The theory can "rationally" explain how Aphrodite speaks to Paris, but it does not explain how she teleports him from the battlefield to his chamber. So you still have to accept either supernatural events or that the story contains fictional elements. In which case the gods are much easier explained than through this theory, which have no other evidence.
And the narrative style of the Iliad (describing events and actions but not thought processes and introspection) is known throughout history.
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 literal description of a real experience.
For me one of the biggest problems with the theory is how people's perception (whether they hear voices or not) could change en masse, presumably because of a change in culture or education, because I don't believe there can have been a biological change over that period. Therefore, if people educated in the right way could hear voices I'd expect there still to be groups of people (members of some religious sect perhaps) who hear voices. So I'd like to see a detailed description of one of those groups. Then I could perhaps believe that the phenomenon was mainstream in ancient Greece.
> Therefore, if people educated in the right way could hear voices I'd expect there still to be groups of people (members of some religious sect perhaps) who hear voices.
My (entirely made up) theory here is that it's mediated through stress and exhaustion. Even today there's something called "brief psychotic disorder" where during a period of extreme stress somebody can experience delusions, hallucinations, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_psychotic_disorder
There are also a variety of religious traditions where modern people will hear the voice of god, enter trance states, channel spirits, etc. And we all know that sleep deprivation can produce all sorts of mental effects.
Given that civilization is mainly marked by improvements in life quality over time, it seems reasonable that the further back we go, the rougher people have it. So figure less sleep, worse nutrition, more desperation, more trauma, both direct and through the frequent death of children, friends, family.
So it seems reasonable to me that early on in civilization people were on average pretty bonkers. And social creatures that we are, that we'd be jointly bonkers; if our parents and siblings and and neighbors experience parts of themselves as the voice of particular gods, we would be likely to as well.
As our lives over generations get slowly better, the stress level drops. So too does the level of biologically driven psychosis. Which undermines the cultural elements that support and channel it, which might collapse relatively suddenly. (A reasonable modern parallel might be the European collapse in religious belief over recent generations.)
All pure speculation, of course. Jaynes's theory is certainly fun to think about, but we would have a hard time getting real experiments past an IRB.
To form a conception of this otherwise impossible to conceive-of social/psychological dynamic, one has to imagine people and civilization which has no reverse focus on the self whatsoever. There would be no collectively determined subjective language to refer to one another and to oneself. For example, I could say "NAME1 verbed NAME2!" and "NAME3 verbed NAME1!" Even when NAME3 is "myself" remember that there is no "myself." That is to say "I verbed NAME1" would not be a statement. NAME3 would be "me" without there being a concept of "me" whatsoever.
To make matters even more difficult, the "past tense" would be very shaky or even non existent without attributing an almost ritualistic re-occurrence to the action, and in addition to that, a driving force which was the "god" or spirit equivalent of that force. In Jayne's theory, the phase of "bicameralism" was a middle phase that allowed for hydraulic agricultural civilization without something that could be described as "literacy of the self."
To express day-to-day behavior, there would be no conceptual active participants to describe AT ALL. Instead, an external force would be used to explain most behaviors - namely gods, ancestors, what have you - who ever's voice would be identified with the behavior. The "hearing voices" part is both real and figurative, as it would be necessary without that neurological self having existed.
It came into existence, according to Jaynes, right along with the language "I" "myself" "you" and so on, and a careful reading of antique civilization's language would help one to notice that there truly was no such language structure to describe the self until that concept formed civilization-wide. Until then, there was no "it" except that which was attributed to a very real pantheon of voices and compulsions which moved people to act.
[edited for clarity]
Well said.
If it seems unlikely to anyone that society could transition to the state described to one where they have a full conception of self, just think of all the societies that didn't have any concept of zero. Yet they now use zero in their everyday life.
Like zero, self is a concept that now seems hard to imagine not having. Yet we know for a fact that societies at one time had no idea of zero.
The sane ones know better than to tell people that they hear voices.
>"Research supports the view that hearing hallucinatory voices is not by itself an indicator of mental illness. Estimates of the percentage of people in the general population without a known psychiatric illness who report auditory hallucinations vary widely. One review of seventeen surveys from nine countries found prevalence estimates as low as fewer than 1% to as high as 84%. Estimates of college students who have reported hearing hallucinatory voices have ranged from 13% to 71%. The wide range of estimates can be attributed in part to differences in definitions, survey instructions, and other methodological variations. Taking into consideration such methodological differences, some researchers estimate the prevalence of hearing voices in the general population to be between 5% and 28%, with 75% of people who report hearing voices to be psychologically healthy. Research suggests also that the prevalence of auditory verbal hallucinations varies by gender, age and culture."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/longing-nostalgia/...
"The wide range of estimates can be attributed in part to differences in definitions, survey instructions, and other methodological variations."
Kind of burying the lead.
"Taking into consideration" Making shit up
I'm more interested in how many people actually hear voices, not memory, interior monologue, or day dreaming. Unbidden commentary by a voice of another that is distinguishable from reality only by deduction.
There being an acceptable way to do so doesn't mean it tells you anything meaningful about the world.
Getting widely divergent numbers means to me that we don't have any accurate understanding.
First stating the range within the existing literature is useful and common practice, at least within academic article writing.
It also doesn't generally mean that any numbers mentioned in the article thereafter are derived by the author mashing the results together and getting some number in between, they are picked from the papers that are referenced at the bottom of the piece.
So here, the wider range is being pulled from one paper that is a wide historical review, the narrower range and estimates for amount of people who hear voices without a recognized mental illness, are pulled from another paper, also a review of existing literature, but one that narrows the scope to more recent research. And then the numbers in the article for the amount of people who link their voices to their God, is the subject of another paper.
It seems that much of what passes for social sciences isn't really science.
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 ?
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).
On another note—
Actually, you do hear voices. You just don’t notice them because you assume that they are your “inner voice.” If you just gave the process of thinking your thoughts a different label, you could easily call it “hearing a voice.” I’m not trying to be a smart ass here, don’t you think that this is true ? IMO, the idea that “thinking thoughts” and “hearing voices” are just different vague metaphorical labels for the same internal phenomenon makes a lot of sense.
Sometimes I wonder if human acquired the ability to "silently" think thoughts only recently. That the ability to silently think evolved much like how the ability to silently read evolved (even today I sometimes run into country folks who have little ability to read without audibly reading, or cannot transfer their password from phone to computer without broadcasting it to everyone around)
Presumably audible thinking and audible reading were the original forms. Then silent thinking and silent reading evolved because of their obvious utility (it's fitness enhancing to be able to hide your thoughts from your enemy blah blah)
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".
The scope for this is highly in flux at present.
The theory is valuable because it's a good explanation for a lot of things and it doesn't disagree with the evidence. That's the purpose of all scientific theories, in Popper's philosophy of science, which is still the most relevant.
I haven't heard anything even half as compelling for a plausible evolution of social cohesion or the origin of consciousness, by which Jayne's means inner life.
Just because something might be "wrong" in its final conclusion, does not mean that it can't offer unique insights on its way of getting there.
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.
One of the things that actually struck me about this theory was that it really boosts the idea that we should respect the minds of non-human animal mind because they may not experience the world differently than we do.
At some point a human form of self awareness could have formed, but I think the key is not triggered by physiology alone. Feral humans exist and it's important to understand that there is an observed malleability of the mind which tapers with age. Such individuals have been found and in some cases rehabilitated into what we consider functioning, self-aware, cognitively capable humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child#Documented_cases_o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period
Edit: It reminded me of this story I saw recently about a girl neglected until age 7. Today she is like a 2 year-old in a 20 year-old's body. Keep in mind there is nothing physically wrong with her other than neglect. Consciousness is emergent behavior. Having the physical elements alone is not enough.
http://www.tampabay.com/projects/girl-in-the-window/neglect-...