Mr. Jaynes’ Wild Ride (2013)
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True or false, I'd frame the hypothesis as "first came language, then came consciousness". Language was shared, something "arose" when people were together. So "the gods" were to point of origin of language.
The reason that kind of hypothesis is appealing is that consciousness and modern thinking had to arise somehow. Going from animals with no language to a modern human with self-consciousness and language is a big, a huge step. We need an intermediate step between these. An "everyone is generating language but not self-consciously" period is such a hypothetical step.
None of this is to claim Jaynes' thesis is true. But it's a reason it's appealing and generally not put on the level of Erich von Däniken. The way that pseudo-scientists like von Däniken fail is they explain simple phenomena with more complex, more unexplained phenomena. Jaynes, whatever his faults, is trying not to do that.
The Däniken comparison comes from the way in which the writer shows you some ancient painting or statue and then claims that it "obviously" depicts how the king or his servants were controlled by hallucinations. I was having flashbacks to when Däniken was doing the same thing with similar artifacts from the same era saying that it must depict "aliens". And I would argue that the theory of a society where everybody is schizophrenic and sharing a collective hallucination of the king while the king is controlled by a hallucination of the previous king, is more complex and creates more unexplained questions than what it's trying to explain - just like saying "the aliens did it".
However if you attempt to imagine how future/other observers might look at this current civilization's lack of attempt to deal with imminent climate change breakdown and the clinging to unreasonable belief in as-yet unmaterialized technological progress following on centuries of mass murder and species destruction then it starts to seem more plausible.
Let's not forget that until very recently the claim that there was no deity was taken as evidence that the claimant was self-evidently working with a non-functioning brain.
In all honesty I must admit to a brief period in my early life when I severely doubted that my father exhibited true human consciousness. While never fully resolved, that question opened my mind to the possibility of Jaynes' hypotheses. And so I read the book but found it of little use.
In my middle years copies of "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" became commonly available in used bookstores at the lowest of prices. I bought every copy I found merely for the beautifully-displayed and elegant title and with the growing awareness that perhaps it might serve yet another purpose than display someday.
These days I use the book mostly as a tool, an impediment of sorts, with which I burden the back and mind of unwelcome and overly-inquisitive visitors to my workplace. I feel no qualms in giving them a copy of the book, charging them with the responsibility of giving me a full and detailed review before or upon returning again. To my great delight no one sent away with Jaynes' tour-de-force in hand has reported back!
The fascination with JJ's idea is not about his theory, it is about the problem he tried to solve, and that we still have not solved. He offered one idea, and supported it as well as he could with what he had, but discarding his idea takes you no closer to a solution.
Note that the events of the Iliad are around the beginning of the Iron Age, near the time of what historians call The Catastrophe, of c. 1190 BC when all the coastal cities around the Mediterranean (except in Egypt) were sacked, and written records dry up for four centuries. The Iliad was written down sometime after the end of this period, coincidentally around the time coins were first minted. Civilization had already existed for 2000+ years, and had money all along, just no actual currency. The Great Pyramids were already ancient, but still much more impressive-looking than today, because their white facing had not yet been stripped off to build mosques of. But I Digress.