self and its component subsystems of unconscious, dreamlike content; emotion; rationality; egoic, "self-conscious" drive; morality; and archetypal influence that is part of our cultural and psychological inheritance as human beings. The general project of all the world's spiritual traditions is the orchestration of all these component subsystems into a unified whole capable of functioning in symphony as opposed to dissonance and discord; where all the component drives, sub-goals, and motivations of the human can be directed at a singular purpose instead of being at odds with one another and running off into different (or even diametrically opposed) directions. The opening of a dialogue with these dormant, "unconscious" aspects and subsystems of man's psychology, the co-creation of an inner mind which we develop into one capable of wisdom, is precisely the object of the spiritual quest; heavens and angels in the sky are simplistic misinterpretations of what is fundamentally a psychological operation taking place in one's mind. The fundamental schism that Jaynes describes between modern, egoic (self-)consciousness and the archetypal forces of gods who dispensed wisdom and guided man's every action in antiquity is that which is repaired by the spiritual quest, the alchemical magnum opus of "solve et coagula," the "union with God" which man has laboured for centuries to attain and developed innumerable divinatory and ritualistic practices to achieve: the washing of the mouths of idols and statues so that the auditory hallucinations that ancient man attributed to "gods" could be more clearly heard; the hypnotic induction of the oracles (at Delphi); the reading of omens, and the practice of augury and sortilege. The crying out for answers in the Psalms is a plea for long dormant aspects of the psyche, which once spoke to man and gave him comfort and inspiration and advice during the trials and tribulations of his life, to awaken again and guide his hand, for the fallibility and vulnerability of egoic man was found lacking in the face of a threatening and astronomically large world beyond his comprehension. [0] https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-5-plato-and-the-cave/ https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-5-plato-and-the-cave/