Please convince me he wasn't exactly right about everything

This whole thing is bullshit. So everybody all of of sudden lost this trait yet somehow impacted every culture.

He doesn't claim it happened at the same time all over the globe, and I don't think bicameralism is true either, but I do believe the brain has two specialized cores, left and right hemispheres.

i wish i could get an answer from someone who's read the book

I read a lot of ancient books and I don't agree with his theory at all.
Also he seems to deny the existence of gods which is so fucking stupid.

>Also he seems to deny the existence of gods which is so fucking stupid.
What? No he doesn't. He explains the phenomenon of gods in terms of bicameralism, that's not the same thing as saying ancient people didn't worship gods.

Ok OP I just downloaded, it better be good

I have it's retarded. None of his shit holds water.

please explain further
i want to disagree with him but all the criticism i can find is flawed

His argument is based on how people wrote 3,000 years ago and the fact people believed in gods. Ancient near easterners used to write everything in conversations. He tries saying they lacked shit like introspection because of a different writing style. If this shit was true, isolated tribes , a fair amount of people should still have this trait.

Empire of the Word, goes into why this theory is bs further.

>trying to figure things out to hard questions is "pseudoscience" and therefore automatically bad
>hard questions never need to be asked
Think for yourself, moron. I agree that the problem, in its current framing, will never be more than a weird, somewhat plausible, but ultimately unprovable conjecture. But think about the ramifications if you start going down related tangents about how culture and language influence psychological development and civilizational progress. Jaynes started off with nothing more than repeated themes in literature and groundbreaking (at the time) developments in neuroscience. Given the rate of how science changes, no new insights in neuroscience have disproven the phenomenology behind his theory, and his attempt to describe consciousness alone ended up becoming a staple definition for talking about it in modern psychology textbooks.

tl;dr it's good thinking when approached with skepticism, common sense, and pragmatism. don't discourage it or condemn it as pseudoscience

>If his hypothesis makes so much sense, then think about this very simple point: why did this consciousness awakening supposedly happen at the same time all over the globe, in very different societies?
Never heard of a meme? Memes are capable of spreading ideas across societies in a rapid amount of time. We're talking about the most weaponized meme of all time, concocted by some of the most successful autists of all time. We treasure works of literature like the Odyssey and the Bible now, but think about what it meant back then to awaken entire societies, imbuing people with an agency that they had no conception of prior.

>He explains the phenomenon of gods in terms of bicameralism
Yes which denies their existence as supernatural beings and also doesn't take into account that the gods have appeared to people numerous times throughout history.

>being this retarded

>homo sapiens wasn't self-aware until language eventually made us conscious of the fact that we have a mind, thoughts, feelings etc.
and before that we essentially acted on instinct

But other animals don't have language and have a very basic level of conscious.

...

Psychohistory makes more sense.

If I read the book correctly, the author claims that bicameralism emerged not trough biological evolution but due to culture and way of life. But it seems unlikely to me that societies
so far from each other (from Mesopotamia to South America) developed the same mentality around the same time independently. And that no bicameral societies survived that we could observe. Also, there are ancient texts like the Epic of Gilgamesh where characters appear to be conscious in the modern sense.

Now, bicameralism was probably a thing, there are enough references to it and some modern experiments seem to simulate it. But it's more likely that some people became bicameral (priests, poets and even mystically inclined people) through ritual and meditation. After all, tribal shamans tend enter to weird altered states of consciousness and according to Jaynes bicameralism was not too far from the stone age (later, these techniques may have been forgotten).

>science
Sorry, he's inherently wrong.

This is not strictly connected to bicameralism but has a similar theme and reinforces some of Jaynes' ideas: priceonomics.com/how-culture-affects-hallucinations/

Seems to me that mental illnesses like psychosis or schizophrenia are more products of culture then some diseases that happen the same way to everyone. Or it suggests that auditory hallucinations are not necessarily symptoms of mental illness and can be part of normal brain function.

I have read the book

I think the big problem is that it is such a huge claim, and you need pretty convincing evidence to back it up. I think his analysis of modern research is good (e.g. schizophrenia, brain hemispheres) but he fails to properly convince on the historical examples.

I think you need to walk away from it feeling that people really were like that in the past, and his evidence is weak. It is such a huge difference to our modern self and no one else thinks people were like this in the past. Why does bicameralism not jump out at you when you read history? Surely it should be obvious

The whole "no introspection" is stupid, but the point about gods appearing to people casually has some bearing

That's not true. For his bicameralism claim maybe, but his write-up in the first part of the book where he breaks down everything 'consciousness' isn't is spot on. The topic needs write-ups like that badly, people are spooked as fuck on 'consciouness'.

Julian Jaynes is controversial because he leaves fundies assblasted that they were once schizos, just like how Darwin triggers fundies by reminding them that they were once monkeys. Hail science.

The epic of Gilgamesh was an oral tradition for many centuries before finally being written down in the last millenium BC, well after the supposed bicameral event took place. surviving texts of the document exhibit similar qualities to early copies of the Trojan War: characters do not introspect but rather do whatever the Gods tell them to do.

I tend to agree with Richard Dawkins on this matter: it's either a work of unmitigated genius and far-thinking, or it's a giant load of hogwash, and the jury is still out until more conclusive evidence presents itself

Whatever begins to exist has a cause;
The universe began to exist;
Therefore:
The universe has a cause.

which leads to

The universe has a cause;
If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful;
Therefore:
An uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.

You might have an argument if you believe that God might not be concerned about humans so that at any time He supposedly contacted us is the product of a bicameral mind but then that all falls apart from his necessary qualities which demonstrate WHY he would contact us.

Stop goodposting.

>So everybody all of of sudden lost this trait

Not true. I'm Jewish and have lots of family with schizophrenia. In fact we are more likely to have schizophrenia. That alone makes his argument more plausible.

Why do we allow the chosen people to be in charge of all of our sacred institutions when they are, by their own admission, mentally ill degenerates?

>right-brain half gives "commands" as if they are gods
>people start anthropomorphizing the commands into mythologies about the deities

>people are no longer bicameral though
>but they still believe in gods

Shit thesis imo.

Because it allows (((us))) to rise to the top. High IQ's = Mental illness = Unstable leaders. It's a recipe for disaster but it still works. Much better than allowing subhuman Goys to take our place.

>ignoring half of the thesis

What half though?

He thought humans lacked introspection until around 8th-7th century BC. This is demonstrably false. The shit about the Iliad and Ecclesiastes is cherry-picking, and if the Vedas aren't proof of introspection, idk what is

>But other animals don't have language and have a very basic level of conscious.
Basic consciousness, but not sapience. Unless, of course, you teach them. You can teach an ape to sign and, after quite some time, communicate to it a basic a vague concept of "God" (such as "the mysterious benign creator of all things that no one has seen"). If you ask it questions regarding the nature of this "God", the ape will sign out child-like explanations, such as "God must be a female, as only females can have babies", or "God must be a tree, for trees create food, and you cannot life without food".

Language has a drastic effect on human awareness of as well. You can take a toddler, for instance, and show them a storyboard where Sally leaves her doll in a box, and Sam moves the doll to another box while she is gone. If you then ask the toddler "In which box will Sally look for her box when she returns", the younger ones will almost invariably answer wrong.

And that lack of ablility to project is also true of adults who learned language late in life, due to, for instance, deafness and lack of exposure to signing. They too will be unable to grasp that concept of personal projection and memory compartmentalization until they've been well versed in signing for years.

And those who do learn language late in life like that, will often describe their previous thought process in much the way you might think an animal's would be - series of images, rather than words and concepts. Even if they had a social group with friends in the same langueless boat, they will usually cut off all contact with them, sometimes describing an unwillingness to "go back to that darkness" and similar such phrasing. Can you imagine thought without language?

So it seems, in the end, consciousness, as we understand it, is less something innate, and more something learned.

[fixed and depoliticized]

Not to mention he'd have to explain something like Göbekli Tepe.

>In which box will Sally look for her doll*
Screw it, I'm not reposting that again. Clearly I'm not consciousness enough for language right now.

If it's a bad idea it isn't for that reason. Lots of shit works like that where people still do things even though the origins for those things no longer exist. It's the behavioral equivalent to vestigial organs.

>This is demonstrably false
No, it's worse than that. It's unfalsifiable. You can never really prove ancient people were "conscious" because you can always claim the modern translations are just imposing modern "conscious" views onto the source material. People forget translations aren't an exact thing, especially not translations of ancient source material, and it's going to involve a lot of non-exact interpretation attempting and subjective word choice decision making. You can endlessly argue about the apparently "conscious" features of these ancient texts being caused by the modern translator, which is exactly what Jaynes does. Most of his argument for bicamerialism involves dissecting linguistics and arguing about what ancient people really used ancient words to refer to.

I guess you're right.

However, you'd be hard pressed to actually figure out what those behavioral vestiges actually are.

Having the capacity for religious experience for example, doesn't contain anything, it's just a capacity; and making a convoluted theory of mind doesn't really explain the source of the capacity in the first place.

>Most of his argument for bicamerialism involves dissecting linguistics and arguing about what ancient people really used ancient words to refer to.
This. Despite Jaynes trying to frame his analysis through a scientific lens, what he's really doing is literary analysis.The basis of his hypothesis is projecting his weird reading of certain ancient texts onto the minds of the authors, like any modern literary critic trying to figure out things about J.D Salinger's mind through The Catcher in the Rye.

>godbrain

Is the idea gods started out as auditory command hallucinations (a phenomenon that definitely does happen in modern day schizophrenics) really that much crazier then the idea people just made up magic super-beings to worship?

Yes. We know that people make up beings they communicate with. Children do it all the time, and cargo cults have been studied pretty extensively. Bicameralism has about as much validity as an explanation as McKenna's stoned ape hypothesis.

That's because they tap into a more primordial psychological state, the one that is not promoted by living in a developed society. Why do you think so many of these events occur after extended period of isolation?

Terence McKenna was also right.

is this just a faggy version of Conspiracy Against the Human Race but long and boring and only covers what's in the first chapter?