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Comment by schemathings | Hacker News Reader

As mentioned below/above .. Snowcrash by Stephenson uses the concepts of the bicameral mind heavily (he mentions it in the opening acknowledgements), and China Miéville has a novel called Embassytown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassytown that doesn't cite that work specifically but feels like a similar exploration along with understandings of simile vs metaphor in the development of language/consciousness.

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Also Peter Watts' Echopraxia has bicamerals - members of order which act together as some sort of hive mind

He also mentions it explicitly (assuming my memory isn't that faulty) in The Big U.

Is THAT what was going on in this book? Thank you! I loved Stephenson but was very, very confused.

Spoilers for Snow Crash follow.

Snow Crash posits that there is a natural language for human brains, akin to assembly code, and that the line between pre-historic and historic humanity comes from a singular event. That natural language is/was (pre)Sumerian, and well-formed sentences in that language are indistinguishable from internal thoughts: to speak is to command belief, to hear is to believe. The singular event is the nam-shub of Enki (http://namshub.com/enki.html) which established a virally propagating firewall that cut off the ability to understand pre-Sumerian and allowed/forced the development of other languages, none of which had the interiority of pre-Sumerian.

This is all codswallop, but it's entertaining.

I'd highly recommend Embassytown. The interpreter has to deal with a species that has two heads that communicate seemingly independently - bicameral mind indeed!

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