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Comment by Gravityloss | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this criticism is old hat, but I can't avoid thinking about it.

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.

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We had a discussion a while ago here (see my comment history) where I shared my experience of schizophrenia (through a drug-induced schizoaffective disorder which I subsequently got under control.)

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.

That is interesting, but, as far as I know, only a very small percentage of people have schizophrenia.

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.

Schizophrenia is a clinical diagnosis. It is made on a scale and based on thresholds both for specificly exhibited behaviors and aggregate number of behaviors exceeding the threshold. In other words, a person could exhibit several behaviors consistent with schizophrenia but not meet the clinical definition.

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.

That captures it very nicely.

In my experience religion/spirituality felt very much like controlled schizophrenia (or my experience felt like an unconstrained version of it to be precise.)

Married to a clinical social worker, I am. One of my grandparents had 'a breakdown' during the Great Depression, another fought what we would now call PTSD from his combat experiences during the Second World War.

Mental illness is pretty common but remains somewhat taboo. That's unfortunate.

>I would imagine that in a primitive environment, you will be eaten if you can't trust your hearing.

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.

> I would imagine that in a primitive environment, you will be eaten if you can't trust your hearing.

That's not actually how schizophrenia works though; it's quite a bit more subtle/complex/varied than just the classic 'hearing things.'

But that was mentioned as an example in the article.

Furthermore, I didn't say it was only that.

Jaynes is suggesting the bicameral mind as a model for the way societies described the sources of motivation which moved individuals to action. Our current scientific model places the locus of motivation internal to the individual when it's not suffering Skinnarianism. But again this is our scientific model.

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?

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