alt Hacker NewsThere was a book in the 1970s called "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes, where he argued that ancient civilizations -- and he used examples from Homer -- lacked the current modern sense of self-consciousness. If you look at their behavior, they interact with some external divine voice that drives their actions, whereas if you read modern literature you see people being driven by an inner voice which they associate with themselves.
This shift from the "bicameral mentality" of the external voice to the modern mentality of the inner voice was hypothesized by Jaynes to be rooted in some biological changes in the brain. At the time there was split brain research that showed these two parts of the brain function independently almost as two different minds in the same skull. See this 2007 survey: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6323702_The_bicamer...
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Not relevant to the article.
Also, that study is extremely dubious/barring on fan-fiction.
Homer (if he was even a person) recited oral epic poetry (that we've lost most of) and we've written down an extremely lossy version of it.
Why should we take any of the mythical character's interactions with mythical gods as any insight for the brains of real humans???
It'd be like year 4000 historians citing World of Warcraft claiming the Lich King is a very obvious example that humans lack an internal monologue because he was not able to distinguish his own motives/actions between Ner'zhul/Arthas (both spiritual entities inhabiting the "Lich King" body).
His theory was that the two brain halves communicated through inner voices. Wernickes Area, on the left side, communicated with the similar area on the right side. WA is where we comprehend speech, so Jaynes theorized that was why bicameral people experienced the communication as inner voices.
The research in the new research paper is about a split between front and back of the brain. So something entirely different. That split is an old idea. Jaynes would most likely have known about it. But it wasnt part of his theory.
Okay but this article is about evolution hundreds of millions of years ago.
It’s an interesting book for sure, but I had (minor, but still) issues even with the introductory premises. Just a few notes I made from the very first chapter:
- Jaynes used the term “reminiscence” in a way very different from Ballard and claimed no animal is capable of reminiscence. That was a very odd claim overall.
- Then he claimed that if we ever create a language that can express everything, metaphors won’t be possible. Which is, I think, almost obviously false, because many metaphors are constructed artistically, despite having exact terms.
- And he talks about spatialization as a primitive aspect of consciousness, but he seems to talk about relations/connectedness at best.
And so on - I misplaced my notes somewhere and only recovered a few random bits. Still, interesting reading, fun (albeit really questionable) core idea, but those papercuts were kinda off-putting for me.
It was a successful pop-sci book when it came out, but its conclusions continue to be met with a lot of skepticism today.
> they interact with some external divine voice that drives their actions
...in a specific region, in a specific time period, immediately before the economic and then societal crash of the eastern Mediterranean that changed culture in the region forever.
The hypothesis breaks down pretty hard when you realize he just kind of handwaves away people in the rest of the world not having any kind of abrupt cut-over in the styles of recorded literature that forms the backbone of his arguments.
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That would imply a biological change in all humans in the last ~3000 years after humans had already dispersed across the entire globe?
That means whatever the change was would have to had occur simultaneously in separate populations all over the world within almost no time at all.