So wow could it be proven wrong, or, less absolutely, what would be (not necessarily absolute) evidence that it is wrong?
Unless someone can answer that, then it’s not science and it’s fair to call it “not even wrong”.
Best is to start with his notion of “bicameral mind.” There is now science which, I think, confirms that auditory hallucinations are opposite-hemisphered from normal speech and hearing. (Yes, that’s unclear – I certainly do not claim to be an expert … and even to get this far depends on recent advances in brain research.)
The unique nature of human language, and its specificity to a single hemisphere does, IMO, render plausible the notion that a “hallucinatory” mode might arise in the opposite hemisphere.
Given this, Jaynes draws connections between related mental modes: auditory hallucinations, schizophrenia, hypnosis, glossolalia, some modes of ancient prophecy, and modes of religion. Does all this seem plausible? Interesting?
Now obviously some people do speak in tongues, do have auditory hallucinations, are easily hypnotisable(); and scientists are studying these phenomena for correlation with hemisphere. So far, proven and testable science. Wikipedia writes “In the late 1990s, Jaynes’s ideas received renewed attention as brain imaging technology confirmed many of his early predictions.” ( – some skeptics don’t believe in hypnosis – is that true of the skeptics in this thread?) When one sees these mental modes, one witnesses the “bicameral mind.” “Not even wrong” indeed! :smack:
But of course Jaynes goes much further. Let’s start by weakening his thesis somewhat and assert just that bicameralism was more common 3000+ years ago than it is now. (It might be interesting to discuss why Jaynes made the stronger claim, but because of the extreme skepticism shown in this thread I think it better to start by asking about the weaker claim. Is it still nonsense? “Not even wrong”?)
Jaynes provides much evidence of bicameral mentality from ancient history. I won’t give examples: those eager to quibble will find much to quibble about when drawing inferences from ancient writings; and you can review these examples by (gasp!) rereading Jaynes’ book! The relationships he shows among superego, religion and hallucination struck me as insightful. Certainly it is easy to read ancient works like the Iliad and conclude that “those people didn’t think like we do.” “Demon possession” seems to have been quite common in Jesus’ Judaea compared with today. If Jaynes is wrong, then why is that?
I believe the dismissive answers given OP’s question are wrong, and did my duty by saying so in this thread. However I am neither expert nor eloquent. Here is a Wikipedia article if OP wants a less dismissive viewpoint.
How much more common? In order to be a useful hypothesis, wouldn’t it have to be much, much more common? That is, the vast majority of people operating at the bicameral level. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make that much difference and wouldn’t be a dominant feature of a culture.
Then we ask: How could this hypothesis be proven? Maybe we can search for records of early contact with primitive populations, like Australian Aboriginals, to see if that mind state was predominantly present. If it wasn’t, that would seem to pretty much blow the hypothesis away, wouldn’t it? Otherwise, you’d have to postulate some considerable contact with post-bicameral peoples, and that does not seem to have been the case.
You probably missed the exchange upthread: Jaynes associated bicameralism with “a final stage in the evolution of language” and early civilization, but not with pre-Neolithic cultures like Australia. Thus Jaynes would give a 3rd mode of mentality to early humans, distinct from both bicameralism and subjective consciousness. Jaynes was likely partly wrong about this relationship, but still it might be better to look to, say, Aztecs or Incas for comparison.
According to Jaynes, there were cycles in Egypt and the New World: a civilization arose with associated bicameralism, the civilization and its associated mentality broke down, then another bicameral civilization arose. BTW, although I don’t think Jaynes claims the connection, I’ve thought the peculiar way both Aztecs and Incas succumbed to the Conquistadores might be evidence of bicameral minds.
The stories, if true, of demon possession in the Gospels, and the relative ease with which such demons were dismissed, give very strong support to Jaynes. The nature of early religions is key evidence, as Jaynes develops at length. Jaynes also shows evidence by comparing bicameral and conscious prose – the Iliad and the Odyssey are well-known examples but Jaynes has others. We might expect language structural differences, e.g. verb markers but AFAIK no linguist has published anything like that in support of Jaynes.
But thanks. At least you seem to have gone beyond “Not even wrong.”
One simple way to understand how underappreciated Jaynes is to consider the nature of “consciousness.” In SDMB threads on this topic Dopers talk past each other. Yet Jaynes gives very clear and useful descriptions of what he means by subjective consciousness. That much alone should be read and appreciated.
No, I understand. He outlines 3 phases:
Late Pleistocene/Neanderthal mind --> bicameral mind --> conscious mind.
But the bicameral mind came out of early civilizations as they rose, contracted and rose again. So we look for peoples who never went thru that process and who had no contact with peoples how did. If his hypothesis is correct, those people should still being the pre-bicameral mode, or Late Pleistocene mode. That’s why the Australian Aboriginals make good candidates.
Now, if we suppose that those people were conscious, then we have a situation where we go from conscious -> bicameral -> conscious and Occam isn’t going to be very happy with that.
I’ve read the book a few times over the years, the last tome several years ago. It’s continuously impressed me as one of those ‘meta’-type books that draws on a huge variety of evidence from wide-ranging areas and pulls them together under the umbrella of one big idea. By so doing it provides an example of how seemingly disparate things can be drawn together by a heretofore unseen common thread. Which makes it All the more disappointing of course when you consider the unavoidable notion that the common thread is very very flimsy.
Nevertheless, even though the big idea is thoroughly dubious, some of the side ideas are compelling. One that has always really stood out for me is Jayne’s analysis of metaphor and the idea that consciousness is essentially created by metaphor. He says something like the 'self in ‘mind-space’ is a metaphor of the body in physical space. That is an idea that really meshes with other concepts in the philosophy of consciousness and in cognitive science, and even in neuroscience. I’ve read a number of other books about these things and the idea of consciousness as metaphor- either explicitly described as such or strongly implied-pops up over and over. To be sure Jayne’s was not the first person to invoke that (e.g. the homunculus) but he did descibe what was for me at least a very accessible and convincing way of thinking about it.
Which begets the question: so what is it that groks the metaphor? Or is it turtles all the way down?
A lot of these ideas seems to enjoy the idea of recursive definitions, but unless there is a base case, it remains pretty useless. It is the base where the really hard bit lives.
From another anthropologist’s work (can’t remember his name at the moment), it’s the interconnectedness of the various parts of the brain. He postulated that a Neanderthal mind was similar to a Homo sapiens’ mind in certain ways. The Neanderthal could think:
My daughter is beautiful
-or-
That flower is beautiful.
but not:
My daughter is as beautiful as a flower.
And that is simply because the brain is processing “flower”, and “daughter” in different regions, and those regions are not interconnected.
Nothing too revolutionary about that… most scientists will tell you that the power of the human brain comes not only from it’s size, but the amount of interconnectedness.
BTW, I was NOT endorsing that idea, just reporting it. I found it interesting, even if impossible to prove at this point.
The problem with the theory as consciousness is something that results from going beyond hunter-gather stage and then the literacy stage is that it happens all over the world at different times… Some groups only recently encountered larger groups, literacy, etc.
One interesting question I wonder about is civilization, or at least agriculture, as a stage in human development. We have the native Americans, who split from Asia over 14,000 years ago (depending on whose theory you believe) yet managed to densely populate two continents and develop multiple instances of agriculture and several higher level civilizations in that time. Yet the same people, inhabiting much of Africa, Asia, and Europe for 70,000 years beforehand, took almost 60,000 years to reach the same point of development.
(I say 70,000 because there was some item I read once about a serious DNA bottleneck in human development about then - possibly the sudden evolution of a much more intelligent or adaptive group that rapidly overtook all others?)
Is this path to agriculture and civilization an indication that the brain was still evolving? Or the language or conceptual thinking that drove developments like agriculture was still evolving? Jared Diamond in “Guns, Germs and Steel” suggests that luck was the driving factor, but even with climate variation it’s hard to believe there was not some adaptable environment where humans and their pet plants could coexist for a few thousand years to produce agriculture, as happened in middle America within 10,000 years.
As for illusions, hallucinations etc. - I wonder if schizophrenia and similar conditions could also account for some early civilizations’ descriptions of seeing Gods and hearing voices. (Wikipedia suggests the incidence can be around 1/2%) We have similar situations in recorded history, where various people have “heard voices” (Joan of Arc comes to mind) and attribute them to the god(s) or demons of their culture. We don’t need a special configuration of everyone’s brain, just a reason why some people have hallucinations.
But they were ALL the same people. Just because the Amerindians got to the Americans relatively recently doesn’t mean they were starting from a more primitive state.
The most parsimonious answer is that it coincided with the retreat of the last Ice Age. Still, its a bit of a mystery and I don’t believe there is a scientific consensus on the answer.
The idea, as I understand it, is that there is no “hard bit” and no discrete “base”. “Consciousness”, so labeled, is a composite activity that is built up from metaphors derived largely from physical experience. Jaynes more or less says (again, as I remember) that the metaphors are created by language, which allows us to label things in one area of understanding, and then redeploy those labels in different areas of understanding, and thus understand one thing in terms of another. In this way we use metaphors of physical experience to understand mental experience. Hence the deployment of words describing physical processes to also describe mental ones. For example, “See” what I mean? Jaynes further goes to say (and now I’m going to have to reread this book to “see” if I’m “remembering” (as in putting the members back together again) it accurately) that this process has a kind of “spill-over” effect, such that aspects of the previously understood thing that were not originally seen in the thing to be understood get carried along anyway. If I “see” what you mean there must be someone/something doing the “seeing”, and there must be some space in which the seeing is happening. As more and more of the mental is understood in terms of the physical, and more and more spill over happens, consciousness is built up.
Putting a neuroscience-y spin on it, the metaphors can be seen as underlain by, as John Mace alludes, partially overlapping activity of neural circuits that process different things. Circuit A may process things that have to do with flowers, while circuit B processes things that have to do with my daughter. When part of A is simultaneously activated with part of B, I am understanding – or making a metaphor of - A in terms of B. Indeed, I think Jaynes even says something like understanding something is synonymous with arriving at a metaphor for it. Even if you don’t agree with it, or don’t think it ultimately explains consciousness, it’s an interesting idea.
At the risk of fading into IMHO or GD, I will add that as far as usefulness goes, I have to disagree with the statement that “unless there is a base case, it [meaning a theory of consciousness, I assume] remains pretty useless”. And in fact I’d say just the opposite. When you look at people with various kinds of brain diseases, strokes, dementia and so forth, it doesn’t really seem like there is one discrete “entity” or on-or-off operator that is responsible for consciousness (at least insofar as it pertains to self-identity). It seems more like people lose bits and pieces, either suddenly, as in a stroke, or over time, as in progressive diseases like dementia. To me it seems more useful (to the extent that any of this is useful) to see consciousness as a spectrum, gradient, or even a process, rather a discrete thing.
My complaint is with simple recursive definitions. Without a base case they are simply incomplete, and thus useless. What is described now isn’t a simple recursive definition, and thus, can stand alone, which is interesting. By adding the idea of overlapping, whatever that really means in terms of mechanism, the definition can be seen to allow bottoming out as it stands, as the overlapping can be seen to allow a sort of leaking away of the use of a pure “metaphor” to define a conscious capability. I’m far from convinced, but it isn’t a simply vacuous definition, as it was before.
This is the puzzle I posed. Assuming that there was no hint of agricultural activity 15,000 years ago in Siberia, then a group that came across the land bridge from Asia with no concept of agriculture developed it within 10,000 years. Yet, “ALL the same people” did not develop agriculture in Afro-Eurasia for 60,000 years until almost the same time as their isolated fellow humans in the Americas; surely there must have been some ecological niches that would permit agriculture in the 50,000BC to 10,000BC era?
… meanwhile, the Australian aborigines did not develop agriculture (AFAIK) despite a few nice wet and fertile areas such as Australia’s east coast.
Meanwhile Mayan pictographs were well on the way to a written language, and Incan knot-work was beginning the proto-literacy stage. I suppose maybe that the critical mass of civilization begins the process of devising record-keeping schemes; or else that level of abstraction was still evolving in the brain…
Ancient Aliens, of course. I saw it on TV! 
I’m not an expert on Mayan Glyphs, but why aren’t they “a written language”?
Anyone interested in recent research supporting Julian Jaynes should check out julianjaynes.org and the follow-up books written by that site’s administrator.
Here’s a recent article that talks about Jayne’s ideas, connecting those ideas to Star Trek’s Borg http://nautil.us/blog/how-star-trek-may-show-the-emergence-of-human-consciousness
Yeah, I trust Jayne’s ideas about as far as I can throw a bicameral.
