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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I

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Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,

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Speaker 1: and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is

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Speaker 1: Stuff You Should Know, the ongoing, amazing, mind blowing edition.

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Speaker 1: You've been into this stuff lately? What's going on with you?

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Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know, man, but yes, I'm

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Speaker 1: definitely into it lately. It's weird approaching fifty existential crisis.

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Speaker 1: I don't know about crisis, maybe more like pondering, existential pondering.

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Speaker 1: I don't think it's a crisis yet. I've still got

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Speaker 1: five years, still fifty, So give me time now, you

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Speaker 1: forty five, I'm forty five and eight ninths. Uh, yeah,

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Speaker 1: you got time. Yeah, great, thank you for that. But no,

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Speaker 1: there's no like one thing that's making me say, like, hey,

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Speaker 1: when did humans become conscious? Or when did humans become intelligent?

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Speaker 1: Or what do we do if aliens come down? Like

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Speaker 1: for some reason, it's just maybe a little more appealing

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Speaker 1: to me than it has been in the past lately.

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Speaker 1: I don't know, but yes, I'm definitely into this kind

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Speaker 1: of thing right now. And this stuff, well, we're gonna

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Speaker 1: talk about today It's based on a how Stuff Works

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Speaker 1: article that Robert Lamb wrote, and I'm not at all

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Speaker 1: surprised that Robert Lamb is into this, but I just

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Speaker 1: want to note that I've heard about this years and

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Speaker 1: years and years ago and have been meaning to do

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Speaker 1: an article or an episode on it. So I don't

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Speaker 1: want you to think this is something who just stumbled across.

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Speaker 1: This is actually the fruition of years of planning and

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Speaker 1: hope and dreams coming to to pass in the in uh,

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Speaker 1: maybe the best episode will ever make. Uh. And of

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Speaker 1: course Robert and not Robert Lamb, the lead singer of

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Speaker 1: the band Chicago. There's another Robert Lamb, and he was

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Speaker 1: in Chicago. In Chicago, is that Peter Sata's stage name

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Speaker 1: No Stara was the bass player and part lead singer

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Speaker 1: along with Robert Lamb, who played keyboards and also sang

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Speaker 1: lead on some and before Terry Cats died, he played

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Speaker 1: guitar and also sang So they had three singers in

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Speaker 1: the early days of Chicago. Just confusing, but none of

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Speaker 1: them are our colleague Robert Lamb, who, along with our

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Speaker 1: colleague Joe, had been doing stuff to blow your mind

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Speaker 1: for many, many years. Another great show. Yeah, and I

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Speaker 1: didn't check, but I would place a substantial amount of

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Speaker 1: money on the idea that they have their own episode

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Speaker 1: on this Julian James by Camra Mind. I bet they have.

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Speaker 1: And we should also shout out Philosophy for Life, Psychology

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Speaker 1: Today and Frontiers in Psychology. And I'm gonna make one

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Speaker 1: up um psychology food Young. Okay, I've got two more

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Speaker 1: that aren't made up late Star Codex and um uh

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Speaker 1: poster her name Hazard on the site less Wrong. That

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Speaker 1: sounds like a great source. It is, Hazard knows what

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Speaker 1: he's talking about. Oh. In one more, I'm sorry, a

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Speaker 1: guy named Jeff Ward or jeff Ward but you know

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Speaker 1: when they say jeff um on medium. So all of

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Speaker 1: those combined with Robert Lamb's article the Coalesce and again,

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Speaker 1: probably the greatest episode we'll ever do. Yeah, and I

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Speaker 1: sort of get some of this. Um, I think you're

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Speaker 1: gonna help me out some because I do have some

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Speaker 1: questions that I'll just throw out here and there, because

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Speaker 1: at times I found myself reading and stuff and going, yeah,

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Speaker 1: but isn't that just blank? Okay, great, I'll do my

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Speaker 1: best to answer, and you're probably right, um, when you're

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Speaker 1: thinking that, which is probably like, yes, all right, well,

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Speaker 1: I mean I guess we should say then that the

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Speaker 1: whole hypothesis is that we're going to be kind of

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Speaker 1: breaking down today. Is controversial and it's not provable necessarily

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Speaker 1: scientifically speaking. So it's sort of one of those Um,

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Speaker 1: I mean, I think it goes beyond thought experiment for sure,

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Speaker 1: definitely into true hypothesis land. But it was proposed by

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Speaker 1: a psychologist here in the United States named Julian Jaynes

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Speaker 1: in the mid nineteen seventies. Of course, yeah, the ear

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Speaker 1: was born. So what he proposed was an answer to

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Speaker 1: a longstanding question, and that was when did humans become conscious?

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Speaker 1: Like when did consciousness emerge? Is it something that came

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Speaker 1: along like in the earliest archaic humans? Is it something

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Speaker 1: that came along much later than that? And how could

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Speaker 1: we ever possibly answer that, like what relics have been

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Speaker 1: left in history, um, in prehistory that would say like, hey,

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Speaker 1: this is evidence of of consciousness um. And Julian James

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Speaker 1: took that up, and he did it as an outsider,

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Speaker 1: which was a huge strike against him because automatically legitimate

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Speaker 1: scientists are like, well, I can't build upon this theory.

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Speaker 1: Possibly this man is in actually in my field of

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Speaker 1: consciousness studies. Um. But the thing is is this, this

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Speaker 1: hypothesis is so well liked, it's just roundly like people

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Speaker 1: just like it. It's just such an interesting hypothesis that

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Speaker 1: it just won't go away. It hasn't gone away. And

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Speaker 1: in fact, there's like a Julian James Institute, there's like

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Speaker 1: groups that have sprung up based on this hypothesis. And

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Speaker 1: what he says, in a very small nutshell is that

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Speaker 1: sometime about one thousand, two thousand years ago humans became

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Speaker 1: conscious in the way that we understand consciousness today. They

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Speaker 1: developed the ability to think about thinking, They developed the

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Speaker 1: ability to think about that other people are thinking. They

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Speaker 1: developed basically what's called subjective introspection, and then as a

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Speaker 1: result of that, they almost automatically gained free will and volition.

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Speaker 1: So what he's saying is that if we went back

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Speaker 1: in time in the Way Back Machine, Chuck, and we

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Speaker 1: met somebody who lived three thousand years ago, four thousand

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Speaker 1: years ago, they would not be a kind just human

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Speaker 1: in the way that we understand conscious humans. That's right,

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Speaker 1: And he thinks that it was a learned thing. And

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Speaker 1: the idea that he throws down is that our our mind,

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Speaker 1: our brain is, or was rather very important was because

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Speaker 1: it no longer is bicameral, which means split into two parts.

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Speaker 1: And we'll get to some actual science about the hemispheres

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Speaker 1: of the brain later on, but in this case he

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Speaker 1: means split into two parts where you have a part

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Speaker 1: that makes decisions and a part that follows. And that

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Speaker 1: neither one of them were conscious. And and here's where

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Speaker 1: I get a little tripped up right out right out

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Speaker 1: of the gate. Is Basically he says that instead of

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Speaker 1: an internal dialogue, which we all have and which indicates

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Speaker 1: a consciousness, uh, like us talking to ourselves, us saying

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Speaker 1: things like everything from like you know, hey, get up

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Speaker 1: and go do this, to just internally thinking about things

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Speaker 1: like humans do that instead of that, we were sort

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Speaker 1: of like human zombies and that we were creatures of habit.

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Speaker 1: We had routines and behaviors that we followed to a

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Speaker 1: t and whenever something disrupted that behavior, which is when

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Speaker 1: like a conscious mind you would think, would speak up

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Speaker 1: that instead of that that an external agent in this case, Uh,

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Speaker 1: they thought there were gods would enter their brain and

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Speaker 1: create an auditory hallucination. Yeah, and that they unquestioningly obeyed

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Speaker 1: that auditory hallucination, and that's what help them get through

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Speaker 1: novel situations that they didn't have like a basically a

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Speaker 1: prescribed script for you know, a mindless automatic thing. Something

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Speaker 1: new came along, they got in their way. This god

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Speaker 1: would speak to them and say, go around that rock.

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Speaker 1: It wasn't there yesterday. Don't worry about it, just go

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Speaker 1: around it. And it could be one of their gods.

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Speaker 1: It could be an ancestor guiding them. I think um one,

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Speaker 1: um one. I think the Sumerians maybe made reference to

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Speaker 1: angels walking beside them um or. And this is really

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Speaker 1: important later on. It's a big part of Jane's hypothesis.

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Speaker 1: It could be your local ruler, the divine king who's

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Speaker 1: in charge of you and everybody else that you know

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Speaker 1: and love and have ever lived among. It could be

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Speaker 1: that person guiding you in your life too. And the

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Speaker 1: idea is they these people heard this in the same

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Speaker 1: way like you said that we hear our own internal dialogue,

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Speaker 1: but they never chalked it up to themselves. It was

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Speaker 1: always coming from the outside. All right, Well, here's I

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Speaker 1: guess where I had my first issue kind of grasping

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Speaker 1: this is there were no gods speaking to them and

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Speaker 1: guiding them. This was just their internal dialogue. They just

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Speaker 1: didn't know it. Yes, yes, yes, there was no gods.

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Speaker 1: But to them, and this is a really important point

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Speaker 1: to them, it definitely was a god talking to them

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Speaker 1: or an ancestor talking to them. And in the same

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Speaker 1: way that if if an actual god got into your

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Speaker 1: brain and like was speaking to you and you responded

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Speaker 1: to it, if you could have looked at their brains

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Speaker 1: lighting up, presumably in like a wonder machine, it would

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Speaker 1: it would respond the same way. So it was entirely

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Speaker 1: real to them, and the same way that a placebo

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Speaker 1: effect has real effects on your body. Um, this would

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Speaker 1: have been the same thing. And then in addition to that,

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Speaker 1: it was culturally supported. Everyone that they knew believed the

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Speaker 1: same thing that the gods were talking to them, and

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Speaker 1: so like that just lent support to this idea so

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Speaker 1: that no one, no one questioned it. It was just

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Speaker 1: that's the way it was. Well, so this, I guess

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Speaker 1: brings me to let me macro this out a little

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Speaker 1: bit in my own dumb brain, and it may just

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Speaker 1: be twenty twenty one century person thinking that I'm engaging

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Speaker 1: in But if the idea is that, uh, before this,

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Speaker 1: there was consciousness. But what we're really saying is there

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Speaker 1: actually was consciousness that they just didn't recognize it as such.

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Speaker 1: Is that the whole point was that if you do

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Speaker 1: not recognize it as consciousness, therefore you are not conscious. Yes,

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Speaker 1: because you're not. You're not experiencing consciousness in any way

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Speaker 1: that we would recognize as you being conscious. You're just

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Speaker 1: kind of um Julian James referred to now. Okay, so so,

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Speaker 1: but the thing is is there's like a lot of

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Speaker 1: scholarly discussion on like, Okay, what did James mean exactly?

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Speaker 1: How literal was he because he used words like automaton.

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Speaker 1: He never called him zombies. Other people call them like zombies,

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Speaker 1: but that no one talked about zombies back then. Hard, No,

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Speaker 1: that's true. But um, well evil Dead had or not

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Speaker 1: evil Dead, living dead now the Living Dead had come

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Speaker 1: out by then. Yeah, but it wasn't like today. Okay, no, no,

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Speaker 1: I know. They're definitely over the automatons. So he called

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Speaker 1: them automatons, and it's essentially the same thing that they were.

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Speaker 1: They just behaved automatically. They didn't stop and think about

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Speaker 1: how they felt. They and this is really important to Chuck.

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Speaker 1: Of course, they still had feelings. They had feelings about

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Speaker 1: the people that were in their kin group, they had

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Speaker 1: feelings about their local ruler, they had feelings about um,

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Speaker 1: you know, stubbing their toe. It's not like they just

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Speaker 1: had no inner life whatsoever. It's that they weren't. They

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Speaker 1: didn't reflect on their inner life, they didn't think about thinking.

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Speaker 1: They didn't they didn't have what we would recognize as consciousness,

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Speaker 1: and in the terms that James is describing consciousness, which

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Speaker 1: is a really narrow definition of consciousness. And then on

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Speaker 1: top of that, he also goes to great links to say, Hey,

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Speaker 1: I understand that you're gonna get all up in a

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Speaker 1: tizzy that I'm saying that these people weren't conscious. I'm

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Speaker 1: not talking about consciousness in general. And I think that

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Speaker 1: you over overestimate just how much consciousness makes up our

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Speaker 1: our lives. Okay, how about we take a break. Okay,

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Speaker 1: I'm gonna go rip a boll uh. We'll take a break,

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Speaker 1: we'll come back and we'll talk about what lots of

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Speaker 1: other stuff right after this and stop shot stop all right.

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Speaker 1: So I've kind of wrapped my head around what this

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Speaker 1: guy is saying. Now it's uh. I will admit it's

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Speaker 1: a little naval gazey for me. Uh On when it

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Speaker 1: comes to certain types of philosophy and hypotheses, I get

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Speaker 1: a little bit like, uh, what's the word? Maybe I

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Speaker 1: can be a little too concrete or is the French

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Speaker 1: concrete and literal in my thinking, because it's not you know,

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Speaker 1: Friday night in college, like two in the morning kind

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Speaker 1: of discussion. So I think that's where I am now.

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Speaker 1: But I do think it's very interesting and that he

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Speaker 1: I mean, I think a lot of this is very interesting,

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Speaker 1: But I think it's interesting that he thought around the

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Speaker 1: first or second millennium BC is when things to him

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Speaker 1: changed and a consciousness began to emerge because of uh, well,

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Speaker 1: eventually language, but specifically metaphor, which is to say that

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Speaker 1: all of a sudden, we could make analogies in our brain.

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Speaker 1: We could link things together. Uh. We saw ourselves as

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Speaker 1: um almost as if they were characters. Ourselves were characters

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Speaker 1: that had like choices that they could make his characters,

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Speaker 1: and that as these things like connected in the brain,

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Speaker 1: then it created just an effect like a domino effect

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Speaker 1: basically where all of a sudden we could work out

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Speaker 1: our own solutions, or we we knew we were capable

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Speaker 1: of working out our own solutions, And wasn't God saying

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Speaker 1: God saying walk around the rock? They realized it was

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Speaker 1: ourselves making the decision to walk around the rock. Yes,

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Speaker 1: but it's but in part of that that also required

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Speaker 1: them to be able to reflect on the idea. Like

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Speaker 1: you said that that they were able to now make

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Speaker 1: their own decisions, right, And you said something earlier where

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Speaker 1: you're like, you know, you were talking about your own

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Speaker 1: internal dialogue where you you think, hey, I should get

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Speaker 1: up and go outside for a second. Um, Like, that's

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Speaker 1: that's different, right, You're thinking about you yourself, and you

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Speaker 1: realize that you are thinking about yourself. That's modern consciousness.

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Speaker 1: What somebody who was a bicameral person during this time

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Speaker 1: would have thought is get up and go outside. And

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Speaker 1: they would stand up and go outside without questioning because

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Speaker 1: God had just instructed them to do that, so it

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Speaker 1: must be important. And they didn't think about where it

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Speaker 1: came from. They definitely didn't think it was from themselves,

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Speaker 1: and they didn't reflect on it. They just obeyed it.

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Speaker 1: That's Jane's position, and that if you compare those two things.

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Speaker 1: You're talking about two totally different forms of mental life,

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Speaker 1: and that's so different. He said that this is that

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Speaker 1: what we understand is consciousness just wasn't around until a

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Speaker 1: couple of thousand years ago. Okay, I can buy that.

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Speaker 1: I like it as a hypothesis. I can swim in

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Speaker 1: this pool. Okay, good, good. Here's the thing it's really

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Speaker 1: important to to to realize, like you said something, that

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Speaker 1: you're you're a literalist, right, that's actually really appropriate to

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Speaker 1: approach this because Julian Jaynes one of the very radical

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Speaker 1: things that he did was he took the ancients literally

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Speaker 1: because when he started looking around and we'll talk more

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Speaker 1: about this later, but he was looking for those artifacts

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Speaker 1: that would prove his hypothesis or lend support to it

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Speaker 1: at least, and he was an expert in ancient languages, right,

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Speaker 1: so he was it was really appropriate. He could actually

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Speaker 1: read Sumerian and Mesopotamian, and he took what they were

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Speaker 1: saying when they said things like, um, you know, the

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Speaker 1: gods told us to do this, that that they thought

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Speaker 1: that the gods told him to do this, not that

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Speaker 1: they were using metaphors. So he took them literally on

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Speaker 1: their word and that's a real departure from anybody else

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Speaker 1: who's ever examined the ancients of what they were saying. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and I think it's also something we should point out now,

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Speaker 1: even though it comes up later in our research. Is that, um,

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Speaker 1: when you think of an auto, I guess an automatic

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Speaker 1: society or society of automatons. Uh. That's not to say

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Speaker 1: that they weren't successful. He's describing some of the most successful,

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Speaker 1: you know, ancient civilizations that existed. But I think his

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Speaker 1: contention is that it was a hive mind all working

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Speaker 1: together as automatons that allowed this stuff to get accomplished,

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Speaker 1: and not the conscious mind, right, And he didn't I

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Speaker 1: don't think he ever used it as like, I don't

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Speaker 1: think ever explicitly said that it was an emergent prop

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Speaker 1: pretty of a hive mind. But that's kind of what

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Speaker 1: he was describing, kind of like if you take one

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Speaker 1: stone cutter and one stone mason and three stone carriers

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Speaker 1: and multiply that unit by five hundred and give it

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Speaker 1: a year, you have a zigguratte built. That That's just

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Speaker 1: that's just all those people knew what to do, they

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Speaker 1: knew their position in their place, and they just did it,

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Speaker 1: and so yeah, you could totally do that. With people

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Speaker 1: who are thinking in this way and weren't conscious, you

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Speaker 1: could probably actually get it done more easily than you

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Speaker 1: could with people who stopped and thought, I'm above this,

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Speaker 1: this work is is not suited for me. I should

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Speaker 1: be doing something else, or why is the foreman being

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Speaker 1: so mean to me today? Like they didn't think like

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Speaker 1: that under Jane's um hypothesis, So they would probably get

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Speaker 1: the work done more efficiently, at least more quietly. I

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Speaker 1: would guess. Oh, I mean consciousness proposed or brought along

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Speaker 1: a whole host of problems. I imagine if you're the

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Speaker 1: ruling class. Uh. I think one thing that's interesting is

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Speaker 1: that you mentioned um about what what is it? Jane's

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Speaker 1: not Johns, Jane's Jane's thought about I love Robert Lamb's

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Speaker 1: James Addison joke in here by that Oh that was yours?

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Speaker 1: Oh well, where to go? Thanks, you said, Janes says,

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Speaker 1: and then in parentheses you put it's a pretty good joke.

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Speaker 1: But what Jane said was that, um, and it's something

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Speaker 1: you mentioned earlier, was that consciousness. I think we think

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Speaker 1: consciousness plays too big of a role. And what is

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Speaker 1: actually a life that is can largely be still automatic

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Speaker 1: on a lot of levels. And this is from the

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Speaker 1: actual book in nineteen six and it's a little little

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Speaker 1: mind blowy. I kind of like it. Consciousness is a

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Speaker 1: much smaller part of our mental life than we're conscious

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Speaker 1: of because we cannot be conscious of what we are

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Speaker 1: not conscious of. It's like asking a flat and this

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Speaker 1: is where it kind of comes home to me. It's

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Speaker 1: like a asking a flashlight in a dark room to

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Speaker 1: search around for something that does not have any light

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Speaker 1: shining upon it. So that's where it comes home to meet,

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Speaker 1: is when you and hey, it's metaphor. So how about

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Speaker 1: that he lays down a metaphor that makes me understand

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Speaker 1: it a little bit more. Yeah, because you know, wherever

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Speaker 1: the flashlight looks, there's light. And his point, yeah, and

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Speaker 1: his point is is wherever your conscious mind looks, there's consciousness.

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Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that there's consciousness all over the place.

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Speaker 1: And um, yeah. Robert Lamb does use as a really

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Speaker 1: good example of unloading a dishwasher, right, like when you're

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Speaker 1: unloading the dishwasher, especially if you're one of those people

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Speaker 1: who put like all of your knives in one place

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Speaker 1: all of your forks in one part of the basket,

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Speaker 1: all of your spoons and so on. Right, a maniac

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Speaker 1: in other words, sensible human. If you do it like that,

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Speaker 1: it's you can you can just be on a pilot

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Speaker 1: because you've done it so many times. But when you

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Speaker 1: do something like drop a fork, that's out of the norm.

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Speaker 1: That's a novel thing that doesn't happen every time. And

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Speaker 1: so in in the bi cameral mind, God would have said, um,

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Speaker 1: I command thee to pick up thine fork butter fingers,

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Speaker 1: and you would lean over and pick up the fork,

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Speaker 1: and that was that. Instead you you might not even

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Speaker 1: think about picking up the fork. You might do that automatically,

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Speaker 1: but it's still out of the norm. It's still different.

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Speaker 1: You have to kind of think about it a little

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Speaker 1: more than just unloading the dishwasher. Now, if you take

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Speaker 1: that dishwasher metaphor chuck, and you realize that three five,

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Speaker 1: nine thousand years ago, there were no dishwashers. There was

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Speaker 1: no ice cream scoop, there was no cookie scoop, there

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Speaker 1: was no avocado splitter, there was nothing like that. Wait,

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Speaker 1: what's that thing? Now? Yeah, you don't know, you don't

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Speaker 1: have one of those. No, I'll send you one. You're

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Speaker 1: missing out. It's a it's a multi tool for cutting avocados,

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Speaker 1: getting the pit out, and then slicing them as you

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Speaker 1: scoop them out. They're essential. As a matter of fact,

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Speaker 1: I do pretty well with my knife, but I would

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Speaker 1: love to see one of these. Okay, I'm gonna get

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Speaker 1: to you one for Christmas. Okay. So the point is that, like,

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Speaker 1: there wasn't a big variety of stuff, so there wasn't

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Speaker 1: that many novel situations, like we encounter novel situations like

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Speaker 1: almost constantly. That's just modern life. And that's the basis

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Speaker 1: of James um uh Like hypothesis that the reason that

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Speaker 1: consciousness evolves is because we started to get faced with

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Speaker 1: more and more novel situations on a much more frequent basis.

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Speaker 1: So it maybe it became inefficient for God to be

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Speaker 1: talking to us every thirty seconds um or maybe we

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Speaker 1: just got better at thinking for ourselves and consciousness kind

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Speaker 1: of evolved out of that. But the point is life

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Speaker 1: was much less complex back then, so you could have

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Speaker 1: something like a bi camera mind. You could have somebody

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Speaker 1: who who consciousness hadn't evolved in yet because they hadn't

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Speaker 1: been introduced to enough experience in life, and with that

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Speaker 1: experience came the the fork falling on the floor. In

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Speaker 1: other words, yeah, or you know, there's a lot more

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Speaker 1: dishes to put away, in much more different dishes to

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Speaker 1: put away rather than just forks, you know, you know

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Speaker 1: what I'm saying. Or you have one fork and you

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Speaker 1: just carry it with you everywhere, you know, like you

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Speaker 1: don't have to think about that. There was just less

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Speaker 1: stuff to think about, is what I'm saying. Well, now

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Speaker 1: you're speaking my language, because if I had it my way,

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Speaker 1: every member of my family would have one for one spoon,

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Speaker 1: one knife, one bowl, one cup, one plate, and they

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Speaker 1: were all responsible for keeping them clean and put away. Man,

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Speaker 1: every time I hear one cup there, I'm like, there's

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Speaker 1: a joke in there somewhere, But even if I could

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Speaker 1: come up with it, I wouldn't be able to say it.

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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's true. All right. So now we're at

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Speaker 1: the point where we can talk a little bit more

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Speaker 1: about this idea of metaphor and language sort of bringing

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Speaker 1: about this change. And uh so what James was throwing

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Speaker 1: down in ninety six, besides apparently a bunch of roach

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Speaker 1: clips was a the emergence of agricultural society is kind

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Speaker 1: of changing everything, and that all of a sudden, we

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Speaker 1: are not living in groups of you know, ten or

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Speaker 1: twelve people that are hunting and gathering, where even if

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Speaker 1: there was sort of a leader within that group, it

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Speaker 1: was very easy to disseminate information and follow that that leader.

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Speaker 1: Once we started settling down planting and growing things, engaging

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Speaker 1: in trade with other people's that that did a lot

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Speaker 1: of things that complicated every process, and it meant that

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Speaker 1: societies were much much larger and that rulers couldn't necessarily

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Speaker 1: speak directly to people anymore. Yeah, so the another not

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Speaker 1: two specific people, like they could lay down an edict

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Speaker 1: and that would get disseminated in other words, right, and

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Speaker 1: so like um, I've read before back when I was

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Speaker 1: an anthropology student that hunter gatherer bands usually numbered no

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Speaker 1: more than thirty people, Like that was the absolute maps

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Speaker 1: and once you reach that, you'd split off into two

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Speaker 1: different bands. So yeah, like the person in charge was

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Speaker 1: like part of your moment to moment life. And if

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Speaker 1: you're if you have if you're suddenly in a civilization

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Speaker 1: and you're building a ziggurat for somebody's probably not deigning

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Speaker 1: to talk to you. And part of Jane's um hypothesis

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Speaker 1: is that this this bicameralism emerged from you know, all

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Speaker 1: those new novel situations like learning to plant crops, learning

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Speaker 1: to domesticate cows, learning to engage in trade and talk

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Speaker 1: to other people, that we started to like need direction

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Speaker 1: from the gods more and more, and uh, it started

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Speaker 1: to kind of get faster and faster. Um. But in

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Speaker 1: the meantime it was a form of social control because

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Speaker 1: one of the people you could think was talking to

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Speaker 1: you was that local ruler who you were building the

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Speaker 1: ziggerat for. So that would be a way to keep

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Speaker 1: an increasingly large population in check, right, And as they

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Speaker 1: got bigger and bigger, uh, and they started, you know,

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Speaker 1: trading with people like we were saying that. You know,

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Speaker 1: that's was sort of the beginning of the end for

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Speaker 1: his uh, not his bi camera mind, but the b

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Speaker 1: camera mind. And one of the biggest problems with all

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Speaker 1: of that was when we started writing stuff down, because

427
00:25:26,640 --> 00:25:31,240
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, um, this these auditory hallucinations that

428
00:25:31,400 --> 00:25:34,399
Speaker 1: he felt like everyone was having to instruct them on

429
00:25:34,480 --> 00:25:37,040
Speaker 1: what to do. There was there was now stuffed down

430
00:25:37,080 --> 00:25:39,720
Speaker 1: on paper that you could read and you could refer

431
00:25:39,840 --> 00:25:42,960
Speaker 1: to and go back to and pass around and post

432
00:25:43,080 --> 00:25:46,440
Speaker 1: on the you know, on tablets at the walls of

433
00:25:46,480 --> 00:25:50,160
Speaker 1: the city or whatever. And that was all of a sudden,

434
00:25:50,160 --> 00:25:51,760
Speaker 1: you weren't waiting around for God to tell you what

435
00:25:51,880 --> 00:25:53,920
Speaker 1: to do. You could just go read that tablet. Yeah,

436
00:25:54,000 --> 00:25:57,400
Speaker 1: so the power that we gave to the god's commands

437
00:25:57,680 --> 00:26:02,840
Speaker 1: were kind of transferred to um, the written word. And yeah,

438
00:26:02,880 --> 00:26:04,720
Speaker 1: that seems to have been like the death knell for

439
00:26:05,320 --> 00:26:09,240
Speaker 1: the bicamera mind, right, um. And there's something really interesting

440
00:26:09,280 --> 00:26:13,439
Speaker 1: that's worth pointing out. Jaynes apparently didn't have any hy

441
00:26:13,640 --> 00:26:19,119
Speaker 1: hypothesis on what came before the bicamera mind because he

442
00:26:19,240 --> 00:26:22,800
Speaker 1: said it started as a result of the increasing um

443
00:26:23,240 --> 00:26:27,159
Speaker 1: organization that agriculture brought Alonge and that there wasn't bi

444
00:26:27,240 --> 00:26:29,639
Speaker 1: camera minds before then, But he doesn't say what was

445
00:26:29,760 --> 00:26:32,399
Speaker 1: before then? Um, And people even asked him like, okay,

446
00:26:32,440 --> 00:26:35,679
Speaker 1: what about you know, um hunter gatherer societies that are

447
00:26:35,720 --> 00:26:39,440
Speaker 1: still around today, you know, where would they have gotten consciousness?

448
00:26:39,480 --> 00:26:42,280
Speaker 1: And he never really answered that, but it's it's definitely

449
00:26:42,280 --> 00:26:44,800
Speaker 1: worth pointing out that that's an open question. But he

450
00:26:44,960 --> 00:26:49,800
Speaker 1: basically says bicameralism, Uh, or the bi camera mind. I

451
00:26:49,840 --> 00:26:53,640
Speaker 1: should say bi cameralism is the senate in the house. UM,

452
00:26:54,840 --> 00:26:57,280
Speaker 1: but the bi camera mind lasted from the advent of

453
00:26:57,280 --> 00:27:01,800
Speaker 1: agriculture about eleven thousand years ago, all about two thousand

454
00:27:01,920 --> 00:27:06,040
Speaker 1: ish maybe fred or no. Three thousand is years ago,

455
00:27:06,480 --> 00:27:10,119
Speaker 1: so it was about a seven thousand year span of

456
00:27:10,520 --> 00:27:13,720
Speaker 1: UM B camera minded. Then as life got more and

457
00:27:13,760 --> 00:27:18,119
Speaker 1: more sophisticated, we started thinking for ourselves. And what he

458
00:27:18,240 --> 00:27:23,000
Speaker 1: says is that language and in particular the written word,

459
00:27:23,040 --> 00:27:27,399
Speaker 1: but also language got more and more sophisticated, and as

460
00:27:27,440 --> 00:27:30,320
Speaker 1: it got more sophisticated, there was more of a potential

461
00:27:30,400 --> 00:27:33,479
Speaker 1: for us to start thinking in metaphors and metaphors, as

462
00:27:33,520 --> 00:27:37,240
Speaker 1: you said, is the basis of consciousness and the way

463
00:27:37,320 --> 00:27:40,399
Speaker 1: we think in Julian Jane's mind. And there's actually a

464
00:27:40,440 --> 00:27:44,200
Speaker 1: lot of support for that. Charles, may I oh please?

465
00:27:44,880 --> 00:27:50,200
Speaker 1: So that post by Hazard on Less wrong, it's called

466
00:27:50,240 --> 00:27:53,720
Speaker 1: consciousness as metaphor. What James has to offer and what

467
00:27:53,920 --> 00:27:57,560
Speaker 1: Hazard says, um is that like Hazard just puts out

468
00:27:57,600 --> 00:28:00,919
Speaker 1: like a paragraph from like an economic report, and it's

469
00:28:00,920 --> 00:28:05,280
Speaker 1: about recessions in Europe and it talks about Germany plunging

470
00:28:05,359 --> 00:28:09,200
Speaker 1: into recession or the UK falling deeper into recession or

471
00:28:09,280 --> 00:28:12,760
Speaker 1: France emerging from a recession. And what Hazard points out

472
00:28:13,240 --> 00:28:17,840
Speaker 1: is that all of these descriptors imagine a recession as

473
00:28:17,880 --> 00:28:22,679
Speaker 1: a three dimensional physical thing that we can entire nations

474
00:28:22,720 --> 00:28:26,320
Speaker 1: can move into and out of. That's not true. Recessions

475
00:28:26,359 --> 00:28:29,560
Speaker 1: aren't three dimensional. They aren't physical things. You can't emerge

476
00:28:29,600 --> 00:28:32,280
Speaker 1: from them, you can't fall into them. But we just

477
00:28:32,400 --> 00:28:35,680
Speaker 1: think about it like that, and that's metaphor. So we

478
00:28:35,840 --> 00:28:39,680
Speaker 1: think in metaphors so frequently we don't even recognize it anymore.

479
00:28:40,080 --> 00:28:44,080
Speaker 1: And that was Jane's point that when we gain the

480
00:28:44,160 --> 00:28:47,920
Speaker 1: ability to think in metaphors, we became conscious, We started

481
00:28:48,000 --> 00:28:51,320
Speaker 1: thinking for ourselves, we became capable of introspection. And it

482
00:28:51,480 --> 00:28:54,720
Speaker 1: was the evolution of language that led us to that point.

483
00:28:55,280 --> 00:28:57,400
Speaker 1: Like basically, it just we just hit a threshold where

484
00:28:57,440 --> 00:29:01,400
Speaker 1: suddenly languages sophisticated enough that it could unlock new thoughts

485
00:29:01,440 --> 00:29:05,640
Speaker 1: in our brains and in turn unlocked consciousness. I mean

486
00:29:05,720 --> 00:29:08,880
Speaker 1: that makes sense because you know, in a meta a

487
00:29:08,920 --> 00:29:13,440
Speaker 1: metaphor is literally not literal, and if you were, if

488
00:29:13,480 --> 00:29:16,440
Speaker 1: you did, if that was not a thing yet, then

489
00:29:16,760 --> 00:29:19,239
Speaker 1: it chives with the whole notion that everything they were

490
00:29:19,320 --> 00:29:22,040
Speaker 1: doing was very literal up and to that point, and

491
00:29:22,120 --> 00:29:25,440
Speaker 1: that that would have been a pretty seismic shift. Uh.

492
00:29:25,840 --> 00:29:28,560
Speaker 1: If you can compare like with like, you know, all

493
00:29:28,600 --> 00:29:30,360
Speaker 1: of a sudden. Yeah, and you even see this in

494
00:29:30,520 --> 00:29:34,960
Speaker 1: like Um, like movies that are trying to emphasize how

495
00:29:35,560 --> 00:29:39,080
Speaker 1: backwards or back in time, you know, some group is

496
00:29:39,720 --> 00:29:42,880
Speaker 1: um and they emphasize it by having that group take

497
00:29:42,960 --> 00:29:46,320
Speaker 1: everything literally, usually to comic effect, like in Kingpin when

498
00:29:46,400 --> 00:29:49,520
Speaker 1: Randy Quaid was an Amish person. Right, yeah, he took

499
00:29:49,640 --> 00:29:53,560
Speaker 1: everything literally and it was hilarious. Hilarity ensued, but it

500
00:29:53,720 --> 00:29:57,400
Speaker 1: was also to demonstrate how just simple and behind he was.

501
00:29:57,480 --> 00:30:00,560
Speaker 1: He couldn't he couldn't engage in metaphor, you didn't think

502
00:30:00,640 --> 00:30:03,480
Speaker 1: like that. That's actually based on I don't know whether

503
00:30:03,760 --> 00:30:08,440
Speaker 1: on purpose or not, but that's based on Julian James hypothesis. Yeah.

504
00:30:08,480 --> 00:30:11,400
Speaker 1: And you know what, that's a nice segue to children,

505
00:30:12,200 --> 00:30:16,200
Speaker 1: because when you have a human child, Uh, it's very

506
00:30:16,240 --> 00:30:18,720
Speaker 1: funny to see how literal they are for those first

507
00:30:18,840 --> 00:30:22,600
Speaker 1: years and that they don't understand metaphor, they don't understand

508
00:30:23,120 --> 00:30:27,040
Speaker 1: certainly don't understand things like sarcasm, and you have to

509
00:30:27,320 --> 00:30:30,760
Speaker 1: change the way you talk to little kids because they

510
00:30:30,840 --> 00:30:35,280
Speaker 1: do take everything so literally and think so literally. And uh,

511
00:30:35,560 --> 00:30:39,720
Speaker 1: children are are references are referenced with Jane's Uh the

512
00:30:39,880 --> 00:30:44,040
Speaker 1: idea that, um, I think what age like, kids up

513
00:30:44,120 --> 00:30:47,720
Speaker 1: until the age of five basically, uh don't really have

514
00:30:47,920 --> 00:30:52,080
Speaker 1: much of a human consciousness. Uh. And it's and you know,

515
00:30:52,560 --> 00:30:56,280
Speaker 1: the idea that children are are just little narcissist walking

516
00:30:56,320 --> 00:30:59,920
Speaker 1: around is a fun joke, but it's true because they

517
00:31:00,160 --> 00:31:04,320
Speaker 1: don't know that other people think differently than they think.

518
00:31:04,600 --> 00:31:07,480
Speaker 1: Up until about the age of five, they don't realize

519
00:31:07,520 --> 00:31:10,480
Speaker 1: there are other lines of thought and ways of thinking

520
00:31:10,600 --> 00:31:13,360
Speaker 1: and ways of feeling about things that other that other

521
00:31:13,440 --> 00:31:16,440
Speaker 1: people have exactly. That's what's called theory of mind, right

522
00:31:16,840 --> 00:31:20,720
Speaker 1: and um On Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander went to

523
00:31:20,840 --> 00:31:24,840
Speaker 1: great links to basically say that Julian Jaynes using the

524
00:31:24,960 --> 00:31:29,200
Speaker 1: term consciousness just really muddied the waters unnecessarily and if

525
00:31:29,280 --> 00:31:31,480
Speaker 1: you just use theory of mind, it would have made

526
00:31:31,480 --> 00:31:34,840
Speaker 1: a lot more sense. And Scott Anderson Scott Alexander, I think,

527
00:31:34,840 --> 00:31:37,680
Speaker 1: I said Anderson Scott Alexander makes some really a really

528
00:31:37,760 --> 00:31:40,360
Speaker 1: good case for it, and that's kind of what he's

529
00:31:40,400 --> 00:31:43,800
Speaker 1: pointing out is um. You know, like it's it's possible

530
00:31:43,920 --> 00:31:48,520
Speaker 1: that because you learn it's not you're not born with it.

531
00:31:48,720 --> 00:31:51,640
Speaker 1: You you learn it through experience. It just kind of

532
00:31:51,720 --> 00:31:54,200
Speaker 1: evolves in you as you grow as a person and

533
00:31:54,400 --> 00:31:57,680
Speaker 1: experience more and more novel stuff and interact with people more,

534
00:31:58,080 --> 00:32:02,600
Speaker 1: almost like a micro azum of what happened in civilization

535
00:32:02,920 --> 00:32:06,960
Speaker 1: a few thousand years ago, you gain theory of mind.

536
00:32:07,400 --> 00:32:09,400
Speaker 1: So the fact that you can learn and that you

537
00:32:09,560 --> 00:32:16,720
Speaker 1: do learn something that integral to consciousness really supports the

538
00:32:16,800 --> 00:32:19,960
Speaker 1: idea that maybe consciousness, as we understand it, was learned.

539
00:32:20,040 --> 00:32:22,800
Speaker 1: It did evolve, It was an emergent property of an

540
00:32:22,880 --> 00:32:27,160
Speaker 1: increasingly sophisticated language. It's a fascinating thing to see happen

541
00:32:27,440 --> 00:32:30,960
Speaker 1: in a child's life. Um, to see these little lightbulbs

542
00:32:31,040 --> 00:32:34,520
Speaker 1: come on seemingly out of nowhere, but you realize it,

543
00:32:34,560 --> 00:32:38,000
Speaker 1: as you know, very much a learned thing. Very fascinating.

544
00:32:38,600 --> 00:32:41,200
Speaker 1: All Right, I say, we take a break and we'll

545
00:32:41,240 --> 00:32:45,920
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about, uh, just some other fascinating

546
00:32:45,960 --> 00:32:55,120
Speaker 1: stuff when we get back. Right after this things s

547
00:33:15,920 --> 00:33:18,040
Speaker 1: I was gonna summarize what we're going to talk about,

548
00:33:18,120 --> 00:33:19,960
Speaker 1: but I didn't feel like it all of a sudden

549
00:33:19,960 --> 00:33:23,600
Speaker 1: before they break. I think it's nice it's loose. Can

550
00:33:24,160 --> 00:33:25,920
Speaker 1: can I talk about one of my favorite parts of

551
00:33:26,000 --> 00:33:31,200
Speaker 1: this this hypothesis definitely is we were we're kind of

552
00:33:31,280 --> 00:33:34,600
Speaker 1: jumping around now, but jumping back to where we talked

553
00:33:34,640 --> 00:33:38,760
Speaker 1: about writing things down. All of a sudden, it was

554
00:33:38,840 --> 00:33:43,680
Speaker 1: around here in human history that there was a collapse

555
00:33:43,920 --> 00:33:47,600
Speaker 1: of societies, uh, in the Mediterranean around the Middle East.

556
00:33:47,640 --> 00:33:51,200
Speaker 1: It was called the Late Bronze Age collapse. And it

557
00:33:51,360 --> 00:33:53,040
Speaker 1: didn't take that long, and it meant like these very

558
00:33:53,080 --> 00:33:55,800
Speaker 1: advanced sort of societies, in a matter of decades, a

559
00:33:55,920 --> 00:33:59,720
Speaker 1: number of them, uh, a lot of their culture was lost.

560
00:34:00,240 --> 00:34:02,280
Speaker 1: That was it's sort of They called it, in fact,

561
00:34:02,320 --> 00:34:05,880
Speaker 1: the Greek Dark Ages, and it lasted for hundreds of years.

562
00:34:06,720 --> 00:34:11,480
Speaker 1: And jibing with this was when humans started to lose.

563
00:34:12,120 --> 00:34:13,880
Speaker 1: And it kind of all makes sense that they were

564
00:34:13,960 --> 00:34:18,040
Speaker 1: losing um with a written word, with metaphorign language coming along,

565
00:34:18,400 --> 00:34:21,520
Speaker 1: they were losing this voice as a god. They were

566
00:34:21,960 --> 00:34:24,160
Speaker 1: they felt like they were losing their gods because all

567
00:34:24,160 --> 00:34:26,880
Speaker 1: of a sudden, the gods were silent to them. They

568
00:34:26,960 --> 00:34:29,960
Speaker 1: weren't speaking to them in their mind because they were

569
00:34:29,960 --> 00:34:34,600
Speaker 1: gaining consciousness. And here's where it gets super interesting. James

570
00:34:34,640 --> 00:34:40,640
Speaker 1: has a hypothesis that says, it's about here where the

571
00:34:40,800 --> 00:34:44,239
Speaker 1: organized religions that we know today were born out of

572
00:34:44,719 --> 00:34:50,239
Speaker 1: a kind of nostalgia basically for these gods that left them. Right. Yeah,

573
00:34:50,719 --> 00:34:53,400
Speaker 1: I think that idea is really interesting. It is and

574
00:34:53,560 --> 00:34:56,480
Speaker 1: I mean that the timetable really jibes, and it is

575
00:34:56,520 --> 00:34:59,239
Speaker 1: really interesting that that late Bronze Age collapse happened when

576
00:34:59,280 --> 00:35:03,080
Speaker 1: it did. Um. But but the idea is not just

577
00:35:03,280 --> 00:35:08,839
Speaker 1: nostalgia but also desperation. Because these people had guidance, they

578
00:35:08,840 --> 00:35:12,759
Speaker 1: didn't have to think, and this poor set of generations

579
00:35:12,880 --> 00:35:16,000
Speaker 1: over a few hundred years are maybe some of the

580
00:35:16,080 --> 00:35:20,000
Speaker 1: most pitiful humans that ever lived, because they went from

581
00:35:20,400 --> 00:35:23,279
Speaker 1: just knowing what to do because the gods told them

582
00:35:23,360 --> 00:35:25,600
Speaker 1: what to do, to having no idea what to do

583
00:35:25,880 --> 00:35:29,640
Speaker 1: because their gods had abandoned them. And they that as

584
00:35:29,680 --> 00:35:34,160
Speaker 1: a result of that, they started forming religions. They started, um,

585
00:35:34,560 --> 00:35:37,360
Speaker 1: you know, beseeching the gods to give them a sign.

586
00:35:37,840 --> 00:35:40,800
Speaker 1: This is when oracles started to become a thing. Profits

587
00:35:40,800 --> 00:35:44,600
Speaker 1: started to become a thing. Superstitions um like omens grew

588
00:35:44,960 --> 00:35:47,680
Speaker 1: like there was a Sumerian omen. If a horse comes

589
00:35:47,680 --> 00:35:50,000
Speaker 1: into your house and bite you you will soon die

590
00:35:50,120 --> 00:35:53,120
Speaker 1: and your family will soon be scattered. Stuff like that. Right,

591
00:35:53,440 --> 00:35:56,600
Speaker 1: So this this didn't exist before because the gods were

592
00:35:56,920 --> 00:35:59,840
Speaker 1: in charge of everything. Now they were suddenly gone, and

593
00:36:00,080 --> 00:36:01,960
Speaker 1: I just think it must be must have been really

594
00:36:02,040 --> 00:36:05,759
Speaker 1: pitiful and dark to live through that time. Yeah, I

595
00:36:05,800 --> 00:36:09,719
Speaker 1: mean they were lost, I guess as a people. Yeah,

596
00:36:09,760 --> 00:36:12,359
Speaker 1: And and I mean that was figuratively they were lost,

597
00:36:12,400 --> 00:36:15,000
Speaker 1: but literally too because that late Bronze Age collapse they

598
00:36:15,040 --> 00:36:17,480
Speaker 1: think was brought on at least in part by climate

599
00:36:17,560 --> 00:36:20,840
Speaker 1: change and probably invasion. There's this mysterious group called the

600
00:36:20,880 --> 00:36:24,400
Speaker 1: Sea People's that seem to have overrun different cultures, and

601
00:36:24,480 --> 00:36:27,560
Speaker 1: so like culture after culture would fall, those people would

602
00:36:27,560 --> 00:36:32,160
Speaker 1: become refugees, descend upon another culture, end up pushing that

603
00:36:32,280 --> 00:36:34,120
Speaker 1: to the breaking point that culture would fall. It was

604
00:36:34,160 --> 00:36:37,640
Speaker 1: just like a domino effect of collapsing cultures all at once.

605
00:36:38,000 --> 00:36:40,640
Speaker 1: So they really felt like the gods had abandoned him,

606
00:36:40,680 --> 00:36:42,560
Speaker 1: like they had angered him or something like that. They

607
00:36:42,600 --> 00:36:47,520
Speaker 1: were genuinely lost. So what James did, uh to help

608
00:36:47,560 --> 00:36:50,000
Speaker 1: support his hypothesis, which makes sense, was to go back

609
00:36:50,040 --> 00:36:53,920
Speaker 1: and look at literature, uh and at the time and

610
00:36:53,960 --> 00:36:56,279
Speaker 1: see if it's sort of supported this I know one

611
00:36:56,320 --> 00:36:58,080
Speaker 1: of the things he wrote a lot about in his

612
00:36:58,320 --> 00:37:02,680
Speaker 1: book in six was that was Homer's Iliad, because he's

613
00:37:02,760 --> 00:37:04,279
Speaker 1: kind of like, here's proof right here. I mean, if

614
00:37:04,280 --> 00:37:07,440
Speaker 1: you look at the Iliad, they were basically automatons. They

615
00:37:08,000 --> 00:37:09,840
Speaker 1: they just listened to the gods and did what the

616
00:37:09,920 --> 00:37:14,960
Speaker 1: gods said, and they substituted, um, like, the words that

617
00:37:15,040 --> 00:37:18,400
Speaker 1: we would use to substitute in for the Iliad to

618
00:37:18,680 --> 00:37:22,359
Speaker 1: indicate consciousness just weren't there, right, So they were more

619
00:37:22,440 --> 00:37:25,320
Speaker 1: like physical descriptors like my belly was quivering or my

620
00:37:25,400 --> 00:37:28,520
Speaker 1: heart was fluttering or something like that, not um. I

621
00:37:28,640 --> 00:37:32,839
Speaker 1: think the example that's used as fear filled Agamemnon's mind,

622
00:37:33,480 --> 00:37:36,280
Speaker 1: and well, there wasn't a mind, so they would describe

623
00:37:36,400 --> 00:37:40,600
Speaker 1: fear and other physical terms, right yeah. And that it

624
00:37:40,719 --> 00:37:44,879
Speaker 1: wasn't until later on when um new translations were coming along,

625
00:37:45,000 --> 00:37:48,600
Speaker 1: that people who were now conscious turned the stuff into metaphor.

626
00:37:49,000 --> 00:37:51,399
Speaker 1: And James is saying they didn't mean it as metaphor before,

627
00:37:51,440 --> 00:37:53,680
Speaker 1: they meant it as literally, and they didn't have descriptors

628
00:37:53,719 --> 00:37:56,720
Speaker 1: her mind. And when they say the gods were guiding

629
00:37:56,760 --> 00:37:59,319
Speaker 1: them along, they meant it literally. And he was saying

630
00:37:59,360 --> 00:38:02,560
Speaker 1: that the Eliot in particular, UM started to be written

631
00:38:02,560 --> 00:38:06,520
Speaker 1: about eleven d b C. And then around seven b C.

632
00:38:06,760 --> 00:38:08,960
Speaker 1: It was like in its form that we see it today,

633
00:38:09,440 --> 00:38:11,200
Speaker 1: but along the way it was kind of added to

634
00:38:11,640 --> 00:38:15,360
Speaker 1: and it it was written during the transition from bicameral

635
00:38:15,440 --> 00:38:18,960
Speaker 1: mind to modern consciousness. He sees it as basically a

636
00:38:19,120 --> 00:38:23,239
Speaker 1: document that that traces that transition. Very interesting. There was

637
00:38:23,280 --> 00:38:26,160
Speaker 1: some other stuff too, right literature wise, Yeah, so that

638
00:38:26,280 --> 00:38:28,279
Speaker 1: wasn't the only one. UM. He also found in some

639
00:38:28,400 --> 00:38:31,480
Speaker 1: of the religious texts, like evidence that people felt like

640
00:38:31,520 --> 00:38:35,399
Speaker 1: God had abandoned them. There's something a Mesopotamian poem called

641
00:38:35,440 --> 00:38:40,239
Speaker 1: the ludlul bell Nmecki, and it says, my God has

642
00:38:40,400 --> 00:38:43,400
Speaker 1: forsaken me and disappeared. My Goddess has failed me and

643
00:38:43,520 --> 00:38:46,080
Speaker 1: keeps at a distance. The good angel who walked beside

644
00:38:46,120 --> 00:38:50,600
Speaker 1: me has departed. And again, most other scholars would say,

645
00:38:51,239 --> 00:38:53,800
Speaker 1: there's something happened. This guy was blue, he was in

646
00:38:53,880 --> 00:38:56,560
Speaker 1: a funk. Who knows, but it's all metaphorical. And James

647
00:38:56,680 --> 00:38:59,480
Speaker 1: is saying, no, this guy had God talking to him.

648
00:38:59,640 --> 00:39:03,120
Speaker 1: Now he doesn't anymore. So should we talk a little

649
00:39:03,120 --> 00:39:07,279
Speaker 1: bit about actual science here with the brain, because this

650
00:39:07,400 --> 00:39:09,360
Speaker 1: is something we've covered before in the past when we

651
00:39:09,480 --> 00:39:14,400
Speaker 1: talked about alien hands syndrome where it came from a

652
00:39:14,560 --> 00:39:20,040
Speaker 1: gazillion years ago. Um, we there were there was evidence

653
00:39:20,120 --> 00:39:24,280
Speaker 1: that when the um there there were certain epilepsy patients

654
00:39:24,719 --> 00:39:28,239
Speaker 1: who where it was so severe that they would uh

655
00:39:28,480 --> 00:39:32,320
Speaker 1: sever the corpus colossum, undergo a corpus colostomy, and the

656
00:39:32,480 --> 00:39:35,680
Speaker 1: corpus colossum is basically the the thing that makes the

657
00:39:35,719 --> 00:39:39,680
Speaker 1: two hemispheres of the brain communicate with one another. And

658
00:39:40,160 --> 00:39:42,279
Speaker 1: with alien hands syndrome, I think they found that it

659
00:39:42,320 --> 00:39:45,680
Speaker 1: could be brought on by this surgery where all of

660
00:39:45,719 --> 00:39:48,600
Speaker 1: a sudden, the left arm was doing something and without

661
00:39:48,640 --> 00:39:51,320
Speaker 1: being told to do it by the the right brain.

662
00:39:52,520 --> 00:39:58,080
Speaker 1: And they have uh James, I think, or people since James,

663
00:39:58,120 --> 00:39:59,960
Speaker 1: And was it James or was it just people trying

664
00:40:00,000 --> 00:40:03,320
Speaker 1: into uh sort of proof his theory. I think that

665
00:40:03,520 --> 00:40:08,240
Speaker 1: people saw this these experiments as support for Jenes's theory. Okay,

666
00:40:08,320 --> 00:40:13,040
Speaker 1: So they looked at these surgeries, these corpus colostomies, and

667
00:40:13,600 --> 00:40:17,000
Speaker 1: they're they're called split brain patients basically where they you know,

668
00:40:17,120 --> 00:40:19,920
Speaker 1: after the surgery, it's not like they felt all out

669
00:40:19,960 --> 00:40:22,200
Speaker 1: of whack. They felt like a regular you know, whole

670
00:40:22,280 --> 00:40:25,960
Speaker 1: human being. But they learned that there were these little

671
00:40:26,000 --> 00:40:28,520
Speaker 1: things that would pop up where a hemisphere would take

672
00:40:28,520 --> 00:40:32,880
Speaker 1: an action based on this information that it didn't have

673
00:40:33,000 --> 00:40:36,879
Speaker 1: access to. And the example they gave was UH, if

674
00:40:36,920 --> 00:40:40,840
Speaker 1: they like instructed the right hemisphere to just walk to

675
00:40:40,920 --> 00:40:43,719
Speaker 1: the kitchen, uh, and they would get up and walk

676
00:40:43,760 --> 00:40:45,400
Speaker 1: to the kitchen. But they would say, hey, why did

677
00:40:45,440 --> 00:40:48,320
Speaker 1: you get up and walk to the kitchen? The language

678
00:40:48,880 --> 00:40:52,640
Speaker 1: the left hemisphere, the language dominant hemisphere, UH, is the

679
00:40:52,760 --> 00:40:56,879
Speaker 1: only part that can respond to that. But the left

680
00:40:56,920 --> 00:40:59,560
Speaker 1: hemisphere doesn't know why it got up, and they're really

681
00:40:59,640 --> 00:41:02,680
Speaker 1: fast nating. Part is that they wouldn't say, well, I

682
00:41:02,719 --> 00:41:04,320
Speaker 1: don't know, I'm not sure why I just did that.

683
00:41:04,640 --> 00:41:06,880
Speaker 1: I just did it. They would make something up on

684
00:41:07,000 --> 00:41:09,279
Speaker 1: the spot and say, you know, I felt like getting

685
00:41:09,360 --> 00:41:12,239
Speaker 1: up and going to make a bowl of cereal. And

686
00:41:13,000 --> 00:41:15,880
Speaker 1: it's it's almost like we had this natural instinct to

687
00:41:15,960 --> 00:41:19,080
Speaker 1: bs somebody when faced with a question that we can't

688
00:41:19,080 --> 00:41:22,439
Speaker 1: answer about why we did something. Yeah, Because the left

689
00:41:22,480 --> 00:41:25,560
Speaker 1: hemisphere wants to explain things. It wants to tell the

690
00:41:25,640 --> 00:41:29,720
Speaker 1: story um using metaphors usually and this was this became

691
00:41:29,760 --> 00:41:33,160
Speaker 1: the left brain interpreter theory and um, it kind of

692
00:41:33,239 --> 00:41:38,480
Speaker 1: supports um Uh Jane's idea that the consciousness is a

693
00:41:38,520 --> 00:41:40,880
Speaker 1: flashlight looking for a dark spot in a room and

694
00:41:40,960 --> 00:41:44,320
Speaker 1: it just can't find it. And um, the idea is

695
00:41:44,440 --> 00:41:49,400
Speaker 1: that the left hemisphere creates the explanation the stories for

696
00:41:49,480 --> 00:41:52,480
Speaker 1: our behavior, even if it doesn't know why we did something.

697
00:41:52,520 --> 00:41:54,960
Speaker 1: But that's just what it does. And there's a saying

698
00:41:55,160 --> 00:41:59,000
Speaker 1: in consciousness research among people who subscribe to the left

699
00:41:59,040 --> 00:42:03,240
Speaker 1: brain Interpreter theory is that consciousness isn't in the oval

700
00:42:03,320 --> 00:42:05,239
Speaker 1: office like it thinks it is. It's more in the

701
00:42:05,320 --> 00:42:08,480
Speaker 1: press office, like it's the one that's public facing explaining

702
00:42:08,520 --> 00:42:11,320
Speaker 1: what you're doing, but it might not have all the information,

703
00:42:11,560 --> 00:42:16,440
Speaker 1: so sometimes it's just b s NG. It's very interesting stuff. Uh,

704
00:42:16,560 --> 00:42:19,440
Speaker 1: And sort of tying in with the kid thing, Um,

705
00:42:19,680 --> 00:42:21,520
Speaker 1: who is this? How do you pronounced the name of

706
00:42:21,560 --> 00:42:27,800
Speaker 1: that one researcher Kushtian Lastian Couture k k U I

707
00:42:28,040 --> 00:42:31,600
Speaker 1: J S c E. N Oh, yeah, I'm just gonna

708
00:42:31,640 --> 00:42:34,520
Speaker 1: say Chustian. I think that's pretty pretty dead on. That's

709
00:42:34,560 --> 00:42:39,160
Speaker 1: the person who runs the Julian James um Uh Society

710
00:42:39,719 --> 00:42:42,560
Speaker 1: today because James died in I don't think we ever

711
00:42:42,600 --> 00:42:47,160
Speaker 1: pointed that out. But this person basically says, hey, if

712
00:42:47,200 --> 00:42:51,320
Speaker 1: you look at people who hear voices, and that's not

713
00:42:51,480 --> 00:42:54,520
Speaker 1: necessarily to say someone that has schizophrenia, because that is

714
00:42:55,880 --> 00:43:01,239
Speaker 1: one percent of the population apparently is the highest ten

715
00:43:01,320 --> 00:43:06,200
Speaker 1: percent of the population. Can you know, does hear things basically?

716
00:43:07,239 --> 00:43:11,680
Speaker 1: So these Uh, it's the idea of the command voice

717
00:43:11,760 --> 00:43:15,480
Speaker 1: basically is to to do something. And uh, if you're

718
00:43:15,480 --> 00:43:17,400
Speaker 1: hearing a voice that says, you know, moved to the

719
00:43:17,440 --> 00:43:19,080
Speaker 1: window and look out on the street, that's one thing.

720
00:43:19,400 --> 00:43:21,879
Speaker 1: If you hear a voice that says, take the knife

721
00:43:21,920 --> 00:43:25,560
Speaker 1: from the drawer and you know, put it in someone's head,

722
00:43:26,320 --> 00:43:30,160
Speaker 1: then that's another thing altogether. And uh, we were talking

723
00:43:30,200 --> 00:43:33,080
Speaker 1: about kids earlier, you know, the idea of the imaginary

724
00:43:33,200 --> 00:43:37,360
Speaker 1: friend kind of jobs with this lack of consciousness of

725
00:43:37,480 --> 00:43:41,600
Speaker 1: kids have imaginary friends. I had an imaginary friends. My

726
00:43:41,719 --> 00:43:44,600
Speaker 1: daughter had for years what she called her ghost friends,

727
00:43:45,320 --> 00:43:48,960
Speaker 1: which is a lot creepier way to put it. But

728
00:43:49,120 --> 00:43:50,960
Speaker 1: I think that's all just sort of to say that,

729
00:43:51,160 --> 00:43:54,400
Speaker 1: like that nine percent of people who are hearing voices

730
00:43:55,280 --> 00:44:00,680
Speaker 1: who are not suffering from schizophrenia, is that proof of

731
00:44:01,040 --> 00:44:04,920
Speaker 1: that initial bicamera mind at work. Right, yeah, and and

732
00:44:05,160 --> 00:44:08,480
Speaker 1: I mean, um, Julian James believed that children go from

733
00:44:08,640 --> 00:44:11,759
Speaker 1: a bicamera state to a conscious state, as evidenced by

734
00:44:11,800 --> 00:44:14,759
Speaker 1: that development of theory of mind, or as evidenced by

735
00:44:14,840 --> 00:44:19,040
Speaker 1: imaginary friends. Um, and that they're they're kind of recreating

736
00:44:19,120 --> 00:44:22,360
Speaker 1: what society or the human species went through thousands of

737
00:44:22,480 --> 00:44:27,600
Speaker 1: years ago as they age and develop. Very interesting. So um,

738
00:44:27,960 --> 00:44:30,560
Speaker 1: there you might be out there, especially if you're a

739
00:44:30,760 --> 00:44:35,400
Speaker 1: concretist like Chuck Um thinking like you might be rocking

740
00:44:35,440 --> 00:44:38,319
Speaker 1: in your seat right now, face flushed about to faint

741
00:44:38,400 --> 00:44:46,560
Speaker 1: out of rage, Cameron, because like, this is by definition unscientific.

742
00:44:46,880 --> 00:44:50,440
Speaker 1: It's not provable in the form that James put it forth.

743
00:44:51,000 --> 00:44:55,480
Speaker 1: It's more of a concept, uh, an idea, and apparently

744
00:44:55,600 --> 00:44:57,600
Speaker 1: he was well aware of that. He didn't touted as

745
00:44:57,800 --> 00:45:02,280
Speaker 1: as anything more than that. But question uh. The director

746
00:45:02,360 --> 00:45:05,239
Speaker 1: of the Julian Jane Society likes to point out that, um,

747
00:45:05,680 --> 00:45:08,040
Speaker 1: it was he was basically laying the groundwork for an

748
00:45:08,200 --> 00:45:10,719
Speaker 1: entirely new way of looking at things so that other

749
00:45:10,840 --> 00:45:13,319
Speaker 1: people could come along and you know, take it up

750
00:45:13,600 --> 00:45:16,560
Speaker 1: and and figure out how he was wrong, how he

751
00:45:16,680 --> 00:45:19,080
Speaker 1: was right, what needed fleshing out, what made sense, and

752
00:45:19,160 --> 00:45:22,640
Speaker 1: it's that form and people have been doing that again.

753
00:45:22,719 --> 00:45:25,680
Speaker 1: This is this is like a crackpot theory that has

754
00:45:25,760 --> 00:45:29,040
Speaker 1: never gone away because the more people pay attention to

755
00:45:29,120 --> 00:45:31,120
Speaker 1: it and the more we start to understand about the brain,

756
00:45:31,560 --> 00:45:34,360
Speaker 1: the more sense it kind of makes. Uh. And it

757
00:45:34,480 --> 00:45:37,440
Speaker 1: it seems to be gaining traction rather than losing it

758
00:45:37,600 --> 00:45:41,040
Speaker 1: over the like fifty years that it's been around. I

759
00:45:41,120 --> 00:45:43,759
Speaker 1: think it's interesting. I don't hate this stuff. I'm not

760
00:45:43,880 --> 00:45:46,799
Speaker 1: rocking in my chair. David Bowie loved it. He said

761
00:45:46,880 --> 00:45:52,200
Speaker 1: that the origin of consciousness is the breakdown of bicameral mind.

762
00:45:52,960 --> 00:45:56,719
Speaker 1: I think that was it. No, he said it was

763
00:45:56,800 --> 00:46:01,480
Speaker 1: one of the top hundred books to read. Oh all right,

764
00:46:01,760 --> 00:46:05,640
Speaker 1: I believe that totally. It's very Bowie thing for sure,

765
00:46:07,200 --> 00:46:10,080
Speaker 1: and other people too. Um. And then one other thing

766
00:46:10,200 --> 00:46:12,080
Speaker 1: another way to put all this to kind of sum

767
00:46:12,200 --> 00:46:14,440
Speaker 1: it up that I saw it put is that, um,

768
00:46:14,640 --> 00:46:17,080
Speaker 1: we developed at some point back in the in history

769
00:46:17,400 --> 00:46:22,160
Speaker 1: a left brain bias, you know, which kind of ties

770
00:46:22,239 --> 00:46:24,759
Speaker 1: into your original view of the whole thing, which was,

771
00:46:25,440 --> 00:46:28,080
Speaker 1: you know, they weren't conscious that they were conscious? Right?

772
00:46:28,480 --> 00:46:33,359
Speaker 1: You like that? You got anything else? Uh? I might,

773
00:46:33,520 --> 00:46:36,680
Speaker 1: but I might just not be aware of it man,

774
00:46:37,680 --> 00:46:39,759
Speaker 1: as I said, this is the best episode we've ever

775
00:46:39,840 --> 00:46:44,400
Speaker 1: done since Chuck Giggles, which everybody loves. I think. Then

776
00:46:44,440 --> 00:46:48,879
Speaker 1: it's time for a listener mail. Uh, this is about

777
00:46:48,920 --> 00:46:53,600
Speaker 1: the freedom of the Press episode and this was a

778
00:46:53,760 --> 00:46:57,839
Speaker 1: Josh request. Hey guys, how freedom of the press word

779
00:46:57,920 --> 00:47:00,440
Speaker 1: struck a particular chord with me. I used to work

780
00:47:00,480 --> 00:47:02,960
Speaker 1: as a science teacher but was finding more and more

781
00:47:03,000 --> 00:47:05,880
Speaker 1: students were being duped by pseudoscience on the Internet and

782
00:47:05,960 --> 00:47:08,160
Speaker 1: weren't being provided the tools to recognize this. So I

783
00:47:08,200 --> 00:47:11,400
Speaker 1: did a master's in the library and information science and

784
00:47:11,480 --> 00:47:15,680
Speaker 1: now a school librarian on a minute mission to vanquish disinformation.

785
00:47:16,960 --> 00:47:19,160
Speaker 1: While I've included the topic of journalism in terms of

786
00:47:19,200 --> 00:47:23,080
Speaker 1: approaching news critically as with any online source of information,

787
00:47:23,160 --> 00:47:26,839
Speaker 1: your recent podcast on how Freedom the Press works really

788
00:47:26,880 --> 00:47:29,719
Speaker 1: inspired me to put forward more information and content about

789
00:47:29,760 --> 00:47:33,680
Speaker 1: media freedoms and the risks for journalists. Here in Sweden,

790
00:47:34,239 --> 00:47:36,400
Speaker 1: it's very easy to take freedom to press for granted.

791
00:47:37,040 --> 00:47:39,279
Speaker 1: Last year, in sympathy with my American colleagues, I put

792
00:47:39,320 --> 00:47:42,320
Speaker 1: up a display of banned books tracked by the a

793
00:47:42,640 --> 00:47:46,080
Speaker 1: l A, and each book had a tag listing the

794
00:47:46,239 --> 00:47:49,520
Speaker 1: years and ranking a book was challenged, and I encouraged

795
00:47:49,600 --> 00:47:51,920
Speaker 1: the students to guess what for. It led to a

796
00:47:52,000 --> 00:47:54,160
Speaker 1: lot of really good That's what I loved. This experiment

797
00:47:54,520 --> 00:47:57,239
Speaker 1: with students led to a lot of really good discussions.

798
00:47:57,320 --> 00:48:00,279
Speaker 1: Many students hadn't realized the scale of how many books

799
00:48:00,280 --> 00:48:02,600
Speaker 1: have been banned or challenged. Were horrified to see their

800
00:48:02,640 --> 00:48:05,800
Speaker 1: own favorite books on display. Uh And we're also shocked

801
00:48:05,840 --> 00:48:10,399
Speaker 1: by the justification, as are we always. Now that COVID

802
00:48:10,480 --> 00:48:12,480
Speaker 1: restrictions are being lifted, I'm very much looking forward to

803
00:48:12,520 --> 00:48:15,960
Speaker 1: taking students to the world's first library of censored books,

804
00:48:16,400 --> 00:48:23,800
Speaker 1: the Dowitt Isaac Library in the Malmer Archives as a

805
00:48:23,840 --> 00:48:27,160
Speaker 1: new mole so that students can see the extent of

806
00:48:27,800 --> 00:48:30,879
Speaker 1: limitations on the press and media freedoms around the world.

807
00:48:31,560 --> 00:48:34,800
Speaker 1: Thanks again for the fascinating show and all around amazing series.

808
00:48:35,360 --> 00:48:42,719
Speaker 1: Kind regards uh Met van liga Hell's Niggar that is

809
00:48:43,160 --> 00:48:46,960
Speaker 1: must just be a salutation and Swedish that comes from

810
00:48:47,480 --> 00:48:52,640
Speaker 1: ms ms Alice Antonsen. She hear hers, thank you, Alice.

811
00:48:52,719 --> 00:48:55,120
Speaker 1: That is amazing. I'm so glad we've we got to

812
00:48:55,200 --> 00:48:58,080
Speaker 1: that listener meal because I've been proud of that person

813
00:48:58,200 --> 00:49:00,319
Speaker 1: for a very long time. Ever since that you came

814
00:49:00,360 --> 00:49:04,840
Speaker 1: in totally. How about Sweden Hunt, keeping the American Dream alive?

815
00:49:06,480 --> 00:49:08,640
Speaker 1: And Chuck Also, before we sign off, there's something I've

816
00:49:08,640 --> 00:49:10,759
Speaker 1: been meaning to address that you said earlier. You said

817
00:49:10,800 --> 00:49:13,640
Speaker 1: you have a dumb brain. You know you don't? Did

818
00:49:13,719 --> 00:49:17,000
Speaker 1: I say that? Yeah? You did. So if you want

819
00:49:17,040 --> 00:49:18,800
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us like Alice did and

820
00:49:18,960 --> 00:49:21,279
Speaker 1: show the world what a hero you are, we would

821
00:49:21,360 --> 00:49:23,680
Speaker 1: love to hear that kind of thing, you can email

822
00:49:23,760 --> 00:49:30,400
Speaker 1: us to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff

823
00:49:30,440 --> 00:49:32,360
Speaker 1: you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.

824
00:49:32,920 --> 00:49:36,040
Speaker 1: For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,

825
00:49:36,280 --> 00:49:39,120
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.