However, in his book I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter describes in a pretty moving way the conversations he has with his dead wife. Humans have "mirror neurons," which allow us to copy individual behaviors of other humans. This is useful in the short term, because it enables us to learn through observation as well as through trial and error.
Hofstadter takes this concept further, to suggest that over the years he knew his wife, his memories of her coalesced into a mental model, a copy of her personality that he carries around in his own brain. At first it was fuzzy and not very useful for predicting her behavior, but as he learned more about her, the model grew in detail and sophistication. After her death, he continued to interact intensively with that internal model, asking its advice on raising their children and generally treating it as though it were a person, keeping those memories alive and vivid.
Jaynes's book was his PhD thesis: he had a really cool idea and did all he could to argue that it was correct. Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge was his PhD paper at UCLA. He probably faked most or all of it. When called on by a PhD supervisor to produce his field notes he gave a sort of "the dog ate 'em" excuse and was awarded the PhD anyway. Are his ideas still valuable? A lot of people think so.
We come up with really cool ideas and then work to show they're more plausible than you'd think.
This is the function of a lot of intellectual work: as Isaiah Berlin said, intellectuals are people who want ideas to be as interesting as possible. Peter Berger said that intellectuals invent ideas which, if they're not strictly "true" they ought to be true.
More generally the best intellectuals do work that creates new space for intellectuals to work in. (See Randall Collins's The Sociology of Philosophies.)
In Jayne's work he didn't know about the Sperry-Gazzaniga split brain experiments? Is that right? Sperry-Gazzaniga severed the corpus callosums of patients whose epileptic fits were so extreme their lives were becoming unmanageable. The corpus callosum is a thick band of nerve fibers that separate the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Their operations cured the patients of intractable epilepsy, but they quickly found there now seemed to be "two" people in these patients, depending on which hemisphere was addressed, and this data applies to all of us, and Sperry got the Nobel in 1981, not only for this work, but a larger body of neuroscientific breakthroughs.
All of this work has fed the pop psychology of right-brained people and left-brained people, etc.
The best work most recently, to my mind, is Iain McGilchrist's magisterial The Master and His Emissary.
Jaynes is wrong. Jaynes is immortal, though. Wonderful piece, Kevin Simler! Thank you!
>He’s pretty adamant, for example, that ancient people weren’t conscious — a claim I find very hard to swallow.
In fact, that is the entire point of his theory. He's not saying people in the past were universally schizophrenic. He's saying that people in the past had no self. What would become the self was divided in two, the "strange loop" had not yet bitten it's tail. Hence, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown fo the Bicameral Mind. Not:
>So, now, imagine you were a person — a human self — living in Sumer in 2000 BC. What would your inner life be like? How would you have experienced the world?
>In many ways you would have been just like a typical modern human. The crucial difference is that you would have experienced occasional, or perhaps frequent, auditory hallucinations: the voices of your god or gods.
The Tukulti stone altar reminds me of the aniconic Buddhist representations such as a footprint, or a Bodhi tree but no yogi underneath. These were prevalent in the first 500 years or so of the religion, quite a lot less so since about the first century CE. Richard Gombrich writes very interestingly on the topic.
There's some cause for speculation that crossover of ideas between pantheistic Greece and atheistic Buddhism led to more tolerance of Buddha images ...but this has nothing to do with bicameral minds.
Except that Buddhist teaching is very careful to delineate between form, the senses, volitions, consciousness and emotion; all interwoven as "self", never static, always interacting. Learning that fire burns, thanks to the sharp emotion of pain, or due to conditioning by one's elders (experienced as voices) . . . it's all very plausible.
I personally have occasional 'hallucinations' of stabbing myself with a sharp knife, in the eyeball specifically. My explanation is that the clear risk, magnified by experience and the warnings of wiser elders, somehow got fused with that shot from L'Age D'Or.
The mind is fascinating, and I shall definitely go back to reading Jaynes thanks to your series.
Well now I pretty much have to read the series. Jaynes gave a talk to my graduate class not long after his book came out. Made a lasting impression on me. And I still have the book.
Fascinating. I hold this view in a different flavor: multitudes of various coagulated “selves” in us take roles that we have developer in life. A husband, a worker, a stranger in a bar, a regular in a bar, an aspiring armchair philosopher. One mind can have all those “passengers” and depending on our life style and upbringing some may develop enough cohesion to be “independent”.
It’s not a theory, but observational conclusion, I see it everywhere and it’s not hidden.
Seems to be a smuggled premise here is that the singular physical brain MUST be producing the voices. Which, given our minimal understanding of consciousness, is worthy of examining rather than accepting?
Many people hear the voice of god, and the phenomena occurs across cultures.
We also experience strong affiliations to large cultural groups and experience the thoughts and feelings of the group. Just go to any large sports event, you’ll see widespread consistency in language and expression of emotion.
A wonderful thought-provoking book. I read it shortly after it came out then bought several copies to pass on to friends. I particularly enjoyed his description of what consciousness is.
Surely the "And God spake to Noah" stuff is purely a literary convention, still common today, especially in comedy. "So I asked myself, 'What's the worst that can happen?'"
I wonder why you find this so fascinating. We all hallucinate. When we collectively agree on what we hallucinate, we call it perception. We constantly negotiate and coordinate our hallucinations through language. This process transforms the organism's instinct for self-preservation into the collective group effort that characterises the human species.
Language serves as the magic that gives structure to our hallucinations - making private experience public and vice versa. It helps us distinguish between what is real - "things as they are" and what is imaginary or hypothetical (possible, probable or necessary). Through the ability to imagine - or hallucinate, if you will - we adapt to changes in our environment.
Because there are different languages, they offer different agreed-upon understandings of reality. When we encounter voices that seem outside the usual realm of experience, we may interpret them in different ways based on our cultural background. We may attribute them to our inner thoughts, to an "alternate self", to a "universal consciousness" or to God, depending on our beliefs. Of course, if we believe in God, we might think that He is constantly communicating with us. If we don't, we might think of these voices as thoughts that are created in our minds - or, in some cases, voices coming from our ankles, for example. There is nothing wrong with hearing voices as long as they don't become an obstacle to our social life.
However, in his book I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter describes in a pretty moving way the conversations he has with his dead wife. Humans have "mirror neurons," which allow us to copy individual behaviors of other humans. This is useful in the short term, because it enables us to learn through observation as well as through trial and error.
Hofstadter takes this concept further, to suggest that over the years he knew his wife, his memories of her coalesced into a mental model, a copy of her personality that he carries around in his own brain. At first it was fuzzy and not very useful for predicting her behavior, but as he learned more about her, the model grew in detail and sophistication. After her death, he continued to interact intensively with that internal model, asking its advice on raising their children and generally treating it as though it were a person, keeping those memories alive and vivid.
http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=columns&vol=randall_hayes&article=001
Jaynes's book was his PhD thesis: he had a really cool idea and did all he could to argue that it was correct. Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge was his PhD paper at UCLA. He probably faked most or all of it. When called on by a PhD supervisor to produce his field notes he gave a sort of "the dog ate 'em" excuse and was awarded the PhD anyway. Are his ideas still valuable? A lot of people think so.
We come up with really cool ideas and then work to show they're more plausible than you'd think.
This is the function of a lot of intellectual work: as Isaiah Berlin said, intellectuals are people who want ideas to be as interesting as possible. Peter Berger said that intellectuals invent ideas which, if they're not strictly "true" they ought to be true.
More generally the best intellectuals do work that creates new space for intellectuals to work in. (See Randall Collins's The Sociology of Philosophies.)
In Jayne's work he didn't know about the Sperry-Gazzaniga split brain experiments? Is that right? Sperry-Gazzaniga severed the corpus callosums of patients whose epileptic fits were so extreme their lives were becoming unmanageable. The corpus callosum is a thick band of nerve fibers that separate the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Their operations cured the patients of intractable epilepsy, but they quickly found there now seemed to be "two" people in these patients, depending on which hemisphere was addressed, and this data applies to all of us, and Sperry got the Nobel in 1981, not only for this work, but a larger body of neuroscientific breakthroughs.
All of this work has fed the pop psychology of right-brained people and left-brained people, etc.
The best work most recently, to my mind, is Iain McGilchrist's magisterial The Master and His Emissary.
Jaynes is wrong. Jaynes is immortal, though. Wonderful piece, Kevin Simler! Thank you!
well said!
>He’s pretty adamant, for example, that ancient people weren’t conscious — a claim I find very hard to swallow.
In fact, that is the entire point of his theory. He's not saying people in the past were universally schizophrenic. He's saying that people in the past had no self. What would become the self was divided in two, the "strange loop" had not yet bitten it's tail. Hence, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown fo the Bicameral Mind. Not:
>So, now, imagine you were a person — a human self — living in Sumer in 2000 BC. What would your inner life be like? How would you have experienced the world?
>In many ways you would have been just like a typical modern human. The crucial difference is that you would have experienced occasional, or perhaps frequent, auditory hallucinations: the voices of your god or gods.
The Tukulti stone altar reminds me of the aniconic Buddhist representations such as a footprint, or a Bodhi tree but no yogi underneath. These were prevalent in the first 500 years or so of the religion, quite a lot less so since about the first century CE. Richard Gombrich writes very interestingly on the topic.
There's some cause for speculation that crossover of ideas between pantheistic Greece and atheistic Buddhism led to more tolerance of Buddha images ...but this has nothing to do with bicameral minds.
Except that Buddhist teaching is very careful to delineate between form, the senses, volitions, consciousness and emotion; all interwoven as "self", never static, always interacting. Learning that fire burns, thanks to the sharp emotion of pain, or due to conditioning by one's elders (experienced as voices) . . . it's all very plausible.
I personally have occasional 'hallucinations' of stabbing myself with a sharp knife, in the eyeball specifically. My explanation is that the clear risk, magnified by experience and the warnings of wiser elders, somehow got fused with that shot from L'Age D'Or.
The mind is fascinating, and I shall definitely go back to reading Jaynes thanks to your series.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, subscribed, and looking forward to more. Thank you!
:D
Sorry I haven’t read your whole series, so maybe you’ve mentioned tulpas or tulpamancy. It if not, you would find it interesting.
I think it was mentioned in one of the earlier essays ;)
Well now I pretty much have to read the series. Jaynes gave a talk to my graduate class not long after his book came out. Made a lasting impression on me. And I still have the book.
Fascinating. I hold this view in a different flavor: multitudes of various coagulated “selves” in us take roles that we have developer in life. A husband, a worker, a stranger in a bar, a regular in a bar, an aspiring armchair philosopher. One mind can have all those “passengers” and depending on our life style and upbringing some may develop enough cohesion to be “independent”.
It’s not a theory, but observational conclusion, I see it everywhere and it’s not hidden.
Maybe can plug my attempt to storify this:
https://open.substack.com/pub/wildpacific/p/isolated-incident
Ah yes, I read this book years ago. A fascinating thesis. I need to pick it back up. Thanks.
Seems to be a smuggled premise here is that the singular physical brain MUST be producing the voices. Which, given our minimal understanding of consciousness, is worthy of examining rather than accepting?
Can I recommend the work of Tanya Luhrmann to show that this phenomenon is not part of our past, but also our present.
https://www.google.com/gasearch?q=tanya%20luhrmann
Many people hear the voice of god, and the phenomena occurs across cultures.
We also experience strong affiliations to large cultural groups and experience the thoughts and feelings of the group. Just go to any large sports event, you’ll see widespread consistency in language and expression of emotion.
You have a typo here. You mean "BC" not "AD."
"It’s only by the 5th century AD, when hallucinations were no longer pandemic, that we start to find clear skepticism. "
A wonderful thought-provoking book. I read it shortly after it came out then bought several copies to pass on to friends. I particularly enjoyed his description of what consciousness is.
Surely the "And God spake to Noah" stuff is purely a literary convention, still common today, especially in comedy. "So I asked myself, 'What's the worst that can happen?'"
😳……I wonder how this ‘’fits’’with what Elan Barenholtz is proposing……Read you later✌🏻(☯️)
https://www.mentalhealth.com/blog/decoding-the-voices-of-schizophrenia#:~:text=Where%20Do%20These%20Voices%20Come,it%20can%20be%20deeply%20disturbing.
I wonder why you find this so fascinating. We all hallucinate. When we collectively agree on what we hallucinate, we call it perception. We constantly negotiate and coordinate our hallucinations through language. This process transforms the organism's instinct for self-preservation into the collective group effort that characterises the human species.
Language serves as the magic that gives structure to our hallucinations - making private experience public and vice versa. It helps us distinguish between what is real - "things as they are" and what is imaginary or hypothetical (possible, probable or necessary). Through the ability to imagine - or hallucinate, if you will - we adapt to changes in our environment.
Because there are different languages, they offer different agreed-upon understandings of reality. When we encounter voices that seem outside the usual realm of experience, we may interpret them in different ways based on our cultural background. We may attribute them to our inner thoughts, to an "alternate self", to a "universal consciousness" or to God, depending on our beliefs. Of course, if we believe in God, we might think that He is constantly communicating with us. If we don't, we might think of these voices as thoughts that are created in our minds - or, in some cases, voices coming from our ankles, for example. There is nothing wrong with hearing voices as long as they don't become an obstacle to our social life.