Selects: Thrill to the Stunning Bicameral Mind Hypothesis

Psychologist Julian Jaynes came up with a stunning hypothesis in 1976, that human consciousness only developed in the last 3000 years. And he seemed to have proof in ancient texts. Scholars have been picking it apart ever since and in this classic episode we join the club. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:29Josh Clark?

  In these episodes, they share their stories, from diagnosis to working with their care team on their treatment plan. Listen to Voices of Vivgard on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, guys. It's Josh and for this week's select, I'm going with our August 2022 episode on the bicameral mind theory. It is mind blowing, mind expanding, mind flabbergasting. It's just a really good episode. It's just really me and Chuck sitting around, having a really interesting conversation about some really interesting stuff. So if you feel like expanding your mind right now, I would say this is a great episode to listen to. Enjoy.

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 2:26Josh Clark?

  Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the ongoing, amazing, mind-blowing edition.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  You've been into this stuff lately. What's going on with you?

• 2:40Josh Clark?

  I don't know. I don't know, man. But yes, I'm definitely into it lately. It's weird.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Approaching 50? Existential crisis?

• 2:50Josh Clark?

  Uh, I don't know about crisis. Maybe more like pondering, existential pondering. I don't think it's a crisis yet. I've still got five years till 50, so give me time.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Are you 45? I thought you were like 47.

• 3:03Josh Clark?

  I'm 45 and 8/9ths.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, you got time.

• 3:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, great. Thank you for that. But no, there's no like one thing that's making me say like, "Hey, when did humans become conscious?" Or, "When did humans become intelligent?" Or, "What do we do if aliens come down?" Like, for some reason, it's just maybe a little more appealing to me than it has been in the past lately. I don't know. But yes, I'm definitely into this kind of thing right now. And this stuff, what we're going to talk about today, it's based on a How Stuff Works article that Robert Lamb wrote. And I'm not at all surprised that Robert Lamb is into this. But I just want to note that I've heard about this years and years and years ago, and have been meaning to do an article or an episode on it. So I don't want you to think this is something you just stumbled across. This is actually

• 3:49Josh Clark?

  the fruition of years of planning and hope and dreams coming to pass in maybe the best episode we'll ever make.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  And of course, Robert and not Robert Lamb, the lead singer of the band Chicago. Just to make it clear.

• 4:08Josh Clark?

  There's another Robert Lamb and he was in Chicago?

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Still is in Chicago.

• 4:12Josh Clark?

  Is that Peter Sotera's stage name?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  No. Sotera was the bass player and part lead singer, along with Robert Lamb, who played keyboards and also sang lead on some. And before Terry Kath died, he played guitar and also sang. So they had three singers in the early days of Chicago.

• 4:31Josh Clark?

  That's just confusing.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  But none of them are our colleague, Robert Lamb, who along with our colleague Joe, had been doing stuff to blow your mind for many, many years. Another great show.

• 4:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and I didn't check, but I would place a substantial amount of money on the idea that they have their own episode on this, Julie and Jane's By Cameramind.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  I bet they have, and we should also shout out Philosophy for Life, Psychology Today, and Frontiers in Psychology, and I'm gonna make one up, Psychology Foo Young.

• 5:03Josh Clark?

  Okay, I've got two more that aren't made up. Slate Star Codex and a poster named Hazard on the site Less Wrong.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  That sounds like a great source.

• 5:15Josh Clark?

  It is Hazard, knows what he's talking about. Oh, and one more, I'm sorry, a guy named Joff Ward, or Jeff Ward, but you know, when they say it like Joff.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:23Josh Clark?

  On Medium. So, all of those combined with Robert Lamb's article that coalesced into, again, probably the greatest episode we'll ever do.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I sort of get some of this, I think you're gonna help me out some, because I do have some questions that I'll just throw out here and there, because at times I found myself reading this stuff and going, "Yeah, but isn't that just blank?"

• 5:45Josh Clark?

  Okay, great, I'll do my best to answer, and you're probably right when you're thinking that. The answer's probably like, "Yes."

• 5:53Speaker 02

  All right, well, I mean, I guess we should say then that the whole hypothesis that we're gonna be kind of breaking down today is controversial, and it's not provable necessarily scientifically speaking. So, it's sort of one of those, I mean, I think it goes beyond thought experiment for sure.

• 6:11Josh Clark?

  Definitely.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Into true hypothesis land, but it was proposed by a psychologist here in the United States named Julian Jaynes in the mid 1970s, of course.

• 6:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the year I was born.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, 76, baby.

• 6:27Josh Clark?

  So, what he proposed was an answer to a longstanding question, and that was, "When did humans become conscious? Like, when did consciousness emerge? Is it something that came along, like, in the earliest archaic humans? Is it something that came along much later than that? And how could we ever possibly answer that? Like, what relics have been left in history, in prehistory, that would say, like, 'Hey, this is evidence of consciousness?' And Julian Jaynes took that up, and he did it as an outsider, which was a huge... Huge strike against him because automatically legitimate scientists are like, well, I can't build upon this theory possibly. This man is in a, actually in my field of consciousness studies.

• 7:12Josh Clark?

  But the thing is, is this, this hypothesis is so well liked. It's just roundly liked. People just like it. It's just such an interesting hypothesis that it just won't go away. It hasn't gone away. And in fact, there's like a Julian Jaynes Institute. There's like groups that have sprung up based on this hypothesis. And what he says in a very small nutshell is that sometime about 1,000, 2,000 years ago, humans became conscious in the way that we understand consciousness today. They developed the ability to think about thinking. They developed the ability to think about that other people are thinking. They developed basically what's called subjective introspection.

• 7:57Josh Clark?

  And then as a result of that, they almost automatically gained free will and volition. So what he's saying is that if we went back in time in the wayback machine, Chuck, and we met somebody who lived 3,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, they would not be a conscious human in the way that we understand conscious humans.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  That's right. And he thinks that it was a learned thing. And the idea that he throws down is that our, our mind, our brain is, or was rather, very important, was. Cause it no longer is. Bicameral, which means split into two parts and we'll get to some actual science about the hemispheres of the brain later on. But in this case, he means split into two parts where you have a part that makes decisions and a part that follows. And that neither one of them were conscious. And, and here's where I get a little tripped up. Okay. Right out, right out of the gate.

• 8:58Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Is basically, he says that instead of an internal dialogue, which we all have and which indicates a consciousness, like us talking to ourselves, us saying things like everything from like, you know, hey, get up and go do this. To just internally thinking about things like humans do, that instead of that.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  We were sort of like human zombies in that we were creatures of habit. We had routines and behaviors that we followed to a T. And whenever something disrupted that behavior, which is when like a conscious mind you would think would speak up, that instead of that, that an external agent, in this case, they thought they were gods, would enter their brain and create an auditory hallucination.

• 9:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and that they unquestioningly obeyed that auditory hallucination. And that that's what helped them get through novel situations that they didn't have like a, basically a prescribed script for. You know, a mindless, automatic thing. Something new came along that got in their way. This god would speak to them and say, go around that rock. It wasn't there yesterday. Don't worry about it. Just go around it. And it could be one of their gods. It could be an ancestor guiding them. I think one, one, I think the Sumerians maybe made reference to angels walking beside them. Or, and this is really important later on. It's a big part of Jane's hypothesis. It could be your local ruler,

• 10:36Josh Clark?

  the divine king who's in charge of you and everybody else that you know and love and have ever lived among. It could be that person guiding you in your life, too. And the idea is they, these people heard this in the same way, like you said, that we hear our own internal dialogue, but they never chalked it up to themselves. It was always coming from the outside.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  All right, here's, I guess, where I had my first issue kind of grasping this, is there were no gods speaking to them and guiding them. This was just their internal dialogue. They just didn't know it.

• 11:10Josh Clark?

  Yes, yes, yes, there was no gods. But to them, and this is a really important point, to them, it definitely was a god talking to them or an ancestor talking to them. And in the same way that if, if an actual god got into your brain and like was speaking to you and you responded to it, if you could have looked at their brains lighting up, presumably in like a wonder machine. It would, it would respond the same way. So it was entirely real to them. And the same way that a placebo effect has real effects on your body, this would have been the same thing. And then in addition to that, it was culturally supported. Everyone that they knew believed the same thing, that the gods were talking to them.

• 11:52Josh Clark?

  And so like that just lent support to this idea so that no, no one questioned it. It was just, that's the way it was.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Well, so this, I guess, brings me to, let me macro this out a little bit in my own dumb brain. And it may just be 20th century, 21st century person thinking

• 12:08Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  that I'm engaging in. But if the idea is that before this, there was no consciousness, but what we're really saying is there actually was consciousness. They just didn't recognize it as such. Is that the whole point was that if you do not recognize it as consciousness, therefore you are not conscious?

• 12:27Josh Clark?

  Yes, because you're not, you're not experiencing consciousness in any way that we would recognize as you being conscious. You're just kind of, um, Julian Jaynes referred to it.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  I see what this guy's doing now.

• 12:40Josh Clark?

  Okay. So, so, but the thing is, is there's like a lot of scholarly discussion on like, okay, what did Jaynes mean exactly? How literal was he? Because he used words like automaton. He never called them zombies. Other people called them like zombies, but um,

• 12:54Speaker 02

  No one talked about zombies back then hardly.

• 12:56Josh Clark?

  No, that's true. But, um, well, Evil Dead had, or not Evil Dead, uh, Living Dead. None of the Living Dead had come out by then.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it wasn't like today.

• 13:04Josh Clark?

  Okay. No, no, I know. They're definitely overdone today. So he called them automatons and it's essentially the same thing that they were, they just behaved automatically. They didn't stop and think about how they felt. They, and this is really important too, Chuck. Of course they still had feelings. They had feelings about the people that were in their kin group. They had feelings about their local ruler. They had feelings about, um, you know, stubbing their toe. It's not like they just had no inner life whatsoever. It's that they weren't, they, they didn't reflect on their inner life. They didn't think about thinking. They didn't, they, they didn't have what we would recognize as consciousness. And in the terms that Jaynes is, is describing consciousness,

• 13:46Josh Clark?

  which is a really narrow definition of consciousness. And then on top of that, he also goes to great lengths to say, hey, I understand that you're going to get all up in a tizzy that I'm saying that these people weren't conscious. I'm not talking about consciousness in general. And I think that you overestimate just how much consciousness makes up our lives.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Okay, how about we take a break?

• 14:10Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  I'm gonna go rip a bong.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Kidding. We'll take a break, we'll come back and we'll talk about what, lots of other stuff, right after this.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we gonna do all this?

• 14:37Josh Clark?

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• 14:40Speaker 04

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• 14:56Speaker 03

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• 15:04Josh Clark?

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• 15:27Josh Clark?

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• 15:31Speaker 06

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• 15:37Speaker 04

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• 15:40Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 15:40Speaker 04

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• 15:50Josh Clark?

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• 16:09Josh Clark?

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• 16:35Josh Clark?

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• 16:58Speaker 04

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• 17:11Josh Clark?

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• 17:39Speaker 02

  All right, so I've kind of wrapped my head around what this guy's saying now. It's, I will admit, it's a little navel gazy for me when it comes to certain types of philosophy and hypotheses. I get a little bit like, what's the word? Maybe I can be a little too concrete, or as the French might say, concret and literal in my thinking, because it's not Friday night in college at like 2:00 in the morning kind of discussion. Right. So I think that's where I am now. But I do think it's very interesting in that he, I mean, I think a lot of this is very interesting, but I think it's interesting that he thought around the first or second millennium B.C.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  is when things, to him, changed and a consciousness began to emerge because of, well, eventually, language, but specifically metaphor, which is to say that all of a sudden we could make analogies in our brain, we could link things together. We saw ourselves as...

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Almost as if they were characters.

• 18:47Josh Clark?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Ourselves were characters that had like choices that they could make as characters.

• 18:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  And as these things like connected in the brain, then it created just an effect, like a domino effect, basically.

• 19:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Where all of a sudden, we could work out our own solutions, or we knew we were capable of working out our own solutions. And then it wasn't God saying, a God saying, "Walk around the rock." They realized it was ourselves making the decision to walk around the rock.

• 19:19Josh Clark?

  Yes, but it's, but in part of that, that also required them to be able to reflect on the idea, like you said, that they were able to now make their own decisions, right? And you said something earlier where you're like, you know, you were talking about your own internal dialogue, where you, you think, "Hey, I should get up and go outside for a second."

• 19:39Josh Clark?

  Like, that's, that's different, right? You're thinking about you yourself, and you realize that you are thinking about yourself. That's modern consciousness. What somebody who was a bicameral person during this time would have thought is, "Get up and go outside." And they would stand up and go outside without questioning, because God had just instructed them to do that, so it must be important. And they didn't think about where it came from. They definitely didn't think it was from themselves, and they didn't reflect on it. They just obeyed it. That's Jane's position. And that if you compare those two things, you're talking about two totally different forms of mental life. And it's so different, he said, that this is, that what we understand as consciousness

• 20:23Josh Clark?

  just wasn't around until a couple thousand years ago.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Okay, I can buy that. I like it as a hypothesis. I can swim in this pool.

• 20:33Josh Clark?

  Okay, good, good.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Within thirty minutes.

• 20:35Josh Clark?

  Here's the thing, it's really important to, to, to realize, like, you said something that you're, you're a literalist, right? That's actually really appropriate to approach this. Because Julian Jaynes, one of the very radical things that he did, was he took the ancients literally. Because when he started looking around, and we'll talk more about this later. But he was looking for those artifacts that would prove his hypothesis or lend support to it at least. And he was an expert in ancient languages, right? So he was, it was really appropriate. He could actually read Sumerian and Mesopotamian. And he took what they were saying when they said things like, you know, the gods told us to do this, that they thought that the gods told them to do this, not that they were using metaphor.

• 21:18Josh Clark?

  So he took them literally on their word. And that is a real departure from anybody else who's ever examined the ancients of what they were saying.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think it's also something we should point out now, even though it comes up later in our research, is that when you think of an, I guess, an automatic society or a society of automatons, that's not to say that they weren't successful. He's describing some of the most successful, you know, ancient civilizations that existed. But I think his contention is that it was a hive mind all working together as automatons that allowed this stuff to get accomplished and not the conscious mind.

• 21:59Josh Clark?

  Right. And he didn't, I don't think he ever used it as like, I don't think he ever explicitly said that it was an emergent property of a hive mind, but that's kind of what he was describing. Kind of like, if you take one stone cutter and one stone mason and three stone carriers and multiply that unit by 500 and give it a year, you have a ziggurat built. That's just, that's just, all those people knew what to do. They knew their position and their place and they just did it. And so, yeah, you could totally do that with people who are thinking in this way and weren't conscious. You could probably actually get it done more easily than you could with people who stopped and thought, I'm above this. This work is not suited for me. I should be doing something else. Or

• 22:43Josh Clark?

  why is the foreman being so mean to me today? Like, they didn't think like that under Jane's hypothesis. So they would probably get the work done more efficiently, at least more quietly, I would guess.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, consciousness proposes her, brought along a whole host of problems.

• 23:01Josh Clark?

  It's true.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  I imagine, if you're the ruling class. I think one thing that's interesting is that you mentioned about what, what, is it Jane's?

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Not Jines, Janes?

• 23:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Janes thought about, I love Robert Lamb's Janes at Dixon joke in here, by the way.

• 23:19Josh Clark?

  That was mine.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  Oh, that was yours?

• 23:21Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Oh, well, way to go.

• 23:23Josh Clark?

  Thanks.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  You said Janes says, and then in parentheses, you put, huh.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  It's a very good joke, but what Jane said was that, um, and it's something you mentioned earlier, was that consciousness, I think we think consciousness plays too big of a role in what is actually a life that is, can largely be still automatic on a lot of levels.

• 23:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  And this is from the actual book in 1976, and it's a little, little mind-blowing. I kind of like it. Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we're conscious of. Because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. It's like asking a flat, and this is where it kind of comes home to me. It's like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. So that's where it comes home to me, is when you, and hey, it's metaphor, so how about that? He lays down a metaphor that makes me understand it a little bit more.

• 24:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because, you know, wherever the flashlight looks, there's light.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  There's light.

• 24:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and his point is, is wherever your conscious mind looks, there's consciousness. But that doesn't mean that there's consciousness all over the place. And, um, yeah, Robert Lamb does, uh, uses a really good example of unloading a dishwasher, right? Like, when you're unloading the dishwasher, especially if you're one of those people who put like all of your knives in one place, all of your forks in one part of the basket, all of your spoons and so on, right? A maniac, in other words.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Sensible human.

• 25:03Josh Clark?

  If you do it like that, it's, you can, you can just be on autopilot because you've done it so many times. But when you do something like drop a fork, that's out of the norm. That's a novel thing that doesn't happen every time. And so in, in the bicameral mind, God would have said, um, "I command thee to pick up thine fork, butter fingers." And you would lean over and pick up the fork, and that was that. Instead, you, you might not even think about picking up the fork. You might do that automatically, but it's still out of the norm. It's still different, and you have to kind of think about it a little more than just unloading the dishwasher. Now, if you take that dishwasher metaphor, Chuck, and you realize that three, five, nine thousand years ago, there were no dishwashers.

• 25:48Josh Clark?

  There was no ice cream scoop, there was no cookie scoop, there was no avocado splitter. There was nothing like that.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Wait, what's that? Is that a thing now?

• 25:58Josh Clark?

  Yeah, you don't know, you don't have one of those?

• 26:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 26:00Josh Clark?

  Oh, I'll send you one, you're missing out. It's a, it's a multi-tool for cutting avocados, getting the pit out, and then slicing them as you scoop them out. They're essential, as a matter of fact.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  All right, I do pretty well with my knife, but I would love to see one of these.

• 26:15Josh Clark?

  Okay, I'm gonna get you one for Christmas.

• 26:19Josh Clark?

  So, the, the point is that like, there wasn't a big variety of stuff. So, there wasn't that many novel situations. Like, we encounter novel situations like almost constantly. That's just modern life. And that's the basis of Jane's, um, uh, like hypothesis, that the reason that consciousness evolves is because we started to get faced with more and more novel situations on a much more frequent basis. So, it, it, maybe it became inefficient for God to be talking to us every thirty seconds. Or, maybe we just got better at thinking for ourselves and consciousness kind of evolved out of that. But the point is, life was much less complex back then, so you could have something like a bicameral mind. You could have somebody who, who consciousness hadn't evolved in yet

• 27:04Josh Clark?

  because they hadn't been introduced to enough experience in life.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  And with that experience came the, the fork falling on the floor, in other words?

• 27:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah, or, you know, there's a lot more dishes to put away and much more different dishes to put away, rather than just forks. You know?

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Okay, sure.

• 27:24Josh Clark?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:25Josh Clark?

  Or you have one fork and you just carry it with you everywhere, you know? Like, you don't have to think about that. There was just less stuff to think about, is what I'm saying.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Well, now you're speaking my language, because if I had it my way, every member of my family would have one fork, one spoon, one knife, one bowl, one cup, one plate.

• 27:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  And they were all responsible for keeping them clean and put away.

• 27:46Josh Clark?

  Man, every time I hear one cup, I'm like, there's a joke in there somewhere, but even if I could come up with it, I wouldn't be able to say it.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that's true. All right, so now we're at the point where we can talk a little bit more about this idea of metaphor and language sort of bringing about this change. And so what James was throwing down in 1976, besides apparently a bunch of roach clips, was the emergence of agricultural societies kind of changing everything. And that all of a sudden, we are not living in groups of, you know, 10 or 12 people that are hunting and gathering, where even if there was sort of a leader within that group, it was very easy to disseminate information and follow that leader.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Once we started settling down, planting and growing things, engaging in trade with other peoples, that did a lot of things that complicated every process. And it meant that societies were much, much larger and that rulers couldn't necessarily speak directly to people anymore.

• 28:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so another part of-

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Not to specific people, like they could lay down an edict and that would get disseminated, in other words.

• 29:05Josh Clark?

  Right, so like, I've read before, back when I was an anthropology student, that hunter-gatherer bands usually numbered no more than 30 people. Like, that was the absolute max. And once you reached that, you'd split off into two different bands. So, yeah, like, the person in charge was like, part of your moment-to-moment life. And if you're suddenly in a civilization and you're building a ziggurat for somebody, he's probably not deigning to talk to you. And part of Jane's hypothesis is that this bicameralism emerged from, you know, all those new novel situations, like learning to plant crops, learning to domesticate cows, learning to engage in trade and talk to other people, that we started to like,

• 29:48Josh Clark?

  need direction from the gods more and more, and it started to kind of get faster and faster. But in the meantime, it was a form of social control. Because one of the people you could think was talking to you was that local ruler who you were building the ziggurat for. So that would be a way to keep an increasingly large population in check.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  Right, and as they got bigger and bigger, and they started, you know, trading with people like we were saying, that, you know, that was sort of the beginning of the end for his, not his bicameral mind, but the bicameral mind. And one of the biggest problems with all of that was when we started writing stuff down. Because all of a sudden, this, these auditory hallucinations that he felt like everyone was having to instruct them on what to do, there was, there was now stuff down on paper that you could read and you could refer to and go back to and pass around and post on the, you know, on tablets at the walls of the city or whatever.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  And that was, all of a sudden, you weren't waiting around for a god to tell you what to do. You could just go read that tablet.

• 30:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so the power that we gave to the gods commands were kind of transferred to

• 31:07Josh Clark?

  the written word. And yeah, that seems to have been like the death knell for the bicameral mind, right? And there's something really interesting that's worth pointing out. James apparently didn't have any hypothesis on what came before the bicameral mind. Because he said it started as a result of the increasing organization that agriculture brought along. And that there wasn't bicameral minds before then. But he doesn't say what was before then. And people even asked him like, okay, what about, you know, hunter-gatherer societies that are still around today? You know, where would they have gotten consciousness? And he never really answered that. But it's, it's definitely worth pointing out that that's an open question. But he basically says bicameralism,

• 31:54Josh Clark?

  or the bicameral mind, I should say. Bicameralism is the senate in the house. But the bicameral mind lasted from the advent of agriculture about 11,000 years ago till about 2,000-ish, maybe 1,500, or no, 3,000-ish years ago. So it was about a 7,000-year span of bicameral mind. And then, as life got more and more sophisticated, we started thinking for ourselves. And what he says is, That language, in particular, the written word, but also language, got more and more sophisticated. And as it got more sophisticated, there was more of a potential for us to start thinking in metaphors.

• 32:38Josh Clark?

  And metaphors, as you said, is the basis of consciousness and the way we think in Julian Jayne's mind. And there's actually a lot of support for that, Charles. May I?

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Oh, please.

• 32:50Josh Clark?

  So that post by Hazard on Less Wrong.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Let's see what Hazard has to say.

• 32:55Josh Clark?

  It's called Consciousness as Metaphor: What Jayne has to Offer. And what Hazard says is that, like, Hazard just puts out like a paragraph from like an economic report. And it's about recessions in Europe. And it talks about Germany plunging into recession, or the UK falling deeper into recession, or France emerging from a recession. And what Hazard points out is that all of these descriptors imagine a recession as a three-dimensional, physical thing that we can, entire nations can move into and out of. That's not true. Recession's aren't three-dimensional. They aren't physical things. You can't emerge from them. You can't fall into them. But we just think about it like that, and that's metaphor.

• 33:40Josh Clark?

  So we think in metaphors so frequently, we don't even recognize it anymore. And that was Jayne's point, that when we gain the ability to think in metaphors, we became conscious. We started thinking for ourselves. We became capable of introspection. And it was the evolution of language that led us to that point. Like, basically, it just, we just hit a threshold where suddenly language is sophisticated enough that it could unlock new thoughts in our brains, and in turn, it unlocked consciousness.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  I mean, that makes sense, because, you know, a metaphor is literally not literal. And if you were, if you did, if that was not a thing yet. Then it chides with the whole notion that everything they were doing was very literal up until that point.

• 34:27Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  And that would have been a pretty seismic shift. Uh, if you can compare like with like, you know, all of a sudden.

• 34:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and you even see this in like, um, like movies that are trying to emphasize how backwards or back in time, you know, some group is. Um, and they emphasize it by having that group take everything literally, usually to comic effect, like in Kingpin, when Randy Quaid was an Amish person, right?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:55Josh Clark?

  He took everything literally and it was hilarious, hilarity ensued, but it was also to demonstrate how just simple and behind he was. He couldn't, he couldn't engage in metaphors. He didn't think like that. That's actually based on, I don't know whether on purpose or not, but that's based on Julian Jane's hypothesis.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you know what? That's a nice segue to children, uh, because when you have a human child, uh, it's very funny to see how literal they are for those first years.

• 35:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  And that they don't understand metaphor, they don't understand, certainly don't understand things like sarcasm. And you have to change the way you talk to little kids because they do take everything so literally and think so literally. And, uh, children are, are referenced with Jane's, uh, the idea that, um, I think what age, like kids up until the age of five, basically, uh, don't really have much of a, a human consciousness. Uh, and it's in, you know, the idea that children are just little narcissists walking around is a fun joke, but it's true because they don't know that other people think differently

• 36:09Speaker 02

  than they think up until about the age of five. They don't realize there are other lines of thought and ways of thinking and ways of feeling about things.

• 36:18Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  That other, that other people have.

• 36:20Josh Clark?

  Exactly. That's what's called theory of mind, right? And, um, on Slate Star Codex, uh, Scott Alexander went to great lengths to basically say the, that Julian Jane's using the term consciousness just really muddied the waters unnecessarily. And if he had just used theory of mind, it would have made a lot more sense. And Scott Anderson, Scott Alexander, I think I said Anderson, Scott Alexander makes some really, a really good case for it. And that's kind of what he's pointing out is, um, you know, like it's, it's possible that. Because you learn, it's not, you're not born with it. You learn it through experience. It just kind of evolves in you as you grow as a person and experience more and more novel stuff and interact with people more.

• 37:04Josh Clark?

  Almost like a microcosm of what happened in civilization a few thousand years ago.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:11Josh Clark?

  You gain theory of mind. So the fact that you can learn and that you do learn something that integral to consciousness really supports the idea that maybe consciousness as we understand it was learned. It did evolve. It was an emergent property of an increasingly sophisticated language.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  It's a fascinating thing to see happen in a child's life, to see these little light bulbs come on seemingly out of nowhere, but you realize it is, you know, very much a learned thing.

• 37:42Josh Clark?

  Man, I'll bet.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Very fascinating. All right, I say we take a break and we'll talk a little bit about just some other fascinating stuff when we get back, right after this.

• 38:10Josh Clark?

  Everyone has a story to tell. What's yours? The moment you met your partner, landed that promotion? For people living with a rare disease, life can feel divided into before the diagnosis and all the after moments that follow. On Voices of VivGart, VivGart is also known as its generic name, Fgart Tigamod Alpha Fcab, you'll hear powerful stories from people facing challenges and embracing a life with a rare disease.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  Join host Andra Stratten as she guides listeners through honest conversations about life after diagnosis. You'll hear how each guest worked with her care team on their treatment plan, as well as their personal challenges, setbacks, progress, and moments of connection.

• 38:46Josh Clark?

  These stories reveal that life is bigger than a moment, a condition, or a tough day. Listen to Voices of VivGart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 39:03Josh Clark?

  World Mental Health Day takes place in October, and it's really meant to be more than just awareness. It's about actually taking the next step and getting support if you need it.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  But a lot of people still talk themselves out of therapy. They think it's too expensive. They're not sure if it'll actually work. They don't know how to find the right therapist, or they just get overwhelmed trying to navigate the whole system.

• 39:22Josh Clark?

  And that's exactly what Rula is built to fix. Rula makes therapy feel a lot more approachable, a lot more human. You can find a therapist who actually fits your needs, not just whoever's available. And with insurance, sessions average around $15 copay.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can sign up in just a few minutes. You can get matched with the right provider and even book something as soon as the next day.

• 39:41Josh Clark?

  And it's not just about starting. Rula helps you stay consistent and actually make progress because taking care of your mental health isn't a one-time thing. So if you've been thinking about therapy, don't talk yourself out of it. This is a really easy way to take that first step.

• 39:54Speaker 04

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• 40:06Speaker 07

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• 40:51Speaker 04

  I was going to summarize what we were going to talk about, but I didn't feel like it all of a sudden before the break.

• 40:55Josh Clark?

  I think it's nice. It's loosey-goosey. I think that's the way it should be.

• 40:59Speaker 04

  Can I talk about one of my favorite parts of this?

• 41:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  The hypothesis?

• 41:03Josh Clark?

  Definitely.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Is we were, we're kind of jumping around now, but jumping back to where we talked about writing things down all of a sudden. It was around here in human history that there was a collapse of societies in the Mediterranean, around the Middle East. It was called the Late Bronze Age Collapse. And it didn't take that long. And it meant like these very advanced sort of societies in a matter of decades. A number of them, a lot of their culture was lost. That was, it's sort of, they called it, in fact, the Greek Dark Ages. And it lasted for hundreds of years. And jiving with this was when humans started to lose, and it kind of all makes sense that

• 41:48Speaker 02

  they were losing, with the written word, with metaphor and language coming along, they were losing this voice as a god. They were, they felt like they were losing their gods because all of a sudden, the gods were silent to them. They weren't speaking to them in their mind because they were gaining consciousness. And here's where it gets super interesting. James has a hypothesis that says it's about here where the organized religions that we know today were born out of a kind of nostalgia, basically, for these gods that left them.

• 42:24Josh Clark?

  Right?

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think that idea is really interesting.

• 42:28Josh Clark?

  It is. And I mean, the timetable really jibes. And it is really interesting that that Late Bronze Age Collapse happened when it did. But, but the idea is not just nostalgia, but also desperation.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:42Josh Clark?

  Because these people had guidance. They didn't have to think. And this poor set of generations over a few hundred years are maybe some of the most pitiful humans that ever lived.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:53Josh Clark?

  Because they went from just knowing what to do because the gods told them what to do, to having no idea what to do because their gods had abandoned them. And they, as a result of that, they started forming religions. They started, you know, beseeching the gods to, to give them a This is when oracles started to become a thing, prophets started to become a thing, superstitions like omens grew, like there was a Sumerian omen. If a horse comes into your house and bites you, you will soon die and your family will soon be scattered. Stuff like that, right? So this, this didn't exist before because the gods were in charge of everything.

• 43:33Josh Clark?

  Now they were suddenly gone and I just think it must be, must have been really pitiful and dark to live through that time.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they were lost, I guess. As a people.

• 43:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and, and I mean, that was figuratively, they were lost, but literally too, because that late Bronze Age collapse, they think was brought on at least in part by climate change and probably invasion. There's this mysterious group called the sea peoples that seemed to have overrun different cultures. And so like culture after culture would fall, those people would become refugees, descend upon another culture, end up pushing that to the breaking point, that culture would fall. It was just like a domino effect of collapsing cultures all at once. So they really felt like the gods had abandoned them, like they'd angered them or something like that. They were genuinely lost.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  So what James did to help support his hypothesis, which makes sense, was to go back and look at literature of the time and see if it sort of supported this. I know one of the things he wrote a lot about in his book in 1976 was that, was Homer's Iliad. Because he's kind of like, here's proof right here. I mean, if you look at the Iliad, they were basically automatons. They, they just listened to the gods and did what the gods said. And they substituted, like the words that we would use to substitute in for the Iliad to indicate consciousness just weren't there.

• 44:56Josh Clark?

  Right, so they were more like physical descriptors, like my belly was quivering or my heart was fluttering or something like that, not, I, I think the example that's used is fear filled Agamemnon's mind.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:08Josh Clark?

  Well, there wasn't a mind, so they would describe fear in other physical terms, right?

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Like a stomach ache.

• 45:14Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and that it wasn't until later on, when new translations were coming along, that people who were now conscious turned the stuff into metaphor. And James is saying, they didn't mean it as metaphor before. They meant it as literally, and they didn't have descriptors for minds. And when they say the gods were guiding them along, they meant it literally. And he was saying that the Iliad in particular started to be written about 1100 BCE. And then around 700 BCE, it was like in its form that we see it today. But along the way, it was kind of added to. And it was written during the transition from bicameral mind to modern consciousness.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:52Josh Clark?

  He sees it as basically a document that traces that transition.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, very interesting. There was some other stuff too, right? Literature wise?

• 46:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so that wasn't the only one. He also found in some of the religious texts, like evidence that people felt like God had abandoned them. There's something, a Mesopotamian poem called the Lidl Bell Nemeke. And it says, "My God has forsaken me and disappeared. My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance. The good angel who walked beside me has departed." And again, most other scholars would say, there's something happened. This guy was blue, he was in a funk, who knows? But it's all metaphorical. And James is saying, no, this guy had God talking to him, now he doesn't anymore.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  So should we talk a little bit about actual science here with the brain?

• 46:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Because this is something we've covered before in the past when we talked about Alien Hand Syndrome.

• 46:48Josh Clark?

  Oh, is that where it came up?

• 46:49Speaker 02

  From a gazillion years ago. We, there were, there was evidence that when the, there were certain epilepsy patients where it was so severe, that they would sever the corpus callosum, undergo a corpus callostomy. And the corpus callosum is basically the thing that makes the two hemispheres of the brain communicate with one another. And with Alien Hand Syndrome, I think they found that it could be brought on by this surgery where all of a sudden the left arm was doing something and without being told to do it by the right brain. And they have, James, I think, or people since James, was it James or was it just people

• 47:34Speaker 02

  trying to? Sort of proof his theory.

• 47:38Josh Clark?

  I think that people saw this, these experiments as support for Jane's theory.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Okay, so they looked at these surgeries, these corpus colostomies, and they're called split-brain patients, basically, where they, you know, after the surgery, it's not like they felt all out of whack, they felt like a regular, you know, whole human being. But they learned that there were these little things that would pop up where a hemisphere would take an action based on this information that it didn't have access to. And the example they gave was if they like instructed the right hemisphere to just walk to the kitchen, and they would get up and walk to the kitchen, but they would say, hey, why did you get up and walk to the kitchen? The language, the left hemisphere, the language dominant

• 48:25Speaker 02

  hemisphere, is the only part that can respond to that. But the left hemisphere doesn't know why it got up. And the really fascinating part is that they wouldn't say, well, I don't know, I'm not sure why I just did that, I just did it. They would make something up on the spot and say, you know, I felt like getting up and going to make a bowl of cereal.

• 48:47Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  And it's almost like we had this natural instinct to BS somebody when faced with a question that we can't answer about why we did something.

• 48:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because the left hemisphere wants to explain things. It wants to tell the story, using metaphors usually. And this is, this became the left brain interpreter theory. And it kind of supports Jane's idea that the consciousness is a flashlight looking for a dark spot in a room, and it just can't find it. And the idea is that the left hemisphere creates the explanation, the stories for our behavior, even if it doesn't know why we did something. But that's just what it does. And there's a saying in consciousness research, among people who subscribe to the left brain interpreter theories, that consciousness

• 49:36Josh Clark?

  isn't in the Oval Office like it thinks it is, it's more in the press office. Like, it's the one that's public facing, explaining what you're doing, but it might not have all the information. So sometimes it's just BSing.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  That's very interesting stuff.

• 49:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  And sort of tying in with the kid thing, who is this, how do you pronounce the name of that one researcher, Kushtan?

• 50:00Josh Clark?

  Ask Jean Kooij?

• 50:01Speaker 02

  K K U I J S T E N.

• 50:04Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  I'm just gonna say Kooijstien.

• 50:07Josh Clark?

  I think that's pretty, pretty dead on. That's the, the person who runs the Julian Jaynes, society.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Today, because James died in 1997. I don't think we ever pointed that out.

• 50:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  But this person basically says, hey, if you look at people who hear voices, and that's not necessarily to say someone that has schizophrenia, because that is 1% of the population, apparently is, the highest 10% of the population can, you know, does hear things, basically. So, these, it's the idea of the, the command voice, basically, is to, to do something. And if you're hearing a voice that says, you know, move to the window and look out on the street, that's one thing. If you hear a voice that says, take the knife from the drawer and, you know, put it in someone's head, then that's another thing altogether.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  And we were talking about kids earlier, you know, the idea of the imaginary friend kind of jives with this lack of consciousness. 65% of kids have imaginary friends. I had an imaginary friends. My daughter had, for years, what she called her ghost friends, which is a lot creepier way to put it.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  But I think that's all just sort of to say that, like, that 9% of people who are hearing voices, who are not suffering from schizophrenia, is, that's proof of that initial bicameral mind at work, right?

• 51:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And, and, I mean, Julian Jaynes believed that children go from a bicameral state to a conscious state, as evidenced by that development of theory of mind, or as evidenced by imaginary friends. And that, they're, they're kind of recreating what society or the human species went through thousands of years ago, as they age and develop.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  Very interesting.

• 52:02Josh Clark?

  So you might be out there, especially if you're a concretist like Chuck, thinking like, you might be rocking in your seat right now, face flushed, about to faint out of rage.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Oh, wait, is my camera on?

• 52:18Josh Clark?

  Like, this is by definition unscientific. It's not provable in the form that James put it forth. It's more of a concept, an idea. And apparently, he was well aware of that. He didn't tout it as anything more than that. But Cushton, the director of the Julian Jayne Society, likes to point out that it was, he was basically laying the groundwork for an entirely new way of looking at things so that other people could come along and, you know, take it up and figure out how he was wrong, how he was right, what needed fleshing out, what made sense in that form. And people have been doing that. Again, this is like a crackpot theory that has never gone away.

• 53:02Josh Clark?

  Because the more people pay attention to it, and the more we start to understand about the brain, the more sense it kind of makes. And it seems to be gaining traction rather than losing it over the like 50 years that it's been around.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  I think it's interesting. I don't hate this stuff. I'm not rocking in my chair.

• 53:20Josh Clark?

  David Bowie loved it. He said that the origin of consciousness is the breakdown of bicameral mind? I think that was it.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  It's a song?

• 53:30Josh Clark?

  No. He said it was one of the top 100 books to read.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  Oh, all right. I believe that.

• 53:38Josh Clark?

  Totally.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  It's a very Bowie thing.

• 53:40Josh Clark?

  For sure.

• 53:42Josh Clark?

  And other people, too. And then one other thing, another way to put all this, to kind of sum it up, that I saw it put, is that we developed at some point back in the, in history, a left-brain bias.

• 53:55Josh Clark?

  That's it. You know, which kind of ties into your original view of the whole thing, which was, you know, they weren't conscious that they were conscious.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  Right. I like that.

• 54:05Josh Clark?

  You got anything else?

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Uh, I might, but I might just not be aware of it.

• 54:11Josh Clark?

  Man. As I said, this is the best episode we've ever done. Since Chuck giggles, which everybody loves, I think then it's time for listener mail.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  Uh, this is about the Freedom of the Press episode. And this was a Josh request. Hey, guys. How Freedom of the Press Works struck a particular chord with me. I used to work as a science teacher, but was finding more and more students were being duped by pseudoscience on the internet and weren't being provided the tools to recognize this. So I did a master's in library and information science, and now a school librarian on a mission to vanquish disinformation.

• 54:51Josh Clark?

  Awesome.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  Uh, while I've included the topic of journalism in terms of approaching news critically, as with any online source of information, your recent podcast on How Freedom of the Press Works really inspired me to put forward more information and content about media freedoms and the risks for journalists. Here in Sweden, it's very easy to take Freedom of the Press for granted. Last year, in sympathy with my American colleagues, I put up a display of banned books tracked by the ALA. And each book had a tag listing the years and ranking a book was challenged, and I encouraged the students to guess what for. It led to a lot of really good, that's, I love this experiment with students. Led to a lot of really good discussions. Many students hadn't realized the scale of how many books had been banned or challenged,

• 55:36Speaker 02

  were horrified to see their own favorite books on display, and were also shocked by the justification, as are we always.

• 55:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  Uh, now that COVID restrictions are being lifted, I'm very much looking forward to taking students to the world's first library of censored books, the Dawitt Isaac Library in the Malmur Archives. That's a new Malm.

• 55:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Uh, so that students can see the extent of limitations on the press and media freedoms around the world. Uh, thanks again for the fascinating show and all-around amazing series. Kind regards. Med vänliga helsnigare.

• 56:16Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Uh, that is, uh, must just be a salutation in Swedish.

• 56:20Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  That comes from Ms. Alice Antunsson. She her hers.

• 56:26Josh Clark?

  Thank you, Alice. That is amazing. I'm so glad we got to that listener mail because I've been proud of that person for a very long time, ever since that email came in. Totally. How about Sweden, huh? Keeping the American dream alive. I love it. And Chuck, also, before we sign off, there's something I've been meaning to address that you said earlier. You said you have a dumb brain. No, you don't. Did I say that? Yeah, you did. Okay. So if you want to get in touch with us, like Alice did, and show the world what a hero you are, we would love to hear that kind of thing. You can email us to [email protected].

• 57:05Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 57:21Josh Clark?

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• 58:23Josh Clark?

  Introducing Voices of VivGart. VivGart is also known as its generic name, Efgart Tigamod Alpha F-Cab. And this new show features firsthand stories from people living with a rare disease. Hosted by Andrew Stratton, these perspectives highlight that life is more than a moment, a condition, or a tough day. Living with a rare disease can be challenging, but it does not define the Voices of VivGart. In these episodes, they share their stories, from diagnosis to working with their care team on their treatment plan. Listen to Voices of VivGart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 58:57Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.