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Comment by escape_goat | Hacker News Reader

Did the bicameral mind ever exist in Polynesia? If it didn't, why not? If it did, then when and how did it disappear? Are Polynesians actually conscious after all? If consciousness is an artifact induced by "cultural development and knowledge about the world", then are people born into deprived circumstances perhaps not as conscious as the rest of us? If consciousness is a psychological development induced by specific linguistic features, then what are those features? Are people capable of consciousness if they can only speak an insufficiently advanced language?

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This is my issue with the theory - it's very euro centric. Somewhere like Papua New Guinea where the millions of highlanders had no contact with the rest of the world until the 1930s just don't fit the theory. Presumably they'd have to be bicameral before and in a very small period of time full conscious - doesn't sound plausible.

Or the various tribes, such as those in the Andaman Islands, who have NEVER been contacted. Do they have no consciousness at all, even now?

It seems possible, but if so one would expect some indirect indications from those Westerners who've written of their experiences with "first" contacts. There probably haven't been many neurologists among them, but one would at least expect a number of linguists, who could have been expected to notice something.

Well, in many instances the primary source material we have for initial Western contacts with ethnic groups in Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific refer to them as "primitive savages" or "unthinking brutes," and historically, such peoples were generally regarded as sub-human by many of the Westerners most familiar with them. So if a lack of consciousness on the part of those not previously contacted by Westerners is something that seems possible to you, then these might be the sources of evidence you were looking for.

>If consciousness is a psychological development induced by specific linguistic features, then what are those features? Are people capable of consciousness if they can only speak an insufficiently advanced language?

Developmental psychology has alot to say on this topic. For one you need the linguistic structure of "I" and pronouns in general(I/We/It). Pronouns are a universal linguistic structure and represent the ability to shift between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person perspective. A pretty amazing cognitive ability if you think about it.

If pronouns are a universal linguistic structure, then doesn't that suggest that the cognition that they reference is innate rather than linguistically acquired? How does one determine that consciousness requires the linguistic category, rather than the other way around?

I can see how, in children, the development of consciousness and the meaningful use of pronouns might coincide, and that the two might be conflated in a description of normative developmental psychology.

If one strictly regards consciousness as emerging from language development, however, the suggestion is that a child that was never capable of speech or language comprehension would never actually become conscious.

It also leaves as an open (and rather curious) question whether an adult would continue to be conscious after the onset of any of the more serious categories of aphasia.

I agree. That's just his take on the data.

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