Chapter 1: What is the bicameral mind hypothesis proposed by Julian Jaynes?
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Hey there, guys. It's Josh. And for this week's Select, I'm going with our August 2022 episode on the bicameral mind theory. It is mind-blowing, mind-expanding, mind-flabbergasting. It's just a really good episode. It's just really me and Chuck sitting around having a really interesting conversation about some really interesting stuff.
So if you feel like expanding your mind right now, I would say this is a great episode to listen to. Enjoy.
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Chapter 2: How did ancient civilizations perceive their consciousness?
And this stuff, what we're going to talk about today, it's based on a HowStuffWorks article that Robert Lamb wrote. And I'm not at all surprised that Robert Lamb is into this. But I just want to note that I've heard about this years and years and years ago and have been meaning to do an article or an episode on it. So I don't want you to think this is something you just stumbled across.
This is actually the fruition of years of planning and hope and and dreams coming to pass in maybe the best episode we'll ever make.
And, of course, Robert, and not Robert Lamb, the lead singer of the band Chicago. Just to make it clear.
There's another Robert Lamb, and he was in Chicago?
Still is in Chicago.
Is that Peter Cetera's stage name?
No. Cetera was the bass player and part lead singer, along with Robert Lamb, who played keyboards and also sang lead on some. And before Terry Kath died, he played guitar and also sang. So they had three singers in the early days of Chicago. That's just confusing.
But none of them are our colleague, Robert Lamb, who, along with our colleague Joe, have been doing stuff to blow your mind for many, many years. Another great show.
Yeah, and I didn't check, but I would place a substantial amount of money on the idea that they have their own episode on this, Julie and Jane's Bicameral Mind.
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Chapter 3: What evidence does Julian Jaynes use to support his hypothesis?
history, in prehistory, that would say like, hey, this is evidence of consciousness. And Julian Jaynes took that up and he did it as an outsider, which was a huge strike against him because automatically legitimate scientists are like, well, I can't build upon this theory. Possibly this man is actually in my field of consciousness studies. But the thing is, is this hypothesis is so well liked.
It's just roundly liked. People just like it. It's just such an interesting hypothesis that it just won't go away. It hasn't gone away. And in fact, there's like a Julian Jaynes Institute. There's like groups that have sprung up based on this hypothesis. And what he says in a very small nutshell is that sometime about 1,000, 2,000 years ago,
Humans became conscious in the way that we understand consciousness today. They developed the ability to think about thinking. They developed the ability to think about that other people are thinking. They developed basically what's called subjective introspection. And then as a result of that, they... almost automatically gained free will and volition.
So what he's saying is that if we went back in time in the way back machine, Chuck, and we met somebody who lived 3,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, they would not be a conscious human in the way that we understand conscious humans.
That's right. And he thinks it was a learned thing. And the idea that he throws down is that our mind, our brain is or was rather very important, was because it no longer is bicameral, which means split into two parts. And we'll get to some actual science about the hemispheres of the brain later on.
But in this case, he means split into two parts where you have a part that makes decisions and a part that follows and that neither one of them were conscious. And here's where ā I get a little tripped up. Okay. Right out of the gate. Sure.
Is basically, he says that instead of an internal dialogue, which we all have and which indicates a consciousness, like us talking to ourselves, us saying things like everything from like, you know, hey, get up and go do this, to just internally thinking about things like humans do, that instead of that dialogue, We were sort of like human zombies in that we were creatures of habit.
We had routines and behaviors that we followed to a T. And whenever something disrupted that behavior, which is when like a conscious mind you would think would speak up, that instead of that ā An external agent, in this case, they thought they were gods, would enter their brain and create an auditory hallucination.
Yeah, and that they unquestioningly obeyed that auditory hallucination. And that's what helped them get through novel situations that they didn't have, like, basically a prescribed script for. You know, a mindless, automatic thing. Something new came along that got in their way. This god would speak to them and say, go around that rock. It wasn't there yesterday. Don't worry about it.
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Chapter 4: How did the emergence of language influence human consciousness?
All right. Here's, I guess, where I had my first issue kind of grasping this is there were no gods speaking to them and guiding them. This was just their internal dialogue. They just didn't know it.
Yes, yes, yes. There was no gods. But to them, and this is a really important point, to them, it definitely was a god talking to them or an ancestor talking to them. And in the same way that if an actual god got into your brain and like was speaking to you and you responded to it, if you could have looked at their brains lighting up, presumably in like a wonder machine,
it would respond the same way. So it was entirely real to them. And the same way that a placebo effect has real effects on your body, this would have been the same thing. And then in addition to that, it was culturally supported. Everyone that they knew believed the same thing, that the gods were talking to them. And so that just lent support to this idea so that no one questioned it.
It was just that's the way it was.
Well, so this, I guess, brings me to Let me macro this out a little bit in my own dumb brain. And it may just be 21st century person thinking that I'm engaging in. But if the idea is that... Before this, there was no consciousness, but what we're really saying is there actually was consciousness. They just didn't recognize it as such.
Is that the whole point was that if you do not recognize it as consciousness, therefore you are not conscious?
Yes, because you're not experiencing consciousness in any way that we would recognize as you being conscious. You're just kind of ā Julian Jaynes referred to it.
I see what this guy is doing now.
scholarly discussion on, like, okay, what did James mean exactly? How literal was he? Because he used words like automaton. He never called them zombies. Other people called them, like, zombies. Yeah, they didn't.
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Chapter 5: What role did agriculture play in the development of consciousness?
They didn't think about thinking. They didn't have what we would recognize as consciousness. And in the terms that James is describing consciousness, which is a really narrow definition of consciousness. And then on top of that, he also goes to great lengths to say, hey, I understand that you're going to get all up in a tizzy that I'm saying that these people weren't conscious.
I'm not talking about consciousness in general. And I think that you overestimate just how much consciousness makes up our lives.
Okay. How about we take a break?
Okay.
I'm going to go rip a bong. Kidding. We'll take a break. We'll come back and we'll talk about lots of other stuff right after this. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential.
Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, this is Robert from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. Joe and I are both lifelong Star Wars fans, so we're celebrating May the 4th with a brand new week of fun, thought-provoking Star Wars-related episodes.
Join us as we tackle science and culture topics from a galaxy far, far away, such as the biology of Tauntauns and Wampas on the ice planet Hoth, or the practicality and corporate business sense of the Sith Rule of Two. Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Do you remember when Diana Ross double-tapped Lil' Kim's boobs at the VMAs? Or when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people? I know what you're thinking. What the hell does George Bush got to do with Lil' Kim? Well, you can find out on the Look Back At It podcast. I'm Sam Jay. And I'm Alex English.
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Chapter 6: How does modern consciousness differ from the bicameral mind?
Right. So I think that's where I am now. But ā I do think it's very interesting in that he ā I mean I think a lot of this is very interesting. But I think it's interesting that he thought around the first or second millennium BC is when things to him changed and a consciousness began to emerge because of ā well, eventually language, but specifically metaphor ā
which is to say that all of a sudden we could make analogies in our brain. We could link things together. We saw ourselves as almost as if they were characters. Ourselves were characters that had like choices that they could make as characters. Yeah. And as these things like connected in the brain ā then it created just an effect, like a domino effect, basically.
Yeah.
Where all of a sudden, we could work out our own solutions, or we knew we were capable of working out our own solutions. And then it wasn't God saying, walk around the rock. They realized it was ourselves making the decision to walk around the rock.
Yeah.
Yes, but in part of that, that also required them to be able to reflect on the idea, like you said, that they were able to now make their own decisions, right? And you said something earlier where you were talking about your own internal dialogue where you think, hey, I should get up and go outside for a second.
Yeah.
Like, that's different, right? You're thinking about you, yourself, and you realize that you are thinking about yourself. That's modern consciousness. What somebody who was a bicameral person during this time would have thought is, get up and go outside. And they would stand up and go outside without questioning because God had just instructed them to do that. So it must be important.
And they didn't think about where it came from. They definitely didn't think it was from themselves. And they didn't reflect on it. They just obeyed it. That's Jane's position. And that if you compare those two things, you're talking about two totally different forms of mental life.
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Chapter 7: What scientific studies relate to the bicameral mind theory?
But I think his contention is that it was a hive mind all working together as automatons that allowed this stuff to get accomplished and not the conscious mind.
Right. And he didn't, I don't think he ever used it as like, I don't think he ever explicitly said that it was an emergent property of a hive mind. But that's kind of what he was describing. Kind of like if you take one stone cutter and one stone mason and three stone carriers and multiply that unit by 500 and give it a year, you have a ziggurat built.
Right.
That that's just that's just all those people knew what to do. They knew their position and their place and they just did it. And so, yeah, you could totally do that with people who are thinking in this way and weren't conscious. You could probably actually get it done more easily than you could with people who stopped and thought, I'm above this. this work is not suited for me.
I should be doing something else. Or why is the foreman being so mean to me today? Like they didn't think like that under Jane's hypothesis. So they would probably get the work done more efficiently, at least more quietly, I would guess.
Oh, I mean consciousness proposer brought along a whole host of problems. It's true. I imagine if you're the ruling class. I think one thing that's interesting is that you mentioned about what ā is it Jane's? Not Jines, Janes. Yeah. Janes thought about ā I love Robert Lamb's Janes of Dixon joke in here, by the way. That was mine. Oh, that was yours? Mm-hmm.
Oh, what a way to go. Thanks.
You said Janes says, and then in parentheses you put ha. It's a very good joke. But what Janes said was that ā And it's something you mentioned earlier was that consciousness, I think we think consciousness plays too big of a role in what is actually a life that can largely be still automatic on a lot of levels. Yeah. And this is from the actual book in 1976. And it's a little mind-blowing.
I kind of like it. Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we're conscious of because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. It's like asking a flat ā and this is where it kind of comes home to me. It's like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of the bicameral mind hypothesis today?
Sensible human. If you do it like that, you can just be on autopilot because you've done it so many times. But when you do something like drop a fork, that's out of the norm. That's a novel thing that doesn't happen every time. And so in the bicameral mind ā God would have said, I command thee to pick up thine fork, butterfingers, and you would lean over and pick up the fork, and that was that.
Instead, you might not even think about picking up the fork. You might do that automatically, but it's still out of the norm. It's still different, and you have to kind of think about it a little more than just unloading the dishwasher. Now, if you take that dishwasher metaphor, Chuck, and you realize that three, five, 9,000 years ago, there were no dishwashers. There was no ice cream scoop.
There was no cookie scoop. There was no avocado splitter. There was nothing like that. Wait, what's that? Is that a thing now? Yeah, you don't have one of those? No. Oh, I'll send you one. You're missing out. It's a multi-tool for cutting avocados, getting the pit out, and then slicing them as you scoop them out. They're essential, as a matter of fact.
All right. I do pretty well with my knife, but I would love to see one of these.
Okay. I'm going to get you one for Christmas. All right. Okay. So the point is that, like, there wasn't a big variety of stuff. So there wasn't that many novel situations. Like, we encounter novel situations, like, almost constantly. That's just modern life. And that's the basis of Jane's, like, hypothesis thatā
The reason that consciousness evolves is because we started to get faced with more and more novel situations on a much more frequent basis. So maybe it became inefficient for God to be talking to us every 30 seconds. Or maybe we just got better at thinking for ourselves and consciousness kind of evolved out of that. But the point is,
Life was much less complex back then, so you could have something like a bicameral mind. You could have somebody who consciousness hadn't evolved in yet because they hadn't been introduced to enough experience in life.
And with that experience came the fork falling on the floor, in other words?
Yeah, or, you know, there's a lot more dishes to put away and much more different dishes to put away rather than just forks. You know what I'm saying? Or you have one fork and you just carry it with you everywhere. You know, like you don't have to think about that. There was just less stuff to think about is what I'm saying.
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