The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind By Julian Jaynes

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Author: Julian Jaynes

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National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

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Probably like many recent readers of this book, I learned the bicameral theory due to Westworld, where the idea is cleverly used as an explanation for developing AI consciousness. While I commend the Westworld writers for making use of an interesting idea as a fictional trope, the theory itself is unconvincing, which is why it remained so obscure for decades.Jaynes' theory, as numerous reviewers here recount, is that human self-consciousness, as we understand it, is a very recent development, beginning only in the 1st Millennium BCE, and then in only certain areas. It's an extraordinary claim. At first when I read blurbs saying Jaynes' theory asserts true consciousness began 3000 years ago, I thought it was a misprint, and they dropped a zero. But it was no misprint. That is the claim.Jaynes evidently was a very smart, extremely well read psychologist, and developed his theory largely based upon his readings of ancient classics such as the Illiad and the Odyssey. He detected in these works an absence of a modern conception of subjective self-awareness. Where you or I might subjectively puzzle over a dilemma, or introspect upon a feeling, these works attribute this type of contemplation and decision making to the gods. Jaynes discusses other early civilizations as well--less convincingly--to maintain that all humans, including those that built the earliest civilizations in the Middle East, Egypt, China and India, did so essentially unconsciously, guided by hallucinated god-voices. This explains, according to Jaynes, ancient idol worship, and theocratic states.Of course, there are a lot of other explanations for these things, really everything else historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists have maintained written or claimed until Jaynes came along. And the fact is, while the theory is interesting, and the book makes good reading, Jaynes' evidence for his assertions is paper thin. While evidently quite convinced he was right, he also understood the weakness of his case, and throughout the book acknowledges this in various ways, usually by saying things like "...further research of this is required."The theory also leads to some odd and even prejudicial conclusions, such that I doubt he'd get a major publisher to produce it today. For example, in Jaynes' view, Native American peoples were almost completely lacking in modern human consciousness at the time of the European arrival. In other words, they were something akin to higher animals psychologically, but not fully aware humans as we understand things today. This explains Jaynes, is largely why a massive empire such as that of the Inca, could fall to a small band of Europeans led by a middle ranking Spanish soldier. I would not reject such a theory out of modern political correctness. But I would reject such a provocative theory without better evidence, which Jaynes simply doesn't provide.There are also very strange omissions from the theory, most noticeably almost completely ignoring the development of Islam. Whether this is because the rise of Islam did not fit his theory (it doesn't) or because Jaynes just never thought about it, I don't know. However, Islamic ideas and history alone largely upend his theory.According to Jaynes, the first area of the world to shed bicameralism in favor of full self-consciousness was the Middle East, and this began toward the end of the 2d Millennium BCE and was complete by about 500 BCE. By the time of Mohammed over 1000 years later, Jaynes claims that bicameral man was long gone, if some atavistic remnants remained (and remain) in human psychology. But Mohammed himself is the bicameral man par excellence. The whole story of Islamic revelation is a bicameral event. The Angel Gabriel appears to Mohammed and directly conveys God's commands--at length. But Mohammed could not have been a bicameral man according to Jaynes. They were already bred out of existence through natural selection. I suppose Jaynes might have figured out a way to get around this--Mohammed a rare bicameral throwback. But the fact that Jaynes completely ignores it, either suggests that he could not fit it in, or that dealing with Islam never occurred to him. This is either intellectually dishonest, or ignorant. Either way, it does not do much to recommend the theory.There are a ton more problems with Jaynes' theory which would take its own long book (...the Bicameral Mind is itself a rather long and sometimes grueling read), but I will note just one more from the Afterward in the new edition which was written about 15 years after original publication of the book. In it Jaynes seeks to rebut some of the objections raised to the theory, one of which was the popularity of the mirror in ancient civilizations and its depiction in art. Why critics asked, would non-self conscious people want to look at themselves in the mirror? Jaynes, as he does frequently, never answers the question, instead setting up a straw man and knocking it down. Recognizing oneself in the mirror is not a self-conscious act he says, and then proves it by a lengthy discussion of how primates, very young children and even trained pigeons can do it. However, that is not the objection. The objection is vanity. The use and production of mirrors, and the very artistic depiction of people using mirrors in these civilizations, demonstrates a self-consciousness which Jaynes simply cannot refute. So he just argues around it. Much of the original book is like this as well."...the Bicameral Mind" is an interesting read in the same way of other contemporaneous books of the 1970s that sought to explain old ideas with bold new claims are interesting. Throughout, I could not help but think that the whole thing was a lot like Eric von Daniken's "Chariots of the Gods" about the search for ancient astronauts. Like Jaynes, at about the same time, von Daniken sought to explain ancient mysteries with a stunning if outlandish theory. Both are thought provoking, interesting and make pretty good reads. They are not good history, or good explanations for human accomplishments and behaviors.

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