[dmn322]

Jaynes says the concept of self derived from linguistic metaphor. Until there was a concept of the “mind” as a container that could have thoughts “in” it, he says thoughts were experienced as hallucinations from the right temporal lobe, and people were essentially acting in a hypnotic state driven by those hallucinations

[ransackdev]

Hmm, I remember being 4 years old, not knowing anything at all about the brain, the mind, or much else for that matter. I actually was pretty confused about everything around me. But I knew the voice in my head was me thinking, and I know for a fact that not a single thing was taught to me directly or indirectly to influence that. I just knew that those were my thoughts, because I was thinking them. I’m not special so I’d guess most people “just know” that it’s their own mind, without having to know what a mind is a or have any knowledge at all, and that they aren’t hallucinations.

It’s pretty weird to me that many folks view the people in our past as being unable to be intelligent near or on par with today’s levels. These people were not hypnotized by hallucinations, that’s saying they were not smart enough to even have a thought that they could understand it came from themselves. Yet they were smart enough to develop pulleys and create pyramids, or many other wonders of the world. Things we literally do know how they weee able to do at that time in the past. Things that none of our modern structures will outlast. Things that took understanding of complex subjects, capacity planning, raw material refining, site surveying, astronomy, physics, math, weather patterns, etc.

I wonder in 12k years if humans will look at us and say we were incapable of knowing that our thoughts were ours and lived in a hypnotic state viewing our thoughts as hallucinations. They couldn’t possibly know for one. And also, doesn’t that seem like a odd way to view people who accomplished things we still don’t fully understand?

[angiosperm]

By the time you were 4, you had already absorbed much of the structure of your parents' language, including its models of self.

People were not less intelligent in the past, but they knew less, and had a radically smaller fund of inventions, including mental models and practices, to draw upon. Late speculation about "hypnosis" and "hallucinations" have to be understood as analogies. We know with certainty, anyway, that notions of gods and sacrifice were invented at some particular time, and passed along. And, we know it was common in many places to perceive carved figures talking.

In 12ky, if we don't eliminate ourselves, we will certainly have many inventions that we will be unable to understand life without, and be left to try to imagine it.

[dmn322]

I'm not saying I agree with his hypothesis, but I admire its craziness. He's well aware that it's out there, and he makes some pretty compelling points... doing a pretty thorough analysis of the earliest available literature. For instance in the Illiad, there are essentially no direct references to thoughts or even feeling. He lists the many points where people literally say they're talking to god all throughout ancient literature. They say it in a way that doesn't sound like a metaphor at all. The rulers say something like "<insert god's name> told me to gather 1000lbs of barley and feed him 10 lbs and take him for a procession"... so that is their edict.

I don't think he's suggesting they were stupid. I think what he's suggesting is much more a reflection on the power of metaphor and the sort of fragility of the psyche more than anything. And he addresses something that I've never seen anyone else address. If previous civilizations were so similar psychologically, why don't we see more literature before 2000 bc that contains metaphor. Why doesn't the earliest writing contain self-reflection?

In fact if you see all these ancient people worshipping gods, building gigantic monuments to them, sacrificing humans (many of whom happily participated)... then it seems like you must assume they're stupid on some level to believe they were psychologically the same as us but they just lacked the critical thinking to put their labor to better use. And that they were just lying when they said they were talking to gods, depicting it on friezes, etc.

Hellen Keller said she really did not feel conscious until after she learned language. She had no concept of self. I could never make sense of that either. It seemed like it must be a fluke, like she was exaggerating it to play into people's expectations. But her description sounds 100% sincere.

As for you being 4 years old and being able to differentiate yourself and the thoughts in your head. That's years after you learned "I" and "you".. Years after you learned to remember.

Anyway, when I first started reading the book, it was with extreme skepticism... kind of hate-reading. The book was a gift, and I read it because I liked Westworld, the HBO show which heavily references it. But I have to say, as someone who has been staunchly anti-humanist.. who has advocated for the same basic thought you're advocating for... studying history through the lens of an average person who is just like us... believing that the average people didn't really believe the religious stuff and it was just forced on them by the elites.. this book made me question those deeply held assumptions. I'm still not sold, but I think it needs to not be dismissed offhand without a legitimate evidence-based criticism.

[angiosperm]

Except we don't really know enough about neuroanatomy to connect anything about lobes to anything historical. What we do know is that neuroanatomy hasn't changed in the last 50,000 years. So what did change is, necessarily, in the domain of the software, which in brains means ideas and concepts. And inventions. Inventing a theory of mind must have been mind-blowing.

[dmn322]

We do know that stimulating the right temporal lobe with electrodes causes auditory hallucinations. This is the same area that is responsible for actual speech processing on the left side.

We also know that the left side wernicke and broca's areas are used in conscious language production while the right side does not seem to be at all (in the vast majority of people, with some exceptions where the lateralization is flipped).

Where it gets interesting is his review of historical literature and cataloguing use of metaphor (or lack thereof) in ancient writing.

He takes the Illiad and shows where in the original greek, there's essentially no metaphor for internal emotional or psychological states that's conclusively non-physical. Even apparent references to emotional states reference physiological responses, not specifically emotions. This was right on the cusp of when he suggests the change occured. In the Illiad when someone describes their motivation, it's almost always attributed to a god telling them to do it. Similar accounts abound in literature.

There are many accounts of ancient rulers directly conversing with some hallucinated being as if they're there. As is there art depicting it. But it slows down around and stops around the time of the bronze age collapse in the region.

His suggestion is that it originated with people hallucinating their dead relatives, their dead tribal leaders etc. which is why they would sort of prop them up like they're still alive and have something to say.

I was very, very skeptical at first, but the neuroscience was actually pretty thorough for being written in the 80s and I couldn't find any of it that has been debunked to my knowledge.

[angiosperm]

Jaynes's timeline, anyway, was badly messed up. The notion of independent brain half-selves has been debunked, although brain function localized to certain places is real. It is clear that, if indeed people at that time experienced life as he describes, then by the time we got writing not everybody did. We don't need to depend on any notion of changing neuroanatomy; brain function is entirely plastic enough without such an assumption.

I quizzed an ancient-Greek scholar about Jaynes, and his story about evolution of Greek language. He said there is no such phenomenon in Attic Greek, and Jaynes had confabulated it. Such confabulations have long been an occupational hazard of Classics scholarship. Modern statistical methods have proved necessary to banish them.

[dmn322]

"The notion of independent brain half-selves has been debunked" I don't think his hypothesis really hinges on that.

> It is clear that, if indeed people at that time experienced life as he describes, then by the time we got writing not everybody did.

I'm not sure I'd agree with that this is clear. The phenomenon he describes about writing is something one can easily experience by simply reading ancient texts. It feels different. There is no self reflection.

As for the ancient-Greek scholar you mention... I guess I'd need to see some specifics. Just hearing 2nd-hand that an anonymous scholar said he made it up isn't very compelling evidence. I'm curious about these modern statistical methods you've mentioned... how did they address Jaynes' theory?

"there is no such phenomenon in Attic Greek"... I didn't get the impression of a singular phenomenon other than a lack of metaphoric references to the self in early writing. The timeline for Attic Greek seems to start at 500BC which seems to be on the end side of his hypothesized breakdown of the bicameral mind and 300 years after the Illiad was apparently written. Jaynes suggested it may even be older, passed down through oral history. I'm not sure that we have any evidence to truly debunk that.

Of course once the mental metaphors were established, they would quickly spread through the language, so it would be no surprise to see plenty of examples of Greek that did have more mental metaphors, especially a few hundred years later.

If you can point me to some writing from before 1500 BC or so that clearly shows a mental metaphor of a self which contains or otherwise is connected to thoughts (i.e. "the thoughts in my head"), then I'll have to take that as solid evidence against his theory.

I studied cognitive linguistics in undergrad, so this is an interesting topic to me. His theory definitely goes completely counter to what I'd previously believed which is the we've probably been far more advanced for far longer than is normally assumed. For instance the idea that the clovis people were the first in North America always seemed ridiculous to me. The thing is, even though Jaynes' idea is sort of against that general sensibility, it doesn't really directly contradict it. Anyway, I'd be curious whatever details you know about it. I thought about trying to make a serious rebuttal essay to it to find the evidence against