Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
Speaker 1: and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is
Speaker 1: Stuff You Should Know, the ongoing, amazing, mind blowing edition.
Speaker 1: You've been into this stuff lately? What's going on with you?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know, man, but yes, I'm
Speaker 1: definitely into it lately. It's weird approaching fifty existential crisis.
Speaker 1: I don't know about crisis, maybe more like pondering, existential pondering.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's a crisis yet. I've still got
Speaker 1: five years, still fifty, So give me time now, you
Speaker 1: forty five, I'm forty five and eight ninths. Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you got time. Yeah, great, thank you for that. But no,
Speaker 1: there's no like one thing that's making me say, like, hey,
Speaker 1: when did humans become conscious? Or when did humans become intelligent?
Speaker 1: Or what do we do if aliens come down? Like
Speaker 1: for some reason, it's just maybe a little more appealing
Speaker 1: to me than it has been in the past lately.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but yes, I'm definitely into this kind
Speaker 1: of thing right now. And this stuff, well, we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about today It's based on a how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: article that Robert Lamb wrote, and I'm not at all
Speaker 1: surprised that Robert Lamb is into this, but I just
Speaker 1: want to note that I've heard about this years and
Speaker 1: years and years ago and have been meaning to do
Speaker 1: an article or an episode on it. So I don't
Speaker 1: want you to think this is something who just stumbled across.
Speaker 1: This is actually the fruition of years of planning and
Speaker 1: hope and dreams coming to to pass in the in uh,
Speaker 1: maybe the best episode will ever make. Uh. And of
Speaker 1: course Robert and not Robert Lamb, the lead singer of
Speaker 1: the band Chicago. There's another Robert Lamb, and he was
Speaker 1: in Chicago. In Chicago, is that Peter Sata's stage name
Speaker 1: No Stara was the bass player and part lead singer
Speaker 1: along with Robert Lamb, who played keyboards and also sang
Speaker 1: lead on some and before Terry Cats died, he played
Speaker 1: guitar and also sang So they had three singers in
Speaker 1: the early days of Chicago. Just confusing, but none of
Speaker 1: them are our colleague Robert Lamb, who, along with our
Speaker 1: colleague Joe, had been doing stuff to blow your mind
Speaker 1: for many, many years. Another great show. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: didn't check, but I would place a substantial amount of
Speaker 1: money on the idea that they have their own episode
Speaker 1: on this Julian James by Camra Mind. I bet they have.
Speaker 1: And we should also shout out Philosophy for Life, Psychology
Speaker 1: Today and Frontiers in Psychology. And I'm gonna make one
Speaker 1: up um psychology food Young. Okay, I've got two more
Speaker 1: that aren't made up late Star Codex and um uh
Speaker 1: poster her name Hazard on the site less Wrong. That
Speaker 1: sounds like a great source. It is, Hazard knows what
Speaker 1: he's talking about. Oh. In one more, I'm sorry, a
Speaker 1: guy named Jeff Ward or jeff Ward but you know
Speaker 1: when they say jeff um on medium. So all of
Speaker 1: those combined with Robert Lamb's article the Coalesce and again,
Speaker 1: probably the greatest episode we'll ever do. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: sort of get some of this. Um, I think you're
Speaker 1: gonna help me out some because I do have some
Speaker 1: questions that I'll just throw out here and there, because
Speaker 1: at times I found myself reading and stuff and going, yeah,
Speaker 1: but isn't that just blank? Okay, great, I'll do my
Speaker 1: best to answer, and you're probably right, um, when you're
Speaker 1: thinking that, which is probably like, yes, all right, well,
Speaker 1: I mean I guess we should say then that the
Speaker 1: whole hypothesis is that we're going to be kind of
Speaker 1: breaking down today. Is controversial and it's not provable necessarily
Speaker 1: scientifically speaking. So it's sort of one of those Um,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it goes beyond thought experiment for sure,
Speaker 1: definitely into true hypothesis land. But it was proposed by
Speaker 1: a psychologist here in the United States named Julian Jaynes
Speaker 1: in the mid nineteen seventies. Of course, yeah, the ear
Speaker 1: was born. So what he proposed was an answer to
Speaker 1: a longstanding question, and that was when did humans become conscious?
Speaker 1: Like when did consciousness emerge? Is it something that came
Speaker 1: along like in the earliest archaic humans? Is it something
Speaker 1: that came along much later than that? And how could
Speaker 1: we ever possibly answer that, like what relics have been
Speaker 1: left in history, um, in prehistory that would say like, hey,
Speaker 1: this is evidence of of consciousness um. And Julian James
Speaker 1: took that up, and he did it as an outsider,
Speaker 1: which was a huge strike against him because automatically legitimate
Speaker 1: scientists are like, well, I can't build upon this theory.
Speaker 1: Possibly this man is in actually in my field of
Speaker 1: consciousness studies. Um. But the thing is is this, this
Speaker 1: hypothesis is so well liked, it's just roundly like people
Speaker 1: just like it. It's just such an interesting hypothesis that
Speaker 1: it just won't go away. It hasn't gone away. And
Speaker 1: in fact, there's like a Julian James Institute, there's like
Speaker 1: groups that have sprung up based on this hypothesis. And
Speaker 1: what he says, in a very small nutshell is that
Speaker 1: sometime about one thousand, two thousand years ago humans became
Speaker 1: conscious in the way that we understand consciousness today. They
Speaker 1: developed the ability to think about thinking, They developed the
Speaker 1: ability to think about that other people are thinking. They
Speaker 1: developed basically what's called subjective introspection, and then as a
Speaker 1: result of that, they almost automatically gained free will and volition.
Speaker 1: So what he's saying is that if we went back
Speaker 1: in time in the Way Back Machine, Chuck, and we
Speaker 1: met somebody who lived three thousand years ago, four thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, they would not be a kind just human
Speaker 1: in the way that we understand conscious humans. That's right,
Speaker 1: And he thinks that it was a learned thing. And
Speaker 1: the idea that he throws down is that our our mind,
Speaker 1: our brain is, or was rather very important was because
Speaker 1: it no longer is bicameral, which means split into two parts.
Speaker 1: And we'll get to some actual science about the hemispheres
Speaker 1: of the brain later on, but in this case he
Speaker 1: means split into two parts where you have a part
Speaker 1: that makes decisions and a part that follows. And that
Speaker 1: neither one of them were conscious. And and here's where
Speaker 1: I get a little tripped up right out right out
Speaker 1: of the gate. Is Basically he says that instead of
Speaker 1: an internal dialogue, which we all have and which indicates
Speaker 1: a consciousness, uh, like us talking to ourselves, us saying
Speaker 1: things like everything from like you know, hey, get up
Speaker 1: and go do this, to just internally thinking about things
Speaker 1: like humans do that instead of that, we were sort
Speaker 1: of like human zombies and that we were creatures of habit.
Speaker 1: We had routines and behaviors that we followed to a
Speaker 1: t and whenever something disrupted that behavior, which is when
Speaker 1: like a conscious mind you would think, would speak up
Speaker 1: that instead of that that an external agent in this case, Uh,
Speaker 1: they thought there were gods would enter their brain and
Speaker 1: create an auditory hallucination. Yeah, and that they unquestioningly obeyed
Speaker 1: that auditory hallucination, and that's what help them get through
Speaker 1: novel situations that they didn't have like a basically a
Speaker 1: prescribed script for you know, a mindless automatic thing. Something
Speaker 1: new came along, they got in their way. This god
Speaker 1: would speak to them and say, go around that rock.
Speaker 1: It wasn't there yesterday. Don't worry about it, just go
Speaker 1: around it. And it could be one of their gods.
Speaker 1: It could be an ancestor guiding them. I think um one,
Speaker 1: um one. I think the Sumerians maybe made reference to
Speaker 1: angels walking beside them um or. And this is really
Speaker 1: important later on. It's a big part of Jane's hypothesis.
Speaker 1: It could be your local ruler, the divine king who's
Speaker 1: in charge of you and everybody else that you know
Speaker 1: and love and have ever lived among. It could be
Speaker 1: that person guiding you in your life too. And the
Speaker 1: idea is they these people heard this in the same
Speaker 1: way like you said that we hear our own internal dialogue,
Speaker 1: but they never chalked it up to themselves. It was
Speaker 1: always coming from the outside. All right, Well, here's I
Speaker 1: guess where I had my first issue kind of grasping
Speaker 1: this is there were no gods speaking to them and
Speaker 1: guiding them. This was just their internal dialogue. They just
Speaker 1: didn't know it. Yes, yes, yes, there was no gods.
Speaker 1: But to them, and this is a really important point
Speaker 1: to them, it definitely was a god talking to them
Speaker 1: or an ancestor talking to them. And in the same
Speaker 1: way that if if an actual god got into your
Speaker 1: brain and like was speaking to you and you responded
Speaker 1: to it, if you could have looked at their brains
Speaker 1: lighting up, presumably in like a wonder machine, it would
Speaker 1: it would respond the same way. So it was entirely
Speaker 1: real to them, and the same way that a placebo
Speaker 1: effect has real effects on your body. Um, this would
Speaker 1: have been the same thing. And then in addition to that,
Speaker 1: it was culturally supported. Everyone that they knew believed the
Speaker 1: same thing that the gods were talking to them, and
Speaker 1: so like that just lent support to this idea so
Speaker 1: that no one, no one questioned it. It was just
Speaker 1: that's the way it was. Well, so this, I guess
Speaker 1: brings me to let me macro this out a little
Speaker 1: bit in my own dumb brain, and it may just
Speaker 1: be twenty twenty one century person thinking that I'm engaging
Speaker 1: in But if the idea is that, uh, before this,
Speaker 1: there was consciousness. But what we're really saying is there
Speaker 1: actually was consciousness that they just didn't recognize it as such.
Speaker 1: Is that the whole point was that if you do
Speaker 1: not recognize it as consciousness, therefore you are not conscious. Yes,
Speaker 1: because you're not. You're not experiencing consciousness in any way
Speaker 1: that we would recognize as you being conscious. You're just
Speaker 1: kind of um Julian James referred to now. Okay, so so,
Speaker 1: but the thing is is there's like a lot of
Speaker 1: scholarly discussion on like, Okay, what did James mean exactly?
Speaker 1: How literal was he because he used words like automaton.
Speaker 1: He never called him zombies. Other people call them like zombies,
Speaker 1: but that no one talked about zombies back then. Hard, No,
Speaker 1: that's true. But um, well evil Dead had or not
Speaker 1: evil Dead, living dead now the Living Dead had come
Speaker 1: out by then. Yeah, but it wasn't like today. Okay, no, no,
Speaker 1: I know. They're definitely over the automatons. So he called
Speaker 1: them automatons, and it's essentially the same thing that they were.
Speaker 1: They just behaved automatically. They didn't stop and think about
Speaker 1: how they felt. They and this is really important to Chuck.
Speaker 1: Of course, they still had feelings. They had feelings about
Speaker 1: the people that were in their kin group, they had
Speaker 1: feelings about their local ruler, they had feelings about um,
Speaker 1: you know, stubbing their toe. It's not like they just
Speaker 1: had no inner life whatsoever. It's that they weren't. They
Speaker 1: didn't reflect on their inner life, they didn't think about thinking.
Speaker 1: They didn't they didn't have what we would recognize as consciousness,
Speaker 1: and in the terms that James is describing consciousness, which
Speaker 1: is a really narrow definition of consciousness. And then on
Speaker 1: top of that, he also goes to great links to say, Hey,
Speaker 1: I understand that you're gonna get all up in a
Speaker 1: tizzy that I'm saying that these people weren't conscious. I'm
Speaker 1: not talking about consciousness in general. And I think that
Speaker 1: you over overestimate just how much consciousness makes up our
Speaker 1: our lives. Okay, how about we take a break. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go rip a boll uh. We'll take a break,
Speaker 1: we'll come back and we'll talk about what lots of
Speaker 1: other stuff right after this and stop shot stop all right.
Speaker 1: So I've kind of wrapped my head around what this
Speaker 1: guy is saying. Now it's uh. I will admit it's
Speaker 1: a little naval gazey for me. Uh On when it
Speaker 1: comes to certain types of philosophy and hypotheses, I get
Speaker 1: a little bit like, uh, what's the word? Maybe I
Speaker 1: can be a little too concrete or is the French
Speaker 1: concrete and literal in my thinking, because it's not you know,
Speaker 1: Friday night in college, like two in the morning kind
Speaker 1: of discussion. So I think that's where I am now.
Speaker 1: But I do think it's very interesting and that he
Speaker 1: I mean, I think a lot of this is very interesting,
Speaker 1: But I think it's interesting that he thought around the
Speaker 1: first or second millennium BC is when things to him
Speaker 1: changed and a consciousness began to emerge because of uh, well,
Speaker 1: eventually language, but specifically metaphor, which is to say that
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, we could make analogies in our brain.
Speaker 1: We could link things together. Uh. We saw ourselves as
Speaker 1: um almost as if they were characters. Ourselves were characters
Speaker 1: that had like choices that they could make his characters,
Speaker 1: and that as these things like connected in the brain,
Speaker 1: then it created just an effect like a domino effect
Speaker 1: basically where all of a sudden we could work out
Speaker 1: our own solutions, or we we knew we were capable
Speaker 1: of working out our own solutions, And wasn't God saying
Speaker 1: God saying walk around the rock? They realized it was
Speaker 1: ourselves making the decision to walk around the rock. Yes,
Speaker 1: but it's but in part of that that also required
Speaker 1: them to be able to reflect on the idea. Like
Speaker 1: you said that that they were able to now make
Speaker 1: their own decisions, right, And you said something earlier where
Speaker 1: you're like, you know, you were talking about your own
Speaker 1: internal dialogue where you you think, hey, I should get
Speaker 1: up and go outside for a second. Um, Like, that's
Speaker 1: that's different, right, You're thinking about you yourself, and you
Speaker 1: realize that you are thinking about yourself. That's modern consciousness.
Speaker 1: What somebody who was a bicameral person during this time
Speaker 1: would have thought is get up and go outside. And
Speaker 1: they would stand up and go outside without questioning because
Speaker 1: God had just instructed them to do that, so it
Speaker 1: must be important. And they didn't think about where it
Speaker 1: came from. They definitely didn't think it was from themselves,
Speaker 1: and they didn't reflect on it. They just obeyed it.
Speaker 1: That's Jane's position, and that if you compare those two things.
Speaker 1: You're talking about two totally different forms of mental life,
Speaker 1: and that's so different. He said that this is that
Speaker 1: what we understand is consciousness just wasn't around until a
Speaker 1: couple of thousand years ago. Okay, I can buy that.
Speaker 1: I like it as a hypothesis. I can swim in
Speaker 1: this pool. Okay, good, good. Here's the thing it's really
Speaker 1: important to to to realize, like you said something, that
Speaker 1: you're you're a literalist, right, that's actually really appropriate to
Speaker 1: approach this because Julian Jaynes one of the very radical
Speaker 1: things that he did was he took the ancients literally
Speaker 1: because when he started looking around and we'll talk more
Speaker 1: about this later, but he was looking for those artifacts
Speaker 1: that would prove his hypothesis or lend support to it
Speaker 1: at least, and he was an expert in ancient languages, right,
Speaker 1: so he was it was really appropriate. He could actually
Speaker 1: read Sumerian and Mesopotamian, and he took what they were
Speaker 1: saying when they said things like, um, you know, the
Speaker 1: gods told us to do this, that that they thought
Speaker 1: that the gods told him to do this, not that
Speaker 1: they were using metaphors. So he took them literally on
Speaker 1: their word and that's a real departure from anybody else
Speaker 1: who's ever examined the ancients of what they were saying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think it's also something we should point out now,
Speaker 1: even though it comes up later in our research. Is that, um,
Speaker 1: when you think of an auto, I guess an automatic
Speaker 1: society or society of automatons. Uh. That's not to say
Speaker 1: that they weren't successful. He's describing some of the most successful,
Speaker 1: you know, ancient civilizations that existed. But I think his
Speaker 1: contention is that it was a hive mind all working
Speaker 1: together as automatons that allowed this stuff to get accomplished,
Speaker 1: and not the conscious mind, right, And he didn't I
Speaker 1: don't think he ever used it as like, I don't
Speaker 1: think ever explicitly said that it was an emergent prop
Speaker 1: pretty of a hive mind. But that's kind of what
Speaker 1: he was describing, kind of like if you take one
Speaker 1: stone cutter and one stone mason and three stone carriers
Speaker 1: and multiply that unit by five hundred and give it
Speaker 1: a year, you have a zigguratte built. That That's just
Speaker 1: that's just all those people knew what to do, they
Speaker 1: knew their position in their place, and they just did it,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, you could totally do that. With people
Speaker 1: who are thinking in this way and weren't conscious, you
Speaker 1: could probably actually get it done more easily than you
Speaker 1: could with people who stopped and thought, I'm above this,
Speaker 1: this work is is not suited for me. I should
Speaker 1: be doing something else, or why is the foreman being
Speaker 1: so mean to me today? Like they didn't think like
Speaker 1: that under Jane's um hypothesis, So they would probably get
Speaker 1: the work done more efficiently, at least more quietly. I
Speaker 1: would guess. Oh, I mean consciousness proposed or brought along
Speaker 1: a whole host of problems. I imagine if you're the
Speaker 1: ruling class. Uh. I think one thing that's interesting is
Speaker 1: that you mentioned um about what what is it? Jane's
Speaker 1: not Johns, Jane's Jane's thought about I love Robert Lamb's
Speaker 1: James Addison joke in here by that Oh that was yours?
Speaker 1: Oh well, where to go? Thanks, you said, Janes says,
Speaker 1: and then in parentheses you put it's a pretty good joke.
Speaker 1: But what Jane said was that, um, and it's something
Speaker 1: you mentioned earlier, was that consciousness. I think we think
Speaker 1: consciousness plays too big of a role. And what is
Speaker 1: actually a life that is can largely be still automatic
Speaker 1: on a lot of levels. And this is from the
Speaker 1: actual book in nineteen six and it's a little little
Speaker 1: mind blowy. I kind of like it. Consciousness is a
Speaker 1: much smaller part of our mental life than we're conscious
Speaker 1: of because we cannot be conscious of what we are
Speaker 1: not conscious of. It's like asking a flat and this
Speaker 1: is where it kind of comes home to me. It's
Speaker 1: like a asking a flashlight in a dark room to
Speaker 1: search around for something that does not have any light
Speaker 1: shining upon it. So that's where it comes home to meet,
Speaker 1: is when you and hey, it's metaphor. So how about
Speaker 1: that he lays down a metaphor that makes me understand
Speaker 1: it a little bit more. Yeah, because you know, wherever
Speaker 1: the flashlight looks, there's light. And his point, yeah, and
Speaker 1: his point is is wherever your conscious mind looks, there's consciousness.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that there's consciousness all over the place.
Speaker 1: And um, yeah. Robert Lamb does use as a really
Speaker 1: good example of unloading a dishwasher, right, like when you're
Speaker 1: unloading the dishwasher, especially if you're one of those people
Speaker 1: who put like all of your knives in one place
Speaker 1: all of your forks in one part of the basket,
Speaker 1: all of your spoons and so on. Right, a maniac
Speaker 1: in other words, sensible human. If you do it like that,
Speaker 1: it's you can you can just be on a pilot
Speaker 1: because you've done it so many times. But when you
Speaker 1: do something like drop a fork, that's out of the norm.
Speaker 1: That's a novel thing that doesn't happen every time. And
Speaker 1: so in in the bi cameral mind, God would have said, um,
Speaker 1: I command thee to pick up thine fork butter fingers,
Speaker 1: and you would lean over and pick up the fork,
Speaker 1: and that was that. Instead you you might not even
Speaker 1: think about picking up the fork. You might do that automatically,
Speaker 1: but it's still out of the norm. It's still different.
Speaker 1: You have to kind of think about it a little
Speaker 1: more than just unloading the dishwasher. Now, if you take
Speaker 1: that dishwasher metaphor chuck, and you realize that three five,
Speaker 1: nine thousand years ago, there were no dishwashers. There was
Speaker 1: no ice cream scoop, there was no cookie scoop, there
Speaker 1: was no avocado splitter, there was nothing like that. Wait,
Speaker 1: what's that thing? Now? Yeah, you don't know, you don't
Speaker 1: have one of those. No, I'll send you one. You're
Speaker 1: missing out. It's a it's a multi tool for cutting avocados,
Speaker 1: getting the pit out, and then slicing them as you
Speaker 1: scoop them out. They're essential. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: I do pretty well with my knife, but I would
Speaker 1: love to see one of these. Okay, I'm gonna get
Speaker 1: to you one for Christmas. Okay. So the point is that, like,
Speaker 1: there wasn't a big variety of stuff, so there wasn't
Speaker 1: that many novel situations, like we encounter novel situations like
Speaker 1: almost constantly. That's just modern life. And that's the basis
Speaker 1: of James um uh Like hypothesis that the reason that
Speaker 1: consciousness evolves is because we started to get faced with
Speaker 1: more and more novel situations on a much more frequent basis.
Speaker 1: So it maybe it became inefficient for God to be
Speaker 1: talking to us every thirty seconds um or maybe we
Speaker 1: just got better at thinking for ourselves and consciousness kind
Speaker 1: of evolved out of that. But the point is life
Speaker 1: was much less complex back then, so you could have
Speaker 1: something like a bi camera mind. You could have somebody
Speaker 1: who who consciousness hadn't evolved in yet because they hadn't
Speaker 1: been introduced to enough experience in life, and with that
Speaker 1: experience came the the fork falling on the floor. In
Speaker 1: other words, yeah, or you know, there's a lot more
Speaker 1: dishes to put away, in much more different dishes to
Speaker 1: put away rather than just forks, you know, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. Or you have one fork and you
Speaker 1: just carry it with you everywhere, you know, like you
Speaker 1: don't have to think about that. There was just less
Speaker 1: stuff to think about, is what I'm saying. Well, now
Speaker 1: you're speaking my language, because if I had it my way,
Speaker 1: every member of my family would have one for one spoon,
Speaker 1: one knife, one bowl, one cup, one plate, and they
Speaker 1: were all responsible for keeping them clean and put away. Man,
Speaker 1: every time I hear one cup there, I'm like, there's
Speaker 1: a joke in there somewhere, But even if I could
Speaker 1: come up with it, I wouldn't be able to say it.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's true. All right. So now we're at
Speaker 1: the point where we can talk a little bit more
Speaker 1: about this idea of metaphor and language sort of bringing
Speaker 1: about this change. And uh so what James was throwing
Speaker 1: down in ninety six, besides apparently a bunch of roach
Speaker 1: clips was a the emergence of agricultural society is kind
Speaker 1: of changing everything, and that all of a sudden, we
Speaker 1: are not living in groups of you know, ten or
Speaker 1: twelve people that are hunting and gathering, where even if
Speaker 1: there was sort of a leader within that group, it
Speaker 1: was very easy to disseminate information and follow that that leader.
Speaker 1: Once we started settling down planting and growing things, engaging
Speaker 1: in trade with other people's that that did a lot
Speaker 1: of things that complicated every process, and it meant that
Speaker 1: societies were much much larger and that rulers couldn't necessarily
Speaker 1: speak directly to people anymore. Yeah, so the another not
Speaker 1: two specific people, like they could lay down an edict
Speaker 1: and that would get disseminated in other words, right, and
Speaker 1: so like um, I've read before back when I was
Speaker 1: an anthropology student that hunter gatherer bands usually numbered no
Speaker 1: more than thirty people, Like that was the absolute maps
Speaker 1: and once you reach that, you'd split off into two
Speaker 1: different bands. So yeah, like the person in charge was
Speaker 1: like part of your moment to moment life. And if
Speaker 1: you're if you have if you're suddenly in a civilization
Speaker 1: and you're building a ziggurat for somebody's probably not deigning
Speaker 1: to talk to you. And part of Jane's um hypothesis
Speaker 1: is that this this bicameralism emerged from you know, all
Speaker 1: those new novel situations like learning to plant crops, learning
Speaker 1: to domesticate cows, learning to engage in trade and talk
Speaker 1: to other people, that we started to like need direction
Speaker 1: from the gods more and more, and uh, it started
Speaker 1: to kind of get faster and faster. Um. But in
Speaker 1: the meantime it was a form of social control because
Speaker 1: one of the people you could think was talking to
Speaker 1: you was that local ruler who you were building the
Speaker 1: ziggerat for. So that would be a way to keep
Speaker 1: an increasingly large population in check, right, And as they
Speaker 1: got bigger and bigger, uh, and they started, you know,
Speaker 1: trading with people like we were saying that. You know,
Speaker 1: that's was sort of the beginning of the end for
Speaker 1: his uh, not his bi camera mind, but the b
Speaker 1: camera mind. And one of the biggest problems with all
Speaker 1: of that was when we started writing stuff down, because
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, um, this these auditory hallucinations that
Speaker 1: he felt like everyone was having to instruct them on
Speaker 1: what to do. There was there was now stuffed down
Speaker 1: on paper that you could read and you could refer
Speaker 1: to and go back to and pass around and post
Speaker 1: on the you know, on tablets at the walls of
Speaker 1: the city or whatever. And that was all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: you weren't waiting around for God to tell you what
Speaker 1: to do. You could just go read that tablet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the power that we gave to the god's commands
Speaker 1: were kind of transferred to um, the written word. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems to have been like the death knell for
Speaker 1: the bicamera mind, right, um. And there's something really interesting
Speaker 1: that's worth pointing out. Jaynes apparently didn't have any hy
Speaker 1: hypothesis on what came before the bicamera mind because he
Speaker 1: said it started as a result of the increasing um
Speaker 1: organization that agriculture brought Alonge and that there wasn't bi
Speaker 1: camera minds before then, But he doesn't say what was
Speaker 1: before then? Um, And people even asked him like, okay,
Speaker 1: what about you know, um hunter gatherer societies that are
Speaker 1: still around today, you know, where would they have gotten consciousness?
Speaker 1: And he never really answered that, but it's it's definitely
Speaker 1: worth pointing out that that's an open question. But he
Speaker 1: basically says bicameralism, Uh, or the bi camera mind. I
Speaker 1: should say bi cameralism is the senate in the house. UM,
Speaker 1: but the bi camera mind lasted from the advent of
Speaker 1: agriculture about eleven thousand years ago, all about two thousand
Speaker 1: ish maybe fred or no. Three thousand is years ago,
Speaker 1: so it was about a seven thousand year span of
Speaker 1: UM B camera minded. Then as life got more and
Speaker 1: more sophisticated, we started thinking for ourselves. And what he
Speaker 1: says is that language and in particular the written word,
Speaker 1: but also language got more and more sophisticated, and as
Speaker 1: it got more sophisticated, there was more of a potential
Speaker 1: for us to start thinking in metaphors and metaphors, as
Speaker 1: you said, is the basis of consciousness and the way
Speaker 1: we think in Julian Jane's mind. And there's actually a
Speaker 1: lot of support for that. Charles, may I oh please?
Speaker 1: So that post by Hazard on Less wrong, it's called
Speaker 1: consciousness as metaphor. What James has to offer and what
Speaker 1: Hazard says, um is that like Hazard just puts out
Speaker 1: like a paragraph from like an economic report, and it's
Speaker 1: about recessions in Europe and it talks about Germany plunging
Speaker 1: into recession or the UK falling deeper into recession or
Speaker 1: France emerging from a recession. And what Hazard points out
Speaker 1: is that all of these descriptors imagine a recession as
Speaker 1: a three dimensional physical thing that we can entire nations
Speaker 1: can move into and out of. That's not true. Recessions
Speaker 1: aren't three dimensional. They aren't physical things. You can't emerge
Speaker 1: from them, you can't fall into them. But we just
Speaker 1: think about it like that, and that's metaphor. So we
Speaker 1: think in metaphors so frequently we don't even recognize it anymore.
Speaker 1: And that was Jane's point that when we gain the
Speaker 1: ability to think in metaphors, we became conscious, We started
Speaker 1: thinking for ourselves, we became capable of introspection. And it
Speaker 1: was the evolution of language that led us to that point.
Speaker 1: Like basically, it just we just hit a threshold where
Speaker 1: suddenly languages sophisticated enough that it could unlock new thoughts
Speaker 1: in our brains and in turn unlocked consciousness. I mean
Speaker 1: that makes sense because you know, in a meta a
Speaker 1: metaphor is literally not literal, and if you were, if
Speaker 1: you did, if that was not a thing yet, then
Speaker 1: it chives with the whole notion that everything they were
Speaker 1: doing was very literal up and to that point, and
Speaker 1: that that would have been a pretty seismic shift. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you can compare like with like, you know, all
Speaker 1: of a sudden. Yeah, and you even see this in
Speaker 1: like Um, like movies that are trying to emphasize how
Speaker 1: backwards or back in time, you know, some group is
Speaker 1: um and they emphasize it by having that group take
Speaker 1: everything literally, usually to comic effect, like in Kingpin when
Speaker 1: Randy Quaid was an Amish person. Right, yeah, he took
Speaker 1: everything literally and it was hilarious. Hilarity ensued, but it
Speaker 1: was also to demonstrate how just simple and behind he was.
Speaker 1: He couldn't he couldn't engage in metaphor, you didn't think
Speaker 1: like that. That's actually based on I don't know whether
Speaker 1: on purpose or not, but that's based on Julian James hypothesis. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know what, that's a nice segue to children,
Speaker 1: because when you have a human child, Uh, it's very
Speaker 1: funny to see how literal they are for those first
Speaker 1: years and that they don't understand metaphor, they don't understand
Speaker 1: certainly don't understand things like sarcasm, and you have to
Speaker 1: change the way you talk to little kids because they
Speaker 1: do take everything so literally and think so literally. And uh,
Speaker 1: children are are references are referenced with Jane's Uh the
Speaker 1: idea that, um, I think what age like, kids up
Speaker 1: until the age of five basically, uh don't really have
Speaker 1: much of a human consciousness. Uh. And it's and you know,
Speaker 1: the idea that children are are just little narcissist walking
Speaker 1: around is a fun joke, but it's true because they
Speaker 1: don't know that other people think differently than they think.
Speaker 1: Up until about the age of five, they don't realize
Speaker 1: there are other lines of thought and ways of thinking
Speaker 1: and ways of feeling about things that other that other
Speaker 1: people have exactly. That's what's called theory of mind, right
Speaker 1: and um On Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander went to
Speaker 1: great links to basically say that Julian Jaynes using the
Speaker 1: term consciousness just really muddied the waters unnecessarily and if
Speaker 1: you just use theory of mind, it would have made
Speaker 1: a lot more sense. And Scott Anderson Scott Alexander, I think,
Speaker 1: I said Anderson Scott Alexander makes some really a really
Speaker 1: good case for it, and that's kind of what he's
Speaker 1: pointing out is um. You know, like it's it's possible
Speaker 1: that because you learn it's not you're not born with it.
Speaker 1: You you learn it through experience. It just kind of
Speaker 1: evolves in you as you grow as a person and
Speaker 1: experience more and more novel stuff and interact with people more,
Speaker 1: almost like a micro azum of what happened in civilization
Speaker 1: a few thousand years ago, you gain theory of mind.
Speaker 1: So the fact that you can learn and that you
Speaker 1: do learn something that integral to consciousness really supports the
Speaker 1: idea that maybe consciousness, as we understand it, was learned.
Speaker 1: It did evolve, It was an emergent property of an
Speaker 1: increasingly sophisticated language. It's a fascinating thing to see happen
Speaker 1: in a child's life. Um, to see these little lightbulbs
Speaker 1: come on seemingly out of nowhere, but you realize it,
Speaker 1: as you know, very much a learned thing. Very fascinating.
Speaker 1: All Right, I say, we take a break and we'll
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about, uh, just some other fascinating
Speaker 1: stuff when we get back. Right after this things s
Speaker 1: I was gonna summarize what we're going to talk about,
Speaker 1: but I didn't feel like it all of a sudden
Speaker 1: before they break. I think it's nice it's loose. Can
Speaker 1: can I talk about one of my favorite parts of
Speaker 1: this this hypothesis definitely is we were we're kind of
Speaker 1: jumping around now, but jumping back to where we talked
Speaker 1: about writing things down. All of a sudden, it was
Speaker 1: around here in human history that there was a collapse
Speaker 1: of societies, uh, in the Mediterranean around the Middle East.
Speaker 1: It was called the Late Bronze Age collapse. And it
Speaker 1: didn't take that long, and it meant like these very
Speaker 1: advanced sort of societies, in a matter of decades, a
Speaker 1: number of them, uh, a lot of their culture was lost.
Speaker 1: That was it's sort of They called it, in fact,
Speaker 1: the Greek Dark Ages, and it lasted for hundreds of years.
Speaker 1: And jibing with this was when humans started to lose.
Speaker 1: And it kind of all makes sense that they were
Speaker 1: losing um with a written word, with metaphorign language coming along,
Speaker 1: they were losing this voice as a god. They were
Speaker 1: they felt like they were losing their gods because all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, the gods were silent to them. They
Speaker 1: weren't speaking to them in their mind because they were
Speaker 1: gaining consciousness. And here's where it gets super interesting. James
Speaker 1: has a hypothesis that says, it's about here where the
Speaker 1: organized religions that we know today were born out of
Speaker 1: a kind of nostalgia basically for these gods that left them. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that idea is really interesting. It is and
Speaker 1: I mean that the timetable really jibes, and it is
Speaker 1: really interesting that that late Bronze Age collapse happened when
Speaker 1: it did. Um. But but the idea is not just
Speaker 1: nostalgia but also desperation. Because these people had guidance, they
Speaker 1: didn't have to think, and this poor set of generations
Speaker 1: over a few hundred years are maybe some of the
Speaker 1: most pitiful humans that ever lived, because they went from
Speaker 1: just knowing what to do because the gods told them
Speaker 1: what to do, to having no idea what to do
Speaker 1: because their gods had abandoned them. And they that as
Speaker 1: a result of that, they started forming religions. They started, um,
Speaker 1: you know, beseeching the gods to give them a sign.
Speaker 1: This is when oracles started to become a thing. Profits
Speaker 1: started to become a thing. Superstitions um like omens grew
Speaker 1: like there was a Sumerian omen. If a horse comes
Speaker 1: into your house and bite you you will soon die
Speaker 1: and your family will soon be scattered. Stuff like that. Right,
Speaker 1: So this this didn't exist before because the gods were
Speaker 1: in charge of everything. Now they were suddenly gone, and
Speaker 1: I just think it must be must have been really
Speaker 1: pitiful and dark to live through that time. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean they were lost, I guess as a people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and I mean that was figuratively they were lost,
Speaker 1: but literally too because that late Bronze Age collapse they
Speaker 1: think was brought on at least in part by climate
Speaker 1: change and probably invasion. There's this mysterious group called the
Speaker 1: Sea People's that seem to have overrun different cultures, and
Speaker 1: so like culture after culture would fall, those people would
Speaker 1: become refugees, descend upon another culture, end up pushing that
Speaker 1: to the breaking point that culture would fall. It was
Speaker 1: just like a domino effect of collapsing cultures all at once.
Speaker 1: So they really felt like the gods had abandoned him,
Speaker 1: like they had angered him or something like that. They
Speaker 1: were genuinely lost. So what James did, uh to help
Speaker 1: support his hypothesis, which makes sense, was to go back
Speaker 1: and look at literature, uh and at the time and
Speaker 1: see if it's sort of supported this I know one
Speaker 1: of the things he wrote a lot about in his
Speaker 1: book in six was that was Homer's Iliad, because he's
Speaker 1: kind of like, here's proof right here. I mean, if
Speaker 1: you look at the Iliad, they were basically automatons. They
Speaker 1: they just listened to the gods and did what the
Speaker 1: gods said, and they substituted, um, like, the words that
Speaker 1: we would use to substitute in for the Iliad to
Speaker 1: indicate consciousness just weren't there, right, So they were more
Speaker 1: like physical descriptors like my belly was quivering or my
Speaker 1: heart was fluttering or something like that, not um. I
Speaker 1: think the example that's used as fear filled Agamemnon's mind,
Speaker 1: and well, there wasn't a mind, so they would describe
Speaker 1: fear and other physical terms, right yeah. And that it
Speaker 1: wasn't until later on when um new translations were coming along,
Speaker 1: that people who were now conscious turned the stuff into metaphor.
Speaker 1: And James is saying they didn't mean it as metaphor before,
Speaker 1: they meant it as literally, and they didn't have descriptors
Speaker 1: her mind. And when they say the gods were guiding
Speaker 1: them along, they meant it literally. And he was saying
Speaker 1: that the Eliot in particular, UM started to be written
Speaker 1: about eleven d b C. And then around seven b C.
Speaker 1: It was like in its form that we see it today,
Speaker 1: but along the way it was kind of added to
Speaker 1: and it it was written during the transition from bicameral
Speaker 1: mind to modern consciousness. He sees it as basically a
Speaker 1: document that that traces that transition. Very interesting. There was
Speaker 1: some other stuff too, right literature wise, Yeah, so that
Speaker 1: wasn't the only one. UM. He also found in some
Speaker 1: of the religious texts, like evidence that people felt like
Speaker 1: God had abandoned them. There's something a Mesopotamian poem called
Speaker 1: the ludlul bell Nmecki, and it says, my God has
Speaker 1: forsaken me and disappeared. My Goddess has failed me and
Speaker 1: keeps at a distance. The good angel who walked beside
Speaker 1: me has departed. And again, most other scholars would say,
Speaker 1: there's something happened. This guy was blue, he was in
Speaker 1: a funk. Who knows, but it's all metaphorical. And James
Speaker 1: is saying, no, this guy had God talking to him.
Speaker 1: Now he doesn't anymore. So should we talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about actual science here with the brain, because this
Speaker 1: is something we've covered before in the past when we
Speaker 1: talked about alien hands syndrome where it came from a
Speaker 1: gazillion years ago. Um, we there were there was evidence
Speaker 1: that when the um there there were certain epilepsy patients
Speaker 1: who where it was so severe that they would uh
Speaker 1: sever the corpus colossum, undergo a corpus colostomy, and the
Speaker 1: corpus colossum is basically the the thing that makes the
Speaker 1: two hemispheres of the brain communicate with one another. And
Speaker 1: with alien hands syndrome, I think they found that it
Speaker 1: could be brought on by this surgery where all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, the left arm was doing something and without
Speaker 1: being told to do it by the the right brain.
Speaker 1: And they have uh James, I think, or people since James,
Speaker 1: And was it James or was it just people trying
Speaker 1: into uh sort of proof his theory. I think that
Speaker 1: people saw this these experiments as support for Jenes's theory. Okay,
Speaker 1: So they looked at these surgeries, these corpus colostomies, and
Speaker 1: they're they're called split brain patients basically where they you know,
Speaker 1: after the surgery, it's not like they felt all out
Speaker 1: of whack. They felt like a regular you know, whole
Speaker 1: human being. But they learned that there were these little
Speaker 1: things that would pop up where a hemisphere would take
Speaker 1: an action based on this information that it didn't have
Speaker 1: access to. And the example they gave was UH, if
Speaker 1: they like instructed the right hemisphere to just walk to
Speaker 1: the kitchen, uh, and they would get up and walk
Speaker 1: to the kitchen. But they would say, hey, why did
Speaker 1: you get up and walk to the kitchen? The language
Speaker 1: the left hemisphere, the language dominant hemisphere, UH, is the
Speaker 1: only part that can respond to that. But the left
Speaker 1: hemisphere doesn't know why it got up, and they're really
Speaker 1: fast nating. Part is that they wouldn't say, well, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I'm not sure why I just did that.
Speaker 1: I just did it. They would make something up on
Speaker 1: the spot and say, you know, I felt like getting
Speaker 1: up and going to make a bowl of cereal. And
Speaker 1: it's it's almost like we had this natural instinct to
Speaker 1: bs somebody when faced with a question that we can't
Speaker 1: answer about why we did something. Yeah, Because the left
Speaker 1: hemisphere wants to explain things. It wants to tell the
Speaker 1: story um using metaphors usually and this was this became
Speaker 1: the left brain interpreter theory and um, it kind of
Speaker 1: supports um Uh Jane's idea that the consciousness is a
Speaker 1: flashlight looking for a dark spot in a room and
Speaker 1: it just can't find it. And um, the idea is
Speaker 1: that the left hemisphere creates the explanation the stories for
Speaker 1: our behavior, even if it doesn't know why we did something.
Speaker 1: But that's just what it does. And there's a saying
Speaker 1: in consciousness research among people who subscribe to the left
Speaker 1: brain Interpreter theory is that consciousness isn't in the oval
Speaker 1: office like it thinks it is. It's more in the
Speaker 1: press office, like it's the one that's public facing explaining
Speaker 1: what you're doing, but it might not have all the information,
Speaker 1: so sometimes it's just b s NG. It's very interesting stuff. Uh,
Speaker 1: And sort of tying in with the kid thing, Um,
Speaker 1: who is this? How do you pronounced the name of
Speaker 1: that one researcher Kushtian Lastian Couture k k U I
Speaker 1: J S c E. N Oh, yeah, I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: say Chustian. I think that's pretty pretty dead on. That's
Speaker 1: the person who runs the Julian James um Uh Society
Speaker 1: today because James died in I don't think we ever
Speaker 1: pointed that out. But this person basically says, hey, if
Speaker 1: you look at people who hear voices, and that's not
Speaker 1: necessarily to say someone that has schizophrenia, because that is
Speaker 1: one percent of the population apparently is the highest ten
Speaker 1: percent of the population. Can you know, does hear things basically?
Speaker 1: So these Uh, it's the idea of the command voice
Speaker 1: basically is to to do something. And uh, if you're
Speaker 1: hearing a voice that says, you know, moved to the
Speaker 1: window and look out on the street, that's one thing.
Speaker 1: If you hear a voice that says, take the knife
Speaker 1: from the drawer and you know, put it in someone's head,
Speaker 1: then that's another thing altogether. And uh, we were talking
Speaker 1: about kids earlier, you know, the idea of the imaginary
Speaker 1: friend kind of jobs with this lack of consciousness of
Speaker 1: kids have imaginary friends. I had an imaginary friends. My
Speaker 1: daughter had for years what she called her ghost friends,
Speaker 1: which is a lot creepier way to put it. But
Speaker 1: I think that's all just sort of to say that,
Speaker 1: like that nine percent of people who are hearing voices
Speaker 1: who are not suffering from schizophrenia, is that proof of
Speaker 1: that initial bicamera mind at work. Right, yeah, and and
Speaker 1: I mean, um, Julian James believed that children go from
Speaker 1: a bicamera state to a conscious state, as evidenced by
Speaker 1: that development of theory of mind, or as evidenced by
Speaker 1: imaginary friends. Um, and that they're they're kind of recreating
Speaker 1: what society or the human species went through thousands of
Speaker 1: years ago as they age and develop. Very interesting. So um,
Speaker 1: there you might be out there, especially if you're a
Speaker 1: concretist like Chuck Um thinking like you might be rocking
Speaker 1: in your seat right now, face flushed about to faint
Speaker 1: out of rage, Cameron, because like, this is by definition unscientific.
Speaker 1: It's not provable in the form that James put it forth.
Speaker 1: It's more of a concept, uh, an idea, and apparently
Speaker 1: he was well aware of that. He didn't touted as
Speaker 1: as anything more than that. But question uh. The director
Speaker 1: of the Julian Jane Society likes to point out that, um,
Speaker 1: it was he was basically laying the groundwork for an
Speaker 1: entirely new way of looking at things so that other
Speaker 1: people could come along and you know, take it up
Speaker 1: and and figure out how he was wrong, how he
Speaker 1: was right, what needed fleshing out, what made sense, and
Speaker 1: it's that form and people have been doing that again.
Speaker 1: This is this is like a crackpot theory that has
Speaker 1: never gone away because the more people pay attention to
Speaker 1: it and the more we start to understand about the brain,
Speaker 1: the more sense it kind of makes. Uh. And it
Speaker 1: it seems to be gaining traction rather than losing it
Speaker 1: over the like fifty years that it's been around. I
Speaker 1: think it's interesting. I don't hate this stuff. I'm not
Speaker 1: rocking in my chair. David Bowie loved it. He said
Speaker 1: that the origin of consciousness is the breakdown of bicameral mind.
Speaker 1: I think that was it. No, he said it was
Speaker 1: one of the top hundred books to read. Oh all right,
Speaker 1: I believe that totally. It's very Bowie thing for sure,
Speaker 1: and other people too. Um. And then one other thing
Speaker 1: another way to put all this to kind of sum
Speaker 1: it up that I saw it put is that, um,
Speaker 1: we developed at some point back in the in history
Speaker 1: a left brain bias, you know, which kind of ties
Speaker 1: into your original view of the whole thing, which was,
Speaker 1: you know, they weren't conscious that they were conscious? Right?
Speaker 1: You like that? You got anything else? Uh? I might,
Speaker 1: but I might just not be aware of it man,
Speaker 1: as I said, this is the best episode we've ever
Speaker 1: done since Chuck Giggles, which everybody loves. I think. Then
Speaker 1: it's time for a listener mail. Uh, this is about
Speaker 1: the freedom of the Press episode and this was a
Speaker 1: Josh request. Hey guys, how freedom of the press word
Speaker 1: struck a particular chord with me. I used to work
Speaker 1: as a science teacher but was finding more and more
Speaker 1: students were being duped by pseudoscience on the Internet and
Speaker 1: weren't being provided the tools to recognize this. So I
Speaker 1: did a master's in the library and information science and
Speaker 1: now a school librarian on a minute mission to vanquish disinformation.
Speaker 1: While I've included the topic of journalism in terms of
Speaker 1: approaching news critically as with any online source of information,
Speaker 1: your recent podcast on how Freedom the Press works really
Speaker 1: inspired me to put forward more information and content about
Speaker 1: media freedoms and the risks for journalists. Here in Sweden,
Speaker 1: it's very easy to take freedom to press for granted.
Speaker 1: Last year, in sympathy with my American colleagues, I put
Speaker 1: up a display of banned books tracked by the a
Speaker 1: l A, and each book had a tag listing the
Speaker 1: years and ranking a book was challenged, and I encouraged
Speaker 1: the students to guess what for. It led to a
Speaker 1: lot of really good That's what I loved. This experiment
Speaker 1: with students led to a lot of really good discussions.
Speaker 1: Many students hadn't realized the scale of how many books
Speaker 1: have been banned or challenged. Were horrified to see their
Speaker 1: own favorite books on display. Uh And we're also shocked
Speaker 1: by the justification, as are we always. Now that COVID
Speaker 1: restrictions are being lifted, I'm very much looking forward to
Speaker 1: taking students to the world's first library of censored books,
Speaker 1: the Dowitt Isaac Library in the Malmer Archives as a
Speaker 1: new mole so that students can see the extent of
Speaker 1: limitations on the press and media freedoms around the world.
Speaker 1: Thanks again for the fascinating show and all around amazing series.
Speaker 1: Kind regards uh Met van liga Hell's Niggar that is
Speaker 1: must just be a salutation and Swedish that comes from
Speaker 1: ms ms Alice Antonsen. She hear hers, thank you, Alice.
Speaker 1: That is amazing. I'm so glad we've we got to
Speaker 1: that listener meal because I've been proud of that person
Speaker 1: for a very long time. Ever since that you came
Speaker 1: in totally. How about Sweden Hunt, keeping the American Dream alive?
Speaker 1: And Chuck Also, before we sign off, there's something I've
Speaker 1: been meaning to address that you said earlier. You said
Speaker 1: you have a dumb brain. You know you don't? Did
Speaker 1: I say that? Yeah? You did. So if you want
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us like Alice did and
Speaker 1: show the world what a hero you are, we would
Speaker 1: love to hear that kind of thing, you can email
Speaker 1: us to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff
Speaker 1: you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
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