Characters in the Iliad are fully conscious, they have inner lives, they do not always follow the gods’ commands, and they do many things without any divine commands to prompt them. Homer also uses encounters with divine voices in the same way modern writers use the devices available to them: to establish character and advance the plot.
Jaynes misreads the Iliad so badly that it’s difficult to believe he’s not doing so deliberately. It is easier for me to believe that he’s dishonest than he’s that incompetent.
A more subtle point: the god-voice thing and theory of mind are not mutually exclusive. If you believe that your god is telling you what to do and their god is telling your enemies what to do, it's consistent with that to believe that their god has information yours doesn't and vice versa, that their god thinks differently from yours, and that both sides will act based on knowing the first two things. The actions one should take based on this are not very different from those indicated by Western theory of mind.
Maybe monotheism is adaptive because it forces reconciliation of competing claims about what the aligned voices in people's heads are telling them to do.
But in the prehistory world of the illiad most or all stories would have been oral first and written second. That process change alone would change the way you represented your story.
In addition, mental disorders and their thought patterns were not well delineated in the ancient world. There was possibly a broader concept of what was considered normal mental capacity.
And hallucinogens were thought to be from the gods for spiritual guidance.
I think one thing to keep in mind is that the Homeric myths do not describe the Late Bronze Age at its zenith, but rather during its collapse, a collapse that was much worse than the fall of the Roman Empire. One phenomenon that accompanies societal collapse is the destruction of a society's symbolic order and sense of meaning, resulting in quite literal mass psychosis. This was observed in hunter-gatherer or horticultural peoples under observation by anthropologists during the 20th century. When they became too exposed to civilized society, all at once their entire culture would implode on itself and the population would collectively go insane for a brief period, starting with adolescents and rapidly spreading throughout the band. They would develop bizarre delusions, hallucinate, engage in repetitive, meaningless behavior, sometimes turn on each other in frenzied violence. In a matter of days they would calm down, but from then on their original culture was dead; they hardly remembered or recognized any of their previous rituals, stories, or customs, even when prompted by white anthropologists who had previously observed them. They would sink into despair and emptiness and were usually quickly overtaken by modernity, abandoning their original ways of subsistence for wage labor or dependency on handouts, and often succumbing to drug and alcohol addiction. There is also evidence--in the form of Neolithic massacre sites all over Eurasia--that the spread of agriculture led to eras of extreme violence, terror, raiding, cannibalism, and genocide that only ended when formerly relatively egalitarian societies fell under the rule of warlords, who then became kings. What might at first appear to be a "bicameral mind" might actually be the eruption of mass psychosis when a society's culture disintegrates.
I believe I read this in the essay “Preconquest Consciousness” by E. Richard Sorensen, part of a book titled Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology. Unfortunately the book has been pulled from the Internet Archive but you can find Sorensen’s essay here: https://danbartlett.co.uk/preconquest-consciousness-e-richard-sorenson/
(looks like I got some details wrong though, as it's been two years since the last time I read it and it took me some time to even remember what and where it was)
On further reflection, if we are to take the essay's understanding of preconquest consciousness seriously and relate it to civilizational collapses, then there can be no monolithic "postconquest consciousness" as Sorensen theorizes. Rather, "postconquest consciousness" is always embedded within a particular symbolic order (as opposed to the less abstract, mostly non-symbolic preconquest consciousness). Therefore the initial rupture of preconquest consciousness wouldn't be a one-off event, but something that *returns* when the symbolic order collapses, like a wound held shut by sutures that never fully heals, but eventually the sutures break.
Reflecting even further on this, I am now somewhat skeptical of the entire essay, which I first encountered when I was still hanging out in anarchist spaces. Reading it again now, it seems very much in the vein of anthropological wishful thinking that has been a thing since at least Rousseau (if not the story of Adam and Eve) but was especially popular in the wake of World War II. There is a lot of more recent analysis that severely contradicts the "human puppy" idea of uncontacted peoples and suggests they had all the same vices and evils that we do, in roughly similar proportions.
> 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.
I would state this more strongly: The conscious mind is in charge of constructing justifications that conform to the rules of the surrounding society. As part of this, some facts about the individual and his motivations must be suppressed from the fact-inventory of the conscious mind. This ensures that others are not told of socially-disapproved motivations for what the elephant is doing.
I once noted down this quote from "Andrew Stolbach, MD, MPH":
> When I was a medical student, another medical student asked, "Why are we admitting this guy to psychiatry for hearing voices? Everyone hears voices all the time."
>
> I think about this a lot.
I suspect that a lot of people hear voices. But as you say, the social consequences of that are affected by society.
There have been over the past few centuries many, many ordinary people (often traders) from literate cultures who have lots of interaction with people in primitive (non-state-level) societies, and many of them have left written information about their dealings. None of them (that I've ever heard of) report that primitive people think in some fundamentally different way.
I would love to hear you expand on the idea that lack of consciousness requires immediate decisions, that it is consciousness that allows us to postpone them. I agree that it allows us to _consciously_ postpone, but what about unconscious postponements? Surely an unconscious being doesn't act on every (unconscious) sensory input?
I find it very hard to reason about, but when I look back on my own unconscious choices I can often find it plausible that the choice was available much earlier than when I decided to act, so some decision process was in play that didn't result in an immediate action (though maybe a sequence of "holds" followed by a single "do it").
And is consciousness required to seek out more information, to choose a more appropriate timing? If I take an animated discussion as a stand-in for a verbal unconscious event, I can see that I probed my friend's thoughts without aiming for anything, and eventually have quite a lot of information to decide where I think her reasoning has gone astray. All without reflecting or aiming consciously
>>I agree that it allows us to _consciously_ postpone, but what about unconscious postponements? Surely an unconscious being doesn't act on every (unconscious) sensory input?
I think unconscious postponement is expressed as emotions and moods. As you suggest, most input we register unconsciously does not lead to immediate action. Instead it affects emotions. For example, unconscious decisions that this-person-is-nice or this-place-is-creepy often leads to no action at all. Just a change in emotion that leads to an increased readiness for a certain type of action.
"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"
They didn't have "inner voice".Thats the whole point Jaynes is making. The voices of gods were heard as auditory hallucinations.
As for primitive people, isn't it well-known that they hear and see spirits much more than modern people? Why?
It is plausible that your interpretation of Jaynes' theory is more accurate than mine. And I would call your version less generous to Jaynes. The claim that uncivilized people, all of them, are hallucinating 24/7 is a really bold one, which I think is amply contradicted by anthropology.
>>As for primitive people, isn't it well-known that they hear and see spirits much more than modern people? Why?
I think most of primitive people the see spirits here and there for the same reason that I see meters and centimeters wherever I go. But also, the primitive people I have read about see spirits to very different degrees. Only some of them get clear and enduring images and voice messages from spirits, often after extensive training and effort.
Bicamerality was a feature of ancient civilizations.Its application to modern uncivilized is a different matter.
The conscious people when they speak with nonconscious people, naturally cast the nonconscious mentality into their own familiar terms. This is one problem with anthropological evidence.
This is also encountered when ancient texts are translated.
And then this translation stuff. In my mother tongue, Swedish, there is no word for "mind". Instead we need to use "consciousness" or "brain" (in older texts "senses" are being used, but that is old-fashioned now). Does that mean that Swedes have no concept of the mind, only of the physical brain and active consciousness? I can witness that this is absolutely not the case. I remember once when I was about ten years old and my mother, who was really into popular psychology, told me that "the brain can't hear the word 'not'". I thought it sounded awkward and I still do. If Swedish had a word for 'mind', she would have said that the unconscious mind can't hear the word 'not'. In any case, this is what the lack of a word in the Swedish causes: A bit of linguistic awkwardness. Not a profoundly different way of imagining human psychology.
>>Bicamerality was a feature of ancient civilizations.Its application to modern uncivilized is a different matter.
Saying that ancient civilizations affected people's consciousness is another thing than saying that people lacked consciousness until a certain point of civilizational development. If we only assume the former statement, then anthropology can't tell us much, because the last ancient civilizations unravelled 500 years ago. But if we assume that consciousness only evolved because of a certain degree of civilization had been reached, then uncontacted American tribes should really lack that degree of consciousness. Because Julian Jaynes said that the Aztecs were still at the unconscious stage, and there were no more advanced civilizations in America than the Aztecs. So I if Julian Jaynes' hypothesis was that consciousness did not evolve ever in history before 1200 BC in the Middle East, then American isolated tribes should have had little opportunity to learn about consciousness before they encountered modern civilization in the 20th century.
Edit: Since my last paragraph was probably incomprehensible I replace it. Some anthropologists probably lacked social sensitivity to the degree that they wouldn't notice that the person they were talking to was actually psychotic. But a high degree of sensitivity to what kind of person one is talking to is widespread and must have occurred also among anthropologists. I don't think that people in general are blind to cultural differences. For example, I have spent a few months in the Middle East, and I noticed that people there didn't value self irony to the same degree that Westerners do. I also noticed the same phenomenon in the Balkans. Many people do like me and actually try to perceive similarities and differences in mentality between cultures. And I highly doubt that a group of people who in every moment perceive themselves as vehicles for a deity would escape the attention of such observers.
Great read. In defense of Jaynes' overall concept, if not the particulars - there's the complete lack of human faces appearing in art until about 6000 BC (or something like that - I don't have the date in front of me, but it was long after the end of the Ice Age). I don't think we fully realized ourselves as individuals until about that time.
This has very much changed, the data you have is severely out of date. Göbekli Tepe and the other Tas Tepeler sites. Apparently the "lack of faces" was a bit of an overestimate i.e. merely an academic phantasm. Human heads and faces all over. And it is dated 10000-8000 BCE!
Also out of date: study of psychosis. Hallucinations can take many forms, if which only some are auditory. "Voices" are probably best modeled as intra-brain attempts to bypass faulty communication between brain regions by using all alternative channels available, including brain regions "commandeering" the voicebox to inform other regions about output that fails to be transmitted internally, which may appear to affected person as "those crazy voices."
(As disclaimer, I have been very ambivalent about Jaynes. When I applied to US college ages ago, I got the book as gift from someone at admissions office and it was a harbinger of getting admitted. I then searched out Jaynes and met him. Was left in utter shock upon knocking on door of his office only to be confronted by a malodorous, super rude, unkempt person who summarily dismissed me with unthinking arrogance. Am not at all positive, but seems quite possible he may have been schizophrenic himself. Far as his book, frankly the only bicameral thing there is the US Congress.)
So you really met Julian Jaynes?! It is really interesting that you describe Julian Jaynes this way, because Anders loosely suggested more or less exactly what I think you are speculating over here: That Jaynes himself was one of those charismatic psychotic leaders who gain a following through their impressive personalities. Anders read the Wikipedia page about Julian Jaynes more carefully than I did and concluded that he must have been quite a personality. That coupled with Jaynes' notably weak methodology made Anders speculate that Jaynes himself was the kind of person who dreams together theories.
In real life, at least judging by all of 2 minutes he spoke with me prior to slamming the door into my face, he basically displayed all the charisma of mildew. Took me a good year just to recover, it was a soul-crushing experience, frankly worse than meeting the darn Wizard of Oz. Nothing behind the curtain! I would have preferred it otherwise. From my current perspective, his entire book is merely a very convincing and seductive error. Can't lie about that. One example was his attempt to smoke bay leaves in order to ascertain whether the Pythia inhaled the. Jaynes missed the whole football there. The Pythia was actually inhaling ethylene wafting out of a faultline in the ground. Symptoms mesh very well with ancient descriptions. And yet Jaynes concluded the question settled after giving himself a bay leaf smoke headache. Far as his entire argument, it is non-falsifiable and is therefore not science but mere storytelling.
Kenneth Good, the anthropologist who married a Yanomamö teenage girl, reports that this teenage girl freaked out the first time she saw herself in a large, full-length mirror. Does that mean that she didn't perceive herself as an individual? I doubt it.
People depicted animal faces tens of thousands of years ago. So if they didn't depict human faces frequently, I would guess that they abstained because of some kind of taboo (which still exist in some cultures today, for example the Amish, or Islam, for that matter). After all, drawing a portrait of a person is still risky business: The person in question might dislike the depiction.
Great article. I think Jaynes' key value is as provocateur . By presenting such a bold thesis statement as handed down 'from the gods' it shocks our modern mentality into really contemplating other means of ordering the minds. It teaches we fish what water is.
Once all people heard voices, then voices were heard by some people only then these few people required assistance of hallucinogenics then the voices faded away entirely.
I have seen a claim in the popular science press that there is one small tribe somewhere that doesn't use personal names, only descriptions. But also that this tribe is unique this way in all of anthropology.
Off topic: I want to know everything about dolphins. A couple of years ago I made an effort to find all books there are about dolphins. Most of them turned out to be books for children. I really didn't encounter that problem when I searched for books about chimpanzees.
On topic: It makes sense if dolphins call each other, because they communicate over vast distances with low visibility. "you there!" probably works better for ground-living creatures like chimpanzees.
I agree, dolphins are fascinating, and eerily intelligent with their big brains. Strange that there's no litterature to be found comparing their intelligence to that of humans. I remember reading that dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors.
Cats use names, but names are not personal. Like I might call that cat over there "squirrel tail" because her tail is curved like the tail of a messed-up squirrel, but that's not how she would identify herself.
Another cat might call her "smol gray cat" because she is gray and small.
Another thing is that the names change. I might call that grey cat Squirrel Tail but earlier today she might have been "Beggar Cat" when she was trying to help herself to a bite of thst chipmunk I was trying to eat in peace.
"Hello, I am known as Vexorg, Destroyer of Cats and Devourer of Chickens," "I am Zornorph, the One who Comes By Night to the Neighbour's Yard, and this is Princess Sheewana, Barker of Great Annoyance and daughter of Queen La, Stainer of Persian Rugs."
Characters in the Iliad are fully conscious, they have inner lives, they do not always follow the gods’ commands, and they do many things without any divine commands to prompt them. Homer also uses encounters with divine voices in the same way modern writers use the devices available to them: to establish character and advance the plot.
Jaynes misreads the Iliad so badly that it’s difficult to believe he’s not doing so deliberately. It is easier for me to believe that he’s dishonest than he’s that incompetent.
A more subtle point: the god-voice thing and theory of mind are not mutually exclusive. If you believe that your god is telling you what to do and their god is telling your enemies what to do, it's consistent with that to believe that their god has information yours doesn't and vice versa, that their god thinks differently from yours, and that both sides will act based on knowing the first two things. The actions one should take based on this are not very different from those indicated by Western theory of mind.
Maybe monotheism is adaptive because it forces reconciliation of competing claims about what the aligned voices in people's heads are telling them to do.
Excellent points, thanks
But in the prehistory world of the illiad most or all stories would have been oral first and written second. That process change alone would change the way you represented your story.
In addition, mental disorders and their thought patterns were not well delineated in the ancient world. There was possibly a broader concept of what was considered normal mental capacity.
And hallucinogens were thought to be from the gods for spiritual guidance.
I think one thing to keep in mind is that the Homeric myths do not describe the Late Bronze Age at its zenith, but rather during its collapse, a collapse that was much worse than the fall of the Roman Empire. One phenomenon that accompanies societal collapse is the destruction of a society's symbolic order and sense of meaning, resulting in quite literal mass psychosis. This was observed in hunter-gatherer or horticultural peoples under observation by anthropologists during the 20th century. When they became too exposed to civilized society, all at once their entire culture would implode on itself and the population would collectively go insane for a brief period, starting with adolescents and rapidly spreading throughout the band. They would develop bizarre delusions, hallucinate, engage in repetitive, meaningless behavior, sometimes turn on each other in frenzied violence. In a matter of days they would calm down, but from then on their original culture was dead; they hardly remembered or recognized any of their previous rituals, stories, or customs, even when prompted by white anthropologists who had previously observed them. They would sink into despair and emptiness and were usually quickly overtaken by modernity, abandoning their original ways of subsistence for wage labor or dependency on handouts, and often succumbing to drug and alcohol addiction. There is also evidence--in the form of Neolithic massacre sites all over Eurasia--that the spread of agriculture led to eras of extreme violence, terror, raiding, cannibalism, and genocide that only ended when formerly relatively egalitarian societies fell under the rule of warlords, who then became kings. What might at first appear to be a "bicameral mind" might actually be the eruption of mass psychosis when a society's culture disintegrates.
This is very interesting, where can I read about it?
It makes sense, because psychosis tends to be triggered by stress (a fact used by primitive societies in their training of shamans).
I believe I read this in the essay “Preconquest Consciousness” by E. Richard Sorensen, part of a book titled Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology. Unfortunately the book has been pulled from the Internet Archive but you can find Sorensen’s essay here: https://danbartlett.co.uk/preconquest-consciousness-e-richard-sorenson/
(looks like I got some details wrong though, as it's been two years since the last time I read it and it took me some time to even remember what and where it was)
On further reflection, if we are to take the essay's understanding of preconquest consciousness seriously and relate it to civilizational collapses, then there can be no monolithic "postconquest consciousness" as Sorensen theorizes. Rather, "postconquest consciousness" is always embedded within a particular symbolic order (as opposed to the less abstract, mostly non-symbolic preconquest consciousness). Therefore the initial rupture of preconquest consciousness wouldn't be a one-off event, but something that *returns* when the symbolic order collapses, like a wound held shut by sutures that never fully heals, but eventually the sutures break.
Reflecting even further on this, I am now somewhat skeptical of the entire essay, which I first encountered when I was still hanging out in anarchist spaces. Reading it again now, it seems very much in the vein of anthropological wishful thinking that has been a thing since at least Rousseau (if not the story of Adam and Eve) but was especially popular in the wake of World War II. There is a lot of more recent analysis that severely contradicts the "human puppy" idea of uncontacted peoples and suggests they had all the same vices and evils that we do, in roughly similar proportions.
Kind of similar: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/eve-theory-of-consciousness-v3
> 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.
I would state this more strongly: The conscious mind is in charge of constructing justifications that conform to the rules of the surrounding society. As part of this, some facts about the individual and his motivations must be suppressed from the fact-inventory of the conscious mind. This ensures that others are not told of socially-disapproved motivations for what the elephant is doing.
I once noted down this quote from "Andrew Stolbach, MD, MPH":
> When I was a medical student, another medical student asked, "Why are we admitting this guy to psychiatry for hearing voices? Everyone hears voices all the time."
>
> I think about this a lot.
I suspect that a lot of people hear voices. But as you say, the social consequences of that are affected by society.
There have been over the past few centuries many, many ordinary people (often traders) from literate cultures who have lots of interaction with people in primitive (non-state-level) societies, and many of them have left written information about their dealings. None of them (that I've ever heard of) report that primitive people think in some fundamentally different way.
I would love to hear you expand on the idea that lack of consciousness requires immediate decisions, that it is consciousness that allows us to postpone them. I agree that it allows us to _consciously_ postpone, but what about unconscious postponements? Surely an unconscious being doesn't act on every (unconscious) sensory input?
I find it very hard to reason about, but when I look back on my own unconscious choices I can often find it plausible that the choice was available much earlier than when I decided to act, so some decision process was in play that didn't result in an immediate action (though maybe a sequence of "holds" followed by a single "do it").
And is consciousness required to seek out more information, to choose a more appropriate timing? If I take an animated discussion as a stand-in for a verbal unconscious event, I can see that I probed my friend's thoughts without aiming for anything, and eventually have quite a lot of information to decide where I think her reasoning has gone astray. All without reflecting or aiming consciously
>>I agree that it allows us to _consciously_ postpone, but what about unconscious postponements? Surely an unconscious being doesn't act on every (unconscious) sensory input?
I think unconscious postponement is expressed as emotions and moods. As you suggest, most input we register unconsciously does not lead to immediate action. Instead it affects emotions. For example, unconscious decisions that this-person-is-nice or this-place-is-creepy often leads to no action at all. Just a change in emotion that leads to an increased readiness for a certain type of action.
"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"
They didn't have "inner voice".Thats the whole point Jaynes is making. The voices of gods were heard as auditory hallucinations.
As for primitive people, isn't it well-known that they hear and see spirits much more than modern people? Why?
It is plausible that your interpretation of Jaynes' theory is more accurate than mine. And I would call your version less generous to Jaynes. The claim that uncivilized people, all of them, are hallucinating 24/7 is a really bold one, which I think is amply contradicted by anthropology.
>>As for primitive people, isn't it well-known that they hear and see spirits much more than modern people? Why?
I think most of primitive people the see spirits here and there for the same reason that I see meters and centimeters wherever I go. But also, the primitive people I have read about see spirits to very different degrees. Only some of them get clear and enduring images and voice messages from spirits, often after extensive training and effort.
Bicamerality was a feature of ancient civilizations.Its application to modern uncivilized is a different matter.
The conscious people when they speak with nonconscious people, naturally cast the nonconscious mentality into their own familiar terms. This is one problem with anthropological evidence.
This is also encountered when ancient texts are translated.
And then this translation stuff. In my mother tongue, Swedish, there is no word for "mind". Instead we need to use "consciousness" or "brain" (in older texts "senses" are being used, but that is old-fashioned now). Does that mean that Swedes have no concept of the mind, only of the physical brain and active consciousness? I can witness that this is absolutely not the case. I remember once when I was about ten years old and my mother, who was really into popular psychology, told me that "the brain can't hear the word 'not'". I thought it sounded awkward and I still do. If Swedish had a word for 'mind', she would have said that the unconscious mind can't hear the word 'not'. In any case, this is what the lack of a word in the Swedish causes: A bit of linguistic awkwardness. Not a profoundly different way of imagining human psychology.
>>Bicamerality was a feature of ancient civilizations.Its application to modern uncivilized is a different matter.
Saying that ancient civilizations affected people's consciousness is another thing than saying that people lacked consciousness until a certain point of civilizational development. If we only assume the former statement, then anthropology can't tell us much, because the last ancient civilizations unravelled 500 years ago. But if we assume that consciousness only evolved because of a certain degree of civilization had been reached, then uncontacted American tribes should really lack that degree of consciousness. Because Julian Jaynes said that the Aztecs were still at the unconscious stage, and there were no more advanced civilizations in America than the Aztecs. So I if Julian Jaynes' hypothesis was that consciousness did not evolve ever in history before 1200 BC in the Middle East, then American isolated tribes should have had little opportunity to learn about consciousness before they encountered modern civilization in the 20th century.
Edit: Since my last paragraph was probably incomprehensible I replace it. Some anthropologists probably lacked social sensitivity to the degree that they wouldn't notice that the person they were talking to was actually psychotic. But a high degree of sensitivity to what kind of person one is talking to is widespread and must have occurred also among anthropologists. I don't think that people in general are blind to cultural differences. For example, I have spent a few months in the Middle East, and I noticed that people there didn't value self irony to the same degree that Westerners do. I also noticed the same phenomenon in the Balkans. Many people do like me and actually try to perceive similarities and differences in mentality between cultures. And I highly doubt that a group of people who in every moment perceive themselves as vehicles for a deity would escape the attention of such observers.
Great read. In defense of Jaynes' overall concept, if not the particulars - there's the complete lack of human faces appearing in art until about 6000 BC (or something like that - I don't have the date in front of me, but it was long after the end of the Ice Age). I don't think we fully realized ourselves as individuals until about that time.
This has very much changed, the data you have is severely out of date. Göbekli Tepe and the other Tas Tepeler sites. Apparently the "lack of faces" was a bit of an overestimate i.e. merely an academic phantasm. Human heads and faces all over. And it is dated 10000-8000 BCE!
Also out of date: study of psychosis. Hallucinations can take many forms, if which only some are auditory. "Voices" are probably best modeled as intra-brain attempts to bypass faulty communication between brain regions by using all alternative channels available, including brain regions "commandeering" the voicebox to inform other regions about output that fails to be transmitted internally, which may appear to affected person as "those crazy voices."
(As disclaimer, I have been very ambivalent about Jaynes. When I applied to US college ages ago, I got the book as gift from someone at admissions office and it was a harbinger of getting admitted. I then searched out Jaynes and met him. Was left in utter shock upon knocking on door of his office only to be confronted by a malodorous, super rude, unkempt person who summarily dismissed me with unthinking arrogance. Am not at all positive, but seems quite possible he may have been schizophrenic himself. Far as his book, frankly the only bicameral thing there is the US Congress.)
So you really met Julian Jaynes?! It is really interesting that you describe Julian Jaynes this way, because Anders loosely suggested more or less exactly what I think you are speculating over here: That Jaynes himself was one of those charismatic psychotic leaders who gain a following through their impressive personalities. Anders read the Wikipedia page about Julian Jaynes more carefully than I did and concluded that he must have been quite a personality. That coupled with Jaynes' notably weak methodology made Anders speculate that Jaynes himself was the kind of person who dreams together theories.
In real life, at least judging by all of 2 minutes he spoke with me prior to slamming the door into my face, he basically displayed all the charisma of mildew. Took me a good year just to recover, it was a soul-crushing experience, frankly worse than meeting the darn Wizard of Oz. Nothing behind the curtain! I would have preferred it otherwise. From my current perspective, his entire book is merely a very convincing and seductive error. Can't lie about that. One example was his attempt to smoke bay leaves in order to ascertain whether the Pythia inhaled the. Jaynes missed the whole football there. The Pythia was actually inhaling ethylene wafting out of a faultline in the ground. Symptoms mesh very well with ancient descriptions. And yet Jaynes concluded the question settled after giving himself a bay leaf smoke headache. Far as his entire argument, it is non-falsifiable and is therefore not science but mere storytelling.
Kenneth Good, the anthropologist who married a Yanomamö teenage girl, reports that this teenage girl freaked out the first time she saw herself in a large, full-length mirror. Does that mean that she didn't perceive herself as an individual? I doubt it.
People depicted animal faces tens of thousands of years ago. So if they didn't depict human faces frequently, I would guess that they abstained because of some kind of taboo (which still exist in some cultures today, for example the Amish, or Islam, for that matter). After all, drawing a portrait of a person is still risky business: The person in question might dislike the depiction.
Great article. I think Jaynes' key value is as provocateur . By presenting such a bold thesis statement as handed down 'from the gods' it shocks our modern mentality into really contemplating other means of ordering the minds. It teaches we fish what water is.
IIRC, Aztec priests drank cacahua-xochitl, which was supposed to be hallucinogenic.
Once all people heard voices, then voices were heard by some people only then these few people required assistance of hallucinogenics then the voices faded away entirely.
Fascinating and timely.
> Has Julian Jaynes ever heard of any groups of humans, in any place, in which people had no names?
And later studies have shown that humans aren't the only animals using names:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/02/20/172538036/researchers-find-that-dolphins-call-each-other-by-name
I have seen a claim in the popular science press that there is one small tribe somewhere that doesn't use personal names, only descriptions. But also that this tribe is unique this way in all of anthropology.
Off topic: I want to know everything about dolphins. A couple of years ago I made an effort to find all books there are about dolphins. Most of them turned out to be books for children. I really didn't encounter that problem when I searched for books about chimpanzees.
On topic: It makes sense if dolphins call each other, because they communicate over vast distances with low visibility. "you there!" probably works better for ground-living creatures like chimpanzees.
I agree, dolphins are fascinating, and eerily intelligent with their big brains. Strange that there's no litterature to be found comparing their intelligence to that of humans. I remember reading that dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors.
Cats use names, but names are not personal. Like I might call that cat over there "squirrel tail" because her tail is curved like the tail of a messed-up squirrel, but that's not how she would identify herself.
Another cat might call her "smol gray cat" because she is gray and small.
Another thing is that the names change. I might call that grey cat Squirrel Tail but earlier today she might have been "Beggar Cat" when she was trying to help herself to a bite of thst chipmunk I was trying to eat in peace.
"Hello, I am known as Vexorg, Destroyer of Cats and Devourer of Chickens," "I am Zornorph, the One who Comes By Night to the Neighbour's Yard, and this is Princess Sheewana, Barker of Great Annoyance and daughter of Queen La, Stainer of Persian Rugs."