The “bicameral mind” 30 years on (2007)
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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.
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.
And for me, miss the important point.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
Nagel's paper was published in 1974.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't that raise some serious ethical concerns if at some point what you might end up having built is human-like consciousness?
Staying with Westworld, it also explores the possible reactions of those consciousnesses to that ethical issue being ignored
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.
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.
Films don’t usually show anyone shitting. That is not proof that nobody had to go to the bathroom.
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?)
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.
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.
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?
Both are grasping at a simplicity they don't find when they look carefully.
So, things like Jaynes posits might have happened, but you cannot get support for it from neuroanatomy.
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.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13546805.2010.5...
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2011.1...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2828853/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11097-011-9235-x
> 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.
> 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.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...
The fallout will be huge.
https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-arc...
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.
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.
- Rudolf Steiner, May 1910
https://rsarchive.org/Medicine/GA059/English/RSP1983/1910050...
> 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".
https://web.archive.org/web/20200607225553/https://www.funct...
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
they did manage to add some alphago references in s2 though.