I asked her once, decades later, how she coped with it all, and her answer still freaks me out sometimes.
She said she didn’t know she was a person who had choices, or could think about the situation she was in. She just did as she was expected to.
She’s in her 60s now and is far more in tune with her emotions, thoughts and feelings than I remember her when I was a kid.
She was virtually in catatonic autopilot most of her life, because no one encouraged her to think.
There's a quote from Helen Keller in this vein, after she was taught to communicate, though I can't find the full text:
"When the sun of consciousness first shone upon me, behold a miracle!"
In buddhism (I'm not a specialist by any means), I think awareness and consciousness is a central concept too. "The light of awareness", "awakening" is seen as holy. I really think that awareness is essential to enabling us to have hope to improve and specially understand our life and our problems; besides making us more connected, participating in reality. I like Thich Nhat Hanh's saying of a "serene encounter with reality" he finds through meditation. Different, each in its own poetry, ways of saying the similar things.
And I think the profound realization and awareness of the reality of others can bring no other outcome than compassion. That's why I think awareness is extremely important too for living in a society and enable living in a civilization.
I think you should read the above book.
https://selfdefinition.org/hearing-voices/Barbara-O'Brien-Op...
Genuinely unexploited niches and entirely novel strategies exist, but they are extraordinarily rare.
Do other primates show strong bicameral connectivity in terms of physical brain structures?
Neurologically Jaynes locates these voices, and even defines gods to be those particular neurological phenomena located in the right hemisphere of the brain, that communicated its preverbal judgements to "man," located in the left hemisphere, which interpreted such judgments as speech:
The gods were in no sense "figments of the imagination" of anyone. They *were* man's volition. They occupied his nervous system,
probably his right hemisphere, and from stores of admonitory and preceptive experience, transmuted this experience into articulated
speech which then "told" the man what to do.
Before that, who knows?
0: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmhe... 1: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-alcohol-1890
A lot of people have been taught to read that as "therefore it's false" or "therefore it's true" or "therefore it's unimportant", but really all it means is that it is not amenable to scientific confirmation or debunking. That, and nothing more. Many things are not amenable to scientific confirmation or debunking that are true and false and important and unimportant and everything else.
Thus reality is carved away, leaving only the important part. Which we call "reality" of course.
You have an opinion that the hypothesis is false. I share that opinion. We probably have fairly radically different reasons for our opinions, though. Either way, they are just opinions, however well informed. We don't have proof.
(Gotta underline everything for you people, I swear.)
Aquatic ape hypothesis is similar. It's a initially a great theory and explains many things. Only when you start to investigate other explanations, the theory starts to fall a apart. Endurance running hypothesis on the other hand seems to hold. Incidentally it explains many of the same things as aquatic ape hypothesis, and there is more supporting evidence.