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

I think you're making a category error comparing quackish theories of planetary dynamics to questionable theories of mind.

Nobody really knows how the modern human psychological consciousness developed. To compare a theory about that, to a theory claiming as-near-as-we-can-tell-physically-wrong things about Jupiter and Venus and Earth's rotation and physical forces, is invalid.

When I read criticisms of Jaynes, they seem a lot like criticisms of Darwin's original, simplistic view of evolution. Saying the bicameral mind is not a perfect theory is uninteresting; hardly anything is a perfect theory. What matters is the specific criticism (do you have one?) leveled at it, and whether the bulk of Jaynes's ideas can be modified and extended, with another few decades or century's worth of knowledge, into something that's roughly (empirically tested to be) accurate.

Nobody takes Darwin's original expression of evolutionary theory as gospel today, but it's part of the scientific canon for a reason. It was incomplete and therefore misleading in some ways, but the core ideas are essentially taken as true today. We can see evolution in action through microbiology and genome analysis, even if some specific (narrow) ideas and predictions by Darwin and early primitive evolutionary theory have been falsified.

Or look how relativity developed. First people were tinkering around with ideas about electromagnetism, discovering things about light, then came special relativity, which led to a bunch of problems, which led to general relativity. And even GR is wrong, since it doesn't currently accommodate quantum theory. That doesn't make special or general relativity wrong, so much as it makes them incomplete. They may be wrong in an absolute sense, but they're still quite useful. Even special relativity, being the wrong-er of the two, has some important "first step" realizations, like speed of light being invariant. Even the ether theory, now pretty much falsified, might end up having some contribution to future physics, if it turns out that there's some substrate (in a sense, though it would probably be neither matter-like nor light-like, and instead coupled to matter and light in interesting ways) that binds things together.

I have early memories of a non verbal world, and in it, objects were not discrete. There were visually distinct elements, such things on the walls, and the walls themselves, but I had no concept of them being separate, or having names, or needing them, and didn't think about them. I just looked around. There was no chain of thoughts, just silent observation.

Likewise, I lacked object permanence. When my mother left the room, she ceased to exist; I did not think about her or imagine her being somewhere else.

There was no sense of time, no before or after that I can tell.I was just living in the moment.

Ironically I know now what time it was, my rough age, and even the season, because of the specifics of where my room was. It was afternoon nap time. The sunlight was streaming in my window, which happened only in fall/winter, as there was a summertime screen of trees. We later reoriented our house, so that lets me establish my age too. I was just turned two, and late to talk.

There must have been some sense of self by then, but I think that starts earlier, developing from kicking your legs and swinging your arms, and eventually realizing that you are a causation.

Talking about this memory damages it, because language and symbolism overlays the experience into an approximation. But it is very different from my other memories.

I think I held onto that memory because I had a later event that echoed it. Soon after we moved to another town, and there a whole bunch of people got the flu. People had not forgotten the Spanish Flu by the early 70s, and there was worries about another one. So they quarantined the hospital,put me in an oxygen tent, and I got to enjoy another timeless experience.

By that time I could think, though I didn't talk. During admittance, my mom was holding me while talking to a nurse, and I saw a person in an oxygen tent get pushed down a hallfway. I pointed and asked, "Can I be in one of those?" Years later when I related this to my mother, she laughed and said, "No you didn't, you were too young to talk like that."

I wasn't yet old enough to be told "you'll be here for a few days at least", or "mommy can't visit you(and she was pregnant)". The O2 tent was comprised of a yellowish, rubbery vinyl, and I remember touching it, and that it was a new experience for me. Couldn't really see anything through it, except diffuse sunlight. So I lay there facing the wall mostly, too sick to move, and spent a week with no internal narrative. I don't remember feeling lonely, scared, or bored. I remember a nurse checking on me(and probably changing my diaper), but not being awake at night.

It works because the bicameral theory is a hallucination. ;)

For anyone trying to generalize Mr. Jayne's theory from an article or set of comments - I suggest that you definitely do not. Really, don't do that with anyone's theories, but instead READ THE BOOK.

The way that Jaynes "carves up consciousness" as Daniel Dennet puts it in one review, is very different than the way that a reflexive intellectual instinct would choose to. The taxonomy that Jaynes decides upon is distinctive from our mental reflexes, and not at all the same as what nearly everyone begins with.

I feel that this "Bicameral" consciousness discussion keeps reappearing on Hacker News in part because it is crucial for us to create a proper distinction between these terms - AI is rapidly going to become conscious in exactly the way Julian Jaynes suggests we became "conscious" and that consciousness is very much different than what we think it is (or must be) for AI to become generally aware of itself.

I suggest that anyone who is working towards AGI MUST discover the distinctions that Julian Jaynes made. That does not mean that his theory regarding our consciousness is correct, but merely that his ways of describing "self-awareness" or whatever other term could be applied is crucial to getting a grip on what the true mechanism of "the self" is in the truest engineering sense. That is to say, that if the "self" is the licensed self-aware driver of a vehicle and the engine and transmission is the remainder of cognition, than the order of development was actually from "self-driving car" into human driven vehicles - metaphorically speaking.

Basically, up until recently, we just DID, and in attempting to describe WHY we were forced to invent metaphor until collectively we were able to create the language necessary to actually BE self aware. Without the language, we actually were NOT self aware. We were self-driving cars with no human drivers. The human driver only arrived after there were ways of describing "him."

> There are people today who hear voices, but they are a minority and we label them as mentally ill.

I've always wondered how much of that comes down to definition and perception?

I can "hear" my own thoughts, so I pretty much have "voices" in my head. That I recognize them as my own, probably isn't a given.

Because when I try to talk about this with friends&family, most of them don't even seem to understand what I'm talking about with "hearing yourself think" like they have no active thoughts of their own?!

As such I don't think it's something that has established itself on a large scale across the whole population, I think there are still very big differences between how individual humans think and perceive their own thinking, which by now we might label as being "somewhere on the spectrum".