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Comment by eckmLJE | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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.

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.

Thanks for mentioning this -- I hadn't heard of it. Google did indeed return a PDF link as the top result. Will give it a read!

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!

https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/articles/the-origin-o... implies (if I'm understanding correctly what it is) that in 1973 Jaynes was saying that he had already been thinking for many years about "a new theory of consciousness".

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.

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.

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