The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I once examined the tentative hypothesis that some people lacked consciousness - that their behaviour seemed to be missing certain key components of introspection. So this book caught my interest (and of course because it had a great title). But "Origin" proved to be a tedious read providing weak support for its hypotheses.
Nonetheless, when I find a copy in the wild (usually they're in great condition, not much handling) I buy it and put it on the shelf. When someone is IMO pestering me unduly, I hand them the book, ask them to read it and get back to me. That's good for at least 3 months of peace, a small price to pay for quiet time.
You would assume that there would still be lots of people living in this bicameral state, as human populations have been very fragmented for the last few thousand years.
But as far as I know, there aren't any.
It would seem extremely unlikely that such developments would have occurred worldwide in isolated populations at the same time.
It is well documented that various people (be it indigenous or "western") use hallucinatory drugs to get into states with reduced sense of reality. They do not live like that all the time, and indeed could not survive so.
I haven't read the book yet (it's on my Kindle by now though) but from what I've read it's very similar to that state of mind and, if that is so, then many 'mystics' actually do stil live that way.
I would imagine that in a primitive environment, you will be eaten if you can't trust your hearing.
But I might be totally wrong, I haven't read the book.
That's not actually how schizophrenia works though; it's quite a bit more subtle/complex/varied than just the classic 'hearing things.'
Furthermore, I didn't say it was only that.
E.g. clinical science does not pathologize people who claim to hear god during prayer and admit acting upon what they heard when the claims are in the context of organized religious practice and the behavior does not disturb the peace too much.
In my experience religion/spirituality felt very much like controlled schizophrenia (or my experience felt like an unconstrained version of it to be precise.)
Mental illness is pretty common but remains somewhat taboo. That's unfortunate.
When I talk to myself in my head, I normally don't find myself saying, "Who's there? Who said that?" Additionally, if someone was the physically appear in my room and start a conversation with me, I think I'd immediately figure it out. There's some mechanism that lets us differentiate from internal and external voice that we experience every day. I imagine the same applies on some level to auditory hallucinations, if those really are any different from having internal conversations.
The world is full of people who claim to be motivated externally. It is a rather common feature of religions, particularly those in the Western tradition - and from the Western tradition is where Jaynes draws his examples in support of bicameralism. Hearing a god's voice is so common that we don't institutionalize people on that basis. Hell in the US, we often elect them to office.
Closer to home, where did your feeling that Jaynes viewpoint must be rebutted come from? That's meant as a scientific question meaning what was the locus from which the force strong enough to overcome not being bothered arose and how does a unicameral model better explain it?
http://www.meltingasphalt.com/mr-jaynes-wild-ride/
http://www.meltingasphalt.com/accepting-deviant-minds/
Recently though this theory has come back in a new way for me. I'm very interested in gamma waves and how they are by products of our brains synchronizing it's many disparate compartments to create a single coherent experience.
Also, a couple of weeks ago there was an article on HN about extreme isolation. I saw many details in there that made me think of this book.
So king Alfred and Saxon law, gamma waves, and isolation are all interesting things that have resurfaced for me with respect to this book. It's a great theory, pretty sound argument if you read the whole thing and try to understand it. It's just so unbelievable no one else has really taken a stand. Someone famously once said (I'm paraphrasing) "Jaynes is either incredibly wrong or is stupendously right but we don't know".
Also, those of us who do not share direct ancestry with modern cultures (I am a pacific islander), our cultures would possibly not have had consciousness until our contact with outsiders...for my culture, that would be around the late 1700s.
Our oral history does talk about gods, demigods and such. Looking back at most of the oral legends, they tend to be about the gods and mythical events that teach us morals. I think there was one story that might show introspection (a god child who was found in the woods and was raised by human parents) although something like true higher order thinking? I'm not sure, I'd have to think a bit.
Still, it's such an interesting idea. Perhaps that is one way to test the hypothesis, comparing notes with first contacts with indigenous, uncontacted peoples.
Chances are not only all people are conscious and introspective, but most animals are to some degree (it's not an on/off switch, it's an emergent property, the sum of all your reasoning skills).
As for bicameralism, it's just a demonstration of the lengths at which our wrong assumptions can reach when the subject we're creating conjecture about (ancient people) are no longer around, or otherwise unable to explain themselves.
There are plenty of people in the modern day, which claim to have heard the voice of god (or the devil, or aliens, or what have you), which might be a mental disturbance, or quite often is a simple confusion (a dream taken for reality, and so on).
It's just how the mind works to this present day. Sometimes we misinterpret input and make up reasons.
Heck, the theory of bicameralism seems like an example of making up reasons.
I think this has clear implications to AI.
Also, it hits me as some awful mutation to be using your "external protocol" (voices) for internal communication.
Is the claim they were literally hearing voices? Can't be right.
First you'd constantly be getting startled or confused whether someone in your head said something, or someone outside your head said something.
Second there's an inherent lag in converting speech to information and back, when the brain is interconnected well enough with much more efficient ways of communicating internally.
Speech is also highly inaccurate. Same sentence can have multiple meanings. Imagine the hilarious misunderstandings between you and your internal voice.
Which brings another point. How do you answer back? Do you speak out loud, or does the mind have a dedicated "internal speaker" for you to say things into?
Another awkward redundant apparatus.
Here's a simple intuition pump to get you started: Do you think that you don't hear voices? Do you know about the concept of "internal monologue?"
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/o...
Also look up Alien Hand Syndrome. When we are conscious of our ACTIONS we literally are able to call up a memory of DECIDING to do those actions. Otherwise even if we onserve those actions they seem as having been done by SOMEONE ELSE.
Thus, identity and consciousness is relates to memory.
Sometimes I have a feeling that our grandparents or parents are not thinking or introspecting as deeply as my generation. They are just doing things, but we seem to be thinking more about the consequences of our actions. Is there a way to measure this? Or is this just the usual "generation gap" thing?
I have that same feeling, and David Foster Wallace touches on that in his essay on television (http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf).
Come to think of it, even that wouldn't do it - testing one farmer wouldn't tell us anything about his compatriots and rulers.
Both Snowcrash by Neal Stevenson and Distraction by Bruce Sterling make good use of some of the concepts from it, so even if it is wrong, it has helped in the genesis of some great fiction.
If on the other hand you think that many of the mental states he is trying to find explanations for are already extant in several other species, then the problem he is seeking to address simply doesn't exist.
I haven't read Islands in the Net or Schismatrix yet. I should really get around to them at some point. Heavy Weather was pretty good, there's a copy of that within three feet of me right now.
Greek and Semitic societies were in close contact 3000 years ago so a trend towards unicamerality would be intertwined, but I'm wondering about societies separated from the West until later such as China which didn't begin contacts with the West until about 2000 years ago after being cut off for over 50,000 years. Was Confucius (2500 years ago) conscious? If so, then it seems such bicameral mind breakdown evolved separately in West and East.
But to me, Jaynes's theory seems to shine a lot of light on certain phenomena: the prevalence of statuettes in tombs; the injunctive tone and form of common schizophrenic hallucinations; specific artworks like the Homeric poems, the Bible, and the altar of Tukulti-Ninurta I; and so on.
Daniel Dennett wrote an article about the book, in which he states that he "takes it very seriously": http://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-arch...
A quote from that review that I think portrays the book quite fairly:
"Now, when Julian Jaynes tells his story he doesn’t say that it is a just-so story. He doesn’t say it is just a sort of guess at how it might have been. He claims to be telling the historical truth as best as he can figure it out. But he is also clever enough to realize that if he doesn’t have the details just right, then some other story which is in very important respects rather like it must be true. So the whole account is put together by a rather interesting amalgam of aprioristic thinking about how it had to be, historical sleuthing, and inspired guesswork. He uses aprioristic reasoning to establish that we have to have travelled from point A to point B by some route—where and when the twists come is an interesting empirical question. He flavors and deepens and constrains his aprioristic thinking about how it had to be with whatever he can find about how it was and he lets his imagination go as fertile as he can and clutches at whatever straws he can find in the 'fossil record.'"
It is almost as though he is writing a neuroscience book, using the style someone like Homer or Plato would have used.
sound familiar? string theory.
If they check out, we use the stories to extrapolate reality, i.e. build models that predict where reality will go based on our stories.
There are three things to keep in mind:
1) There are infinite stories that may be equally good at describing the same reality. It's best to pick the simplest one that has a set of benefits we need, because why make our life hard, right?
2) If we can't measure how a story matches reality, the story is useless. Say, how on Earth would we measure if people had voices in their minds 3000 years ago? We can't. Therefore the story can't be verified.
3) One should be very careful not to confuse the stories with the reality it models. A story is a story. A model is a model. A math formula is a math formula.
Reality is neither a story, a model, or a math formula. So when it comes to explaining the true nature of things, such as what the heck conscience is, and how it comes to be, science comes short. Because it always has been, and it always will be, just making up stories. But that doesn't make science any less useful, of course.
this has certainly made me want to read the book.
Any theory of mind - unicameral, bicameral, polycameral - is naught but an hypothesis because the claim that there are such things as minds is itself an hypothesis. One that for some is as scientifically plausible as souls and essences...or consciousness.
If one wants to argue over the material character of the mind, bicameralism seems a bit late to be drawing a line in the sand. The enemy has landed, breached the city walls and occupies the lower floors of the innermost keep.
I read Jaynes about twenty years ago. It's thoughtful and entertaining and it's ideas plausible...what is this voice that formulates these words as I type? Certainly better than Penrose who was running rampant over the alt.philosophy at the time. Jaynes is very readable.
Can you articulate the difference between a sense of humorand a sense of morality?
And I take the analogy between programming languages and theories of mind seriously. We don't dismiss programming languages because they don't describe the physical flipping of particular bits that happens on the computer and we don't throw out client-server architectural models when we are working with only one machine. Physicalism when it comes to computing is absurd in most contexts.
Something is thinking, therefore thought exists. The thing which is thinking seems to be somehow located in my body, but I can't prove that I'm not just some sub-process in a vast simulation or such. I also can't prove that the thing which is thinking is actually located in my body, and not just operating through it but with an independent existence. But either way something is thinking, so there is a mind. Whether one chooses solipsism, spiritualism, or materialism (or anything else) the existence of at least one mind is directly observable.
http://www.odditycentral.com/pics/the-creepy-walking-dead-of...
Now, to be fair, that particular hypothesis is pretty far removed from the rest of this theory. I would certainly not say that the meat of his theory is in any way supported by this evidence. It's basically an aside to the rest of his theories.
But, that was a really damn specific hypothesis, and he totally nailed it. He said that people with schizophrenia undergoing a command hallucination would have heightened activity in the right-hemisphere areas that correspond to the speech centers in the left hemisphere, which they do. That's kind of... not the sort of prediction that you just happen to get right by chance. It also revolutionized the study of schizophrenia.
But yes, his statements about the non-schizophrenic brain are basically philosophy and not science at this point. And his historical hypotheses may never reach the state of falsifiability.