![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Julian Jaynes Updated
Jun. 5th, 2020 12:48 amSeveral decades ago, I read Julian Jaynes’s bizarre and fascinating book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which, to summarize briefly, argues that until about 3000 years ago, people were not conscious, and heard the voices of their gods telling them what to do, the gods’ voices coming from one area of the human brain, with the hearing mind — not truly conscious — in the other hemisphere. Aside from various other objections, Jaynes’s 1970s level of understanding of neuroanatomy turned out to be, shall we say, oversimplified.
I remember saying to someone else who had read the book that I thought that Jaynes was onto something, but I did not believe that the change was as drastic as he hypothesized.
Someone in my network linked to an article by Scott Alexander with an updated and refined version of the idea. I highly recommend the article, which I won’t try to summarize at any great length. Briefly, Mr. Alexander thinks that people thousands of years ago were conscious, and did not have bicameral minds in Jaynes’s terms, but that they did hear the voices of their gods, like small children with imaginary friends (also noted by Jaynes, as I recall). What silenced the gods was that people developed a theory of mind, and came to think of themselves and others as having minds, so that when they heard their own thoughts, they heard them as their own thoughts, not as voices of their gods.
It is at least an interesting attempt, and one more believable than full bicameralism, to apply psychology to account for some ancient behavior and writings.
I remember saying to someone else who had read the book that I thought that Jaynes was onto something, but I did not believe that the change was as drastic as he hypothesized.
Someone in my network linked to an article by Scott Alexander with an updated and refined version of the idea. I highly recommend the article, which I won’t try to summarize at any great length. Briefly, Mr. Alexander thinks that people thousands of years ago were conscious, and did not have bicameral minds in Jaynes’s terms, but that they did hear the voices of their gods, like small children with imaginary friends (also noted by Jaynes, as I recall). What silenced the gods was that people developed a theory of mind, and came to think of themselves and others as having minds, so that when they heard their own thoughts, they heard them as their own thoughts, not as voices of their gods.
It is at least an interesting attempt, and one more believable than full bicameralism, to apply psychology to account for some ancient behavior and writings.
