"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.
I don’t think you need to posit bicameralism to salvage parts of this theory. People developed language gradually, and I’m sure there was a period of time where it sat uneasily in the mind, and then a point in time where people had something like an internal monologue for the first time, and without having any theory of consciousness or souls or the brain or anything of the kind, it must have been a world shattering, all consuming miracle for the first people that experienced it.
It makes sense to me that some people would have externalized the source of it and understood it to be spirits or gods or ancestors or whatever kind of disembodied force, and imagine being the first person who could understand it, and control it and help others achieve it — imagine the power and respect that gets you — unlocking a kind of consciousness or divinity in other people. You can see how priesthoods develop from it.
Think about that and go back and read Genesis, and think about how it’s a story about naming things, and categorizing things, and learning about the world. And how it’s knowledge that drives people from a state of paradise, an enternal now where there is no passage of time, no thought, no awareness of ones own mortality.
I suspect you have this backwards: I bet cats have an internal monologue thinking about the next mouse or fresh tin of food. It'll be experienced by them as the same experience as when they're actually chasing a mouse. I think the concept of experiencing a replay of an experience predates language by tens of millions of years. Language just adds a new codec onto that mechanism.
Jaynes's "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" was used as a significant reference for the design of the Boeing 757 and 767 cockpits. Even though the flight decks of the two aircraft were of significantly different scales, Boeing managed to design the two so that they appeared identical to the flight crew, for example, larger windows in the 767 but further away so that they covered the exact same field of view. The goal was to, for the first time, create two quite different aircraft with identical certification so that a pilot certified in one is also certified in the other. It was successful.
I’m not sure i get how a theory of the human mind being divided in a master/follower model relates to designing cockpits that appear identical despite being different sized. Could you elaborate?
I cannot elaborate. I once interviewed one of the Boeing design team execs who told me about the book and its key role in designing for human perception but that is all I know. I wish I knew more.
>> “...but also simple enough that you can't possibly need a whole book to explain it.”
Graphic designer Paul Rand designed several logos during his long career which will be familiar to many people to this day.
The deliverable for Rand was not just a mark, but also a presentation book (example [1]), which is different from the Style Manual describing how to use it.
A dilemma for designers in business is how to justify costs of their designs. (Not much different from R&D I would guess).
While it sounds like a good _idea_ to design cockpit in such a way pilots can be certified once and fly either plane, I could imagine an equally compelling argument the cost is too great compared to the cost of training (I have no idea why—maybe if training costs we’re somehow the burden of a secondary market—whatever).
In which case you might need a great deal of research and maybe a book to make your argument?
This concept was explored by the show "Westworld" (don't worry if you haven't seen it, this point isn't all that relevant to the plot). From what I can tell, this theory, like most theories of consciousness, has fallen out of favor as more materialist views take hold. But it seems like that's only because we abandoned studying a more colloquial definition of consciousness (consciousness = subjective experience) in favor of one that we can observe (consciousness = integrated information theory). It seems to me that these arent mutually exclusive, i.e. we have a physical reality that lends itself to the emergent behavior of language, and language gives us a rich inner life of experience? Or is what Im saying nonsensical, or already how people look at things?
A lot of the criticisms of the Jaynes hypothesis tend to surround the word “consciousness,” which Jaynes defined very precisely for the sake of his argument (internal mind space, analog I, and something else, been a while since I read origin of consciousness).
Either way I’d heavily recommend Origin of Consciousness, it’s an endlessly entertaining piece of work.
Tied closely to this shift is probably the theory falling out of favor due to a lack of evidence. But I’m really enjoying it in Westworld, it’s just great to spend to reflecting on one’s own consciousness.
Though it originates from oral traditions, the Iliad is literature. It is a work of wonder and triumph. Does this story appear to some people as just a list of enumerated events and nothing else?
If the Iliad is not the product of a whole mind then whatever created it is its equal in every regard.
I agree, but in terms of the theory, Jaynes spends some time at the start of his book explaining what he defines as consciousness, as it is only with that definition that the rest of the book makes sense.
Bicameralism seemed a lot sillier to me before I found out I had aphantasia (lack of a mind's eye), and most people see imaginary images while awake. Hearing the voices of imaginary gods doesn't seem all the different from seeing false images.
I don't see false images when I use my mind's eye. My actual sight is not impacted by using my imagination to picture something in my head. There's nothing floating in midair or covering my vision. It's like recalling a memory. Can you not recall a memory of a past event?
There's an enormous difference between auditory hallucinations and visualization.
There's a gap in the language and between minds that makes it near impossible to understand and communicate about the actual experience of thought. There seem to be a lot of people mistaking these gaps for the presence of some unique disorder and calling it "aphantasia".
As far as I'm aware, most people don't see vivid imagery while awake. I can certainly imagine something but it is not a vivid image like reality, my mind's eye is ghostly and dreamlike.
How does this compare in terms of Muscle Memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory
and instinct reactions, things we do from inputs without thinking about at the time of doing. People tend to react if you shout "Timber" near tree's, and rightly so. They react first and think after they have already started reacting.
Is Bicameralism just another way of trying to define primal instinct and how that gave way to intelligent thinking as the main driver in the human evolution I wonder.
So ancient hebrews were just writing stories about their hallucinations for no reason at all other than entertainment? Because some fragment of the hebrew canon doesn't contain language concerning introspection means that introspection doesn't exist? What do blockbuster movies then say about southern californians living in the proximity of hollywood ca 2019??
Ditto for greek mythology and all of the other pseudoscientific grasps that are made here..
If one wanted to make the argument that pre homo sapiens had this mentality, as purely a theory of cognitive development, fine, but holding on to this until the freaking bronze age and using random cultural tidbits out of context and ignoring the vast philosophical/cultural/spiritual/psychological teaching precisely related to managing ones own conciousness that these tidbits were bound up in seems more than a little bit far fetched..
> The views expressed in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind employ a radical neuroscientific hypothesis that was based on research novel at the time, and which is not now considered to be biologically probable
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.