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.
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.
> 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.
"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 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.
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.
I read Jaynes and found it an utterly compelling read. An actual page turner.
I followed it up with “The Master and His Emissary” a few months later and couldn’t get more than 5-10% through it. Just complete drudgery of writing full of nearly pointless asides.
I listened to McGilchrist describe the basics of the idea on a few podcasts and found that quite interesting, but the book itself seems like it could be edited to 1/3 the length without losing anything fundamental. Am I totally off the mark here and should give it another go?
McGilchrist did publish a 30-page summary called “Ways of Attending”, which might be better. It seems to cost as much to buy as a full-size book, but perhaps some Googling can reveal a cheap copy somewhere.
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.
I wonder if he took any inspiration from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat? which was a contemporaneous idea. Extending the question to "What was it like to be an ancient human?" forces us to consider the too-neglected question "What is it like to be this human?"
While reading Jaynes' book and traveling to LinuxTag many years ago, I found that the voices of others began to echo strongly in my mind, just as the book described. Alone again on my way home it was most vivid.
I'll add my voice to the sentiment that it's a work of genius and that its truth is irrelevant: there is great benefit in considering the ideas!
So unless the thing Jaynes said in 1973 he'd been thinking about for a long time was something quite different from what he published a book about in 1976 (which seems super-unlikely to me), Nagel's paper can't have had much to do with it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you want to read a sci-fi drawing from it, I'm surprised to see no-one yet mention Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Without spoiling too much, it asks what would happen if the bicameral mind could be reconstructed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While true for frozen models, this may not be so true for historic recall of memories and semantic lookups of memories or relevant information to the current conversation. We may be able to understand that awareness, or a type of consciousness emerges from a mix of both rational and irrational thought.
Irrational thought could be that which comes from the frozen model and rational thought could come from a lookup of previous input/output, for example.
I submitted a talk by Thomas Metzinger recently which didn't get much traction but is very relevant to this specific topic, "Three Types of Arguments for a Global Moratorium on Synthetic Phenomenology".
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.
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.
> 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.
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?)
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.
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.
This is the same reaction people have when I say I can't see loved ones, in mind. Or an apple. I haven't found anyone with absolute Aphantasia (no images, ever) that can hear things in mind as well. That would include voices or songs.
And yes, echoic recall is the ability to "re-hear" something in mind.
There was a study in the 1800s that first explored this. That 40% of people hear things in mind came from that, as well as subsequent studies recently talking about Aphantasia exploring and measuring the prevalence in the population.
I know that aphantasia exists (I know a famous mathematician who has it) but I had expected it to be fairly uncommon, like color blindness. Soo I was surprised by the percentages mentioned.
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.
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.
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.
Traditionally, a hermit is someone who eschews contact with others, of any kind. Hermits don't spend their time writing and reading letters, for example, which have existed forever.
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?
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.
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:
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
According to my Webster's, the mere strengthening of an argument counts as corroboration. Jaynes cites research in neurology & surgery--such as the wada test & commissurotomy--as possible biological explanations for what he perceived in ancient literature. I think that counts as a strengthening of his argument (as well as Steiner's).
> 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..
To-may-toe, To-mah-toe. Jaynes & Steiner are explaining the same situation (i.e. lack or diminution of the "inner voice" ("the ego had no knowledge of itself"), direction coming externally rather than from within ("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"). That Jaynes attributes it to a lesser-integration of the hemispheres, while Steiner attributes it to different stages of development in the physical/etheric/astral bodies, is a minor detail compared to the world-shaking idea that human consciousness may have been remarkably different just a few thousand years ago.
Steiner: "man had not yet acquired ego-consciousness, for he was embedded in spiritual life itself" and "his clairvoyance was dreamlike and he beheld the spiritual world as though in a dream"
Jaynes: "Volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness whatever and then 'told' to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or 'god', or sometimes as a voice alone. The individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not 'see' what to do by himself."
Different terminologies describing the same situation. We have a Yale psychology professor digging up biological explanations for a theory that originates in 60+ year old crypto-masonic hoo-doo (the + since a lot of what Steiner wrote is a riff on what Blavatsky wrote in 1888, which was probably just soft disclosure of anglo-american masonic ideas going back who knows how many years?). And I am not knocking Jaynes or Steiner or crypto-masonic hoo-doo, because it's all interesting, but it is also very suspicious.
I think that dismissal of a key aspect in the comparison is really stretching it. Steiner was spiritual; Jaynes was "disproving" the spiritual, in a sense.
> That Jaynes attributes it to a lesser-integration of the hemispheres, while Steiner attributes it to different stages of development in the physical/etheric/astral bodies, is a minor detail
This difference alone is huge. You cannot say they are related because of the flimsiest of coincidences that both discuss the ego and religion.
Nothing else matches. I'd say your question, "was Jaynes a closet anthroposophist?" can be answered with a "no".
On the contrary, or that's the vibe I got (since we're speculating now). He tries really hard to scientifically answer all sorts of mysticism surrounding hypnosis, hallucinations, "the soul", ancient humans etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The key problem with Jaynes' hypothesis is that it depends on there being a sharp distinction between the behaviour of the Bronze Age individuals described in the Iliad (for example) and modern people today.
But there is no sharp distinction, and I'd argue there's no distinction at all. There's a difference in the linguistic tools used by the authors, but the characters are perfectly relatable to modern humans.
The biggest problem I see is with the premise of trying to investigate the nature of the human mind in antiquity by examining a few scraps of literature. Even if we accept the premise of bicameral minds existing and these pieces of literature being written by such people, I think that tells us jack shit about the nature of the average human 3000 years ago. There's no reason to think these authors were representative of the average person in their age. These writers might have been on the autism spectrum, or had schizophrenia, or any number of other unusual mental traits that could give their literature unique quirks.
It's like reading a bunch of literature from the European middle ages written by monks, and then concluding that most people back then were celibate men. The social and cultural circumstances of an age leave a mark on what sort of literature is created and preserved.
I agree Jaynes' hypothesis is flawed, but how can you say with such confidence that:
> [...] I'd argue there's no distinction at all [...] the characters are perfectly relatable to modern humans
It can be that you find them relatable due to modern translations, or by projecting your own modern understanding of them. The whole of Jaynes' hypothesis is that they are quite alien and unrelatable, and that they don't function like you and me, and that our reading of them has been wrong.
The probable flaw in Jaynes' thought is that I don't think there is a way to test this supposition, other than time travel.
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.
He asks questions we still don't have answers for.
His answers are probably rubbish, but that doesn't matter. Without a suggested answer, there could have been no book. The assumption is that somebody will take up the questions and get a better answer.
Similarly, the question of how we see was answered with gradually increasing merit. First rays shooting from your eyes, then rays entering your eyes, neural processing for feature extraction, and integration into the fractionated attention stream, with a wholly confabulated continuity.
I like this model of emergent (theory of) mind better. I suspect at each stage, the sensor and the sensed couple. But, I am willing to bet a snake, purely on thermal signal, can (and does) make feints to confuse prey, before striking. That means to me they have an analytical model of "if this then that" beyond the trivial.
"What it is like to be a bat" poses questions to shape and form and understanding if you intuit a higher mind lies behind the sonar.
Probably? I just don't like Jaynes and allow that to leak into a critique.
He does not posit that "no communications took place".
If you want to argue that there was literature before what is generally accepted as "first literature", or writings before "first writings", but traces have been erased, then you'll have to go argue with someone else than Jaynes first.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.