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The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: A reappraisal of Jaynes’ hypothesis (2007)

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Re: The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: A reappraisal of Jaynes’ hypothesis (2007)

#21

Post by spc476 »

goto11 wrote: post #15
bloak wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. The Jaynes hypothesis, as I understand it, is that in early civilisations the majority of the population heard voices and it was considered normal. If you see a reference in literature to a god speaking to someone, you can't easily tell whether that's fiction, metaphor, an exaggeration, a lie, a narrative style, or a li…

I actually don't reject the theory that accounts of Gods appearing and speaking to people could be actual mental processes, guided by culture. I find this more believable than it is all fiction or lies (or that Gods have physical existence outside the human mind). But I do reject the bicameral hypothesis that we either have Gods speaking or we have consciousness, and that shift happened a particular point in time aro…

I just finished reading the book. In it, he doesn't state that it happened at once everywhere. There was one passage that implied that the Aztecs were still mostly bicameral (or were in the immediate period after the bicameral breakdown) when the Spanish arrived in the 16th Century.

Also, the breakdown is not instantaneous, but happens over time. Once it starts, you get religion and oracles (the Oracle at Delphi for example) as the populous attempts to hear the gods' voices for direction. Oracles lasted for about a millennium after the initial breakdown in Greece, and over time, the gods' voices were head less and less.

He also states that modern remnants of the bicameral mind exist in hypnosis and schizophrenia (but in the case of hypnosis, how it works is very culturally dependent).

Re: The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: A reappraisal of Jaynes’ hypothesis (2007)

#23

Post by hliyan »

akvadrako wrote: post #5

Regardless of the historical evidence (or lack thereof) for his theory, I found his book very enlightening. It really helped me understand religion, schizophrenia and the split brain, showing why it would be so important to early human society and how it could came about, biologically and culturally.

I read this over 20 years ago as a teenager. Looking back, now I feel the evidence for the bicameral mind is sketchy (evidence for the bicameral brain, i.e. left-brain/right-brain even more so).

However, I'm still enamored by the idea that consciousness is somehow related to (if not generated by) a mental model of the real world: while animals can only contemplate things that are within their senses and in the present, our mental model allows us to bring far away things (and things in the past or future) to immediate awareness, and thereby be able to contemplate them.

Re: The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: A reappraisal of Jaynes’ hypothesis (2007)

#24

Post by hliyan »

bencollier49 wrote: post #14
bloak wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. The Jaynes hypothesis, as I understand it, is that in early civilisations the majority of the population heard voices and it was considered normal. If you see a reference in literature to a god speaking to someone, you can't easily tell whether that's fiction, metaphor, an exaggeration, a lie, a narrative style, or a li…

I'd be willing to bet that if you took a sample of people who'd trained themselves to lucid dream, you'd find a high proportion of people who heard voices. Specifically upon sleeping and waking.

I'd be a counter-example. I frequently dream lucidly. But I never hear voice or see anything even remotely resembling hallucinations. I'm also one of those individuals who are not susceptible to hypnosis (I've had a professional try and fail repeatedly).

Re: The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: A reappraisal of Jaynes’ hypothesis (2007)

#25

Post by hliyan »

Apocryphon wrote: post #7

Like the phantom time hypothesis, bicameralism is a sort of massively revisionist theory that relies on wild interpretations of historical information. And both are pretty entertaining, regardless.

It would have been better if you had included the reasons for your opinion...

Re: The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: A reappraisal of Jaynes’ hypothesis (2007)

#26

Post by k__ »

hliyan wrote: post #25
Apocryphon wrote: post #7

Like the phantom time hypothesis, bicameralism is a sort of massively revisionist theory that relies on wild interpretations of historical information. And both are pretty entertaining, regardless.

It would have been better if you had included the reasons for your opinion...

bicameral mind is based solely on historical books.

"Achilles didn't hear the gods, he heard his other mind!"

etc.

Re: The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: A reappraisal of Jaynes’ hypothesis (2007)

#27

Post by david_ar »

bloak wrote: post #12
goto11 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if the theory is bullshit then surely it does not actually help anyone understand religion? So the Gods are speaking to people in the Iliad because it was actually one half of the brain speaking to the other. But the Odyssey allegedly is composed after the watershed moment, but Gods are still speaking to people. So the theory does not actually explain anything about religion. The theory can "rationally" explain…

There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. The Jaynes hypothesis, as I understand it, is that in early civilisations the majority of the population heard voices and it was considered normal. If you see a reference in literature to a god speaking to someone, you can't easily tell whether that's fiction, metaphor, an exaggeration, a lie, a narrative style, or a li…

In some sense you could say the vast majority of people hear voices, it's just that we conceptualise this as the "inner voice". It seems somewhat plausible that people could conceptualise this differently if there were a sufficiently strong cultural pressure. Perhaps when we hear words in our heads that we describe as talking to ourselves, ancient people would describe the same experience as gods speaking to them?

Re: The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: A reappraisal of Jaynes’ hypothesis (2007)

#28

Post by phylomortis »

david_ar wrote: post #27
bloak wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. The Jaynes hypothesis, as I understand it, is that in early civilisations the majority of the population heard voices and it was considered normal. If you see a reference in literature to a god speaking to someone, you can't easily tell whether that's fiction, metaphor, an exaggeration, a lie, a narrative style, or a li…

In some sense you could say the vast majority of people hear voices, it's just that we conceptualise this as the "inner voice". It seems somewhat plausible that people could conceptualise this differently if there were a sufficiently strong cultural pressure. Perhaps when we hear words in our heads that we describe as talking to ourselves, ancient people would describe the same experience as gods speaking to them?

Not only ancient people. The concept of a “foreign” inner voice exists in islam and is called vesvese in Turkish. It is commonly attributed to being deceit from satan and as a child you get taught to actively repress it.

Re: The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: A reappraisal of Jaynes’ hypothesis (2007)

#29

Post by deepnet »

bloak wrote: post #12
goto11 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if the theory is bullshit then surely it does not actually help anyone understand religion? So the Gods are speaking to people in the Iliad because it was actually one half of the brain speaking to the other. But the Odyssey allegedly is composed after the watershed moment, but Gods are still speaking to people. So the theory does not actually explain anything about religion. The theory can "rationally" explain…

There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill. The Jaynes hypothesis, as I understand it, is that in early civilisations the majority of the population heard voices and it was considered normal. If you see a reference in literature to a god speaking to someone, you can't easily tell whether that's fiction, metaphor, an exaggeration, a lie, a narrative style, or a li…

Most imaginative people can imagine voices and often discuss things with themselves.

The acceptable version of Janes' hypothesis is that ancients attributed much of their imagination and interior life to objective reality.

A stronger version of Jayne's bicameral mind only requires that the ancient doubted ownership of certain of their emotions and trains of thought and discussed and wrote of them as real - the internal narrative, the train of thought, the stream of consciousness did not exist as a literary device and consequently the ancients did not possess it as a tool of thought.

As Gods and supernatural events were generally accepted in ancient times, the idea that internal dialogue was the voice of 'Gods' or deceased relatives was entirely reasonable as far as they knew back then.

The ancient might say the sea calls me home and the modern would understand the same emotion as guilt at not seeing ones parents.

Dreams are unbidden, uncontrolled internal imaginings we all have and anyone who stays awake long enough will start to hallucinate while awake.

Likewise stress and PTSD can induce unbidden thought, and uncontrolled imaginings and terrors.

We then attribute this to the unconscious mind, so we entertain a certain bicamerality.

Even so many of us moderns still entertain superstitions and use ritual to absolve ourselves from 'bad luck'. The Jungian hypothesis is that the unconscious responds to symbol and ritual and we require understanding our life course in heroic and mythic terms to properly become our own selves apart from our parents' views and social programming.

We are self aware enough to correlate certain cravings for particular sugary treats to advertising influencing us - is the desire for that product truly our own thought ?

We might say that a person lacks wit, empathy or is quick to anger - the ancient talks of them as under a planetary astrological influence or a symbolic event, a raven attending their birth, the reason for their behaviour - the same things are being communicated but the cause is differently attributed.

Jaynes proposes that minds were recently completely bicameral and did not posses our modern consciousness until bicamerality broke down - which is difficult to swallow, haven't we always been this human ?

Re: The “bicameral mind” 30 years on: A reappraisal of Jaynes’ hypothesis (2007)

#30

Post by berberous »

k__ wrote: post #26
hliyan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have been better if you had included the reasons for your opinion...

bicameral mind is based solely on historical books. "Achilles didn't hear the gods, he heard his other mind!" etc.

Have you read it? It’s not based solely on that. It’s also filled with brain research.
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