Was consciousness invented at the Bronze Age collapse?

The ideas in The Origins of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes are both complete rubbish and a work of genius

For a long time I avoided reading beyond the first chapter of a book with the clunky title The Origins of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind, written by a psychologist called Julian Jaynes and published in 1976. After a new reminder I actually read the book.

The hypothesis of the book is that the most advanced stage of human consciousness is learned behavior that only occurred at the Bronze Age collapse 3200 years ago. Before that, everyone believed that their inner voice was the voice of a god, who spoke directly to them, Julian Jaynes claims. They didn’t think, because for them, the process we call thinking was interpreted as a god talking directly to one’s mind. Since people didn’t view themselves as independently reasoning subjects, they couldn’t think of other people as such. Thereby, they lacked what we call a theory of mind. Instead, they assumed that others also were slaves to the voice of a god. Schizophrenia is the clearest vestige of this lost age. According to Julian Jaynes, once upon a time, everyone was schizophrenic.

Richard Dawkins once called the book “one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between!”¹ I disagree. I think it is both a heap of complete rubbish and a work genius.

Let’s start with the way this is rubbish. If people think that I make too many, too bold guesses when I write, I understand what they mean. Still, even an avid producer of guesses like me feels baffled by Julian Jaynes’ level of guesswork. Not only is the basic concept, the idea that all people were hallucinating like schizophrenics until a few thousand years ago, a very bold guess. He also makes bold guesses in the detail level, for example the following line of reasoning about when humans started to identify individuals with personal names:

“It is somehow startling to realize that names were a particular invention that must have come into human development at a particular time. When? What changes might this make in human culture? It is, I suggest, as late as the Mesolithic era, about 10,000 B.C. to 8000 B.C. when names first occurred.”²

And then a long rationalization why human culture had developed enough for names to be necessary about ten thousand years ago. I was genuinely surprised by the boldness of this guesswork: Has Julian Jaynes ever heard of any groups of humans, in any place, in which people had no names? If no group of humans ever, anywhere, has been found to lack personal names, why should we then believe that a comparatively high degree of cultural complexity is needed for humans to give each other names?

Julian Jaynes doesn’t write about that, for one simple reason: He never discovered anthropology. I’m not clear about why. Scott Alexander points to a discussion thread where someone claims to have actually asked Julian Jaynes whether Australian Aborigines lacked consciousness, and Jaynes replied that he wasn’t sure and that the question warranted closer investigation. But why didn’t he himself test his hypothesis through talking to some recently civilized people in the first place?

In the texts I have read about uncivilized peoples, I have found no support for Julian Jaynes’ idea that uncivilized people lack the ability to reflect over mental processes. For example the Yanomamö, the biggest and most well-documented recently contacted people, showed ample evidence of thinking much like modern people. When the abducted Mestizo woman Helena Valero warned a headman called Rashawe that a neighboring group planned to kill him and his men at a feast, the people who heard her started to argue about Helena’s motives.

“She is lying and inventing stories because she is afraid that we will kill her”,

a companion of the headman said.

But the headman himself reasoned that Helena might be right:

“I believe it, very often that is what they do. They pretend to be friends, so that people will be calm, then they attack. This is the truth; I believe it. I will go; I will go because I do not want anyone to think: ‘Our chief was too afraid to go.’ Get ready and let’s go.”³

That is, Rashawe-the-headman was well aware that he was believing things and others had similar minds with other beliefs. (He was subsequently killed at the feast, as Helena had warned him would happen). In the same vein, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon quotes his friend Kaobawä:

“Never show fear to your enemy. Be strong and calm. The moment you reveal that you are afraid, you are in mortal danger. That is when your enemy will kill you.”⁴

If we want to show that a trait is culturally learned, the best way to do that is to search among all present-day human cultures for societies where that trait is and is not present. Julian Jaynes never thought of subjecting his theory to that test. If he had done that, I think he would have discovered rather quickly that it was complete rubbish.

The point of consciousness

This is a very harsh judgement over Jayne’s theory. And also, it isn’t. Because I think that basically, Julian Jaynes made only one very serious mistake: He assumed that in every society, all people think and feel rather similarly. Before the gods fell silent three thousand two hundred years ago, every person heard voices of gods. I don’t fully understand why he assumed that. He readily recognizes that in present time, there are schizophrenics who hear compelling voices. If present-day people have widely different relationships to their inner voices, why would all people in prehistory have been similar in that respect? While reading The Origins of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind, I saw an alternative, much less ambitious interpretation of Jaynes’ theory: People with different kinds of minds existed in history as well as now. But over time, fashions have changed profoundly with regard to whom to listen to.

Let’s start from the beginning: What is the point of consciousness? As many people have pointed out, and as Julian Jaynes points out, consciousness seems to be a bit superfluous. To a large extent, our minds work on an unconscious level. There are so many decisions we make without any conscious deliberation. So why don’t we just make all decisions that way? Why are our minds topped with the ability to reflect consciously at all, when we can make decisions unconsciously too?

Because consciousness allows us to postpone decisions until enough information has been assembled. Unconscious decisions are always made at a certain point, based on whatever information there is there and then. When making conscious decisions, we can instead time the decision to a point when we think we have enough information (a process that causes quite a bit of agony for many people). We can even actively search for pieces of information needed to make a good-enough decision. For that reason, we become conscious of issues that occur in areas where there is a lot of complex information to consider. And we are not conscious of decisions we make in areas where the information is rather simple, like how to move our feet when we walk. Consciousness only is applied to the process of walking when it becomes difficult for some reason, like different terrain or injury. Otherwise we save our ability to deliberate for more complex questions. The more complex and important a question appears, the more it occupies the conscious part of our minds, demanding that we search for new clues that could take us closer to a solution.

The strength of the rider

I don’t think it is a mystery that this kind of mental flexibility evolved. But apparently people have this propensity to reflect consciously to very different degrees. Some people love to reflect over complex relationships between things to the extent that they use all their spare time for it. People with certain psychotic illnesses, on the other hand, are largely unable to reflect, because their reflecting, subjective selves are crowded out by compelling voices that seem to come from external origin. From everyday experience I would suggest that there is a wide continuum between those extremes. Many, if not most, people are capable of reflection, but prefer to avoid it above a certain level. In order to escape their inner voices, they drench out their consciousness as much as they can in stimuli that appeal to their subconscious sides: Music, recreational drugs, sports, collective worship. Many people also seem very prone to adopting the voices of authorities as their own in an unconscious manner: They don’t reflect and decide that what they hear from the mass media/their parents/their teachers must be true: they are the kind of animal that absorbs cultural messages in an automatic manner. Another category of people seems to form opinions more independently, but still reflect very little over those opinions. They have certain basic points of view of the types that people are so lazy these days, no one ever helps me or whatever happens, it must be someone else’s fault. When they say things, they can make statements that contradict one another on a logical level. They don’t seem to care about being coherent; expressing a feeling at the very moment seems to be enough.

Different people have different limits for when they stop reflecting over things and instead are overtaken by their instincts. But we all have such limits. This is what Jonathan Haidt argued for in The Goodness Paradox: That we are all like a complex of an elephant and a rider, with the elephant actually leading and the rider most of all justifying the elephant’s preferences. Basically, we are all guided by unconscious emotional processes. But the conscious rider on top is an individual as much as the elephant they are riding: Some riders are much more vocal and meddlesome than others. That way, I think that the kind of reflective consciousness that Julian Jaynes simply calls consciousness, is an individually variable trait.

My illustration to Jonathan Haidt’s theory, recycled from my post The Philosophy of Peter Turchin

Psychosis as an ideal

Julian Jaynes suggests that minds with a capacity to reflect became more common after the Bronze Age due to natural selection. I don’t want to contradict him entirely on that point. But more importantly, I think that reflection simply was unfashionable in Bronze Age civilizations. Jaynes reads ancient texts like the Iliad and states that they never talk about a subjective self. He takes this as a sign that humans didn’t recognize subjective selves by the time the Iliad was composed. Being a producer of texts myself, I’m skeptical. When I write a text, I proofread it and edit it carefully in order to make sure that only fashionable mental processes are visible through the text. And the mental processes in fashion in the intellectual corner I inhabit are reflection, reason and a small touch of irony. I’m constantly worrying that my less fashionable mental processes will leak through the surface of my texts. So I reread at least once or twice almost everything I ever send to anyone, anywhere. I hold no illusions that this will make people believe that I’m free of malice, envy, pride, aggression and stupid bias. But if I sort out the result of those mental processes in my texts, at least people who read them will hopefully understand that I agree that being guided in life by those mental processes is bad.

I assume that writers and composers in the ancient era did the same, and only included mental processes they found worthy of description in their texts. And I assume that they were much more selective than current writers are, because by then, written culture was a lot smaller. The category things that do not deserve to be written down is big now, but it was a lot bigger during the long time when writing existed but was used to a limited extent by a limited number of people. Presumably, the vast majority of thoughts that occurred seemed too futile to inscribe on a clay table.

In summary, while Julian Jaynes assumes that everyone perceived their selves differently in the Bronze Age, I assume that fashions regarding how a person ought to perceive themselves differed sharply between the Bronze Age and the present. Then like now, there were people with different kinds of minds. But while we medicate people with schizophrenia today so they can exist on the margin of society in the present, in the Bronze Age some of them were seen as speakers of the highest truth.

With this profound and still limited amendment to Julian Jayne’s theory of the bicameral mind, I think it opens up a fascinating path to Bronze Age mentality.

The psychotic world of the Aztecs

Julian Jaynes writes little about the Aztecs. But I think their story proves his point more than anything: That Bronze Age civilizations⁵ were dependent on psychotic people for their ideology.

In the year 1122 C.E. the Mexica, a small Nahuatl-speaking tribe somewhere in northern Mexico, broke up from their homeland and started to wander south. They did so on the order of their supreme deity, Huitzilopochtli, in search of a promised land. Huitzilopochtli communicated directly with his high priests via dreams and profound trances. He gave them omens, prophecies, and navigational tools to reach their promised land and to avoid dangerous situations. At times Huitzilopochtli allowed the Mexica to establish towns and villages throughout the long journey of their migration, so they could rest for 10 to 20 years and increase their numbers before resuming the migration. The old, sick and weak could be granted permission by Huitzilopochtli to stay in these towns.

The search for the promised land continued for two centuries, until 1318. During that time, many dramatic events took place. Once a powerful witch among them called Malinalxóchitl, a sister of the god Huitzilopochtli, gained her own set of followers. Finally Huitzilopochtli held up a shield against her magic so she and her followers could be left in a village. They migrated into the deep woods and founded the town of Malinalco, which is still known for its production of powerful sorcerers. Another time disagreements rose over whether the promised land had actually been reached. The Mexica had settled in a particularly lovely spot where they had made an artificial lagoon that attracted wild birds, frogs and fish. A group among them rebelled and claimed this to be the promised land. Huitzilopochtli’s anger was awakened by this disobedience and after a night of terrible thunder, the Mexica found the bodies of those who had provoked the god’s anger brutally mutilated with their chests cut open and their hearts ripped away.

When the Mexica moved further south into the more populated and civilized area around lake Tetzcoco (which is now mostly dry and the site of current Mexico city) in the late 13th century, they became feared for their bravery, also by settled societies with much bigger armies. They were also capable of settling infertile lands deemed unsuitable for agriculture by the current inhabitants. Although they were only allowed to live on marginal land that the established civilizations had left unused, they grew their crops and established a town. They also started marrying into the families of the dominating people of the area in order to gain political influence. Huitzilopochtli, the god of fire and war, was enraged by the mediocrity of the way of life of his people. He spoke to his priests via dreams and urged them to rise in war and claim complete dominion of the land. The god told them that they were closer to their final destination than ever before. He advised the priests to elaborate a plan to surprise their overlords.

The contents of this plan is the strangest detail of the entire story of the rise of the Aztecs:

“The Mexica sent an emissary to ask for the hand of the king’s daughter to be crowned as the Mexica’s new queen and bride of Huitzilopochtli. King Achitometl agreed to the union. The maiden was then taken to the Temple of Huitzilopochtli and killed as a sacrificial offering. Later a great feast was offered, to which King Achitometl and his court were invited. Upon completing their banquet, the high priest emerged in a ceremony dressed with the remains of the torn up skin of King Achitometl’s daughter. This spectacle enraged the king, and he ordered his court to avenge his daughter by shedding the blood of the Mexica. He commanded every single citizen to come out and battle. They outnumbered the Mexica and pushed them into the lake. Eventually the diminished population was forced to flee to Acatzintitlan, a group of swampy islands surrounded by reeds.

The last war left the Mexica tribe in a state of confusion and desperation. The Mexica population had been diminished, and they now felt desolate.”⁶

In other words, Huitzilopochtli-the-god told his people to form a plan and they formed one of the worst plans in history. They surely knew that their neighbors outnumbered them. They definitely knew that fathers tend to be enraged when their daughters are killed. So why did they arrange a spectacle where they flashed the remains of a murdered princess as an absurd garment? It certainly looks like a severe case of lack of theory of mind.

Not that such details hindered the eventual success of the Mexica. Shortly after the princess slaying debacle, the Mexica people who remained continued their migration in the Tetzcoco lake area for a short time, until they finally arrived at what their priests agreed must be the promised land. In 1325 they founded the city of Tenochtitlan, which was to become one of the biggest cities in the world and the center of a great, bloodthirsty empire.

How could a people with leaders who sometimes made psychotically unrealistic plans achieve this wild level of success? Even if the story about the slain princess isn’t true, the Aztecs certainly weren’t ashamed of it: In this case they would have erased it from their history writing. Whatever actually happened, the Aztecs found the decision to kill the princess to be an example of their great method of making decisions. So the question is: How could a people who celebrated such a deficient method of making decisions rise to such heights? (That is, until they made another uniformed decision and invited Hernán Cortés and his men in the hope that they were messengers of a neglected god.)

According to Julian Jaynes’ theory, it was because no Aztec citizen could think logically and imagine what other people thought. I would rather make the milder assumption that logical and empathetic thinking was suppressed. The Aztecs seem to have applied an extreme high-risk strategy: They based their decision-making on hallucinating madmen. The downside was obvious, as seen in the princess-slaying debacle or the invitation of Hernan Cortez and his men. But the interesting thing is that there was a huge upside too. When the Aztecs migrated through the desert, they were surrounded by hunter-gatherer tribes. Those couldn’t bother the Aztecs, because they couldn’t form powerful armies. Presumably they weren’t psychotic to the extent of the Aztecs, but, as is usually the case with hunter-gatherers, somewhat individualistic. The Aztecs also seem to have been extremely diligent workers. They built towns and farmed intensely with artificial irrigation. The story of the Aztecs makes the impression that they both fought viciously and worked hard. Maybe because they were enslaved by a god who told them to.

Forceful but blind hitting

If Julian Jaynes is right that Bronze Age civilizations were run by psychotic people, that points to an interesting line of cultural evolution.

Civilization is likely to have started with some kind of psychosis. More or less psychotic shamans are a common occurrence in primitive societies all over the world. In primitive societies, shamans tend to be highly respected and feared, but people can still choose whether to follow them or not. Among early civilizations like that of the Aztecs, the deities seem to be rather similar to those invoked by hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists. The difference lies less in the character of the supernatural beings and more in the relationship between the gods, the priests and the people. In Mark Ritchie’s Spirit of the Rainforest - The Story of a Yanomamo Shaman, the protagonist shaman Jungleman is respected and feared. But ultimately, people can choose whether to listen to him or not. His relationship to his spirits is a relationship of cooperation: It seems that for some reason the spirits help Jungleman just because they like to live in the big house in his heart. The Aztecs relied on priests with the ability to dream and hallucinate as much as the Yanomamö. But their supreme god was seen as an absolute commander, which made the words of the priests orders that could not be questioned.

It looks like the practices of hallucinating shamans were put at the very head of top-down societies. That worked, at least sometimes, because people working and fighting together under a psychotic leader were vastly superior to people quarreling over material and reproductive resources the way people tend to do under basic human social structure. But as became obvious with the Aztecs, that was also a highly hazardous strategy. Psychotic priests gave a people the courage to act boldly, but it gave them no means to act intelligently.

Around 1200 BC the Bronze Age empires around the Mediterranean Sea collapsed or contracted significantly. In a short time span, the world of hundreds of thousands of people unravelled. The Mediterranean area was filled with refugees. Julian Jaynes views this collapse as the cause of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, that is, of the rise of reflective consciousness. I would prefer to turn the causality around here, and instead name the increased status of reflective consciousness a cause of the Bronze Age collapse.

The collapse of the Bronze Age empires can be seen as a case of cultural evolution, in which peoples outside the empires evolved the ability to act both boldly and somewhat intelligently. By the time, around 1200 BC, new military tactics evolved, in which big infantry armies vanquished the very expensive chariots that had dominated the battle fields of the Middle East for centuries. An important factor for big infantry armies to arise was simply that people started to believe that such armies stood a chance of winning. As long as people believed that the charioteers were invincible, they certainly wouldn’t risk their lives challenging them. Evolution of beliefs challenged such preconceptions.

A precursor to Minecraft? A vase discovered in southeastern Iran dated to circa 2000-1800 BC shows a warrior riding a chariot pulled by a horse. From the Louvre Museum. Wikimedia Commons

The end of the Bronze Age was the beginning of a new kind of cultural evolution that is still going on: The selection of the right psychosis. For a few thousand years, maybe more, the unreflective hearing of voices was in vogue. From then, a more distant, selective relationship to the gods evolved. In the longer run, peoples who asked is this really a sign from God? did better than peoples who believed that gods were talking directly to some among them, or who even believed that they were led by gods. The latter couldn’t form as impressive empires and build as impressive monuments for another thousand years. Still, they could destroy the empires centered around unreflective psychosis.

In summary, although I find Julian Jaynes’ methodology deplorable, I find his highlighting of the psychotic ideal of Bronze Age empires intriguing, both for the study of history and for the understanding of mental illness. And both the psychology of the Bronze Age and the minds of psychotic people are understudied subjects. Julian Jaynes made them a little less so.

1. Quotation from Wikipedia

2. Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind, 1976, 25 percent of e-book

3. Ettore Biocca, Yanoáma - The Story of Helena Valero, A Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians, 1965, pages 283-284

4. Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö - The Last Days of Eden, 1983, 89 percent of e-book)

5. Including American civilizations that didn’t use bronze, for want of a better name for ancient civilizations of a certain degree of complexity

6. Manuel Aguilar-Moreno, Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, 2006, 13 percent of e-book. All information on the Aztecs in this post comes from this book.