Why do people in the past seem so different from humans now? It's almost like they aren't human...

Got it backwards
ThisWas meant for And the tree bit was meant for

There's been some very minor evolution over the past few thousand years. Not to mention their mannerisms would be completely different.

>Why do people in the past seem so different from humans now?

Ancient people weren't conscious. The right hemisphere used to provide commands to ancient people which they followed unthinkingly, much like how when you walk or drive you usually don't consciously think about what you're doing, it just happens. So imagine those sorts of automatic behaviors, except full time, throw in auditory hallucinations recognized as ancestor spirits and/or gods telling everyone what to do in the absence of conscious thinking, and you have ancient people.

s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/Julian_Jaynes_The_Origin_of_Consciousness.pdf

>inb4 replies of incredulous dismissal; not an argument, read the free online PDF copy of the book linked above, Jaynes made a solid argument

>ancient people were Robots
>we're decendents of Robots

>brain hemispheres

d r o p p e d

>the bicameral mind conveniently stopped being a thing around 1000 BC all at once the entire world over

Yeahhhhhh no

Not an argument. Also to clarify, I don't think Jaynes ever claimed the physical brain structure changed if that's what you're imagining. In fact there are people today who definitely do have command hallucinations which can be identified as coming from the right hemisphere and who follow these commands unthinkingly and automatically. They're called schizophrenics and they're vestigial examples of the precursor to modern conscious behavior.

He never claimed that. See:

Even today there are vestiges of it.

>pushing a credulous non-peer reviewed hypothesis for the etiology of schizophrenia because it fits into your other bullshit theory

Why are there so many armchair pseuds on Veeky Forums who think they have an argument worth fielding in the first place, rather than just regurgitating """facts""" from other people's op-eds like they do?

>Myth: Jaynes's book was not peer reviewed.

>Fact: While Jaynes ultimately chose to publish his book with a non-academic publisher, which he felt might keep it in print for a longer period of time, Jaynes's book was reviewed and commented on by a number of academics during the publication process. These include Stanford psychologist Ernest Hilgard, psychologist Isodor Chein, an anonymous anthropologist, as well as others. Jaynes went on to publish articles and commentaries on his theory in peer-reviewed journals such as Canadian Psychology and Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and discuss his ideas with other prominent scholars at conferences. We should also keep in mind that Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution in a book intended for both a scientific and a lay audience — not in a peer-reviewed journal.

>Jaynes ultimately chose to publish his book with a non-academic

also

>seriously comparing your epick theory with on the origin of species

Can you get any more narcissistic?

>Jaynes ultimately chose to publish his book with a non-academic

What's your point? There's nothing wrong with that. He has academic papers on the topic too, he just wanted a book to stay in print and reach a general audience.

>Can you get any more narcissistic?

He didn't write that about himself, someone else wrote it about him. How can you even parse that as him writing about himself? What went through your mind? I don't understand.

>He didn't write that about himself

>implying I'm talking about him and not you, Parrot

Go regurgitate someone else's credulous hypothesis in another thread.

You understand what narcissism means.

>parrots all of his opinions from kook authors but won't actually defend them beyond cuntpasting other people's words
>worth debating with

>It's OK I'm wrong because you used a quote

>I care more about LARPing as being "right" than the actual truth

only really proving my point here

>LARPing

No, you're not pretend-wrong, you're 100% actual wrong and somehow don't understand how basic words like "narcissism" work.

>NO U over and over again

And we're done here! Hence why you don't debate seriously with a narcissist parrot.

get a room

>narcissist

user, I keep telling you I'm not actually Julian Jaynes.

julian jaynes detected

Because you are right.

Don't listen to the pseuds in this thread.

Greater linguistic complexity and history to our words = more complex society in thought and practice.

If the only images you had of the current world were religious illustrations, and the only quotes you had from this world were from the most famous politicians, generals, and philosophers, then this world would look pretty alien as well.

well I don't either, what the fuck are those

The more I read about history the more I realize things haven't much changed at all.

Royalty still struts about with their head and egos held high. Plebs with dillusions of grandeur do the same. Some reject the system entirely regardless of status, seeking to expose life to the sham they see it as. Some exist to exist and some exist to become legends, remembered throughout the ages.

The only thing truly different from ancient man and modern man is that modern man can expose his stupidity and rashness to the whole planet at the touch of a button. Ancient man was mostly limited to his immediate station.

The biggest thing in common with our ancestors, however, is our incessant need to shitpost.

>pompeiigraphiti.jpg

good point

The pillars of a highway I guess.

What kind of third world country do you live in where you don't have highways?

those huge skyways are pretty unique to America I think fellow burger

>he says as he replies to a post of an asian highway system

Ummm... While I'll admit we have more than most, they're pretty much standard fare for the developed world.

...and judging by the signs, I think that's China.

OK I was wrong. Still though, a lot of European "highways" are basically the equivalent of service roads.

This. When you look at shit like Roman graffiti or popular literature, plays and stuff like that, the past becomes much more humanized.

That said, don't get some idea that they were 'just like us'. Their world was completely different and alien from our own, they had different morals, worldviews and cultural standards. Stuff we take for granted, like the conception of childhood, barely existed except maybe in a small elite; infanticide was very common and seems to be a cultural universal. Most people led very insular lives limited to their local area and there was very little in terms of 'popular culture' except in the most developed civilizations. They're day to day lives were completely alien. But behind cultural differences you can still find, if you look in the right places, that people were still people and felt the same range of emotions we do and interacted with each other in very similar ways.

It's also important to keep in mind this isn't just a past vs present thing, but rather the difference between modern industrial societies and everyone else. Cultures are still around today which remain unintegrated into the modern world, living in traditional lifestyles that seem just as alien to us, whether they're uncontacted Amazonian tribes, Himalayan peasants or isolated Ethiopian monasteries. Watch some ethnographic documentary like Human Planet and you'll see that however different their worlds are, they're still just people.

If you get this feeling, my advice would be to go on youtube a spend a few hours listening to Plutarch's "Lives of the Great Men..." It sounds like it could have been composed a few years ago. Plutarch (depending on the translation if you don't read Greek or Latin) has a very..sort of down to earth, almost casual style. When I was study the classics and Latin in particular and felt like the people I was studying seemed to distant, Plutarch or Pliny the Elder's description of the eruption of Vesuvius will very much humanize them.
And if you are too lazy to read or even listen to an audiobook, HBO's "Rome" is amazing in terms of the length's they went to in order to saty largely true to the sources.

You're clearly one of our burgers that's never left the country...

I bet ya think everyone in Africa lives in mud huts, and everyone in the middle east lives in caves, traveling through the vast deserts on camelback.

>t. Six hours stuck in Paris in a traffic jam.

Plutarch's original texts were in Greek, but if your Greek isn't good and your Latin is, the translations have basically the same effect.

But I have. Go drive through central Europe and the Balkans. They don't have skyways like we do in North Jersey. There are stretches of 4 lane high ways in between longer stretches of just basic roads.

>central Europe and the Balkans
>developed world
Pick one.

Not that even we have skyways "everywhere". There's still plenty of open and even dirt road, once you hit the boonies.

And even in the Balkans you regularly run into shit like this.

Central Europe would include Germany and Austria.

Germany having the largest freeway system outside of China and the US, in addition to one of the first.

Even poland is covered in crap like pic related.

>They don't have skyways like we do in North Jersey
If by "skyways" do you mean the areas around Newark airport to keep the road above the swamp? Yeah, personally I'd take the Balkans any day in terms of atmosphere and scenery...

>First world problems
is2.Veeky Forums.org/wsg/1481830174840.webm

Looking at that image again, and considering it's China, I find it a tad strange that the structures there are so marred they look like the ones, here in 'Murika, that were built back in the 60's and 70's.

Pollution, I guess.

I always imagined life in the ancient world as brutal and lacking any sort of compassion, everyday being a battle for survival for a single meal, and the only hope being that of an afterlife.

I suppose it's always like that somewhere... Though there's always some compassion, somewhere, even in the worst of times, even if it's primarily between families and loved ones and even if it sometimes becomes the exception to the rule. Not everything intrinsic to human nature is negative.

At some level, regardless of era, people are people, and stupid is as stupid does. I suppose that might change in the distant future, when genetic engineering changes the fundamental nature of man, but until then, while cultures vary wildly and sometimes drive us to unthinkable extremes, we've been more or less the same beasts for all of recorded history and, likely, quite a bit beyond.

Though it's probably generally easier for the modern city dweller to relate to say, some butthead in ancient Rome, than some butthead living in the tribal steppes, or even in ancient Tenochtitlan.

Thats simply the trans historic point of view. You are choosing to present the things that are similair however in the same way i can make humans and animals seem like "oh, the sam thing".
Fact is that egyptians looked at the world and at relationships between people in a very different way. Their reasoning and thought processes were different and if a modenr man was to go bac to egypt i bet many much of how he thought would seem unclear or unreasonable to them.
YOU are the one who is ignorant. Ignorant of the changes in human and social consiousness throught human development.

>i am an expert on this
>watch this youtube video and youll get it

My sides.

Ecept that by reading their literature you realize that any complex societies couldnever have simply been schizophrenic.

Why are their penises so small?

Jaynes addresses this by spending the first chapter going over everything consciousness isn't. There's a tendency to imagine every mental process is a form of "consciousness," when in actuality almost every mental process operates without conscious awareness. Here's one of many of those processes he goes through:

>Most people would protest emphatically that the chief function of consciousness is to store up experience, to copy it as a camera does, so that it can be reflected upon at some future time. So it seems. But consider the following problems: Does the door of your room open from the right or the left? Which is your second longest finger? At a stoplight, is it the red or the green that is on top? How many teeth do you see when brushing your teeth? What letters are associated with what numbers on a telephone dial? If you are in a familiar room, without turning around, write down all the items on the wall just behind you, and then look.
>I think you will be surprised how little you can retrospect in consciousness on the supposed images you have stored from so much previous attentive experience. If the familiar door suddenly opened the other way, if another finger suddenly grew longer, if the red light were differently placed, or you had an extra tooth, or the telephone were made differently, or a new window latch had been put on the window behind you, you would know it immediately, showing that you all along ‘knew’, but not consciously so. Familiar to psychologists, this is the distinction between recognition and recall. What you can consciously recall is a thimbleful to the huge oceans of your actual knowledge.

I dont see how this something to do withwhat i wrote. We can read what the anciants wrote and understand their way of thinking and its not the writings of schiznophrenics.

Next time try opening the link before having an opinion, it's a devo music video you idiot.

the advent of technology has so drastically changed humanity in only a few hundred years that the old ways would naturally seem alien but in actuality modern man is the true alien in this situation.

>the advent of technology
happened thousands of years ago you chucklefuck

Schizophrenics are modern people with maladaptive vestiges of ancient thought, so it's not really fair to think of them as belonging to a completely identical situation. For one thing, they share in the auditory command hallucination feature, but in ancient societies this was normal and supported by culture, while in modern times this is confusing and alienating. Even with similar minds, radically different environments can produce radically different behaviors. For another thing, it's different to have something (consciousness) break down into something else (bicameralism) than it is to only have that something else from the beginning.

And aside from those points, Jaynes brings up the issue of modern translators imposing their assumptions on ancient texts. He goes into detail with historical arguments for what certain words should actually be translated as vs. what they're typically translated as.

Yeah, instead of shitposting on the walls of whorehouses, now we shitpost on the internets!

Sadly, technology has yet to truly alter man's core nature, but this may yet happen.

youtube.com/watch?v=jAhjPd4uNFY

that is obviously different technology than what im talking about u dunce

>makes me feel like they were almost completely different in behaviour and other things than us modern humans
They drank alcohol. They laughed at jokes about dicks and farting. They shitposted on walls and signs, what with the internet not existing.
They may have spoken different languages and had different cultures, but they were no less human.

Yes, they were also made of atoms. You are retarded.

I actually learned the reason why Roman artists made them small was because they didn't want their work, which was to show beauty and purity in the human form, to be over sexualized. They didn't want you to focus on genitals, but the humanity and their actions.

Small dicks and big dicks went in and out of style. Art at later periods will have a phallus bigger than their legs.

what the fuck is this cluster truck

pretty much this

Why is that lady suckling a donkey? For fucks sake!

Is he a linguist?

How is it that all vedic texts dwell so much on consciousness if automatons wrote it. These aren't texts on being a good human being or something useful to society, (although that is also written about) simply meditating consciousness.

consciousness is an inherent quality of all life

fuck off lonely fuck

are you trolling?