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Comment by henriquemaia | Hacker News Reader

Just recently I wrote about this book on my dissertation. I was thinking about Socrates and his daemon, and that reminded me Jaynes' theory.

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.

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I read it almost thirty years ago and its appearances on HN was one of the reasons HN resonated with me in my early days here.

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.

> To approach his work with the epistemological presumptions of the scientist or historian, necessarily precludes philosophical skepticism.

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.

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