Jaynes' work is wonderful anthropological scifi, and I recommend it to anyone for that purpose. And I'm not being snarky there; I think it's really enjoyable as something to stimulate the imagination.

As actual science, the book should set every cherrypicking alarm bell ringing. For example, he talks a lot about right vs. left positioning of religious imagery, which is a key part of his theory. The problem with that is that if you come up with any theory based on right/left, you can expect about 50% of the evidence to support you, even if you're wrong.

And the whole book is like that. Lots of enthralling examples, with speculation about how they connect to his theory, but very little systematic analysis of evidence.

Also Iain Mc Gilchrist's "The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World".

https://twitter.com/divided_brain

Initially I thought the article would be about that: how our brain shaped our thinking, and then our literature, culture. I think it's a lot more interesting to ask how our brains shaped our thinking, and then everything we created from literature to culture, to society..

From history books and movies we have this idea that humans were much like us.. but I begin to think in fact, it's almost as if humanity was an entirely different species, almost alien to the way we see ourselves today. I think in many ways they must have been much more reactive and automatic in their behaviour, and if you could travel back in time you would feel like you are amongst complete lunatics and it would be very frightening.

That's the impression I got from the theory, but I really don't buy it. I have yet to read a piece of ancient literature that didn't feel like it was written by a modern human. Gilgamesh, brought up earlier, is a great example.

> they must have been much more reactive and automatic in their behaviour, and if you could travel back in time you would feel like you are amongst complete lunatics and it would be very frightening

This is exactly how I feel when I visit certain extremely religious relatives. They have a 'spiritual' explanation for almost every last tiny detail of their ongoing daily experience. Sometimes I think a few of the more fringe groups of this sort are actively enabling unmedicated schizophrenics.

Thanks for sharing that link. Jaynes' idea is interesting but I really think we're no different than people in the past. I don't see how this change to bicameral minds could have happened.

I'm currently reading the book [1] and while I haven't finished it yet, the thrust (if I'm understanding it correctly) seems to be that it was the increasing complexity of civilization (as populations rose in an area) that lead the brain to reform connections to be less bicameral in nature.

There are evolutionary changes in humans that are known to us. For instance, people of European descent can still digest milk into adulthood; the father you get from Europe, the greater that lactose intolerance grows. So it could also be for bicameralism.

I too, am skeptical about how this came across the world, but he does mention in passing that some of the Pre-Columbian cultures of North America could have still been bicameral as late as the early 1500s. It's really an interesting read.

[1] I found a copy in a used book store and the price was right.

I see it not as a hardware change but a software change. That doesn’t prove Jaynes’ theory, of course. There is another book called Metaprogramming and the Human Biocomputer.

Jaynes’ theory is interesting to me because it reminds me of disassociative disorders.

I don't think you can evaluate if that's true by reading books by people in the past. There are a lot of different states of mind which are consistent with the same output. I mean, just think about how many people with wildly different states of mind (schizophrenic, autism) today who can write books which are indistinguishable from books by "normal" people.

I think you can assume most people write characters that think somewhat like they do.

And is it true that schizophrenic and autistic authors do write the same?

There are a lot of people who don't think verbally, who nevertheless manage (because they have to, because that's basically the only channel we have) to share their ideas using language (in an indistinguishable way from people who do think with words). Some people think with sounds, some are primarily visual thinkers, some are informed by their emotions. I don't think it's infeasible that there are other ways of thinking (or other states of consciousness), which nevertheless have the capacity to produce the same type of output, in terms of writing, as what we with our consciousness produce today.

Are you saying how our brains work never evolved and we think the same as primates?

That seems really far fetched.

It's not so far fetched to say that mammal brains are all pretty similar and have a similar "consciousness" that "lower" mammals may be mediated/obscured by inability to use complex language or some other constraints

The ability to use language is a core part of jayne’s theory though. That would be part of the evolution process.

Thank you for bringing this up. I love this book. The thesis is breathtaking. But as you say, nearly impossible to test rigorously :(

I wonder if its plausibility will become more apparent as lifespans increase, allowing the typical adult human to be able to converse with more than just the generation below and above and hence be able to get at least a local estimation of the rate of change of consciousness in real life; vs. having to rely solely on literature as evidence for the mutability of human consciousness.

We are pretty far off from humans living the thousands of years needed to directly witness the evolution of consciousness species wide. You'd see much more variation by surveying geneticallh remote people alive today.