For anyone trying to generalize Mr. Jayne's theory from an article or set of comments - I suggest that you definitely do not. Really, don't do that with anyone's theories, but instead READ THE BOOK.
The way that Jaynes "carves up consciousness" as Daniel Dennet puts it in one review, is very different than the way that a reflexive intellectual instinct would choose to. The taxonomy that Jaynes decides upon is distinctive from our mental reflexes, and not at all the same as what nearly everyone begins with.
I feel that this "Bicameral" consciousness discussion keeps reappearing on Hacker News in part because it is crucial for us to create a proper distinction between these terms - AI is rapidly going to become conscious in exactly the way Julian Jaynes suggests we became "conscious" and that consciousness is very much different than what we think it is (or must be) for AI to become generally aware of itself.
I suggest that anyone who is working towards AGI MUST discover the distinctions that Julian Jaynes made. That does not mean that his theory regarding our consciousness is correct, but merely that his ways of describing "self-awareness" or whatever other term could be applied is crucial to getting a grip on what the true mechanism of "the self" is in the truest engineering sense. That is to say, that if the "self" is the licensed self-aware driver of a vehicle and the engine and transmission is the remainder of cognition, than the order of development was actually from "self-driving car" into human driven vehicles - metaphorically speaking.
Basically, up until recently, we just DID, and in attempting to describe WHY we were forced to invent metaphor until collectively we were able to create the language necessary to actually BE self aware. Without the language, we actually were NOT self aware. We were self-driving cars with no human drivers. The human driver only arrived after there were ways of describing "him."
Your warning is noble, but I read comments to decide whether the topic is useful. I found the negative comments convincing, so I don't mind questioning the topic further.
Self-awarenes was worked out with "I know that I don't know" and again, but in positive terms with "I think therefore I am". These are the most basic forms of reflection, a y-combinator differentiating endlessly. With literarry writing, this reflection could be stretched out over generations, yielding a national identity, but oral transmission of religious teachings had been practiced before, just with a higher rate of mutation. Such verbalization is important for stability, and similarity is important for discoverability, but if verbalization hadn't happened, the perhaps because it goes without saying.
PS: A single threaded cpu doesn't need to spell out distributed computing primitives, either. It still may use signals, in many cases, even if implemented completely in software.
PPS: maybe there's an interesting parallel from natural language to the progression from imperative language over object oriented or declarative, to agent based programming. Bicameral Petri Nets ...
> Jaynes recognizes that consciousness itself is only a small part of mental activity and is not necessary for sensation or perception, for concept formation, for learning, thinking or even reasoning. Thus, if major human actions and skills can function automatically and unconsciously, then it is conceivable that there were, at one time, human beings who did most of the things we do – speak, understand, perceive, solve problems – but who were without consciousness.
In the spiritual teachings & traditions the wording would be different. I think they would refer to was Jaynes call "consciousness" as "self awareness"; and then assert that "consciousness" is prior to any of that. For example in the dream state we are typically not in control, nor are we aware it's a dream.. yet when we "wake up" we remember having dreamed and having "been there".
In fact I'd argue that we DO many times of the day every day... speak and act without much self awareness. And yet, we remember afterwards and then claim those moments as something we did.
> In short, Jaynes claims that men in the age of the Iliad learned to speak, read, and write, as well as conduct their daily lives, yet remained nonconscious throughout their lives.
Maybe they were indeed much less "self-aware" as we are today, which again is not same as saying not conscious.
edit: it seems to me this is the main contetion in science often times people just conflate mind activity and consciousness , as an (possibly not deliberate) attempt to chuck away the "hard problem of consciousness".
pps: funny enough it is actually an hypothesis, that for human beings to recongize consciousness is also something made possible through self awareness. For example, what is called "awakening" in spiritual teachings is supposed to be the natural state, hence, whatever "spiritual" state it is thought to be, is a self-refetential acknowledhgement of a change of one's perception of self and world. That is, "self awareness" allows for human beings to acknowledge consciousness (since we have to conceive of it).. whereas a dog or cat can be consciouss, and relatively free of worry, yet will never know themselves as "free of worry" (I mean in a rational / self aware way).
Jaynes addresses this critique in the revised Afterword:
> The most common error which I did not emphasize sufficiently is to confuse consciousness with perception... This type of confusion was at least encouraged back in 1921 by Bertrand Russell: “We are conscious of anything that we perceive.” And as his logical atomism became fashionable in philosophy, it became difficult to see it any other way. And in a later book Russell uses as an example of consciousness “I see a table.” But Descartes, who gave us the modern idea of consciousness, would never have agreed. Nor would a radical behaviorist like Watson, who in denying consciousness existed certainly did not mean sense perception.
Earlier in the book he makes a linguistic argument, claiming that his usage of "consciousness" is the only that unifies both the subjective (I am conscious) and objective (I am conscious of X) usages.
Beyond Jaynes and more broadly, I'd consider comparing his theses with that of McLuhan in Gutenberg Galaxy, namely McLuhan's theories about mass literacy. There seems to be a unifying element in that the structure of one's experience (of one's interpretation of their sensory inputs) is strongly related to the sorts of media they consume and to the sorts of epistemological "channels" available. The structure of knowledge and its dissemination (collectively oral? Or privately read? Think about problems such as "atomization of society" and a lightbulb should go off) seems to determine our internal experience to a large degree: older writers such as Walter Benjamin have touched on "movie consciousness" (although not strictly in those words), while more contemporary authors like Sarah Perry discuss "Social Media Consciousness" (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/09/07/social-media-conscious...).
These issues are only going to be more complex as time marches onward. Our understanding of neuroscience and the mind are just getting out of infancy with the optogenetic and CRISPR revolutions. It's going to be pretty cool to see how our definitions change as the science marches onward.
I'll give a concrete example: Persistent vegetative states. Prior to some recent research [0,1], people in these states were thought to be just, well, akin to vegetables. However, under MRI, it was found that there were conscious people 'trapped' in these bodies. Not for all, but for some. Communication out of their 'locked-in' state is now possible. In terms of Jaynes, this means that the acts of perception, concept formation, learning, thinking, and reasoning are not all directly linked; they can occur independent of each other.
Sure, you can argue if these people are conscious still or not, just like with Ulysses. But what we are now seeing is that the seat of the mind, our brains, can be parceled out. Bits of it can act independent of the other parts. That a mind is kinda, sometimes, in specific cases, sorta like Legos. That a human mind is divisible, that the idea of a mind is likely to encompass more than just humans, and that we're just in a small sub-set of 'minds'.
So, it's going to be fun to watch how our ideas of a 'mind', of 'consciousness', of 'personhood', all change as the data keeps rolling in.
Regardless of the historical evidence (or lack thereof) for his theory, I found his book very enlightening. It really helped me understand religion, schizophrenia and the split brain, showing why it would be so important to early human society and how it could came about, biologically and culturally.
Well if the theory is bullshit then surely it does not actually help anyone understand religion? So the Gods are speaking to people in the Iliad because it was actually one half of the brain speaking to the other. But the Odyssey allegedly is composed after the watershed moment, but Gods are still speaking to people. So the theory does not actually explain anything about religion.
The theory can "rationally" explain how Aphrodite speaks to Paris, but it does not explain how she teleports him from the battlefield to his chamber. So you still have to accept either supernatural events or that the story contains fictional elements. In which case the gods are much easier explained than through this theory, which have no other evidence.
And the narrative style of the Iliad (describing events and actions but not thought processes and introspection) is known throughout history.
There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. The Jaynes hypothesis, as I understand it, is that in early civilisations the majority of the population heard voices and it was considered normal.
If you see a reference in literature to a god speaking to someone, you can't easily tell whether that's fiction, metaphor, an exaggeration, a lie, a narrative style, or a literal description of a real experience.
For me one of the biggest problems with the theory is how people's perception (whether they hear voices or not) could change en masse, presumably because of a change in culture or education, because I don't believe there can have been a biological change over that period. Therefore, if people educated in the right way could hear voices I'd expect there still to be groups of people (members of some religious sect perhaps) who hear voices. So I'd like to see a detailed description of one of those groups. Then I could perhaps believe that the phenomenon was mainstream in ancient Greece.
> Therefore, if people educated in the right way could hear voices I'd expect there still to be groups of people (members of some religious sect perhaps) who hear voices.
My (entirely made up) theory here is that it's mediated through stress and exhaustion. Even today there's something called "brief psychotic disorder" where during a period of extreme stress somebody can experience delusions, hallucinations, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_psychotic_disorder
There are also a variety of religious traditions where modern people will hear the voice of god, enter trance states, channel spirits, etc. And we all know that sleep deprivation can produce all sorts of mental effects.
Given that civilization is mainly marked by improvements in life quality over time, it seems reasonable that the further back we go, the rougher people have it. So figure less sleep, worse nutrition, more desperation, more trauma, both direct and through the frequent death of children, friends, family.
So it seems reasonable to me that early on in civilization people were on average pretty bonkers. And social creatures that we are, that we'd be jointly bonkers; if our parents and siblings and and neighbors experience parts of themselves as the voice of particular gods, we would be likely to as well.
As our lives over generations get slowly better, the stress level drops. So too does the level of biologically driven psychosis. Which undermines the cultural elements that support and channel it, which might collapse relatively suddenly. (A reasonable modern parallel might be the European collapse in religious belief over recent generations.)
All pure speculation, of course. Jaynes's theory is certainly fun to think about, but we would have a hard time getting real experiments past an IRB.
For anyone reading this above comment, I believe wpietri has the gist of it.
To form a conception of this otherwise impossible to conceive-of social/psychological dynamic, one has to imagine people and civilization which has no reverse focus on the self whatsoever. There would be no collectively determined subjective language to refer to one another and to oneself. For example, I could say "NAME1 verbed NAME2!" and "NAME3 verbed NAME1!" Even when NAME3 is "myself" remember that there is no "myself." That is to say "I verbed NAME1" would not be a statement. NAME3 would be "me" without there being a concept of "me" whatsoever.
To make matters even more difficult, the "past tense" would be very shaky or even non existent without attributing an almost ritualistic re-occurrence to the action, and in addition to that, a driving force which was the "god" or spirit equivalent of that force. In Jayne's theory, the phase of "bicameralism" was a middle phase that allowed for hydraulic agricultural civilization without something that could be described as "literacy of the self."
To express day-to-day behavior, there would be no conceptual active participants to describe AT ALL. Instead, an external force would be used to explain most behaviors - namely gods, ancestors, what have you - who ever's voice would be identified with the behavior. The "hearing voices" part is both real and figurative, as it would be necessary without that neurological self having existed.
It came into existence, according to Jaynes, right along with the language "I" "myself" "you" and so on, and a careful reading of antique civilization's language would help one to notice that there truly was no such language structure to describe the self until that concept formed civilization-wide. Until then, there was no "it" except that which was attributed to a very real pantheon of voices and compulsions which moved people to act.
> There would be no collectively determined subjective language to refer to one another and to oneself.
Well said.
If it seems unlikely to anyone that society could transition to the state described to one where they have a full conception of self, just think of all the societies that didn't have any concept of zero. Yet they now use zero in their everyday life.
Like zero, self is a concept that now seems hard to imagine not having. Yet we know for a fact that societies at one time had no idea of zero.
>There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill.
The sane ones know better than to tell people that they hear voices.
>"Research supports the view that hearing hallucinatory voices is not by itself an indicator of mental illness. Estimates of the percentage of people in the general population without a known psychiatric illness who report auditory hallucinations vary widely. One review of seventeen surveys from nine countries found prevalence estimates as low as fewer than 1% to as high as 84%. Estimates of college students who have reported hearing hallucinatory voices have ranged from 13% to 71%. The wide range of estimates can be attributed in part to differences in definitions, survey instructions, and other methodological variations. Taking into consideration such methodological differences, some researchers estimate the prevalence of hearing voices in the general population to be between 5% and 28%, with 75% of people who report hearing voices to be psychologically healthy. Research suggests also that the prevalence of auditory verbal hallucinations varies by gender, age and culture."
"The wide range of estimates can be attributed in part to differences in definitions, survey instructions, and other methodological variations."
Kind of burying the lead.
"Taking into consideration" Making shit up
I'm more interested in how many people actually hear voices, not memory, interior monologue, or day dreaming. Unbidden commentary by a voice of another that is distinguishable from reality only by deduction.
Did you check through the referred papers at the end? It doesn't seem, via reading them, that they are just making shit up. You seem to be taking issue with a turn of phrase in the article, rather than the papers the article refers to. Are you making shit up and didn't actually check if they were making shit up?
Getting between 1% and 84% with differently phrased questions with different people doesn't mean that we can mash the results together and get some number in between.
There being an acceptable way to do so doesn't mean it tells you anything meaningful about the world.
Getting widely divergent numbers means to me that we don't have any accurate understanding.
>Getting between 1% and 84% with differently phrased questions with different people doesn't mean that we can mash the results together and get some number in between.
First stating the range within the existing literature is useful and common practice, at least within academic article writing.
It also doesn't generally mean that any numbers mentioned in the article thereafter are derived by the author mashing the results together and getting some number in between, they are picked from the papers that are referenced at the bottom of the piece.
So here, the wider range is being pulled from one paper that is a wide historical review, the narrower range and estimates for amount of people who hear voices without a recognized mental illness, are pulled from another paper, also a review of existing literature, but one that narrows the scope to more recent research. And then the numbers in the article for the amount of people who link their voices to their God, is the subject of another paper.
If you cannot work out by yourself why an academic article would include that the historical range of the subject under discussion is all over the place, then I am not sure that any attempt of leading you to it is going to help. Perhaps just have a bit more of a think about it. Have you read any of the referenced papers?
So, you do understand why they included the wider historical review then. At least you have got exactly the point they were trying to make by including it in the first place. The literature here historically has been shit and all over the place. Which is the kind of point you might want to make if you are putting forward some other papers based on more recent studies that both opens out the field and narrows the error bars somewhat.
Most imaginative people can imagine voices and often discuss things with themselves.
The acceptable version of Janes' hypothesis is that ancients attributed much of their imagination and interior life to objective reality.
A stronger version of Jayne's bicameral mind only requires that the ancient doubted ownership of certain of their emotions and trains of thought and discussed and wrote of them as real - the internal narrative, the train of thought, the stream of consciousness did not exist as a literary device and consequently the ancients did not possess it as a tool of thought.
As Gods and supernatural events were generally accepted in ancient times, the idea that internal dialogue was the voice of 'Gods' or deceased relatives was entirely reasonable as far as they knew back then.
The ancient might say the sea calls me home and the modern would understand the same emotion as guilt at not seeing ones parents.
Dreams are unbidden, uncontrolled internal imaginings we all have and anyone who stays awake long enough will start to hallucinate while awake.
Likewise stress and PTSD can induce unbidden thought, and uncontrolled imaginings and terrors.
We then attribute this to the unconscious mind, so we entertain a certain bicamerality.
Even so many of us moderns still entertain superstitions and use ritual to absolve ourselves from 'bad luck'. The Jungian hypothesis is that the unconscious responds to symbol and ritual and we require understanding our life course in heroic and mythic terms to properly become our own selves apart from our parents' views and social programming.
We are self aware enough to correlate certain cravings for particular sugary treats to advertising influencing us - is the desire for that product truly our own thought ?
We might say that a person lacks wit, empathy or is quick to anger - the ancient talks of them as under a planetary astrological influence or a symbolic event, a raven attending their birth, the reason for their behaviour - the same things are being communicated but the cause is differently attributed.
Jaynes proposes that minds were recently completely bicameral and did not posses our modern consciousness until bicamerality broke down - which is difficult to swallow, haven't we always been this human ?
In some sense you could say the vast majority of people hear voices, it's just that we conceptualise this as the "inner voice". It seems somewhat plausible that people could conceptualise this differently if there were a sufficiently strong cultural pressure. Perhaps when we hear words in our heads that we describe as talking to ourselves, ancient people would describe the same experience as gods speaking to them?
Not only ancient people. The concept of a “foreign” inner voice exists in islam and is called vesvese in Turkish. It is commonly attributed to being deceit from satan and as a child you get taught to actively repress it.
I tried to record myself, to capture my inner monologue, and found it really painful to listen to. I'm also not very good at role play or impersonation. But a professional performer, like a priest or entertainer, has to do it more than just habitually, and their manners become adapted and people might affect a whole dialectic. Whereas children rather randomly babel and come up with unique manerism that are uncommon and consequently deemed unfit. Further, if you grant that deus ex machina could be a bodyless voice in plays and earlier temple ceremonies, it stands to reason that people would consequently spin these messages further and reanalyse their inner monologue as word of god, not the least to shift responsibility, e.g. to the uber-ich, in Freud's terms.
I actually don't reject the theory that accounts of Gods appearing and speaking to people could be actual mental processes, guided by culture. I find this more believable than it is all fiction or lies (or that Gods have physical existence outside the human mind). But I do reject the bicameral hypothesis that we either have Gods speaking or we have consciousness, and that shift happened a particular point in time around the eight century.
I just finished reading the book. In it, he doesn't state that it happened at once everywhere. There was one passage that implied that the Aztecs were still mostly bicameral (or were in the immediate period after the bicameral breakdown) when the Spanish arrived in the 16th Century.
Also, the breakdown is not instantaneous, but happens over time. Once it starts, you get religion and oracles (the Oracle at Delphi for example) as the populous attempts to hear the gods' voices for direction. Oracles lasted for about a millennium after the initial breakdown in Greece, and over time, the gods' voices were head less and less.
He also states that modern remnants of the bicameral mind exist in hypnosis and schizophrenia (but in the case of hypnosis, how it works is very culturally dependent).
Surely the hypothesis has be to rejected in all its specificity but what new hypothesis can be proposed in the negation of the previous one? Could it be that the shift happened but not in the precise time or not all at once or the shift manifested in a more individualistic manner instead of a collective manner? Precisely in Lacanian psychoanalysis the symbolic consciousness (language) emerges as the reaction to an external traumatic encounter with the chaotic impossibility of the real. The hypothesis of bicameral mind may not have much scientific value but isn't it interesting to coincide so much with structuralism?
I'd be willing to bet that if you took a sample of people who'd trained themselves to lucid dream, you'd find a high proportion of people who heard voices. Specifically upon sleeping and waking.
I'd be a counter-example. I frequently dream lucidly. But I never hear voice or see anything even remotely resembling hallucinations. I'm also one of those individuals who are not susceptible to hypnosis (I've had a professional try and fail repeatedly).
There is no such thing as an individual who is not susceptible to hypnosis because all hypnosis is self hypnosis. In fact you had to hypnotize yourself into believing that you’re not susceptible to hypnosis, which proves that the opposite is true.
On another note—
Actually, you do hear voices. You just don’t notice them because you assume that they are your “inner voice.” If you just gave the process of thinking your thoughts a different label, you could easily call it “hearing a voice.” I’m not trying to be a smart ass here, don’t you think that this is true ? IMO, the idea that “thinking thoughts” and “hearing voices” are just different vague metaphorical labels for the same internal phenomenon makes a lot of sense.
Agreed. It's not for nothing we talk about "thinking out loud". That suggests that there is some kind of vague awareness that thinking and speaking are not fundamentally different activities (compare: "feeling aroused/jealous out loud" which doesn't even make sense)
Sometimes I wonder if human acquired the ability to "silently" think thoughts only recently. That the ability to silently think evolved much like how the ability to silently read evolved (even today I sometimes run into country folks who have little ability to read without audibly reading, or cannot transfer their password from phone to computer without broadcasting it to everyone around)
Presumably audible thinking and audible reading were the original forms. Then silent thinking and silent reading evolved because of their obvious utility (it's fitness enhancing to be able to hide your thoughts from your enemy blah blah)
Fascinating comment all around. I fully agree. It never occurred to me that “silent thinking” and “silent reading” are relatively new phenomena. But after reading this comment it’s so obvious that they are.
> There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill.
I've always wondered how much of that comes down to definition and perception?
I can "hear" my own thoughts, so I pretty much have "voices" in my head. That I recognize them as my own, probably isn't a given.
Because when I try to talk about this with friends&family, most of them don't even seem to understand what I'm talking about with "hearing yourself think" like they have no active thoughts of their own?!
As such I don't think it's something that has established itself on a large scale across the whole population, I think there are still very big differences between how individual humans think and perceive their own thinking, which by now we might label as being "somewhere on the spectrum".
I get that the analysis of the Iliad doesn't prove anything and it could just be a stylistic thing, but that doesn't mean the general story he lays out if totally wrong.
The theory is valuable because it's a good explanation for a lot of things and it doesn't disagree with the evidence. That's the purpose of all scientific theories, in Popper's philosophy of science, which is still the most relevant.
I haven't heard anything even half as compelling for a plausible evolution of social cohesion or the origin of consciousness, by which Jayne's means inner life.
I'm sure you can think of some things, but as long as it agrees with the available evidence and is the "best explanation", which includes some subjective and objective criteria, it's a valuable theory.
You specifically mention Popper. Poppers criteria of falsification states that it is not enough that a theory can explain everything. He observed that a lot of pseudoscience (astrology, marxism, freudian psychology at the time) really could be used to explain everything and couldn't really be disproved by any observation. Real scientific theories on the other hand could be used to make predictions which could be verified or shown to be wrong.
I read this over 20 years ago as a teenager. Looking back, now I feel the evidence for the bicameral mind is sketchy (evidence for the bicameral brain, i.e. left-brain/right-brain even more so).
However, I'm still enamored by the idea that consciousness is somehow related to (if not generated by) a mental model of the real world: while animals can only contemplate things that are within their senses and in the present, our mental model allows us to bring far away things (and things in the past or future) to immediate awareness, and thereby be able to contemplate them.
I only read the article so my understanding of Jayne is limited to that, but he doesn't seen to be saying that a mental model of the world is what gives us consciousness. I think many animals have a mental model of the world, with some of the most intelligent animals having a very sophisticated model. My understanding (of Jayne) is that humans have consciousness because they are able to use language to further contemplate and analyze a mental model of the world using metaphors and analogies.
One of the things that actually struck me about this theory was that it really boosts the idea that we should respect the minds of non-human animal mind because they may not experience the world differently than we do.
The bias about intelligence modeling on human intelligence is certainly one of familiarity. Other intelligence models that we can observe like cephalopods are about as foreign as you can imagine on the animalia tree of life. Who can say if some cephalopod aren't capable of more diverse communication via color fluctuations/rhythms and postures than we are with our vocal cords and body language?
At some point a human form of self awareness could have formed, but I think the key is not triggered by physiology alone. Feral humans exist and it's important to understand that there is an observed malleability of the mind which tapers with age. Such individuals have been found and in some cases rehabilitated into what we consider functioning, self-aware, cognitively capable humans.
Edit: It reminded me of this story I saw recently about a girl neglected until age 7. Today she is like a 2 year-old in a 20 year-old's body. Keep in mind there is nothing physically wrong with her other than neglect. Consciousness is emergent behavior. Having the physical elements alone is not enough.
When I first read it, I felt he was trying to find a solution for a problem that doesn't exist, that of; 'given humans are conscious and animals are not, what mechanism could bring about an incredibly sudden evolution of consciousness out of nowhere?'
The answer being that there was not a sudden evolution of consciousness out of nowhere. Human conscious states may be greatly more reflective that other animals, with a greater proportion of our neurons experiencing memory than sensory data, when compared to, say, a squirrel. However, the fundamental aspect of direct awareness is a shared trait, we are just directly aware of a far greater magnitude of internal states than the squirrel.
I think it also useful to semantically separate cognitive consciousness (i.e. Knowing and expressing the existence of your thought processes through arguably higher, more abstract thought processes - which might even go on recursively - knowing that I know that i am conscious, etc) from the externally unmeasurable 'conscious experience', (i.e qualia, the awareness of sensory or thoughts at the most essential level, 'seeing' what one sees, etc).
One could imagine a living being with one but not the other, for example qualia without cognitive consciousness (if I had to guess, I would imagine this experience to be similar to being drugged to the point of having no internal monologue, no complex thought process, but keeping your sensations and vision, etc, or being a barely-sentient animal in purely instictual mode of thought and action)
The opposite, cognitive consciousness without qualia - a.k.a the philosophical zombie - or a computer which can argue the existence of it's thoughts without feeling them is, I gather, a more controversial state of being.
What I find interesting is that in separating the two 'consciousness's, the former ends up taking almost all of the importance and the latter none - anything which can be externally measured ends up in the first category (which is a computable logic process), which leaves very little of utilitarian/evolutionary/algorithmic importance in the second. However, in much discourse about consciousness the latter takes a disproportionate role (i.e fear of losing your unmeasurable consciousness when teleporting, etc, though the cognitive consciousness, being by definition a logical and measurable process is theoretically preserved)
It is also non-falsifiable since it is impossible to prove or disprove whether ancient people were conscious or not. Or for that matter whether a present-day schizophrenic is conscious or not in the same sense.
Can we even prove whether a modern person is conscious? If so, shouldn't we be able to occasionally encounter such unconscious people, either occurring randomly by natural variation (especially given how recently the breakdown is claimed to have happened), or in people who had very little contact with language (hard but not impossible to come by)?
It’s easy to imagine that somebody raised by apes or otherwise totally isolated from humans would not be conscious, but without teaching them to think consciously how could we ever know?
Science aside, the breakdown-of-bicameral-theory has intriguing parallels to Lacan's theory of the mirror stage. In this (nonscientific - but we're learning the limits of scientific psychology) theory, infants are born unarticulated, a mass of limbs with no wholeness to them. In the mirror stage they discover they have a body which is articulated and which is subject to the gaze of others. This begins the split between the Imaginary and the Symbolic (social reality). Under bicameral conditions, men didn't see themselves as articulated and autonomous, let alone as objects of others' (or in the case of gods, the Other, who provides the law) gaze. They didn't have imaginations split from social reality.
I have early memories of a non verbal world, and in it, objects were not discrete. There were visually distinct elements, such things on the walls, and the walls themselves, but I had no concept of them being separate, or having names, or needing them, and didn't think about them. I just looked around. There was no chain of thoughts, just silent observation.
Likewise, I lacked object permanence. When my mother left the room, she ceased to exist; I did not think about her or imagine her being somewhere else.
There was no sense of time, no before or after that I can tell.I was just living in the moment.
Ironically I know now what time it was, my rough age, and even the season, because of the specifics of where my room was. It was afternoon nap time. The sunlight was streaming in my window, which happened only in fall/winter, as there was a summertime screen of trees. We later reoriented our house, so that lets me establish my age too. I was just turned two, and late to talk.
There must have been some sense of self by then, but I think that starts earlier, developing from kicking your legs and swinging your arms, and eventually realizing that you are a causation.
Talking about this memory damages it, because language and symbolism overlays the experience into an approximation. But it is very different from my other memories.
I think I held onto that memory because I had a later event that echoed it. Soon after we moved to another town, and there a whole bunch of people got the flu. People had not forgotten the Spanish Flu by the early 70s, and there was worries about another one. So they quarantined the hospital,put me in an oxygen tent, and I got to enjoy another timeless experience.
By that time I could think, though I didn't talk. During admittance, my mom was holding me while talking to a nurse, and I saw a person in an oxygen tent get pushed down a hallfway. I pointed and asked, "Can I be in one of those?" Years later when I related this to my mother, she laughed and said, "No you didn't, you were too young to talk like that."
I wasn't yet old enough to be told "you'll be here for a few days at least", or "mommy can't visit you(and she was pregnant)". The O2 tent was comprised of a yellowish, rubbery vinyl, and I remember touching it, and that it was a new experience for me. Couldn't really see anything through it, except diffuse sunlight. So I lay there facing the wall mostly, too sick to move, and spent a week with no internal narrative. I don't remember feeling lonely, scared, or bored. I remember a nurse checking on me(and probably changing my diaper), but not being awake at night.
FYI, this way of experiencing the world can be regained through meditation. This includes, from my experience:
- The quieter inner narrative and silent observation.
- The feeling that things not currently being experienced do not "exist" in the same way that things currently being experienced do. They exist in your imagination, and they exist in the sense that you correctly predict that if you were to observe them they would be there, but this knowledge feels ephemeral in contrast to the vivid detailed senses being experienced right now.
- The disconnectedness of time. The past only exists in your memories. If you recall a memory, that happens in the present, and is quite unlike the experience you had that formed the memory.
- Less of a sense of self. All your knowledge is available, but it feels third-person.
I can't relate to some of the other parts of your experience, though, like the lack of separation/names of objects, and the realization of causation.
As a caveat, I haven't been in this state of mind for a week or two, and as you say it doesn't play well with being remembered and analyzed.
Isn't the mirror stage really about discovering the unity of the body (as a kind of closed contour), thus permitting entry into the Imaginary? Then the Symbolic is initiated when these entities (of which the body's image is supposedly the first) start to be thought of in relation to each other, as in language. In that sense, I don't think you can have language without the Symbolic, so the analogy with Jaynes fails. Jaynes didn't claim that the bicameral phase meant undifferentiated reality without terms or objects.
As I understand it, Lacan is talking about individual psychology. It doesn't make sense to talk about a person whose mind is "fused" with social reality, unless you believe that reality is some kind of solipsistic hallucination.
About entering the Imaginary: you're in the right.
That said, there are a number of stages in the development of Lacan's thought (Malcolm Bowie counts three); he starts out ostensibly as a clinician but gradually expands his concepts outwards until they're a generalized theory of subjectivity.
From this point we can argue whether societies have structures somehow resembling subjectivity - as an economist I've spent a lot of time on the clock doing this. The thing is that as a clinical theory Lacan is way out there in the sophistic hallucination scale, even for the tiny minority that wants to resurrect psychodynamic therapy. Yet that's not what draws people to him, is it?
Well, I've never heard of Lacanian economics, but there are plenty of fields in which understanding a bit about Lacan is essential if you want to appreciate the canon.
Lacan as a person/analyst doesn't seem appealing to me, but some kind of psychodynamic therapy surely has a future in the long term, as insight accumulates into the mind. So Lacan seems like something to cautiously sift through for insight.
The social as a subjective entity, or at least an apparently somewhat integrated/regulated entity that individual humans can interact with (the big Other), certainly exists as a concept in people's minds. It's a very formalistic, broad-brush picture of social interactions, of a kind that would probably appeal to computer scientists. There's not a lot of scope for nuance at the level of individual interactions. From that point of view, I suppose it could resemble the crude regulative ideas that control the bicameral mind.
>In fact, the Iliad does not seem to mention any subjective thoughts or the contents of anyone’s mind. The heroes of the Iliad were not able to make decisions, no one was introspecting or even reminiscing. Apparently, they were noble “automata” who were not aware of what they did. Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no internal mind-space to introspect upon. Some lexical oddities in the Homeric text (such as the absence of a single word translating “consciousness”, “mind”, “soul”, or even “body”) led Jaynes to formulate the hypothesis that the Iliad was composed by nonconscious minds, which automatically recorded and objectively reported events, in a manner rather similar to the characters of the poem. The transition to subjective and introspective writings of the conscious mind occurred in later works, beginning with the Odyssey.
The Odyssey is not that later (for any evolutionary or great developmental force to have any effect). Plus it is strongly considered to be of the same authorship and the writing style is very much the same.
What's worse, unlike what the above excerpt claims, most of the Iliad deals with feelings of various kinds -- starting with the famous opening line: "Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus".
Does these parts seem to have any relation to the idea that "The heroes of the Iliad were not able to make decisions, no one was introspecting or even reminiscing. Apparently, they were noble “automata” who were not aware of what they did. Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no internal mind-space to introspect upon"?
> At this Jove was much troubled and answered, "I shall have trouble if you set me quarrelling with Juno, for she will provoke me with her taunting speeches; even now she is always railing at me before the other gods and accusing me of giving aid to the Trojans. Go back now, lest she should find out. I will consider the matter, and will bring it about as wish. See, I incline my head that you believe me. This is the most solemn that I can give to any god. I never recall my word, or deceive, or fail to do what I say, when I have nodded my head."
> As he spoke the son of Saturn bowed his dark brows, and the ambrosial locks swayed on his immortal head, till vast Olympus reeled.
> When the pair had thus laid their plans, they parted- Jove to his house, while the goddess quitted the splendour of Olympus, and plunged into the depths of the sea. The gods rose from their seats, before the coming of their sire. Not one of them dared to remain sitting, but all stood up as he came among them. There, then, he took his seat. But Juno, when she saw him, knew that he and the old merman's daughter, silver-footed Thetis, had been hatching mischief, so she at once began to upbraid him. "Trickster," she cried, "which of the gods have you been taking into your counsels now? You are always settling matters in secret behind my back, and have never yet told me, if you could help it, one word of your intentions."
(...)
> The old man tore his grey hair as he spoke, but he moved not the heart of Hector. His mother hard by wept and moaned aloud as she bared her bosom and pointed to the breast which had suckled him. "Hector," she cried, weeping bitterly the while, "Hector, my son, spurn not this breast, but have pity upon me too: if I have ever given you comfort from my own bosom, think on it now, dear son, and come within the wall to protect us from this man; stand not without to meet him. Should the wretch kill you, neither I nor your richly dowered wife shall ever weep, dear offshoot of myself, over the bed on which you lie, for dogs will devour you at the ships of the Achaeans."
Thus did the two with many tears implore their son, but they moved not the heart of Hector, and he stood his ground awaiting huge Achilles as he drew nearer towards him. As serpent in its den upon the mountains, full fed with deadly poisons, waits for the approach of man- he is filled with fury and his eyes glare terribly as he goes writhing round his den- even so Hector leaned his shield against a tower that jutted out from the wall and stood where he was, undaunted.
Like the phantom time hypothesis, bicameralism is a sort of massively revisionist theory that relies on wild interpretations of historical information. And both are pretty entertaining, regardless.
Unlike the phantom time hypothesis, you can find actual non-historic evidence for the bicameral theory of mind. The strongest of which you can actually experience yourself by triggering psychotic states (through the use of psychedelics or other practices).
There were times where I fully regressed into a psychological state perfectly described by Jaynes in his book, voices and all.
Perhaps there is stronger physiological basis for the non-historic evidence for the bicameral theory, but the historic evidence sure sounds like phantom time/New Chronology jury-rigging accounts to fit a wacky thesis.
Tbh Achilles hearing his other mind is a much more plausible, and realistic, explanation than pretending that invisible and all-powerful gods and deities spoke to him in "thoughts" with their psychic abilities.
It doesn't make it a good theory that you can come up with an even more ridiculous theory. It is not even clear if any of the events of the Iliad are historical beyond there probably was some kind of war. You can explain Gods talking to Achilles with this theory...but can you explain Achilles literally fighting a river-God and winning? Even if this is based on historical events, the Homeric epics are centuries removed. And the Iliad is even fairly realistic compared to the Odyssee.
Yeah, using bicameral theory to explain away myths and religions (and vice versa) completely ignores that there are loads of reported miracles and supernatural events that go beyond visions and voices. Bicameral theory makes a dull Occam's Razor, and myths and religion aren't great evidence for testing a scientific hypothesis.
> It doesn't make it a good theory that you can come up with an even more ridiculous theory.
But in that context "Gods talking to him" isn't the "more ridiculous theory" we came up with after, it was the original theory. Just like this:
> but can you explain Achilles literally fighting a river-God and winning
Doesn't make it "more plausible" for gods and deities to be involved. That "river-God" could have been any numbers of dangerous aquatic animals, which would be way more plausible than arguing "He fought an actual river god!".
I realize I'm ruffling a lot of theist feathers here, but any explanation that involves the "supernatural" should automatically be considered rather implausible, especially when there are much more plausible alternatives that do not involve the supernatural at all.
And the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky. Like the bicameral mind, the theories of Velikovsky are attractive to modern lay people because they give a "rational" explanation for mythology.
I think you're making a category error comparing quackish theories of planetary dynamics to questionable theories of mind.
Nobody really knows how the modern human psychological consciousness developed. To compare a theory about that, to a theory claiming as-near-as-we-can-tell-physically-wrong things about Jupiter and Venus and Earth's rotation and physical forces, is invalid.
When I read criticisms of Jaynes, they seem a lot like criticisms of Darwin's original, simplistic view of evolution. Saying the bicameral mind is not a perfect theory is uninteresting; hardly anything is a perfect theory. What matters is the specific criticism (do you have one?) leveled at it, and whether the bulk of Jaynes's ideas can be modified and extended, with another few decades or century's worth of knowledge, into something that's roughly (empirically tested to be) accurate.
Nobody takes Darwin's original expression of evolutionary theory as gospel today, but it's part of the scientific canon for a reason. It was incomplete and therefore misleading in some ways, but the core ideas are essentially taken as true today. We can see evolution in action through microbiology and genome analysis, even if some specific (narrow) ideas and predictions by Darwin and early primitive evolutionary theory have been falsified.
Or look how relativity developed. First people were tinkering around with ideas about electromagnetism, discovering things about light, then came special relativity, which led to a bunch of problems, which led to general relativity. And even GR is wrong, since it doesn't currently accommodate quantum theory. That doesn't make special or general relativity wrong, so much as it makes them incomplete. They may be wrong in an absolute sense, but they're still quite useful. Even special relativity, being the wrong-er of the two, has some important "first step" realizations, like speed of light being invariant. Even the ether theory, now pretty much falsified, might end up having some contribution to future physics, if it turns out that there's some substrate (in a sense, though it would probably be neither matter-like nor light-like, and instead coupled to matter and light in interesting ways) that binds things together.
The difference is the purported evidence for the theory does not hold as all, as opposed to the theory of natural selection which has observable and reproducible evidenced in the form of breeding. You are kind of turning the burden of proof on its head by claiming that the hypothesis could develop into an better theory. You can say than about any unproven hypothesis.
Some parts of the theory are unfalsifiable (e.g that ancient people did not have self-awareness) which is impossible to disprove, which means it is not a scientific theory at all. The parts based on "evidence" is easy to disprove: Take the theory that gods speaking to Achilles is the bicameral mind. According to the theory the Odyssey is composed after the watershed moment...but gods are still talking to people. So you need another explanation for that (e.g. it is actually fiction). But in that case you can apply the same explanation to the gods speaking in the Iliad, so the theory does not give you any additional explanatory power.
I highly recommend anyone trying to understand this subject read the papers of Dr. Mica Endsley, former Chief Scientist of the US Air Force.
She makes a distinction between the 3 levels of Situational Awareness and Situational Understanding. Here are the 3 levels of Situational Awareness she proposed:
I think this paper, and others of hers, should be recommended reading for any AI researcher. I also think "Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" should be recommended as well.
FYSA, the research community seems split on Dr. Endsley's theories, though there seem to be a majority that view them as correct, based on my own informal experience.
* Endsley, M. R. (1995). Toward a theory of situation awareness in dynamic systems. Human Factors, 37(1), 32-64.
* Endsley, M. R. (1995). Measurement of situation awareness in dynamic systems. Human Factors, 37(1), 65-84.
* Endsley, M. R., & Garland, D. J. (Eds.). (2000). Situation awareness analysis and measurement. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
* Endsley, M. R., & Jones, W. M. (2001). A model of inter- and intrateam situation awareness: Implications for design, training and measurement. In M. McNeese, E. Salas & M. Endsley (Eds.), New trends in cooperative activities: Understanding system dynamics in complex environments (pp. 46-67). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
* Endsley, M. R. (2006). Expertise and Situation Awareness. In K. A. Ericsson, N. Charness, P. J. Feltovich & R. R. Hoffman (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (pp. 633-651). New York: Cambridge University Press.
* Endsley, M. R., & Jones, D. G. (2012). Designing for situation awareness: An approach to human-centered design (2nd ed.). London: Taylor & Francis.
Hm.. Is Functional Neurology (the journal in which this published) related in any way to the field of functional neurology? I think the latter is a rebranding of chiropractic neurology, which some would argue purports some less than scientific ideas.
Fair enough, I have elaborated my criticism in other comments. The reference to Hemmingway might seem flippant, but my point was that the Iliad is told in a certain genre or style where thoughts and mental states or not directly described, only events and actions. This is a particular style of narrative which is not confined to a specific stage in human development but exist throughout history, and even today is pretty popular ("show, don't tell"). Movies generally follow this form and voice-overs explaining the characters thoughts are the exception rather than the rule.
So to claim that the narrative style of the Iliad shows that the people does not have a concept of mind and did not have self awareness is just not justified. The narrative style certainly does not prove that, but on the other hand it is impossible to disprove that Achilles lacked consciousness. Which puts this theory into the realm of the nonfalsifiable.
This is akin to the crackpot theory that the ancient Greeks were not able to perceive the color blue, because that word does not occur in Homer. This is just an incredibly naive understanding of the connection between mind and language. While Homeric Greek might not have such a word, there is absolutely no evidence that their sensory system was different.
Furthermore, taking the Iliad as face value is highly problematic. While historians generally agree that there probably was a war, there is no evidence that any of the persons actually existed or existed at the time. The characters might be legendary or mythological. Note that basically all of them descends from gods a few generations back. Achilles is literally half-god. We know that Helen was worshiped as a deity in Sparta for example. If she was actually a mythological figure, we don't really need some complicated psychological theory to explain how one mythological being could talk to another!
So I think it is fair to say the theory have a naive approach to literature.
The second part of the criticism is that the theory does not actually explain anything. The bicameral mind is supposed to explain how people at the time interacted with Gods. It was actually just the other half of the brain giving advice. OK, but the theory also claims that the the integration of the mind happens some time between the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey (because Odysseys clearly do have a concept of mind with first-person narrative and so on). Which means the theory can't explain the gods appearing in the Odyssey.
I'm sure he was credible enough in the field of psychology, but that does not automatically make him an expert in classical literature or religion, which is where he finds the purported evidence for the theory. Therefore the theory have to be judged on its own merit, not just the academic title of the originator.
Both Jaynes and Pauling are extremely intelligent and not gullible people. Why are we so quick to dismiss their "Crackpot" theories, simply because they don't fit with the dominant paradigm?
It is quite possible for intelligent people to be wrong, especially when they venture outside their area of expertise.
And the cliche about "dominant paradigm" ignores the actual reasons the theory is rejected. Quantum Theory shows that a theory will be accepted even if fundamentally breaks with the dominant paradigm - as long as it can be confirmed by evidence. So that is not really the issue.
Isn't the question taking what it supposed to prove for granted (that we do a facile dismissal of those theories? Who said we didn't do a thorough dismissal?)
Well, is it "simply because they don't fit with the dominant paradigm" or rather because they have been discredited time and again?
The way that Jaynes "carves up consciousness" as Daniel Dennet puts it in one review, is very different than the way that a reflexive intellectual instinct would choose to. The taxonomy that Jaynes decides upon is distinctive from our mental reflexes, and not at all the same as what nearly everyone begins with.
I feel that this "Bicameral" consciousness discussion keeps reappearing on Hacker News in part because it is crucial for us to create a proper distinction between these terms - AI is rapidly going to become conscious in exactly the way Julian Jaynes suggests we became "conscious" and that consciousness is very much different than what we think it is (or must be) for AI to become generally aware of itself.
I suggest that anyone who is working towards AGI MUST discover the distinctions that Julian Jaynes made. That does not mean that his theory regarding our consciousness is correct, but merely that his ways of describing "self-awareness" or whatever other term could be applied is crucial to getting a grip on what the true mechanism of "the self" is in the truest engineering sense. That is to say, that if the "self" is the licensed self-aware driver of a vehicle and the engine and transmission is the remainder of cognition, than the order of development was actually from "self-driving car" into human driven vehicles - metaphorically speaking.
Basically, up until recently, we just DID, and in attempting to describe WHY we were forced to invent metaphor until collectively we were able to create the language necessary to actually BE self aware. Without the language, we actually were NOT self aware. We were self-driving cars with no human drivers. The human driver only arrived after there were ways of describing "him."