It's just that it's one of the most utterly original and compelling bits of speculation ever written about the mind. It's almost certainly off-base, but I still think it's invaluable reading for anyone interested in consciousness and the mind, if only as an example of how strange a satisfactory explanation may end up being, and as a way of exposing one's own unstated assumptions about consciousness.
Those primitives! (clutches cross around neck and looks out window at the towering skyscrapers, all of them flying American flags on the ground level).
Personally, I think the narrative of ancients being that different from us is fairly out there and deep into crackpot territory. Seems to me that a lot of STEM majors haven't read the ancient sources. The idea that Herodotus, Plutarch, or Aurelius had some pre-modern mind is asinine. I can't see how someone who sat down and read The Meditations would walk away with such a conclusion. Jayne's Illiad argument stating that every character has no freewill and playthings of the gods is super weak sauce. Greeks simply weren't that devout in real life, and stuff like he's seeing is a story telling narrative. Not understanding something that simple about the Greeks further discredits him. Imagine if our society and entire conscious structure was judged by the Twilight books.
Even if we step back another couple thousands years, Egypt had a full blown society with professional tradesmen, government, militaries, etc 2500BC. Before that, Mesopotamia had all those things in 3100 BC. The Code of Hammurabi invalidates this guy's thesis pretty easily, although I can imagine him weaseling a more technical and strict definition of "consciousness" to avoid being completely discredited, but at that point this is all useless sophistry.
Also, are we ignoring ancient Hinduism and Buddhism's near obsession with consciousness here?
> perfectly explains
I find geeks seeks out "perfect" and "simple" solutions, which make sense in code, but in the world of history, anthropology, etc are reductionist and wrong. There's also quite a bit of atheistic evangelism here, which I think is why its on HN and not in the dustbin of bad history.
Herodotus, Plutarch, and Aurelius all lived thousands of years after the period discussed by the book.
And a considerable portion of the book is devoted to exploring the possibility of consciousness being something very different from what we imagine it to be, yes; something not necessarily required for civilization or law. Calling that "useless sophistry" isn't really proof otherwise, it's just dismissing the idea out of hand.
Hinduism is made of a large array of different traditions evolving together over thousands of years. The early texts do not have that "obsession with consciousness" (and this, also, is discussed extensively in the book). Buddhism, also, post-dates his proposed "bicameral" period by millenia.
Nobody thinks this explanation is true, just extremely interesting and worthy of discussion.
Why? What you're saying amounts to "nobody should ever ridicule anyone else". To be fair, you haven't qualified what kinds of things you want to speculate over, but some ideas are dangerous and their discussion/spread should be avoided/ridiculed/marginalized - e.g. spreading/discussing/propagating the idea that vaccination is harmful to children without applying any scientific rigor.
In general, I would say that you cannot concede that the point you're making is pure speculation and then also be offended at someone dismissing the idea !!! Lots of things are interesting to lots of people and it is normal behavior to dismiss ideas that one does not find interesting - especially given their speculative nature. :-)
The article cites him citing the Iliad as evidence of his theory. That's a 1200BC story. Homer lived around 800BC.
A lot of people here seem to think this article is promoting Jaynes' arguments or hypothesis but it's not. I'm not surprised though, most hacker news posts on controversial topics are usually advocating for or against an idea; the faster you can write off the argument as bunk the more time you save for other worthy content.
This article is a discussion of speculative science, not an argument. How does it contribute and how does it fail? What does it mean that we choose to speculate or apply the scientific method? It gives perspective on how we research questions now and the role of religions and myths in the past.
So he decides to read early texts, including The Iliad and The Odyssey, to look for signs of people who aren’t capable of introspection—people who are all sea, no rime. And he believes he sees that in The Iliad. He writes that the characters in The Iliad do not look inward, and they take no independent initiative. They only do what is suggested by the gods.
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The Iliad is from 1200BC story, so that means he calling a good chunk of written history and those civilizations (Egypt, early Greece, Mesopotamia) as having this ridiculous pre-modern consciousness.
Right, not in the Odyssey. And I've read the book; he specifically contrasts the Iliad with the Odyssey.
>The Iliad is from 1200BC story, so that means he calling a good chunk of written history and those civilizations (Egypt, early Greece, Mesopotamia) as having this ridiculous pre-modern consciousness.
Yes, that is correct. But not the people who you listed.
nikendo says:
> It makes me think of consciousness like training AI neural networks. Consciousness is akin to training a neural net by testing the result and triggering the reward function accordingly, whereas the subconscious is when you don't bother checking the result, you just "execute" the neural net from the control signal and take whatever result.
nikendo goes on to admit that the analogy might break down, but then reasserts that it works as a simplification (even as a simplification it is only speculation):
> I'm sure the analogy breaks down quite heavily, but it works pretty well as a simplification:
laserdinosaur says:
> So here's my takeaway from the article: concious thought is the evolutionary advantage of being able to modify our own subconscious thoughts.
Both of these are highly-rated comments on this article, currently more highly-rated than my comment which you're responding to.
To take this one step further, there was an Ask HN thread a few weeks back where many people on Hacker News said that they valued the comments on Hacker News better than the articles, and often didn't even read the articles. Maybe you can argue that nikendo and laserdinosaur just forgot to qualify their statements as speculation and don't actually believe what they said. But how is an HN reader who only reads the comments to know that this is the case? Reading those comments they could only conclude that bicameralism is an accepted scientific theory.
The people you're quoting clearly read at least part of the article (they quoted or paraphrased it). I think it's fair to assume they thought anyone reading their comments would read them in the context of the article. The article itself is very critical of Jaynes' ideas and almost all the quoted professionals say "yes that's very interesting, but he has no proof and most of it is flat out wrong."
Anyway that's my long way of saying most articles aren't worth reading but this one is.
That's true, but it doesn't respond to either of my concerns:
1. Did the commenters gloss over the criticism? Do they understand that the criticism of bicameralism is more scientifically valid than the idea itself?
2. Could an HN reader who didn't read the article gather from the comments that bicameralism is not established scientific fact?
The internal dialog wasn't smarter or supernatural or anything, but it was interesting. I would like to know if any research has been done to try to induce this state of mind, and then find a location (if one exists) of the internal dialogue using fMRI.
Get a set of cards.
Shuffle, Deal, Look.
Repeat.
Works on my machine!
Further, there's some danger here. I agree that Jaynes is clear about the speculative nature of his ideas. Jayne and other scientists talking about his work use lots of words like "might", "maybe", "could", "possibly". But you don't have to look far to find people parroting Jaynes' ideas, and often these qualifiers are the first thing to be lost in a game of whisper down the lane. Some people actively dislike these qualifying words, viewing them as "weasel words". Interesting speculation tends to enter the public consciousness as if it were fact. And false "facts" like this inform beliefs, policies, ideologies, even after they are long disproven. In fact, sometimes people who believe these things become scientists to try to prove the hypothesis they already believe.
We have a chance when speculation like this comes up to nip these harmful societal ideas in the bud, to restate the only actual fact that we know, which is that we don't know, and that this speculation shouldn't be propagated and used.
Yes, but I'm saying people don't understand that.
There's a good amount of information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_%28psychology%29#R...