The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind

by DiabloD3 • 12 years ago

52 60 12 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

Codhisattva• 12 years ago

Keep in mind this is a hypothesis and lacks significant supportive evidence. Even after 38 years.

mbrock4• 12 years ago

It's also not significantly falsified.

stcredzero• 12 years ago

Is it falsifiable? I read this book years ago. I'll be damned if I can remember what it says.

lnanek2• 12 years ago

Must have been nice back when science was just making up fun stories like the one linked.

foxhill3• 12 years ago

science has always about taking random guesses (some less random than others) and using evidence to determine wether those guesses are true. perhaps this makes no falsifiable claims. maybe it does, but we have no means to test them.

sound familiar? string theory.

mantrax53• 12 years ago

Science is making up stories and seeing how they check out with reality.

If they check out, we use the stories to extrapolate reality, i.e. build models that predict where reality will go based on our stories.

There are three things to keep in mind:

1) There are infinite stories that may be equally good at describing the same reality. It's best to pick the simplest one that has a set of benefits we need, because why make our life hard, right?

2) If we can't measure how a story matches reality, the story is useless. Say, how on Earth would we measure if people had voices in their minds 3000 years ago? We can't. Therefore the story can't be verified.

3) One should be very careful not to confuse the stories with the reality it models. A story is a story. A model is a model. A math formula is a math formula.

Reality is neither a story, a model, or a math formula. So when it comes to explaining the true nature of things, such as what the heck conscience is, and how it comes to be, science comes short. Because it always has been, and it always will be, just making up stories. But that doesn't make science any less useful, of course.

foxhill3• 12 years ago

nothing wrong with a little conjecture as long as you are aware that it is conjecture.

this has certainly made me want to read the book.

brudgers5• 12 years ago

In which one should it be kept?

Any theory of mind - unicameral, bicameral, polycameral - is naught but an hypothesis because the claim that there are such things as minds is itself an hypothesis. One that for some is as scientifically plausible as souls and essences...or consciousness.

If one wants to argue over the material character of the mind, bicameralism seems a bit late to be drawing a line in the sand. The enemy has landed, breached the city walls and occupies the lower floors of the innermost keep.

I read Jaynes about twenty years ago. It's thoughtful and entertaining and it's ideas plausible...what is this voice that formulates these words as I type? Certainly better than Penrose who was running rampant over the alt.philosophy at the time. Jaynes is very readable.

EGreg3• 12 years ago

Can you articulate the difference between a MEMORY OF DECISION PROCESS and consciousness?

Can you articulate the difference between a sense of humorand a sense of morality?

judk4• 12 years ago

Well the existence of a whole group of "not even wrong" theories doesn't make any single one of them less deserving of complaint when it shows up on its own at a party like HN

SAI_Peregrinus2• 12 years ago

You claim that the existence of minds is just a hypothesis. If that's so, what thought the thoughts which lead to your post? An entity capable of thought IS a mind, and the existence of thought is the only certain thing.

Something is thinking, therefore thought exists. The thing which is thinking seems to be somehow located in my body, but I can't prove that I'm not just some sub-process in a vast simulation or such. I also can't prove that the thing which is thinking is actually located in my body, and not just operating through it but with an independent existence. But either way something is thinking, so there is a mind. Whether one chooses solipsism, spiritualism, or materialism (or anything else) the existence of at least one mind is directly observable.

wmil• 12 years ago

One big problem is the there aren't any existing societies that dress, pose, and feed the dead. So it's very difficult to investigate why they would do that.

balsam• 12 years ago

This might come close. Anecdotally, I know people from that part of the world who are quite functional and yet occasionally tell me quite matter of factly what gods or demons say to them.

http://www.odditycentral.com/pics/the-creepy-walking-dead-of...

lmkg• 12 years ago

Not true. He made a predictive hypothesis of how the brain activity in a schizophrenic person behaves that was later borne out by imaging technology.

Now, to be fair, that particular hypothesis is pretty far removed from the rest of this theory. I would certainly not say that the meat of his theory is in any way supported by this evidence. It's basically an aside to the rest of his theories.

But, that was a really damn specific hypothesis, and he totally nailed it. He said that people with schizophrenia undergoing a command hallucination would have heightened activity in the right-hemisphere areas that correspond to the speech centers in the left hemisphere, which they do. That's kind of... not the sort of prediction that you just happen to get right by chance. It also revolutionized the study of schizophrenia.

But yes, his statements about the non-schizophrenic brain are basically philosophy and not science at this point. And his historical hypotheses may never reach the state of falsifiability.

eponeponepon• 12 years ago

It's a tempting hypothesis - it does feel instantly plausible if one has a decent grounding in ancient literature and history. But as others have said, short of building a time machine and kidnapping an Etruscan farmer... how could we ever disprove it?

Come to think of it, even that wouldn't do it - testing one farmer wouldn't tell us anything about his compatriots and rulers.

foxhill3• 12 years ago

well, that's kind of an issue with consciousness - it's so meta, and intangible.. sort of like trying to guess which OS a machine was running, just by looking at the CPU.

lotsofmangos3• 12 years ago

I love this idea. I suspect it is utterly wrong, but it is wonderful speculation nonetheless.

Both Snowcrash by Neal Stevenson and Distraction by Bruce Sterling make good use of some of the concepts from it, so even if it is wrong, it has helped in the genesis of some great fiction.

asimpletune2• 12 years ago

Interesting, I've never heard those authors I'll have to check them out. Can you say what you think about Jaynes's theory is wrong and why?

lotsofmangos3• 12 years ago

His theory only makes sense if you set a very low bar on other mammalian consciousness, indeed it is an attempt to explain how we became conscious when other animals are not.

If on the other hand you think that many of the mental states he is trying to find explanations for are already extant in several other species, then the problem he is seeking to address simply doesn't exist.

extra88• 12 years ago

The first is "Neal Stephenson," no "v." I enjoy both but much prefer Sterling's earlier work (Islands in the Net, Schismatrix, Heavy Weather).

blincoln• 12 years ago

Stephenson's first novel (<i>The Big U</i>) also makes use of the "Bicameral Mind" theory. It was out of print for a long time, but I thought it was a good read.

EGreg3• 12 years ago

Why is this link so highly ranked on HN when it leads me to a page which simply links to another page?

arethuza• 12 years ago

I guess it's a hack around the rules on HN submission titles - and that title is definitely more interesting than "Bicameralism (psychology)".

jchrisa• 12 years ago

This was my first adult pop-sci read. A little bit thick but after middle-school me read one crazy science book I went on a tear: Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Dan Dennett, Hofstader, and never really stopped. Fun to wake up and see it on HN.

dekhn• 12 years ago

A classic. I remember when my english teacher first mentioned this. It was a first step towards the much larger world of hypothetical neuroscience.

gte910h• 12 years ago

While I think this book has a beautiful premise, even 15 years ago when I read it, falsifiable parts already had been falsified from what I understood before reading it

asimpletune2• 12 years ago

I remember really being blown away by this book when I first read it. Since then, it has come up many times in other scenarios, when learning about other things. For example, the origin of King Alfred's original Saxon laws. They read totally differently if you've read Jaynes's work first.

Recently though this theory has come back in a new way for me. I'm very interested in gamma waves and how they are by products of our brains synchronizing it's many disparate compartments to create a single coherent experience.

Also, a couple of weeks ago there was an article on HN about extreme isolation. I saw many details in there that made me think of this book.

So king Alfred and Saxon law, gamma waves, and isolation are all interesting things that have resurfaced for me with respect to this book. It's a great theory, pretty sound argument if you read the whole thing and try to understand it. It's just so unbelievable no one else has really taken a stand. Someone famously once said (I'm paraphrasing) "Jaynes is either incredibly wrong or is stupendously right but we don't know".

da02• 12 years ago

Can you briefly summarize the Saxon/Bicameral connection? This is all new to me. I first remember reading about the bicameral mind on a online book called "Saturnian Cosmology". But I had no idea it could overlap with Saxon law.

m0nty• 12 years ago

"is as strange as its title suggests. It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets." -- Richard Dawkins

Gravityloss3• 12 years ago

Maybe this criticism is old hat, but I can't avoid thinking about it.

You would assume that there would still be lots of people living in this bicameral state, as human populations have been very fragmented for the last few thousand years.

But as far as I know, there aren't any.

It would seem extremely unlikely that such developments would have occurred worldwide in isolated populations at the same time.

It is well documented that various people (be it indigenous or "western") use hallucinatory drugs to get into states with reduced sense of reality. They do not live like that all the time, and indeed could not survive so.

schizo3• 12 years ago

We had a discussion a while ago here (see my comment history) where I shared my experience of schizophrenia (through a drug-induced schizoaffective disorder which I subsequently got under control.)

I haven't read the book yet (it's on my Kindle by now though) but from what I've read it's very similar to that state of mind and, if that is so, then many 'mystics' actually do stil live that way.

Gravityloss3• 12 years ago

That is interesting, but, as far as I know, only a very small percentage of people have schizophrenia.

I would imagine that in a primitive environment, you will be eaten if you can't trust your hearing.

But I might be totally wrong, I haven't read the book.

brudgers5• 12 years ago

Jaynes is suggesting the bicameral mind as a model for the way societies described the sources of motivation which moved individuals to action. Our current scientific model places the locus of motivation internal to the individual when it's not suffering Skinnarianism. But again this is our scientific model.

The world is full of people who claim to be motivated externally. It is a rather common feature of religions, particularly those in the Western tradition - and from the Western tradition is where Jaynes draws his examples in support of bicameralism. Hearing a god's voice is so common that we don't institutionalize people on that basis. Hell in the US, we often elect them to office.

Closer to home, where did your feeling that Jaynes viewpoint must be rebutted come from? That's meant as a scientific question meaning what was the locus from which the force strong enough to overcome not being bothered arose and how does a unicameral model better explain it?

EGreg3• 12 years ago

One of the necessary components of consciousness is short term memory. Have you ever driven spaced out and then "came to" and realized you've been doing it on "autopilot" for the last few blocks?

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/o...

Also look up Alien Hand Syndrome. When we are conscious of our ACTIONS we literally are able to call up a memory of DECIDING to do those actions. Otherwise even if we onserve those actions they seem as having been done by SOMEONE ELSE.

Thus, identity and consciousness is relates to memory.

judk4• 12 years ago

Someone here didn't like it. Article is deleted, replaced with a redirect to 'Bicameralism'

im3w1l• 12 years ago

The merge happened nearly a decade ago.

naturalethic• 12 years ago

The original linked to an empty wiki page with just the title of the book linking to Bicameralism. So the edit saves some clicks as the link actually goes somewhere with some content now.

noobermin• 12 years ago

One strange possibility this may imply is that some people still untouched by the modern world are really not conscious and introspective. What a weird proposition.

Also, those of us who do not share direct ancestry with modern cultures (I am a pacific islander), our cultures would possibly not have had consciousness until our contact with outsiders...for my culture, that would be around the late 1700s.

Our oral history does talk about gods, demigods and such. Looking back at most of the oral legends, they tend to be about the gods and mythical events that teach us morals. I think there was one story that might show introspection (a god child who was found in the woods and was raised by human parents) although something like true higher order thinking? I'm not sure, I'd have to think a bit.

Still, it's such an interesting idea. Perhaps that is one way to test the hypothesis, comparing notes with first contacts with indigenous, uncontacted peoples.

mantrax53• 12 years ago

I wish we'd stop confusing what we can prove with what is.

Chances are not only all people are conscious and introspective, but most animals are to some degree (it's not an on/off switch, it's an emergent property, the sum of all your reasoning skills).

As for bicameralism, it's just a demonstration of the lengths at which our wrong assumptions can reach when the subject we're creating conjecture about (ancient people) are no longer around, or otherwise unable to explain themselves.

There are plenty of people in the modern day, which claim to have heard the voice of god (or the devil, or aliens, or what have you), which might be a mental disturbance, or quite often is a simple confusion (a dream taken for reality, and so on).

It's just how the mind works to this present day. Sometimes we misinterpret input and make up reasons.

Heck, the theory of bicameralism seems like an example of making up reasons.

dkasper• 12 years ago

The set of posts at Melting Asphalt was where I was first introduced to Jaynes. It's a great exposition of his ideas and had me pondering consciousness for weeks.

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/mr-jaynes-wild-ride/

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/accepting-deviant-minds/

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/hallucinated-gods/

nova• 12 years ago

The great thing about this hypothesis, even if it happens to be false for homo sapiens, is that it separates the concepts of "intelligence" and "consciousness". Jaynes shows that it is at least logically possible for a being to be intelligent, but not conscious.

I think this has clear implications to AI.

mantrax53• 12 years ago

Did we honestly need this to know both aren't related? We have plenty of proof in the AI scene.

Also, it hits me as some awful mutation to be using your "external protocol" (voices) for internal communication.

Is the claim they were literally hearing voices? Can't be right.

First you'd constantly be getting startled or confused whether someone in your head said something, or someone outside your head said something.

Second there's an inherent lag in converting speech to information and back, when the brain is interconnected well enough with much more efficient ways of communicating internally.

Speech is also highly inaccurate. Same sentence can have multiple meanings. Imagine the hilarious misunderstandings between you and your internal voice.

Which brings another point. How do you answer back? Do you speak out loud, or does the mind have a dedicated "internal speaker" for you to say things into?

Another awkward redundant apparatus.

mbrock4• 12 years ago

All of these obvious questions are quite well addressed by the actual book in question, as would be expected from a serious and respected work, since its entire raison is to explain why this seemingly counterintuitive idea does in fact make sense and fits much evidence.

Here's a simple intuition pump to get you started: Do you think that you don't hear voices? Do you know about the concept of "internal monologue?"

gulpahum• 12 years ago

This is interesting. If human consciousness and thinking was changing today, how could you detect it? Perhaps the increased amount of information that we need to process is changing how we think?

Sometimes I have a feeling that our grandparents or parents are not thinking or introspecting as deeply as my generation. They are just doing things, but we seem to be thinking more about the consequences of our actions. Is there a way to measure this? Or is this just the usual "generation gap" thing?

mercer• 12 years ago

Sometimes I have a feeling that our grandparents or parents are not thinking or introspecting as deeply as my generation.

I have that same feeling, and David Foster Wallace touches on that in his essay on television (http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf).

giardini• 12 years ago

Undoubtedly the best nerd book title ever. When I first saw it I was struck speechless with envy, knowing that, with it's publication, book titles had peaked and that from then on any new publications' titles would pale in comparison.

I once examined the tentative hypothesis that some people lacked consciousness - that their behaviour seemed to be missing certain key components of introspection. So this book caught my interest (and of course because it had a great title). But "Origin" proved to be a tedious read providing weak support for its hypotheses.

Nonetheless, when I find a copy in the wild (usually they're in great condition, not much handling) I buy it and put it on the shelf. When someone is IMO pestering me unduly, I hand them the book, ask them to read it and get back to me. That's good for at least 3 months of peace, a small price to pay for quiet time.

vorg• 12 years ago

Jaynes built a case for this hypothesis that human brains existed in a bicameral state until as recently as 3000 years ago by citing evidence from many diverse sources including historical literature [...] For example, in the Iliad and sections of the Old Testament

Greek and Semitic societies were in close contact 3000 years ago so a trend towards unicamerality would be intertwined, but I'm wondering about societies separated from the West until later such as China which didn't begin contacts with the West until about 2000 years ago after being cut off for over 50,000 years. Was Confucius (2500 years ago) conscious? If so, then it seems such bicameral mind breakdown evolved separately in West and East.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

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