Bicameralism, Part 1: The Voice of God

In 1976, psychologist Julian Jaynes presented the world with a stunning new take on the history of human consciousness. His book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” hypothesized that ancient humans heard hallucinated voices in place of conscious thought, and presented archaeological, literary, historical and religious evidence to support this highly controversial view. Join Robert and Joe as they dissect bicameralism and discuss the evidence, the criticisms and more in this two-parter.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:46):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind from How Stuff Works dot com.
Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In. Today,
we're gonna be returning to one of our favorite mind
blowing topics here on the show, and that's going to
be the problems inherent in our experience of consciousness. Yeah,

(01:09):
this is a great one because there's no danger of
us really explaining it and figuring out consciousness anytime soon.
And there have been so many different approaches to it,
right from the neuroscientific to the psychological to the philosophic,
everyone trying to understand this question. Who am I? What
am I? What is this thing I'm experiencing? One of
the most persistent and fascinating questions in the study of

(01:30):
mind and biology is the question of the function of consciousness,
not just what is it? But what does it do?
I mean, you know that you have an internal subjective experience,
that you're aware of your awareness, that you can turn
your mind's eye to work over content in this deep
place in your brain. And by analogy, you believe everybody

(01:51):
else has this ability as well. They seem to have it.
But biologically speaking, why does anybody have it? Now? You
might think it's just necessary part of being an animal
with a brain, right, Like I've got stuff to do.
I've got to eat, gotta go get the groceries, got
to seek shelter, got to check the coin returns in
all these candy machines. So my brain needs to be

(02:12):
able to think about doing that stuff in order to
do it right. But hold up for a second. I
wonder if you've ever had this experience, Robert, tell me
if you have. Do you ever have that experience where
you're driving a car and you arrive at your destination
and you suddenly realize and sort of like the transition
between activities when you get there, that you were not

(02:35):
conscious of the act of driving. Oh yeah, yeah, you
go on a sort of autopilot. I've had that happen
with generally with routine tasks. Uh, it might be driving,
it might be emptying a dishwasher, loading a dishwasher, that
sort of thing, you know, taking dealing with laundry. Yeah,
and so when in the example with driving, this is

(02:56):
often known as highway hypnosis. Maybe you were lost in
your thought bots while on the road and you just
managed to drive from one place to another without consciously
thinking about driving at all, and yet you did it.
Driving is this highly complicated mental task. It involves massive
integration of sense, information, and coordination of different parts of

(03:17):
the body. You've got a time, everything just right, and
yet your brain has the power to make your body
do it without you thinking about it at all. And
unlike dealing with laundry or unloading the dishwasher. If you
do it wrong, people die, so right, it's it's I
think it's one of the reasons we tend to highlight
it is because you think about the fact, Oh, I

(03:39):
don't really remember driving to work, I just kind of
did it. And it's such a dangerous thing for us
to engage in and seemingly turn our brain off to. Yeah,
it can be a terrifying experience for multiple reasons. I mean,
one is the danger, but the other is just how
alien it feels to realize that your body is capable

(03:59):
of doing complex behavior without your knowledge, essentially without you
really being aware of the entire time. So now the
next step I want to take you on is very simple.
Just imagine everything you do is like this, cooking, cleaning, working, talking, fighting, parenting.

(04:20):
Imagine your brain is just as capable of doing everything
it does, but simply without reflecting upon those actions within
the mental theater of your consciousness. So it's highway hypnosis
for your entire life. It's total behavior hypnosis. Is it
possible for you to imagine this? It's difficult to imagine

(04:40):
this sort of thing, for sure, because because in this scenario,
being conscious of your drive like that would be the
abnormality you're talking about, you know, an abnormal state of
consciousness or or even a lack of consciousness really would
be the normal, that would be the predominant human experience exactly.
And now that you're considering that possibility, we ask again,

(05:02):
if that's possible, what does consciousness do and where does
it come from? And why? You know, I think we
often turn to various metaphors to partially explain our thought processes. Yeah,
how often, I mean, how often do we fall back
on computer program, movie or or written fiction as a
loose means of understanding at all? But one of the

(05:22):
you know, the real damnable things about trying to understand
consciousness is that like we're stuck within it. It's like
it's like trying to understand that the Earth is not flat, right, Like,
we have all of these various means of of you know,
of of testing it, of of looking at the data
and knowing for a fact that the world is not
like just a flat plane, and we can even send

(05:43):
a satellite or even a human being up into orbit
to look back down on the Earth and see it
for us. But with consciousness, it's not that easy. Uh,
you know, despite whatever different tools you might be using neuroscientific,
psychological philosophical to step outside of our consciousness and understand
what it actually is. Yeah, I mean one of the
problems is you can't really be conscious of the fact

(06:06):
that you do things unconsciously, Like you can't feel what
that's like in the moment, because as soon as you
pay attention to it to feel it, you're conscious again. Yeah,
and it wouldn't be the same thing, really. Perhaps you
agree or disagree as not remembering doing something, right, you
could have been conscious of doing something and then had
amnesia and forgotten about it. Yeah, Or you know, you

(06:27):
hear people about here about people who consume too much
alcohol and expand have a blackout experience, or accounts of
people who who use ambient to sleep and uh and
they do something that they do not remember, and you know,
various other psychological factors that can create that experience like
this order thirty frying pans on Amazon, right, right. But

(06:49):
for for the for what we're talking about here, this
is a case where yes, you remember driving to work,
but you weren't really there for it. Yeah. Yeah, you
know it happened, but it just your mind was not present, right, likewise,
it's not like undergoing anesthesia and just being out for
the course of a surgery. In thinking about all this,

(07:09):
you know, I often come back to a quote from
the author are Scott Baker, who was recently on our show,
and he he said this about consciousness. The magic can
only vanish as soon as the coin trick is explained.
In this case, we are the magic. So, uh, I
have to think about that when trying to unravel consciousness,
Like we're we're within consciousness, we're creatures of consciousness, and

(07:31):
then to try and take it apart is to take
about ourselves. Well. I know Scott has some anxieties about
the Well I don't want to put words into his mouth,
but I think he has some anxieties about, you know,
the consequences of explaining consciousness too much, Like if you
do explain it, does that create a sort of crisis
of of meaning of existence? Yeah, the semantic apocalypse. Yeah.

(07:54):
So this leads us in to what we're gonna be
talking about for the next two episodes of the show.
This is going to be the first part of a
two part series where we're going to be discussing a
fascinating hypothesis in the history of psychology known as bicameralism. Now, specifically,
we're gonna be looking at the work of the American
psychologist Julian Jaynes in his nineteen six book The Origin

(08:18):
of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The
two episodes that we're gonna do, we're gonna break down
roughly like this. In the first episode, we're going to
just try to explain what Julian Jane's theory of the
bicameral mind and of modern consciousness is and how he
gets there from the problem of consciousness. And then in

(08:39):
the second episode, we want to discuss his argument, like
his evidence for the theory of the bicameral mind, how
he sees evidence of this in history, and maybe some
reactions to the idea since the bicameral mind. And we
should be super clear here at the beginning that this
was and still is a controversial hypothesis. For the purposes

(09:00):
of discussion today, we're going to be entertaining it as
a hypothetical, but you should not take this to be
uh an endorsement of the hypothesis as fact. It's not
widely believed to be correct and full though it has
had many supporters, and even if it's not correct and full,
which is probably not, it might be correct in part. Yeah. Indeed,
there's gonna be a lot of points in this episode

(09:20):
where we're discussing the theory of the bicameral mind as
if it is something that we are totally convinced of. Yeah,
and this book I just mentioned the origin of consciousness
in the Breakdown of the bicameral Mind. I would compare
it to the work of, for example, James Fraser because
I think it's one of those books that's worth reading
even if it's almost completely wrong, because it's just such

(09:43):
a fascinating synthesis of so many disciplines. Today and the
next episode, we're gonna be diving through history, archaeology, ancient literature, philosophy, psychiatry, neuroscience,
and just direct phenomenological experience. I read the Dawkins criticis well,
what Dawkins said of the book is that it's either
Richard Dawkins either said that it's brilliant or it's rubbish,

(10:05):
and that there's no in between. I disagree with that, Yeah,
I would. Yeah, I think that it's very possible that
it is both brilliant and wrong. Yeah, if nothing else,
I think it serves as a fascinating thought experiment. What
if this is true? What if this were true? And
how does it force us to reinterpret the past and
the legacy of our species? Yeah? So, even though I

(10:28):
suspect it's conclusions are probably wrong or at least wrong
in part, this is one of the most interesting books
I've ever read in my life. So, strap in, I
think we should start just by giving a straight version
of Jane's conclusion and then work our way back to it.
Does that make sense to you, Robert, Oh, Yeah, that's
pretty much what he does in the book. Here's this

(10:49):
amazing theory of what consciousness consists of and what it
used to consist of or not consist of, and then
he works backwards from there. Right, And so here's the
us basic summary I can give of his conclusion. Until
roughly three thousand years ago, human beings were not conscious.

(11:09):
Around that time, modern human consciousness began as a cultural invention,
probably in Mesopotamia that's spread across the world over time.
And before that time, for thousands of years, almost all
humans were not conscious in the way we are, but
instead we're commanded in all novel behaviors by hallucinated voices

(11:32):
that they called gods. And I just want to drive
home the impact of this. The argument is that ancient
people's did not think like we think. The god run human,
as he refers to him, at one point experience something
that for us would feel like an altered state of
consciousness or spiritual event. Is if we were hypnotized by

(11:53):
a voice like that of a god and they just
told us what to do, and then catastrophe forces us
to learn consciousness, and in doing so, we ceased hearing
the voices of the gods as we once did. Yeah. So,
just to be clear about this, what is being proposed
is in this period, which he calls the period before consciousness,
is the period of the bicameral human being. In the

(12:14):
bicameral mind, there was no consciousness. There was just action
commanded by hallucinated voices from another part of the brain
that was believed to be a god. Yeah. And what
we'll get into the idea of schizophrenia as it released
all of this in the second episode. But James does

(12:35):
say that, like straight up, this was a time when
everybody was essentially schizophrenic. Now one of the things that's
interesting about this is it runs counter to a lot
of what we do when we read ancient literature and
and flip through ancient history. Is that here's I would
describe my experience this way. Maybe maybe you'll tell me
whether you think it's the same for you. When I

(12:55):
read a work of ancient poetry or I read out
you know, very very ancient, like the ancient Egypt or
ancient Mesopotamia, stuff that goes way way back from before
the Roman Empire. Say, I feel like, on the face
of it, I encounter humans who are completely alien to me.

(13:16):
I feel like I can't identify with them, and I
don't understand the way they're being described. And what usually
happens is I say, okay, well this is just a
problem of translation, Like I'm not getting some things about
the cultural ways that their lives are communicated through this
literature and recorded. Um so I just need to find

(13:36):
ways of seeing the analogies between people like us and
people like them and say, Okay, here they were really
more like us, and here's why things are being misunderstood.
But another way, do you kind of have that same experience? Um? Yeah,
well it depends. I mean definitely. I would say the
oldest civilization that we continually discuss here, it's probably, you know,

(13:59):
ancient Egypt, and you know, we've touched on the fact
that like the religion of ancient Egypt did not did
not travel well beyond its borders, and that that's they were.
They were really alien people to try and understand. So yeah,
I definitely feel that when I'm whenever we're researching the
ancient Egyptians, uh, and to a certain extent, I felt
that when we were talking about, uh, the ancient ancient

(14:20):
Mesopotamia as it relates to the Tower of Babel. But
but there's I feel like there's often also this issue
that I guess is best summed up by the various
medieval pieces of art where you know, such as you know,
the stuff by Brugal the Elder, where you have some
sort of mythic thing going on, like the Tower of Babel,

(14:40):
but then you also have scenes of everyday life. And
so I think, well, if I'm encountering something that doesn't
feel very human and looking at an ancient culture, then
perhaps that's because this is just like the skeleton of experience.
This is just the heroes, the gods, the myths, and
very little is recorded of daily struggles and daily life. Yeah,
but what if the issue is not so much that

(15:04):
the ways they're similar to us is being lost in translation,
but it's that we're reading that basically correct at face value,
and they just weren't like us. Yeah. I feel like
it's it's kind of a challenging perspective to try and
wrestle with because I want to humanize figures of the past,
especially you know, people in other cultures. It feels wrong

(15:25):
to say, look at at at ancient Egyptians, individuals, and
you know, in ancient civilizations of Asia or Africa, and
and think of them as alien, to think of them
as having a different thought process than than we have, right.
I Mean, one way I think that we're resistant to
that is that there's a sort of implied like denigration

(15:46):
in that saying like, oh, if they were very different
from us, they weren't as good as us. And we
certainly don't want to think that way, but we it
might just be the case that their internal mental life
was very different than the internal mental life of people
on Earth today. Yeah, And before we dive in any deeper,
I do want to point out that, yes, The bicameral

(16:06):
mind is referenced in HBO's Westworld, UH, And I really
love Westward. I think it's a wonderful show. However, I
think you'll find that the the idea of the bicameral
mind and the ramifications of bicameralism are far more complex, rewarding,
and terrifying, uh than anything that's explored in that show.

(16:26):
I totally agree. I remember that it came up, but
I don't remember there being much about it in the show. Well, Robert,
I think maybe we should start where Jane's starts in
his book, which is with the problem of consciousness. And
he's got he's got an introduction to his book that
just gives a brief history of all the solutions that
people have tried to offer to the problem of consciousness

(16:48):
over the years, which, even if you don't if you're
not interested in his bicameral theory, this is a cool
intro to read because it's such a well written and
concise summary of the history of people trying to deal
with with what consciousness is and where it came from
up until the mid nineteen seventies. And he's got a
quote where he describes the the you know the question

(17:10):
at the root of the problem of consciousness that is
so good I had to read it. So consciousness is
quote a secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel,
an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an
infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries, a whole kingdom where
each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will,

(17:34):
commanding what we can, A hidden hermitage where we may
study out the troubled book of what we have done
and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself
than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness
that is myself of selves, that is everything and yet
nothing at all. What is it? And where did it
come from? And why? I should also say that the

(17:57):
description infinite resource of disappointments and discoveries a perfect review
for Disney World. Wait, what are the discoveries the discoveries
of disappointments or no, no no, the discoveries are you are discoveries.
It's full of just wonders and disappointments. So I mean,
I loved it, but yeah, it's a it's a it's

(18:18):
it's hard to contemplate the discovery of what other people
throw in the trash. Maybe, isn't that one of the
most interesting things about going to an amusement park is
looking in the trash can and seeing what people throw away.
Maybe this is just me um, Maybe this is a
huge Joe. I don't know. I don't remember the trash
cans of Disney World some that much. But maybe that's

(18:39):
just because it was, you know, stimulation overload. No, it's
great when you let you see a pair of glasses
in there or something and it's like, huh hm. Anyway
back to the problem of consciousness. So, in other words,
it's not hard to understand where human beings came from.
Biology and evolution seemed totally sufficient to explain the exist

(19:00):
a stence of bipedal primates eating and reproducing and making tools.
But the question is not why are those creatures here?
It's why are we here? These entities of reflection and
awareness that seemed to inhabit the bodies of these bipedal primates.
So one can easily imagine, as we talked about earlier
in the introduction, bipedal primates that do all the same

(19:22):
stuff we do, but our automata, there's no inner awareness
or capacity for deliberative thought or reflection. So if if
we're evolved beings, at what point in our evolution did
consciousness appear? And so he he offers a few thoughts
of this. One of them is the idea that consciousness
is a property of matter. Right, so the relationship of

(19:43):
consciousness to what we are conscious of is not fundamentally
different from the relationship between objects interacting physically by contact
or by gravity. It's only different in complexity. Of course,
Jaynes is not persuaded by this view, and I I
would just say, if consciousness is an inherent property of matter,
like a can of baked beans is in some way conscious,

(20:07):
why do we completely lose consciousness under general anesthesia? Like
if you've ever been put under for surgery, you know
what it's like. There's no consciousness whatsoever. It's just a
black hole in your in your experience. But so yeah,
there's no reflection, no internal experience, no memory, no choice,
no dreams. Your mind just ceases until you wake up.

(20:29):
But while you're under anesthesia, you still have the same
mass you did. So if it's something about matter that
would see I don't see why changing the chemical uh,
you know, chemicals flowing through your brain would cause you
to completely lose consciousness. It's just that some part of
the brain has been chemically deactivated. This signals to me

(20:50):
that consciousness has something to do with something happening in
the brain. Yeah. And I think distinctions like this tend
to make a lot of sense to modern humans, in
large part because we have that handy metaphor of hardware
and software. Right, so it's really easy for us to
think of of consciousness arising as essentially like software arising

(21:10):
from the hardware um of the of the brain. Yeah,
it's not there in the hardware. It has to it
has to be run by the hardware. Okay, so so
maybe it's not there in all living matter. But maybe
Jane says, what if it's a property of all living
things like amba's have some form of consciousness. It's just

(21:30):
when life arises, that's when you start having consciousness. Apparently
Darwin was fond of this idea. He's he sort of
saw a rudimentary consciousness in all living things. But according
to Jane's and I think I'd probably have to agree
with them, there is just not any evidence that simple
organisms possess consciousness. Our tendency to project consciousness onto them

(21:51):
is just some fallacy of sympathy. Like we see behavior
and sympathizing with the consciousness behind similar types of behaviors
in human beings, we assume consciousness is behind those similar
behaviors in all creatures. In Amiba's because you know a
human being fleeing a needle would be conscious, you imagine
an amiba fleeing a needle would be conscious. But there's

(22:13):
just no evidence that that's true. Yeah, I think it's
important to remember that as humans, we we anthropomorphize like
mad gods. We're wired to see faces, but we're also
wired to detect minds totally even when there's nothing there. Right, Okay,
So maybe here's another theory. Jane says, what if consciousness
is learning. He says a lot of people were persuaded

(22:35):
this by this view for many years. And here's a quote.
If an animal could modify its behavior on the basis
of its experience, it must be having an experience. It
must be conscious. Thus, if one wish to study the
evolution of consciousness, one simply studied the evolution of learning.
And in fact, James himself, along with many other psychologists

(22:56):
worked under this assumption for many years of psychological research
before or rejecting it. For example, he tells stories about
how he did experiments to see if a mimosa plant
could be trained through conditioning, and he in the end
determined that the mimosa plant was not conscious. Uh. He
he found that species with synaptic nervous systems like fish, flatworms, earthworms,

(23:18):
and so forth, could learn, and originally he took this
as evidence that they possessed some form of consciousness, but
later research has shown this to be just obviously wrong.
You don't need consciousness for learning, because we can show
in human beings that there's a tremendous amount of totally
unconscious learning, unconscious conditioning. Yeah. Plus we need only think

(23:40):
to the slime mold for an example of learning taking
place in the absence of a brain. So um, yeah,
I feel like we've we've moved beyond that. Okay, the
next one is just consciousness is a metaphysical, metaphysical imposition.
It's it's magic, you know. And Okay, well, if if
you think it's magic in joy, but uh, that's that's

(24:02):
not really something that's very productive to proceed with from
a scientific point of view, it's hard to do experiments
to see if consciousness is magic. So uh so you
believe that if you want, but that's not really going
to give you a program of experimentation to work with. Yeah,
I think we can only engage in dualism so far
from a scientific standpoint, because the mind that stands apart

(24:23):
from body must still be rooted in our universe. Uh So,
we can't really do much with magic. Here's another one.
We've talked about this one on the show before. Here's
the helpless spectator theory. Consciousness does nothing, and in fact
it can do nothing. So the idea is that at
some point in evolution, sufficiently complex brains begin to create
this sense of awareness of deliberate thought. Uh And the

(24:46):
relationship between this sensation of experience and the actions in
your body is a complete illusion. Your consciousness does not
in fact control your body. Your body acts, and your
consciousness watches you act. It's a helpless passenger. You're essentially
watching a movie of your own mind, suffering from the
delusion that you're participating in the movie. This is also

(25:09):
known sometimes as epiphenomenalism, that consciousness is just an epiphenomenal uh,
by product of mental processes. Yeah. Thomas Huxley was fond
of this, and he would compare conscious mind and the
physical brain to a genie in a lamp. Yeah. But
so a lot of people have found this not very productive.

(25:30):
I mean, one would one question would be well, but
still what is it? Another thing would be the American
psychologist William James, the guy who wrote The Varieties of
Religious Experience. He argued against this view, as paraphrased by
Jane's quote. If consciousness is the mere, impotent shadow of action,
why is it more intense when action is most hesitant?

(25:53):
And why are we least conscious when doing something most habitual?
I think that's a reasonable question. So James ends up
saying that he thinks any viable theory of consciousness should
at least try to explain a relationship between consciousness and behavior. Okay,
we're getting close to the end of this timeline. How
about consciousness as an emergent property. We've talked about this

(26:14):
idea before too, Right, So, hydrogen is not wet, oxygen
is not wet, but you combine them into H two oh,
and you can create the property of wetness with enough
of these atoms. So in that sense, consciousness would be
a property of certain arrangements of matter. Uh, that is
more than the sum of its parts. It's sort of
a feature emerging from interactions, like from a sufficiently complex

(26:37):
biological system. Exactly. So this may be true. And for James,
I think he correctly reacts to this by saying, well,
it's not that that's false, it's just that that doesn't
answer the question. Consciousness may in fact be emergent, But
so what if it is? Still what is it? And
what does it do? Then we get into the the

(27:00):
the twentieth century with a really really distressing viewpoint consciousness
doesn't exist. This is often identified with the behaviorist school
of psychology like B. F. Skinner, very strong in mid
century psychology. Uh Jane's says, quote, it is an interesting
exercise to sit down and try to be conscious of
what it means to say that consciousness does not exist. Yeah,

(27:23):
you know, some would call that kind of mental exercise meditation. Yeah, okay.
I believe it's u Ekartole who frequently advises one to
think the following, I wonder what my next thought is
going to be in order to clear the mind and Uh,
what I paralyzing thought? Well, no, I wouldn't say paralyzing
is liberating. You know, if you just sort of set

(27:45):
there and if you start if you ask yourself what
my next thought is going to be? What's my next
thought gonna be? And then you kind of or at
least I kind of feel things that feel like the
weight of the default mode network, the weight of consciousness
kind of lifting for a second. It's kind of like
standing on one leg to relieve the weight on the other. Yeah,
that's appealing. So James has a fairly substantial discussion about

(28:08):
the influence of behaviorism, and so the behaviorist school of
psychology had a research program that, just to summarize it,
tried to focus exclusively on externally measurable behaviors, and it
posited that these behaviors could be explained by the interplay
of mere instinctual reactions and stimuli, or not just instinctual ones,
I mean conditioned reactions. It was big on conditioning and

(28:31):
it was not really interested in inner experience. And Jane
says that in the beginning, what behavior iss we're really
saying was consciousness is not important. And this sort of
transformed into the doctrine that consciousness does not exist, and
James actually believes that by focusing on these externally measurable actions,
behaviorism was very useful. It sort of got psychology out

(28:53):
of that squashy realm of philosophy that you think about
with like Freud and Young and made it a more
respect actable experimental science. But Jane says, quote, but having
once been part of its major school, I confess that
it was really not what it seemed off the printed page.
Behaviorism was only a refusal to talk about consciousness. Nobody

(29:14):
really believed he was not conscious. So the way I
interpret that is that behaviorism was in fact a method,
not a theory, and it did a lot of good
for psychology. But now that psychology has sort of like
had had its room cleaned up by this process of
going through a behaviorist phase, you can return to introspective experience,
the internality. What is consciousness? What does it do? Where

(29:37):
did it come from? Now, one last thing he deals with,
and I think this is a very good point to make,
is he focuses on neuroscience. So that you may have
read studies, or not studies, maybe news reports that say, like, hey,
scientists have identified the X as the source of consciousness
in the brain. Maybe it was the reticular activating system,

(29:59):
or maybe it was closs strum or something else in
the brain. There's some region of the brain that some
neuroscientists now think they've identified as the place where consciousness
happens or is made possible. You they may be right.
It may be that you can isolate some sort of
on off switch for consciousness in the brain. But yet again,

(30:19):
I would say, this doesn't answer the fundamental question. You've
just basically narrowed down the physical space of the tissue
that generates it. You still have the question of what
is it, where did it come from, and what does
it do? Yeah? If I draw a hole through um
like a hard drive, am I necessarily drilling a hole
through like the seat of the center of computation? Or

(30:41):
I mean just disrupting the integrated system that makes it possible? Yeah? Yeah,
you could identify some part of a computer that says
you say, well, without this part of the computer, it
couldn't compute. Yeah, I mean I can. I can steal
like the battery off of somebody's laptop, right, But that
really doesn't necessarily answer this, like d per question, of
like what is the nature of computing and why does

(31:03):
it occur? Much easier to answer in the nature in
the discussion of the nature of a computer. Yeah, and
I have to say we we went into this a
little bit in the episode Where Is My Mind? Yeah,
there is a good one to refer back to if
anyone wants more on this topic. Alright, and I know
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we will dive right back into consciousness. Alright, we're back.

(31:27):
All right. We've been discussing in trying to work our
way up to Julian Jane's theory of the origins of
consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. We're starting
with his discussion of what consciousness is um So another
thing that he points out in his book is that
there's an important distinction to be made between consciousness and reactivity.
So this is something interesting to think about. You know,

(31:49):
we talked about the the high the highway hypnosis state
where you can drive without really being conscious of it.
It's a fact that people in some nambulistic states, meaning sleepwalking,
can react without being conscious, like you put an obstacle
in their path and they might go around it, or
they can they can react to their environment and yet
not be conscious the entire time. That people don't know

(32:11):
what they're doing, and so we react unconsciously to all
kinds of things. For example, unconscious learning through conditioning and
reactivity can also be explained through neurology and behavior, but
consciousness not so easily. I've got another thing to ask you,
you listener, right now, Where are you now? Before I

(32:33):
ask you that question, I think it's very likely that
you were not conscious of where you were. And that's
not the same thing as saying you didn't know where
you were. Like, if somebody asks you, you can turn
your attention to the answer to that question and immediately
provide the answer. But you were not thinking about where

(32:54):
you were. The fact of your physical location was not
present in the theater of your mind at that moment,
unless it just happened to be by chance. Yeah, like
it kind of a more extreme example of this would
be if I am reading a really exciting book in
my living room. Am I really in my living room?
Or am I on that you know that that epic

(33:14):
battlefield that I'm reading about. Yeah, that's a great example.
I mean one of the interesting things about engaging with
fiction and like watching a movie or reading a book,
is that you enter this kind of unconscious flow state
or what what you're unconscious about is your own physical
life and your surroundings, and that you're engaged deeply with

(33:34):
the ongoing narratives, such that you forget yourself and where
you are, yeah, or you know. Another example would be
if someone is played by traumatic memory. You know, you
you're aware of your actual physical surroundings, though your mind
is continually going back to this one place or time
and experience. So with those really simple experiments, you can
demonstrate that consciousness is actually a much narrower part of

(33:58):
your mental experience than your entire mental life. Right, Not
everything you do with your brain is conscious. In fact,
most of what you do with your brain is not
conscious consciousness. James uses this one image that I think
is very effective. It's sort of like a flashlight shining
around in a dark room. The whole room is there,

(34:18):
but you can use your you can use the flashlight
to shine on any individual object. And then once you
shine it there and you try to imagine, Okay, what
what is going on in my brain that's not conscious?
So you move the flashlight around to look at things
that you're not conscious of, you immediately become conscious of
them when you shine the light on them. Yeah. This
gets into ideas too that we've discussed about consciousness as

(34:40):
being potentially being just like basically an aspect of who
of awareness, which is not exactly the same as James
is going to propose for the definition of consciousness. But
we're getting there. So James gives this list of things
saying what consciousness is not. So he says, it's not
mental activity. We have demonstrate that tons of mental activity

(35:01):
is Unconsciousness is unconscious. Uh, it's not recording information because
a whole lot of memory is clearly established unconsciously. Think
about the ways that, Uh, there are things that you
could not physically draw a picture of because you don't
remember what they look like, but you would notice if
something was wrong with them. To think about, like if

(35:22):
you came home from your house today and somebody had
moved the pictures around on the wall. You might not
be able to consciously recall where all the pictures are
if you tried to draw a picture of it right now,
but you might notice something was off if they'd been moved. Huh.
You know, it kind of reminds me how some you know,
some books you read there is a very detailed description
of a particular character. Other times there's not. And I

(35:46):
know when I was younger, I used to engage in
an exercise where I would basically pick a movie star
and slot them in as that character. Oh yeah, and uh,
I don't. I haven't done that really in years. Occasionally,
like there'll be an or some you know, a particular
face that kind of becomes that character in my mind
always Jeff Goldblum universe is full of Goldblums. It's not

(36:08):
a bad choice. But but I find a lot of
times if if the author is not giving a very
detailed description, I kind of have a loose idea of
what that character looks like. And I don't think about
it much. But if you were to present me with
an artist sketch of that character, I could instantly tell
you if I liked it or not, or if you
know that, whether it matched my, uh my vision of

(36:30):
what that character would be. Even though my vision of
the character is rather abstract, like in your mental theater,
it's like they're wearing the scramble masks from a scanner darkly.
You know that they look like many things at once.
It's kind of a blur, but you can identify particular
that you think it does not fit that character as
soon as you see it. Okay, So it's not recording
of information, he says, it's not the basis for forming concepts.

(36:53):
I think he's right about this because how about the
concept of a tree. Now he talks about the idea
that no one has ever seen a tree. In fact,
you've only seen this tree or that tree. But he
sort of disagrees with it because he says, you know,
animals have to have categories of things that they react
to in a certain way. So it would kind of

(37:14):
be hard to imagine the life of a squirrel if
a squirrel did not have something like the concept of
a tree. It's got to be able to scramble into
a tree that's never scrambled into before by recognizing it
as a thing that can be scrambled into, which is
a tree. Yeah. And it's difficult, I think for us
to think about that kind of thing because it's very
difficult for us to think about it outside of language. Yeah.

(37:36):
So Jane says that consciousness is not in fact the
basis of learning, and we we know this to be
true through experimentation. Now, signal learning happens automatically. Now that's
just like you know, conditioning, Pavlovian conditioning. You see a
signal and you expect something to happen according to association
with it. Uh. Skill learning also seems to happen when

(37:57):
we're least conscious. Think about training. You ever trained for
like some kind of athletic feed or trained on a
musical instrument, you probably know from experience that you can't
focus too much on your actions. You have to sort
of let go and not overthink it. How about solution learning, uh,
He he talked about how even even the solutions to

(38:19):
like working toward a goal or a problem, the solutions
are things we arrive at unconsciously. So he describes this
experiment where UH students were performing an experiment on their professor,
where every time the professor moved to the right side
of the room, the students, instead of being board, paid
wrapped attention and they laughed really hard when he would
make a joke. And so by you know, the end

(38:41):
of a week, he's basically so far to the right
of the room that he's going out the door, and
he was not aware that they had been training him
this way. He says, consciousness is also not the process
of thinking, thinking, like making judgments. So here's a quick test.
Hold two objects in each and or one sorry, one
object in each hand? Which one is heavier? All right?

(39:05):
So you think about that and you make a judgment,
but you're not conscious of how the judgment arises. Your
brain just sort of presents the answer to you. Right,
one feels heavier, and your brain tells you that's the
one that's heavier. But you you don't, like you've done
some kind of unconscious arithmetic and you're not aware of
the process by which the answer was generated. Yeah, it's

(39:27):
kind of difficult to show your work exactly. It's sort
of like saying, why is too greater than one? Or
like I give you two numbers, you know, six and four?
Which one is larger? You can't explain a conscious process
of deciding which one was larger? Well, I mean I
intrinsically know that that six is greater than one and

(39:48):
I and those are small enough numbers two that I
can I can visualize the quantity. Yeah, I can imagine
six eggs and four eggs. So I can engage in
that kind of like basic visual uh judgment. But you
didn't have to do that, did you. You just had
the answer immediately. Yeah, I guess. You guess it does
become tricky like that because you because because I'm doing

(40:09):
it all right in uh in reverse, I'm looking back
on my decision making, looking back on my judgment and
trying to figure out how it took place in the mind. Yeah,
you're trying to consciously reverse engineer your unconscious thought process. Uh.
So here's another one. He he mentions, let's go with
a pattern. Tell me if you say what comes next
A B A B A question mark B. Right, everyone

(40:35):
can get the answer. It's totally simple. But notice how
you're not consciously aware of how the answer is generated.
You can consciously reflect on the answer once you have it,
but it's not generated by consciousness, it's just there. Yeah.
This is actually a standard part of of of testing
for kindergarteners. By the way, my son just went through this,
and I get to see like the questions he was asking,

(40:57):
and one of them involves a couple of different round
of this to see if they what can a pattern
recognition they have? Yeah? Uh, so here's a crazy thing.
He says that consciousness is not even the process of reasoning.
How would that be the case. Surely we think reason
has something to do with consciousness, and it may have
something to do with consciousness, like, for example, reasoning may

(41:18):
require conscious laying of the groundwork of sort of the
reasoning space. But it is curious to pay attention to
stories of scientists coming up with answers to like complex
mathematical problems or physics problems. They very very often report
that the solutions come to them out of the blue

(41:39):
when they're doing unrelated activities. Like there's a story about
how Einstein had to be careful when he was shaving
because suddenly solutions to problems in physics would leap into
his mind and surprise him when he hadn't been thinking
about them, and he had to be careful not to
cut his own throat with his razor when this happened.
That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think we can all

(41:59):
rely to situations where you you know, you go out
on a walk, or you engage in some of their
activity and yeah, that's when the thoughts begin to come. Yeah,
it's like it's it's in the bath that you have
your Eureka moment. So having excluded all that stuff in
deciding what consciousness is, it's time to to get to
the bones here, Jane says, or would this be the meat?

(42:21):
Would it be the bones? Would it be the fat
to chew on? M let's go with Let's go with
the meat, the meat. Okay, maybe this is the meat,
so Jane says again, I'll just hit you with it
and then we can try to explain it. Consciousness is
a metaphor based model of the world and it arises
from language. Without language, according to Jane's you could not

(42:43):
have consciousness, uh. And it comes from the way we
use language to create metaphors and how those metaphors themselves
lead to new ways of thinking. So how does this work? Well,
let's explore real quick. So a metaphor is actually, when
you think about it, one of the most fascinating things
about out language. It's a thing that without language we
cannot do. Right. Language makes metaphors possible, And it's the

(43:08):
use of a term for one thing to describe another
because of some kind of similarity between them or between
their relations to other things. That sounds kind of complex,
but you use metaphors in your life. You basically know
what they are, right, So uh. He introduces two terms
for the two halves of a metaphor. You've got the
meta frand, which is a new thing, a thing to

(43:29):
be described that you don't already know about. And then
you've got the meta fire and that's the known thing,
the thing in relation used to describe the new thing.
So here's an example. Let's say there's a new species
of beetle that's got a large horn, protuberants branching off
of its head. That's the meta frand it's something new.
You've got the meta fire something you're familiar with, a

(43:51):
stag and its antlers, and the metaphor is a stag beetle. Okay,
but I'm guessing this also applies to say, like, the
meta frand could be a feeling that I have exactly,
and the metaphere is say a tiger. I've seen a tiger,
but this, this emotion that I'm feeling is new to me.
But I can use the tiger as a way to

(44:11):
describe what I'm feeling exactly now. That is is one
of his key insights. We use meta fires based on
the natural physical world around us to understand the metaphrans
of inscrutable internal consciousness. So you have mental activity that
is turned into a metaphor through comparison to some concrete

(44:34):
action in the world, and this process gives rise to
conscious thought. So here's a version of that. How about
you're you're trying to solve a problem and you've you've
got going on in your mind what we just described,
like you the A B A B A B problem,
what comes next? If you think A comes next, you
don't understand what happened in your brain to to give

(44:57):
you that answer. So that might be the metaphor brand
the thing that needs to be described, the unfamiliar thing.
It's the inscrutable process of coming to comprehend the solution
to a problem, and you've got to metaphire something that's
totally familiar, to compare it to seeing with your eyes
something that happens in the physical world. The metaphor is
the conscious thought is now I see the answer. So

(45:21):
consciousness for James is something that is taking place in
a metaphorical mind space that is an analog of physical
space in reality. It's when we invent this metaphor of
a world inside to match the world outside, and we
use metaphors from the physical world to understand and describe

(45:45):
our own mental activity. And through these metaphors, we generate
this self reflective process, this spatialized stuff in the head,
the mind space where we create narratives. We reflect on
our behaviors and generate the circumstances that produce consciousness. And
for James, this is how consciousness arises. I think, I'm

(46:07):
not sure I agree with it, but I do think
this is one of the most fascinating propositions for the
origin of consciousness I've ever heard. Yeah, yeah, it's I
agree with you, it's And I'm hesitant to, you know,
endorse it because I really, for one thing, I really
do like the the awareness explanation. But but but yeah,
when I started thinking about about the power of metaphors,

(46:29):
it it does. It does have a bit of it
does feel true. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing the way
metaphors do pervade are thinking about things. It's one of
the funny things about languages that language makes metaphors possible,
but almost all language is built out of metaphors. Even
the word metaphor is a metaphor. Like the word metaphor
comes from the Greek meaning to carry across. So you've

(46:51):
got this abstract action of taking the meanings of one
word and putting them on another word. But then it
is described in terms of a physical, conquer ead action
in the world that we're familiar with, carrying one thing
to another place. Yea. So even if you think you're
being very literal, uh yeah, you're still you're still walking
on metaphors. Yeah, I mean pretty much. The only language

(47:12):
that is not based on metaphors is that of the physical,
concrete world and basic activities in space. So uh so
James gets to what are the most important features of consciousness? So, like,
what what is consciousness? According to him, he says, one
of the main features is spatialization, and this means that
conscious thoughts metaphorically seem to take place in a quote

(47:35):
mind space, which is not a physical space, and within
the mind space of consciousness, things that do not in
reality have a spatial quality become what he calls spatialized,
that is imagined with spatial qualities. So, for example, time
in direct experience, we apprehend time as this continuous, impermanent

(47:57):
succession of moments. Right, it's hard to describe how you
experience time without using a conscious metaphor that turns it
into space. Like can you how how can you even
describe what time is without changing it into space in
your consciousness? Yeah, I mean you end up having to
come up with some sort of physical description like for instance,

(48:17):
car Vonnegut in The slaughter House five had the description
for for a linear experience of time of a man
on a train with blinders on looking at mountains rollby
and he can't turn his head. Yeah, exactly. So it's
much like that. In our unconscious direct experience, each moment
is sort of lived in and then disappears. But in

(48:39):
our conscious mind space we can organize temporal events into
a timeline, something that does not exist in any detectable
way in reality. There is no such thing as a
timeline in the world. It's only a mental uh construct.
So consciousness makes the past and the future comprehensible and
organize a to us. Suddenly, when you have consciousness, the

(49:02):
past and the future in some sense exist. Yeah, then
this is a This is cool because this ties into
some past discussions we've had about the difference between you know,
linear linear existence and um and and modern humans in
the more cyclical existence of the past. Yeah, totally. Another
feature he isolates of of being unique to consciousness. He

(49:24):
calls it exerption. So this is when you isolate a
detail for attention, using it to represent the whole. So
I'm gonna ask you, Robert, what did you do the
summer after ninth grade? I have no idea. I have
no idea whatsoever. No, I'd have to really think about it.
I guess I probably summer hypnosis. Just totally totally. I

(49:45):
don't know. I mean, if you if you ask the
question about earlier year, I could have said, oh, I
went to scout camp, you know, or I went to
this camper or another. But for ninth grade, I'm not
sure what I did. Well, Okay, So I want to
say for most memories of time period memories, I would
ask like that you probably have at least one image
rise to the top from the time I ask you about,

(50:05):
and that is the exert that represents the summer. And
then from that one exerpted memory might be an image,
you might be a specific episode you recall from that
one exert you can associate around to others that have
something to do with it. Rather in this imagined physical
spatialized timeline or by you know, sort of theme associations.

(50:26):
And this is a process that we know as reminiscing. Right, So,
think about how a human like us without consciousness could
recall information about the past. It's impossible to imagine that
person reminiscing. Does that make sense? Like a person without
consciousness might be able to use information from their past

(50:47):
to make a decision about the future. But and so
they'd have memory, and the memory could be recalled, but
there would be no process of wandering through the mind
space of memory, of the memory theater, looking at one
exerpt of the past after another. Right. Huh, Well, that
it's crazy to try to imagine that, because it would
mean that you could not look longingly back on something

(51:09):
in the past. Exactly, couldn't experience nostalgia. You couldn't. I mean,
one would wonder even if you could be traumatized. I
mean maybe you could, because you could certainly have positive
and negative associations with events. Uh, And you you could
have things you wanted that would be associated with past stimuli.

(51:29):
But you couldn't. You couldn't wander through your memory because
what would you wander with? So a bicameral human who
had been you know, experienced horrific burn. They might they
might have a strong reaction to seeing fire, but they
wouldn't just be setting there eating their you know, their
grass and their berries and then just think, out of

(51:51):
the blue, fire is terrifying and I am afraid of it. No,
I think they probably wouldn't. Yeah, they would not have
memories of that event. The memory would be accessible and
useful to their brain and behavior, but they wouldn't go
back to the memory and experience it with their attention.
Its kind of liberating because you you wouldn't be sitting

(52:11):
around constantly fretting about the past and the future. Right, Okay,
So I asked just the question, if you didn't have consciousness,
what would you wander through your memory with? The thing
you wander through your memory with is the next feature
Janes identifies the analog I. So, for James, an analog
is something that at every point is generated by the thing.

(52:32):
It's an analog of A good example would be a map.
A map is an analog of a part of the
surface of the earth. So the analog I that James
talks about is the mental analog of your body. In reality,
and it moves mentally through mind space to observe and
perform metaphorical quote action within the mind space. If if

(52:53):
that's thick, just think about it's the mental version of
you that does the looking. So when you wander through
your memory, it's your analog eye that does the wandering.
It's the mental representation of yourself as a subject. Yeah.
Worth noting that in his book, he he does stress
that the analog I came into being towards the end
of the second millennium BC. Yeah, and that's about the

(53:14):
time that he's saying that the bi cameral mind largely
began to transition into the conscious mind after the analog eye.
He's also got a feature of consciousness is the metaphor me.
This is the metaphorical object version of yourself that you observe.
So when you say, when you say, I see myself
doing X in a memory, the eye and that sentence,

(53:37):
the subject is the analog eye. The the the analog
version of you that looks, and the me version of
yourself and that sentence is the metaphor me, the subject
version or sorry, the object version of yourself that gets
looked at. That's crazy because it's it forces you to
try to imagine what if you only had I or
you only had me? Yeah, now that affects your your

(53:58):
conscious experience to the world, Well it seems to, at
least in his theory. The bicameral human has neither one
and the conscious human has both. So, yeah, what if
you're some kind of transitionary human where you you you
can't imagine yourself, but you can wander through mental space? Yeah,
or kind of like things only happened to me, But
I don't do things that. Yeah, I don't know. I

(54:20):
wonder if that's possible anyway. Two more features of consciousness
he identifies. So he says consciousness enables neurotization. So an
unconscious being could not form thoughts into coherent stories. You
make a narrative that makes sense. So the non conscious
brain would react to events of the present, perhaps based

(54:42):
on things learned from experiences in the past. But the
conscious mind weaves past, present, and future into a story.
And this story also includes dependencies of cause and effect,
and a story, things didn't just happen, they happened for
a reason. So this is the part of the conscious
mind that makes us concerned with the question why a

(55:02):
final feature of consciousness is what he calls conciliation, or
later in his afterward he calls concilience. And this is
fusing exerpted mental contents together to make it spatially compatible
in a way that makes sense. So if I, Robert,
I'm going to ask you to imagine a couple of things,
a plate and a bunch of spaghetti. Okay, now you're

(55:24):
probably imagining the spaghetti on top of the plate. It's
not the other way around. There was no hesitation there. Yeah,
but I didn't tell you to do that. That's concilience
in your mind. You're organizing things in your mind into
a way that makes sense. Yeah. I would never put
the plate on the spaghetti. At most, I would imagine
the spaghetti in a pile here and the plate over here.
But my mind didn't go there either. Yea. So here

(55:45):
we've finally worked our way up to Jane's idea of
what consciousness is. He says, it's quote an operation rather
than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates
by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog
space ACE with an analog I that can observe that
space and move metaphorically in it or the even shorter

(56:07):
version he says consciousness his quote an analog I neratizing,
so creating stories in a mind space, which I think
is a very elegant way of reckoning with what consciousness is.
I'm not sure that he's correct about the generative mechanism
that like language creates consciousness, though I do think it's
possible that he's correct about that. Um, I'm not sure

(56:29):
he's right about that, but I do think the way
he describes the phenomena of it is very credible. Yeah, alright,
on that note, we're gonna take one more break, and
when we come back, we're going to transition from james
views on what we have now and get into this
concept of the bicameral mind what came before. Thank alright,

(56:51):
we're back, all right, So it's time to explore the
bicameral mind as proposed by Julian James. So, you we
we talked at the beginning about how you can have
this experience of highway hypnosis. Your body can perform complex
behaviors with you really just not being aware that it's happening.
Your brains work in all the stuff, it's pulling the levers.
It's using your vision and your hearing, and it's making

(57:13):
your body move, but you're just not there for it.
You can do all that stuff almost perfectly unconscious of
the process of driving, if it's highway hypnosis or whatever else,
acting purely out of habit an instinct. When suddenly there's
a mime in the middle of the street pretending to
be stuck in a glass box, well that's gonna that's
gonna shake you out of it right there. Yeah, yeah,

(57:34):
So what do you do about this? Obviously, if you
are a conscious human like us, you snap out of it.
Your highway hypnosis goes away. You suddenly become very conscious
of yourself. You become conscious of your driving. You start
nerotizing your imagine self performing possible reactions to the situation.
Right You're working through what should I do? And you

(57:56):
compare these imagined hypotheticals to decide what's gonna happen. And
this is one way we often find ourselves quote using consciousness,
when we have to suddenly deal with novel stimuli. A
thing you didn't expect, that isn't part of your habit
process gets thrown in front of you, and now you've
got a novelty problem. It's an outside context problem and

(58:18):
you've got to deal with it. Yeah, mine in the street. Yeah,
nothing has prepared you for this. How are you going
to roll with this change? Right? So, in in Jane's
vision of consciousness, this is what consciousness mainly does. We
employ our consciousness in volition and decision making when we're
encountering something that we were not used to. But so
that's for us, that's conscious people. What if you were

(58:40):
not capable of consciousness? What if you were entirely a
creature of habit behaviors, like like you know, you're you're
like you are when you're driving the car out of
habit and you just can't turn to the internal nearrotization,
What do you do well, Jane says the hypothetical bicameral
person of antiquity. In this example, I've given um instead

(59:02):
of being conscious when faced with the mim in the street,
instead of becoming conscious of the novel stimuli, would instead
unconsciously hear a voice telling them what to do about it,
and they would obey avoid the mine. Yeah, it would say.
It would be as if a parent said, like, go

(59:23):
around it, and you hear the voice of maybe your
mom or your dad, or some authority figure, your boss
or your chieftain, and yeah, suddenly would tell you, okay,
just drive to the left and go around it and
then proceed as normal, and then you would obey. So
in the next episode, we're going to go into the

(59:45):
into great depth about the evidence that James presents for
the bicameral mind in history. So we're gonna look at
literature and archaeology and all this stuff about what what
he thinks makes the case for the existence of the
bicameral mind. But first I think we should just look
a couple of objections you might have to how could
this be possible? How could humans be like this? Yeah,

(01:00:05):
and I mean, of course when all of this we
have to state the obvious that it is just it
is difficult to try and imagine a default, uh human
mindset that is like this. Absolutely, So here's one objection.
Can people really hear hallucinatory voices that are indistinguishable from
real voices? The answer to this is undoubtedly, yes, just absolutely.

(01:00:27):
If you doubt this, go read about auditory hallucinations. Auditory
hallucinations are number one, They're very common. Even lots of
people who don't normally hallucinate, at some point in their
life will have an auditory hallucination, often in a period
of intense stress. And auditory hallucinations are often perceived as
absolutely real, not necessarily fuzzy or dreamlike, though they can

(01:00:50):
be like that too, But in many cases they are
perceived as as lucid and clear and real as the
voices of people around them. Here's another question. You might
be like, well, wait a minute, can hallucinatory voices really
provide helpful information? Like don't they? Just if you're imagining
the experience of a person with schizophrenia who is caused

(01:01:11):
a lot of suffering by their condition, that certainly does happen.
People can be, you know, told very nasty, negative, unpleasant
things by voices in their head. But there are cases
where these voices do seem to provide comfort and helpful
information and to guide into into guide behaviors in a
in a useful way. It just depends on the case. Well,
and plus not every example James makes about the bicameral

(01:01:35):
mind is a case where the voice or the voice
of the gods is telling the individual to do something
that's beneficial, right, right, I mean, just the same way
that conscious humans can make bad decisions. Your bicameral human
could have part of their brain tell them to do
something that is a bad decision. It's just part of
the human brain that sometimes it makes bad decisions, whether

(01:01:58):
it's existing in a bicameral state or a conscious state.
But so anyway, Yeah, these voices, it's not necessarily that
they're omnipotent or godlike in their knowledge, but rather when
they are helpful, they tend to command information and insight
on about the level of a human brain. This is
not really surprising because they are from a human brain.
So then okay, So if you're with us so far,

(01:02:19):
you might be thinking, okay, well, what actually causes hallucinations?
Where do they come from? If you're hearing voices? Uh?
It depends on many factors. Different people have vastly different
levels of susceptibility to hallucinations. Some people are very prone
to them experienced them all the time. Other people are
not prone to them, but at some point in their
life will experience one, and in almost all cases, Jane says,

(01:02:42):
the trigger for hallucinations is stress. In hallucination prone people,
it takes very little stress to trigger one. In less
prone people. It takes a lot of stress, Jane says,
quote during the eras of the bicameral mind, we may
suppose that the stress threshold for hallucinations was much much
lower than either normal people or schizophrenics today. The only

(01:03:03):
stress necessary was that which occurs when a change in
behavior is necessary because of some novelty in a situation.
This is what we were talking about with the mime
in the road. You've suddenly had something that your habits
do not account for, and you need to make a
decision based on volition. So, resuming the quote, anything that
could not be dealt with on the basis of habit,

(01:03:24):
any conflict between work and fatigue, between attack and flight,
any choice between whom do obey or what to do,
anything that required any decision at all was sufficient to
cause an auditory hallucination. You know. To get back to
to Westworld just a little bit, you know, I mentioned
that they that they used the bicameral mind in that series,

(01:03:45):
and the ideas that at at an earlier point, the
robots essentially at a bicameral mind where the creators were
speaking in their head. It does remind me of a
lot of the modern science of drones where you have
a quote man in a loop scenario, um, where you
could have you have a machine that's going about it's

(01:04:06):
business and when necessary a a human adjust the behavior
of the machine. Yes, yes, totally. Or I think about
like the hybrid machine human chess players. Have you read
about this? Well, I don't know if it's still the case.
For a while, so you had the point where suddenly
the best chess programs could outperform the best human players.

(01:04:27):
But then there was a period and we may still
be in that period where in fact, better than the
best chess programs are players that are chess programs assisted
by human players. Okay, so it's almost like, you know,
the chess program it basically knows what to do all
the time, but maybe to introduce some novelty, the human

(01:04:48):
player steps in and does something clever. Alright, well, what
about neuro neurological evidence for this hypothesis? Right? So, this
is one where I don't want to go into a
whole lot of detail James hypothesis because for one thing,
a lot of it. We don't want to get too
bogged down here. And in the next episode we're gonna
primarily talk about evidence for that James presents for the

(01:05:10):
theory um but his neurological hypothesis may also just in
some cases be proven wrong by later experiments, and we'll
talk about that some more in the second episode, but
here's the gist. There is generally a sense in which
the two hemispheres of the brain, the right hemisphere in
the left hemisphere are genuinely divided and can in some

(01:05:32):
senses act independently, almost as if they were two separate persons. Now,
I think we've talked about some of the evidence for
this before and episodes in the past, right, Yeah, and uh,
and we certainly have talked about and we've discussed uni
himispheric sleep and what it would be like if a
human experience uni himispheric sleep. There's a character in an
Ian in Banks Culture novel that has that scenario going on,

(01:05:56):
and they've essentially got two different personalities. When there's different
personalities because if one side is active, they're they're one way,
of the other side at active they're another way. And
then the if both sides are active, you know, the
standard human experience, you have a mix of both. Now,
it's interesting that James points out that on the left
hemisphere in most people this is going to be the

(01:06:16):
dominant hemisphere, and you know, right handed people, generally this
will be the left left hemisphere of the brain, though
it can alternate for other people. Um the left hemisphere
is where speech generally happens, but James turns his attention
to the analog speech areas of the right brain in
most people. So under Jane's schema, in the bicameral mind,

(01:06:39):
the non dominant hemisphere, which is the right hemisphere and
most people, generates auditory hallucinated voices perceived by the dominant
hemisphere or the left hemisphere and most people. And his
explicit neurological hypothesis is quote, the speech of the gods
was directly organized in what corresponds to vernic the's area

(01:07:00):
on the right hemisphere and spoken or heard over the
interior commissures to or by the auditory areas of the
left temporal lobe. And these commands are then obeyed more
or less automatically, as an obedient child obeys the commands
of a parent or a member of a social animal
species submits to the authority of another individual higher up

(01:07:23):
the dominance hierarchy. And he goes into great detail about
about verbal dominance, like the uh the research on like
how people obey commands and how you can control people's
minds by getting right up in their space and giving
them verbal commands. Um and you know, in in reading
about all of this, I kept thinking back to UH
to yoga class. I love going to I love doing

(01:07:45):
yoga on my own where I'm essentially calling the shots
and following a pattern. But I also love going to
a class where there is a uh there, there is
a leader, there is a teacher who is telling us
how to move our bodies for for an hour and
fifteen minutes, an hour and a half, And it's something
very liberating in that. Yeah. Uh So. In other words,
in Jane's hypothesis about the neurology of this, the non

(01:08:09):
dominant hemisphere does the integration of information in the difficult
thinking about how to deal with stressful situations brought about
by novel stimuli, and then that that right hemisphere or
the non dominant hemisphere, tells the dominant hemisphere what to do,
and the dominant dominant hemisphere incorporates that information and enacts it.

(01:08:30):
So he offers five main pieces of evidence for his
neurological hypothesis. I just want to present his summary of
them very very quickly, and some of these will get
into more detail in part two. Yes, so he says,
the pieces of evidence are that, quote one, both hemispheres
are able to understand language, while normally only the left
can speak. That's kind of interesting too, that there is

(01:08:54):
some vestigial functioning in the right Vernicke's area in a
way similar to the voices of God. So he identifies
that with like activity in the right hemisphere, and most
people the non dominant hemisphere in this speech associated area
being associated in say, people with schizophrenia hearing voices auditory hallucinations,

(01:09:14):
for example, if there are somewhat severed or one is
turned off essentially the other can behave as a person
independently with some adaptation um for that, the contemporary differences
between the hemispheres and cognitive functions at least echo such
differences of function between man and God as seen in
the literature of bicameral Man. So he's comparing. He's saying

(01:09:37):
that there are some analogies between the functions of the
left brain and right right brain to man and God,
as we will see in some ancient literature and finally
he appeals to the sort of plasticity of the brain
that the environment shapes the way the brain functions to
an incredible extent. A lot of what the brain does
is not determined by your genes, but is determined by

(01:09:59):
how you grow up in your social environment. All right,
So those are the basics, alright. So yeah, so we've
established that. In the next episode, we're going to explore
what James presents is the evidence for the existence of
the bicameral mind and the transition from the bicameral mind
to the conscious mind. But I want to end just
by comparing the ideas the bicameral mind versus the conscious mind.

(01:10:20):
I think one of the hardest things to recognize and
keep in mind here is that we have such a
pro consciousness bias. I mean, we we just tend to say, like, well,
consciousness is obviously what what you know, the good life
is all about. But Jane's I don't think it's ever
explicitly saying that one kind of mind is better than another,

(01:10:40):
or even that one kind of mind is smarter than
the other, because they do just seem to offer different
adaptive capabilities, right, Yeah, I mean, and as will explore.
I mean, there's a strong case that when the bicameral
mind goes away, I mean that it's it has tremendous
catastrophic consequences for these these early cultures. Right, So there's
any truth to his theory, it may be the case that,

(01:11:02):
for example, people of the bicameral mind have strengths like
they work better in groups. They on average have greater
mental endurance, you know, they can do things more and
so they're sort of like tougher in keeping at tasks,
and they have more creativity, more fluid linguistic creativity. They
may have been better poets. They may have been just

(01:11:23):
as we've been discussing, they may have been happier, if
in a way that is not like our happiness. Right.
And then on the other hand, of course, people with
conscious minds he's saying, are probably on average more adaptable
that are able to deal with new stimuli when it
comes up and the mind appears in the street. Uh,
you know, I M I won't stop and surrender to it. Right.

(01:11:44):
But but the takeaway if there's any truth to Jane's theory,
I just want to stress is not bicameral mind equals
old stupid and bad and conscious mind equals new smart
and good. They're they're subjectively different models of experiencing the
world with different links and weaknesses. However, the message is
still that ancient people were strange. Ancient people to us,

(01:12:09):
we're alien to us. Yeah, So in the next episode,
we're gonna run through historical, religious, and even modern cultural
evidence that he says supports this theory. So if you
thought there wasn't enough bloodshed in this episode, hang on,
because empires will fall, uh, gods and goddesses will rage.

(01:12:32):
The whole, the whole nine yards, the whole clash of
the Titans will take place in the second episode and
in the meantime. If you want to check out other
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(01:12:56):
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(01:13:24):
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