>>17066493
Be very careful what you call things.
The theory you named is very distinct from the theory you're evoking.

Anyway, Julian Jaynes was very haphazard in his definition of "consciousness" and more or less cherrypicked source material to fit his conclusions.

>>17066493
The bicameral mind is a controversial psychological hypothesis proposing that ancient humans lacked internal self-awareness and instead experienced their own thoughts as auditory hallucinations from "gods"

I'm going to forgo watching op's youtube just this once.

>>17066493
Primitive tribes still exist, you know. By Jaynes' logic, they should be unconscious. If so, none of the anthropologists interacting with them seem to have noticed. If an anthropologist can't reliably judge such a thing from studying and interacting with a people directly, how can a psychologist judge it from interpreting historical material?

>>17066505
this is definitely the weakest part, that i don't agree with either, but the other parts of the theory make sense to me. there had to have been some ground work for consciousness to bootstrap into.

>>17066508
>this is definitely the weakest part, that i don't agree with either, but the other parts of the theory make sense to me.
That's literally the "part" of the theory that determines if it has any basis in reality or not. If these tribes are conscious, everything he says flies out of the window.

>>17066505
The issue is Jaynes meant a very different thing by "consciousness" than what we usually mean.
When I watched a video on the concept that wasn't OP's AI slop (can't be fucked to read the book), one of the cultures Jaynes cited had an interaction that went something like this:
>missionary tries to introduce them to Christianity
>tribe responed "can we meet this 'Jesus' fellow"
>missionary questions whether they've met the spirits they worship
>tribe responds: "yes dumbass. Just go in the jungle or hang out on the river bank for a while. They're right fucking there and they talk to us."

>>17066517
As far as I can tell, Jaynes' idea of consciousness is about being aware of your own mental contents/mental processes and interpreting them as such. What he's basically claiming is that ancient people were mostly going on autopilot, and that what I perceive as conscious self-regulation ("wait, am I doing this right? Maybe I should try that way instead...") they perceived as an external entity commanding them, like they had some disconnect between the part that acts intuitively and the part that reasons abstractly. And because so much of their explicit world modeling revolved around religious concepts, the "voice of reason" wasn't necessarily so reasonable, but had religious tone and content.

I don't think your example proves anything like this at all, only that people in their natural state experience subjective meaning very vividly, can get really lost in their imagination, and don't concern themselves so much with the distinction between objective and subjective. I would say that's far more human and conscious than modern human cattle's sterile mental landscape and self-absorbed wordcel narration.

>>17066522
Your understanding of Jaynes's model pretty much matches mine. And I agree the whole theory is very wishy-washy and I don't buy it.

I used the anecdote as an illustration of what Jaynes sees as evidence on his model in modern primitives and certainly not proof of anything.

>>17066522
I haven't finished his book yet but the evidence looks compelling to me. He says we still see the vestigial bicameral mind through schizophrenia. That everyone is susceptible to hallucinations to process information if stressed enough, but over time we've evolved stronger thresholds by breaking down the bicameral mind. I'd hypothesize that hadza tribes and other hunter gather tribes have much higher rates of schizophrenia than the west does. Good luck finding those stats though.

>>17066526
Fair enough. To be fair, I can imagine a society with the kind of mindset where the line between Jaynes' take and mine gets blurry. You can get so absorbed in a thought that the question of attribution melts away and when you finally snap out of it, you wonder what possessed you (figuratively, at least). Does "divine inspiration" mean God was talking in your thoughts or through your thoughts? The "I" doesn't figure into it while it's happening but God might, so there's a bit of a bias there. How you reconstruct it after the fact and what conceptual drawer you file it in, is more a matter of philosophy than intrinsic cognitive structure if you ask me.

>>17066532
Be careful qith any talk about "divine inspiration" here when we're talking about Jaynes. He posited the the biblical Jews were some of the first people to experience the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Hense the visceral, and almost unique, contempt for idol worship. These were a people who did not experience the same "external voice" in the presence of these idols while witnessing atrocities committed by people who claimed they do.

>>17066531
Of course the evidence is going to appear compelling when you're reading his own work. The problem is it comes down to a post-dictive description of material he collected explicitly in support of his theory. That's bad science.
The schizophrenia point is actually one of his weakest arguments. People with schizophrenia existed back then too and were recognized as strange outliers. Likewise, those who undergo severing of the corpus colosum (a treatment for severe epilepsy) do experience some of the odd quirks that initially inspired Jaynes's framework. But they do not develop anything comparable to schizophrenia.

>>17066531
>I'd hypothesize that hadza tribes and other hunter gather tribes have much higher rates of schizophrenia than the west does.
I doubt it, but ok. Do you also hypothesize they are incapable of metacognition without gods and spirits as intermediaries? Is there any anthropological evidence to support this? Shouldn't they all be schizophrenic? By Jaynes' logic, they have no more reason to be "conscious" than the ancients.

>>17066536
Let me clarify what I mean.

Suppose you're in state of mild (or even profound) ego dissolution, so you're not keeping track of the difference between "internal" and "external" that much. Self-referential mental content is scarce, or at least your consciousness is absorbed in non-self-referential content. Then you have a very vivid realization that you never would've thought yourself capable of - something grand and brilliant compared to your normal everyday thoughts, totally unlike you. You're so startled by this that normal self-awareness kicks in and you go like "woah, what just happened?"

Now imagine you're a highly religious, pre-literate man. You don't have the concepts to articulate what I wrote. You have a bunch of spiritual/religious concepts instead. How are you going to explain what happened to yourself and others? It would be very easy for you to interpret and recount the experience - after the fact - in a way that makes you sound like some bicameral schizophrenic. But that doesn't mean you literally experienced it that way. Could Jaynes have told these two possibilities apart? Could you have told him otherwise, if you didn't even conceive of those two possibilities as distinct? Did Jaynes himself conceive of them as distinct?

One of the biggest issues with the bicameral mind is the idea that every single population on earth seemed to evolve away from it simultaneously despite being under vastly different selection pressures, which is just... not how that works

>>17066550
>evolve away from it simultaneously
come on now...

>>17066547
No I get it. At least I think I do.
What Jaynes is claiming is that these societies experienced an erroneous distinction between their internal monolog and themselves. While they could experience complex emotions and thoughts, they didn't really have the theory of mind to comprehend or express them in a way that didn't involve reifying these concepts as an external entity (deities, spirits, cosmic forces, etc.).
What I, and Jaynes's own contemporaries, are saying in this case is that the connection to schizophrenia is extremely weak for the reasons I laid out before.
The strongest defense of Jaynes's model would drop that association entirely.

>>17066550
The argument goes that it wasn't exactly "simultaneous." It emerged as a sort of "mind virus" from groups of people within societies of growing complexity. These groups did communicate with one another up until the Bronze Age Collapse so the seeds had been sown for the breakdown of the bicameral mind all across the Mediterranean world and immediately surrounding regions before that breakdown became the default state in the civilized world.

>3000 years
that's just silly though. has to be way back for it to make any sense. pyramids were already built at that point
and it also has to be some kind of spectrum.

>>17066628
i agree, but the claim is that there was no evolution or brain chemistry change needed. everything was there physically, allowing consciousness to bootstrap itself in or rather internal monologue to replace the voices

>>17066517
>Dumb ESL talking about something he doesn't understand
Why are you even here?

>>17066995
it makes sense to be on some kind of edge, that can be triggered by social interaction. hence why I called it a spectrum, outside influence can modulate it to some degree.
imagine you growing up by yourself in some cave, you're all feral and scared of the sun god. and along come civilized people that start communicating with you, they can nudge your perception of your surroundings