Bicameralism (Psychology)
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
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.
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.
We have people now who lived their entire lives not realizing that other people visually "see" with their mind's eye.
I think the more likely assumption is that those with an inner monologue would have just thought it normal, and that everyone else was the same.
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?
Either way I’d heavily recommend Origin of Consciousness, it’s an endlessly entertaining piece of work.
If the Iliad is not the product of a whole mind then whatever created it is its equal in every regard.
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.
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..