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Comment by gipp | Hacker News Reader

I don't think anyone anywhere regards it as fact. It's completely speculative, and acknowledged as such in the book. The evidence laid out in the book is narratively compelling but totally circumstantial. For example, the way it so perfectly explains the obsession with physical idols in such a huge and disparate array of cultures around the world is really profound, but of course is no proof at all.

It's just that it's one of the most utterly original and compelling bits of speculation ever written about the mind. It's almost certainly off-base, but I still think it's invaluable reading for anyone interested in consciousness and the mind, if only as an example of how strange a satisfactory explanation may end up being, and as a way of exposing one's own unstated assumptions about consciousness.

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>so perfectly explains the obsession with physical idols

Those primitives! (clutches cross around neck and looks out window at the towering skyscrapers, all of them flying American flags on the ground level).

Personally, I think the narrative of ancients being that different from us is fairly out there and deep into crackpot territory. Seems to me that a lot of STEM majors haven't read the ancient sources. The idea that Herodotus, Plutarch, or Aurelius had some pre-modern mind is asinine. I can't see how someone who sat down and read The Meditations would walk away with such a conclusion. Jayne's Illiad argument stating that every character has no freewill and playthings of the gods is super weak sauce. Greeks simply weren't that devout in real life, and stuff like he's seeing is a story telling narrative. Not understanding something that simple about the Greeks further discredits him. Imagine if our society and entire conscious structure was judged by the Twilight books.

Even if we step back another couple thousands years, Egypt had a full blown society with professional tradesmen, government, militaries, etc 2500BC. Before that, Mesopotamia had all those things in 3100 BC. The Code of Hammurabi invalidates this guy's thesis pretty easily, although I can imagine him weaseling a more technical and strict definition of "consciousness" to avoid being completely discredited, but at that point this is all useless sophistry.

Also, are we ignoring ancient Hinduism and Buddhism's near obsession with consciousness here?

> perfectly explains

I find geeks seeks out "perfect" and "simple" solutions, which make sense in code, but in the world of history, anthropology, etc are reductionist and wrong. There's also quite a bit of atheistic evangelism here, which I think is why its on HN and not in the dustbin of bad history.

There's no need to be so confrontational about this. Everyone agrees it is speculation; I think we need to have room for people to speculate and discuss speculation without being ridiculed about the fact that it's not fact (which of course everybody already knows).

Herodotus, Plutarch, and Aurelius all lived thousands of years after the period discussed by the book.

And a considerable portion of the book is devoted to exploring the possibility of consciousness being something very different from what we imagine it to be, yes; something not necessarily required for civilization or law. Calling that "useless sophistry" isn't really proof otherwise, it's just dismissing the idea out of hand.

Hinduism is made of a large array of different traditions evolving together over thousands of years. The early texts do not have that "obsession with consciousness" (and this, also, is discussed extensively in the book). Buddhism, also, post-dates his proposed "bicameral" period by millenia.

Nobody thinks this explanation is true, just extremely interesting and worthy of discussion.

>Herodotus, Plutarch, and Aurelius all lived thousands of years after the period discussed by the book.

The article cites him citing the Iliad as evidence of his theory. That's a 1200BC story. Homer lived around 800BC.

Jaynes uses the Odyssey as a post bicameralism work. The Odyssey was written well before any of those people were alive.

Article:

So he decides to read early texts, including The Iliad and The Odyssey, to look for signs of people who aren’t capable of introspection—people who are all sea, no rime. And he believes he sees that in The Iliad. He writes that the characters in The Iliad do not look inward, and they take no independent initiative. They only do what is suggested by the gods.

The Iliad is from 1200BC story, so that means he calling a good chunk of written history and those civilizations (Egypt, early Greece, Mesopotamia) as having this ridiculous pre-modern consciousness.

> So he decides to read early texts, including The Iliad and The Odyssey, to look for signs of people who aren’t capable of introspection—people who are all sea, no rime. And he believes he sees that in The Iliad.

Right, not in the Odyssey. And I've read the book; he specifically contrasts the Iliad with the Odyssey.

>The Iliad is from 1200BC story, so that means he calling a good chunk of written history and those civilizations (Egypt, early Greece, Mesopotamia) as having this ridiculous pre-modern consciousness.

Yes, that is correct. But not the people who you listed.

The article itself criticizes Jaynes' use of The Iliad as an example; he handwaved these criticisms away by saying that "consciousness" was added at a later date. The article is candidly critical of Jaynes and so are all the quoted scientists.

A lot of people here seem to think this article is promoting Jaynes' arguments or hypothesis but it's not. I'm not surprised though, most hacker news posts on controversial topics are usually advocating for or against an idea; the faster you can write off the argument as bunk the more time you save for other worthy content.

This article is a discussion of speculative science, not an argument. How does it contribute and how does it fail? What does it mean that we choose to speculate or apply the scientific method? It gives perspective on how we research questions now and the role of religions and myths in the past.

>I think we need to have room for people to speculate and discuss speculation without being ridiculed about the fact that it's not fact (which of course everybody already knows).

Why? What you're saying amounts to "nobody should ever ridicule anyone else". To be fair, you haven't qualified what kinds of things you want to speculate over, but some ideas are dangerous and their discussion/spread should be avoided/ridiculed/marginalized - e.g. spreading/discussing/propagating the idea that vaccination is harmful to children without applying any scientific rigor.

In general, I would say that you cannot concede that the point you're making is pure speculation and then also be offended at someone dismissing the idea !!! Lots of things are interesting to lots of people and it is normal behavior to dismiss ideas that one does not find interesting - especially given their speculative nature. :-)

The difference is that it's a fact that vaccination is not harmful, while consciousness is more of an open problem.

> I don't think anyone anywhere regards it as fact.

nikendo says:

> It makes me think of consciousness like training AI neural networks. Consciousness is akin to training a neural net by testing the result and triggering the reward function accordingly, whereas the subconscious is when you don't bother checking the result, you just "execute" the neural net from the control signal and take whatever result.

nikendo goes on to admit that the analogy might break down, but then reasserts that it works as a simplification (even as a simplification it is only speculation):

> I'm sure the analogy breaks down quite heavily, but it works pretty well as a simplification:

laserdinosaur says:

> So here's my takeaway from the article: concious thought is the evolutionary advantage of being able to modify our own subconscious thoughts.

Both of these are highly-rated comments on this article, currently more highly-rated than my comment which you're responding to.

To take this one step further, there was an Ask HN thread a few weeks back where many people on Hacker News said that they valued the comments on Hacker News better than the articles, and often didn't even read the articles. Maybe you can argue that nikendo and laserdinosaur just forgot to qualify their statements as speculation and don't actually believe what they said. But how is an HN reader who only reads the comments to know that this is the case? Reading those comments they could only conclude that bicameralism is an accepted scientific theory.

Unscientific ideas can inspire useful and possibly prescient thoughts. To me that was the real subtext of this article.

The people you're quoting clearly read at least part of the article (they quoted or paraphrased it). I think it's fair to assume they thought anyone reading their comments would read them in the context of the article. The article itself is very critical of Jaynes' ideas and almost all the quoted professionals say "yes that's very interesting, but he has no proof and most of it is flat out wrong."

Anyway that's my long way of saying most articles aren't worth reading but this one is.

> The people you're quoting clearly read at least part of the article (they quoted or paraphrased it). I think it's fair to assume they thought anyone reading their comments would read them in the context of the article.

That's true, but it doesn't respond to either of my concerns:

1. Did the commenters gloss over the criticism? Do they understand that the criticism of bicameralism is more scientifically valid than the idea itself?

2. Could an HN reader who didn't read the article gather from the comments that bicameralism is not established scientific fact?

Fully agreed! I think Jaynes' book is like a marvelous house of cards. Its foundation is a bit flimsy, but what a fascinating and original read! He certainly knew how to engage the reader, and lot of what he said makes sense, even if I believe he was ultimately wrong.

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