Speaker 1: Hey, are you welcome to stuff to blow your mind?
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: it's Saturday. Time to go back into the vault. Now.
Speaker 1: If you were with us last Saturday, you were here
Speaker 1: for our rerun of the classic episode, part one of
Speaker 1: our exploration of the bicameral mind hypothesis and Julian Jaynes
Speaker 1: from from September I think it was originally, and so
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the last episode we talked a
Speaker 1: little bit about what our thoughts about the bicameral mind
Speaker 1: have been since we first talked about this idea. My
Speaker 1: basic take is that I don't think it's correct as
Speaker 1: a theory of where consciousness came from, yet it remains
Speaker 1: a fascinating, comprehensive hypothesis to explore, even if its main
Speaker 1: point is I think probably wrong. Some sub points that
Speaker 1: Jane's makes within his argument are really interesting and may
Speaker 1: in fact have some historical purchase. And it's also just
Speaker 1: a great, fun, fascinating book to read. I also think
Speaker 1: it's interesting how one can you can almost feel like
Speaker 1: a religious zeal for it, you know, like and sometimes
Speaker 1: I detected that in you. Yeah, Well, like I said
Speaker 1: in the last episode, there's this there's this way that
Speaker 1: the hypothesis can make the magic of religion and mythology, uh,
Speaker 1: seem more believable and seem more possible. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: especially from more of a like a grounded skeptical point
Speaker 1: of view, and uh and it but it's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing too, I can imagine how like I can
Speaker 1: easily envision some sort of alternate future or even an
Speaker 1: alternate at present in which the bi cameral mind has
Speaker 1: become a kind of religion. So anyway, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a It was a fascinating pair of episodes to record,
Speaker 1: and I wouldn't rule out returning to it at some
Speaker 1: point in the future if we find enough new angles
Speaker 1: to take on it and new things to say about it,
Speaker 1: or find some individuals who would want to talk with
Speaker 1: us about it. Yeah. I know. Since we did these episodes,
Speaker 1: I've read articles about all of the all of the
Speaker 1: like sort of popular mainstream academics and thinkers and sky
Speaker 1: allers who are sort of secretly fans of this theory.
Speaker 1: I think, maybe sort of in the same camp we are, Like,
Speaker 1: they don't necessarily believe it's correct, but they're just they
Speaker 1: can't stop thinking about it. I know I've seen Daniel
Speaker 1: Dennett placed in this camp before that he's sort of
Speaker 1: secretly a fan of it. I now have to say
Speaker 1: that among the various ways I try and interpret attacks,
Speaker 1: you know, you looking at it as literature, as as
Speaker 1: some sort of you know, a true story, as some
Speaker 1: sort of allegorical story, etcetera, I also throw in the
Speaker 1: bicamera right mind, and I think, well, what's the bicamera
Speaker 1: read on this? And it's a really fun fun way
Speaker 1: to to to pass the time if you find yourself
Speaker 1: being like bombarded with a kind of say, boring Bible story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can totally see how it would play that kind
Speaker 1: of role. I would be interested in returning to it
Speaker 1: some day, especially if we could find a way of
Speaker 1: bringing some fresh evidence to it, anything in in support
Speaker 1: or in opposition. I mean, one thing I would I
Speaker 1: have thought would be interesting is just try to find
Speaker 1: lots of counter examples to Jane's idea that like ancient
Speaker 1: literature is not display interiority, that the most ancient stories,
Speaker 1: people don't seem to have inner minds, that they just
Speaker 1: you know, their decisions come from deliverances of the gods,
Speaker 1: and if you can just collect lots of examples where
Speaker 1: that's not the case, that could provide some sort of
Speaker 1: counter evidence to say, Okay, so he's probably not right
Speaker 1: about this part of the theory, but other things might
Speaker 1: might still have some purchase. Yeah. Absolutely, So on that note,
Speaker 1: we're going to dive back in. We're gonna play the
Speaker 1: second part of our bi cameral Mind episode we hope
Speaker 1: you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from
Speaker 1: how Stuffworks dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe
Speaker 1: McCormick in today. This is going to be part two
Speaker 1: of our two part series on Julian Jaynes and the
Speaker 1: bicameral mind and the origin of consciousness in the Breakdown
Speaker 1: of the bi cameral Mind. So as this is part
Speaker 1: two of a two part episode. If you haven't heard
Speaker 1: part one yet, you should go back and listen to
Speaker 1: that one first. Sometimes we say, you know, if you
Speaker 1: feel like jumping right in and go for it, this
Speaker 1: is one where I feel like you're really going to
Speaker 1: have a hard time following us if you haven't heard
Speaker 1: part one yet, because that's gonna be where we explain
Speaker 1: what Julian Jamee's main hypothesis is and how he arrived
Speaker 1: at it. And then in the second episode we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about evidence for it from the ancient world
Speaker 1: and from the modern world. Yeah, this episode is going
Speaker 1: to be full of like falling kingdoms and whispering statues
Speaker 1: and other great stuff, but you need that first episode
Speaker 1: to understand it. Now, as with the first episode, we
Speaker 1: want to make clear that we're not necessarily endorsing this hypothesis.
Speaker 1: This is a very controversial hypothesis. It's not something that
Speaker 1: is at all considered proven or even necessarily very well
Speaker 1: attested by evidence. It's something that is controversial but very
Speaker 1: fascinating I think worth exploring as a hypothetical. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: is a it is a radical hypothesis and if nothing else,
Speaker 1: it is just a fascinating thought experiments. So as we
Speaker 1: discuss it again, you're going to hear us Uh discussing
Speaker 1: it as if it was fact, as if this is
Speaker 1: actually how ancient people thought. But that is just a
Speaker 1: part of our exploration of the hypothesis. Now, to briefly
Speaker 1: recap the core of Julian James theory, and we should say,
Speaker 1: Julian James, when did he live? Nine? Yeah? So nine seven.
Speaker 1: Julian James was an American psychologist. He's primarily known for
Speaker 1: this book that was published in nineteen seventy six called
Speaker 1: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,
Speaker 1: And the thrust of that book is, until about three
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, human beings were not conscious. They did
Speaker 1: not possess consciousness and the way we do today. And
Speaker 1: around that time, roughly three thousand years ago, modern human
Speaker 1: consciousness began as a cultural invention, probably in Mesopotamia that's
Speaker 1: spread around the world over time. And before that time,
Speaker 1: for thousands of years, almost all humans were not conscious
Speaker 1: in the way we are, but instead we're unconscious beings
Speaker 1: commanded in all novel behaviors by hallucinated voices that they
Speaker 1: called gods or another way of putting it. And uh,
Speaker 1: and James himself put it this way, everybody was schizophrenic
Speaker 1: sort of. Yeah, I mean, so schizophrenia, as Jane's imagines,
Speaker 1: it is one form or a modified version of a
Speaker 1: regression to this bicameral mind state that used to be
Speaker 1: the norm for how humans and ancient civilizations lived and
Speaker 1: so this norm would be that most of the time
Speaker 1: you would be going around unconsciously behaving out of habit
Speaker 1: you know, you have a stimulus response behaviors, and you
Speaker 1: would have habitual behaviors that you would enact, and this
Speaker 1: would serve to do most things that would be you know,
Speaker 1: recurrent repetitive behaviors over the day. But whenever something new happened,
Speaker 1: whenever you needed to make a decision and there was
Speaker 1: a stress point induced by that decision, you would be
Speaker 1: told what to do by a hallucinated auditor or voice
Speaker 1: that you would perceive as a god, and that you
Speaker 1: would enact that. Now, this is, as you said, a
Speaker 1: radical hypothesis. Yeah, because again the idea here is that
Speaker 1: everybody heard these voices, that this was the universal human experience,
Speaker 1: this was the norm, right, And so obviously I mean
Speaker 1: that that sounds kind of crazy to us, now, like
Speaker 1: what really could could that be true? So if there
Speaker 1: is any truth to Jane's theory, and as we said before,
Speaker 1: we're not necessarily endorsing it as true, just entertaining it
Speaker 1: as an interesting hypothesis, we should be able to find
Speaker 1: some evidence of that theory. And so we can look
Speaker 1: at psychiatry, and we can look at neuroscience, and we
Speaker 1: can look at evidence from the ancient world. And today
Speaker 1: we're going to start by looking at evidence from the
Speaker 1: ancient world, from history, from archaeology, from ancient literature. If
Speaker 1: there was a bicameral mind state, this divided mind state,
Speaker 1: where one half of the brain spoke to the other
Speaker 1: as the voice of a god and commanded the unconscious
Speaker 1: other half, we should be able to see that in
Speaker 1: the behaviors of a people's and the traces left of
Speaker 1: those behaviors. Right, So, a lot of this episode is
Speaker 1: going to be uh, Joe and I discussing some of
Speaker 1: the examples that James brings up in the book. We
Speaker 1: can't possibly touch on all of the examples because much
Speaker 1: of the book, and much of the real joy of
Speaker 1: the book is is him bringing up these various examples
Speaker 1: from from historical accounts, from archaeology, from literature, and using
Speaker 1: that to support the idea of the by bicameral mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and one of the pleasures of the book is even
Speaker 1: if Jane's hypothesis does turn out to be entirely incorrect,
Speaker 1: you know, if there never was any bicameral mind, if
Speaker 1: consciousness is not a recent invention. If he's wrong about
Speaker 1: all that, it's still a fascinating book just because of
Speaker 1: the way he pulls in so many different disciplines and
Speaker 1: ranges throughout history, incorporating evidence in such an amazing and
Speaker 1: fascinating way. All right, well, let's jump into it a
Speaker 1: bit here and are discussing some of the evidence that
Speaker 1: James brought up in the book. Okay, Well, one of
Speaker 1: the things that we probably should be able to think
Speaker 1: about is if ancient people's perceived auditory hallucinations that they
Speaker 1: regarded as gods, and these gods told them what to do.
Speaker 1: There should be some evidence of this in what traces
Speaker 1: they left of their relationship to the gods they believed in. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And one of those examples, Jane's argues is the positioning
Speaker 1: of the houses of the gods. So this is the
Speaker 1: basic idea. Well, so today you travel to a big city.
Speaker 1: Let's say you go to Washington, d C. All right,
Speaker 1: this is our example, not James. So I'm in Washington,
Speaker 1: all right, and you seek out the grandest, most centralized home,
Speaker 1: the one that just really stands out from the rest,
Speaker 1: is the most protected it has them. You know, the
Speaker 1: most central status of any other habitat. Okay, so I'm
Speaker 1: imagining it is the home of an extremely tall, thin
Speaker 1: person that stands looking out over the water. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's one one interpretation. No way, that thing isn't a home,
Speaker 1: is it. No, well, it's not a home. But I
Speaker 1: mean that is an example of a of a building
Speaker 1: of prominence with a with a statue in it, which
Speaker 1: kind of gets into some additional arguments that we're going
Speaker 1: to make here. But no, no, no no, you'd expect to
Speaker 1: find the home of a king, right, yeah, yeah, you would.
Speaker 1: That's the thing, right, you would want to you would expect,
Speaker 1: all right, this is the center of the town. The
Speaker 1: whole town is built around this. It occupies a spatial
Speaker 1: center as well as just the center of meaning and purpose.
Speaker 1: Or maybe sorry, that was probably my sexism talking to
Speaker 1: a king or a queen. In any case, you would
Speaker 1: expect the ruling person to live there. But what have
Speaker 1: you entered into this grand building at the center of
Speaker 1: the city and you found that it was home only
Speaker 1: to a quote hallucinated presence, perhaps a statue of that
Speaker 1: presence in the case of Abraham Lincoln, if you will.
Speaker 1: But still for our purposes here an unreal entity, a god,
Speaker 1: a goddess. Um. You can also look to two cities
Speaker 1: in which a church still occupies the central ground, and
Speaker 1: James argues that this is an ect, perhaps an echo
Speaker 1: of the bicameral past. So why would that, why would
Speaker 1: that be evidence of a bicameral past. To find churches
Speaker 1: or temples at the center of a city as opposed
Speaker 1: to the house of a king. Well, the idea here
Speaker 1: is that the voice occupied the center of our thoughts,
Speaker 1: and so to it occupied the center of the town
Speaker 1: or the city, and that the house of the God
Speaker 1: or the house of the gods was quite literally the
Speaker 1: house of the gods. Yeah, yeah, this is true. So
Speaker 1: if I remember hearing when I was a kid people saying,
Speaker 1: you know, be be respectful when you're in church because
Speaker 1: it's God's house. But the churches I was going to
Speaker 1: didn't literally believe that the God they worshiped lived in
Speaker 1: the church. That was just where humans congregated to worship.
Speaker 1: That's not so much the case in ancient religions. It
Speaker 1: really does seem like in many ancient religions, the place
Speaker 1: of worship or the the you know, the sacred building
Speaker 1: was literally where the God inhabited. Yeah, where the God inhabited,
Speaker 1: and then as things sort of go on, the place
Speaker 1: where God may visit, the place where God maybe uh
Speaker 1: contact did so. He draws on examples from the god
Speaker 1: houses at Jericho, the zigarato or which we discussed in
Speaker 1: our Tower of Babbel episode, as well as the city
Speaker 1: of Hatasus, the Bronze Age capital of the hitt Eede Empire,
Speaker 1: and in the ladder this was actually a mountain shrine
Speaker 1: with images of the overwatching gods rather than a city center,
Speaker 1: but he said it's kind of an exception that that
Speaker 1: also lines up with the argument. He also looks to
Speaker 1: the old mec and Mayan empires as Bicameral Mesoamerican empires
Speaker 1: due to the presence of quote huge otherwise useless, centrally
Speaker 1: located buildings, in chief among these the Pyramid of TiO
Speaker 1: Tiwakan in modern Mexico. And I love how he mentioned,
Speaker 1: you know, otherwise useless buildings because this touches on on
Speaker 1: our discussions in the Tower of Babbel episode regarding the ziggurats.
Speaker 1: A lot of our our study of the past has
Speaker 1: been us trying to figure out what was this for purpose?
Speaker 1: And a lot of times we try and figure out
Speaker 1: a practical purpose. You know what purpose did this structure have? Absolutely?
Speaker 1: I mean these building projects consumed vast resources. I mean
Speaker 1: to build the most prominent and the highest and well
Speaker 1: defended building in the middle of an inhabited space. That
Speaker 1: just seems like, why would you waste that on being
Speaker 1: there for a being that is not that does not
Speaker 1: physically need a house. Yeah, unless you are a people
Speaker 1: for whom the voice of God is real. Again, this
Speaker 1: is just the wonder of this theory is that it
Speaker 1: turns so much of ancient history on its head. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and then also you know more recent history, as
Speaker 1: this is all an echo of the past. Now, in
Speaker 1: the previous episode, we pointed out that you know the
Speaker 1: by the voice of the bicameral mind it is it's
Speaker 1: coming in to help you deal with novel experiences that
Speaker 1: pop up, and how it might be helpful but it
Speaker 1: might also be destructive. Well, in the same way that
Speaker 1: a conscious person can make good decisions or can make
Speaker 1: bad decisions, the God guiding the behaviors of the unconscious
Speaker 1: bicameral person, if this person ever existed, could be giving
Speaker 1: good advice or bad advice. I mean it's based on
Speaker 1: the integrated powers of the brain. In both cases, it's
Speaker 1: just that is it consciously happening or is it being
Speaker 1: delivered to you as a command that must be obeyed. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and along these lines, he attributes the construction of
Speaker 1: ancient meso American cities that are located in inhospitable areas,
Speaker 1: such as you on top of a mountain or uh,
Speaker 1: in the middle of a swamp on the you know,
Speaker 1: on the side of a cliff. He says that, uh,
Speaker 1: that these are areas that yeah, again, we're inhospitable, and
Speaker 1: they may have been abandoned at some point later on. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is because they were linked to the commands
Speaker 1: of quote hallucinations, which in certain periods could be not
Speaker 1: only irrational but downright punishing. Now that's possible, but it's
Speaker 1: also possible that we in the modern world are just
Speaker 1: not seeing correctly what the benefits of these spaces were.
Speaker 1: That's right, I mean, we're always working with imperfect data. Um.
Speaker 1: He does not reference this, but I couldn't help but
Speaker 1: think of Montezuma Castle in modern Arizona. These were cliff
Speaker 1: side dwellings of the Sinegua culture that were abandoned around
Speaker 1: four after centuries of occupation. Now now, various explanations for
Speaker 1: the abandonment of Montezuma Castle include a drought, resource depletion,
Speaker 1: tribal conflict, and interestingly enough religious religious inclination to move.
Speaker 1: Now you can get into a discussion of of how
Speaker 1: that would possibly line up with james timeline for the
Speaker 1: bicameral mine, but he does point out that by the
Speaker 1: time the Incans encountered Europeans in the fifteenth century, uh,
Speaker 1: there was perhaps a combination of things bicameral and things
Speaker 1: proto subjective subjective. Yeah, and that is one feature of
Speaker 1: his theory that for a long period of time it
Speaker 1: wasn't just like everyone was bicameral and then everyone was conscious.
Speaker 1: You had a long period of the slow death of
Speaker 1: bike emeral society turning into being taken over by conscious people.
Speaker 1: You know, this makes me think of shows like Game
Speaker 1: of Thrones and other fantasy worlds where magic slowly bleeds
Speaker 1: out of the world, because that's essentially the argument here
Speaker 1: is that over time, fewer and fewer people are hearing
Speaker 1: the voice voices of the gods. Fewer people are hearing
Speaker 1: the voices of the spirits of the departed loved ones, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And yet they're surrounded by the cultural memory of people
Speaker 1: who did hear the voices of the gods, or people
Speaker 1: who still hear the voices of the gods today even
Speaker 1: though they can't. So you have this society in which
Speaker 1: there are conscious people who are are constantly being reminded
Speaker 1: that they could be in contact with the gods, but
Speaker 1: they're not, and this, I imagine is very distressing and
Speaker 1: frustrating to these people. And you know, this is also
Speaker 1: interesting in that you eventually have this clash between the
Speaker 1: Inca Empire and the Spanish Empire. And he says that
Speaker 1: this was as close, too close to anything in our
Speaker 1: history as to a meeting of these two different minds,
Speaker 1: of the bicameral mind and the conscious mind, like two
Speaker 1: different cultures uh encountering each other. Um And yet he
Speaker 1: points to a number of different arguments for and against
Speaker 1: the Inca Empire being a bicameral empire. Well, it could
Speaker 1: have been an empire in transition, as many of these
Speaker 1: others were for so long. Yeah, I think basically, he
Speaker 1: says that he believes that if there was a transition
Speaker 1: from a bicameral society to a conscious society. That it
Speaker 1: began in Mesopotamia about you know, roughly one thousand BC. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a few hundred years on each side. It
Speaker 1: was a slow transition and spread around the world from there. Yes.
Speaker 1: So with the Inca in particularly, he um, he points
Speaker 1: out that on one hand, uh, the administrative demands and
Speaker 1: politics were probably beyond something that a purely bicameral culture
Speaker 1: could handle. Yet they had a god king who was
Speaker 1: the Inca among them, and there were you know, other
Speaker 1: aspects of bicameral culture as well. Uh. And these may
Speaker 1: have been again to your point, mere traditional echoes of
Speaker 1: the past, but he points out that that you you
Speaker 1: had these gold and jeweled spools that members of the
Speaker 1: top of Inca hierarchy they wore in their ears and
Speaker 1: sometimes with images of the Sun on them. That these
Speaker 1: may have indicated that those same ears, we're hearing the
Speaker 1: voice of the Sun, since the Sun was a god. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he spends a lot of time with various examples
Speaker 1: discussing the importance of eye symbolism, ear symbolism, as as
Speaker 1: showing that that the individual or the statue is somehow
Speaker 1: involved in speech or hearing. Now, one of the things
Speaker 1: I wanted to revisit from our last episode is just
Speaker 1: the idea that James is not necessarily saying that, for example,
Speaker 1: the bicameral mind is not as good as the conscious mind.
Speaker 1: I know, we with our conscious bias, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: would naturally kind of feel that way. But it's not
Speaker 1: necessarily that conscious minds are better or more valuable or
Speaker 1: even smarter. Mean, that's not just that's just not necessarily
Speaker 1: the case. It's that they have different adaptive strengths, and
Speaker 1: so having different strengths, a sudden clash of a conscious
Speaker 1: culture against a bicameral culture could be very disastrous for
Speaker 1: one or the other. Yeah, I mean, this is this
Speaker 1: is basically the the the key example of an outside
Speaker 1: context problem in our world. And uh, and James has
Speaker 1: a just a beautiful little description of how this would
Speaker 1: have gone down. Assuming that this is a meeting of
Speaker 1: a bicameral or partially bicameral culture in the Inca and
Speaker 1: a conscious culture in that of the Spaniards, He says, quote,
Speaker 1: it is possible that it was one of the few
Speaker 1: confrontations between subjective and bicameral minds that for things as
Speaker 1: unfamiliar as Inca at a Wappo was confronted with these rough,
Speaker 1: milk skinned men with hair drooling from their chins instead
Speaker 1: of from their scalps, so that their heads looked upside down,
Speaker 1: clothed in metal, with avertive eyes writing strain ange lama
Speaker 1: like creatures with silver who's having arrived like gods in
Speaker 1: gigantic quampas uh teared like mockagan temples over the sea,
Speaker 1: which to the Inca was unsailable that for all this
Speaker 1: there were no bicameral voices coming from the sun or
Speaker 1: from the golden statues of Cuzco in their dazzling towers,
Speaker 1: not subjectively conscious, unable to deceive or to nar narraw
Speaker 1: to rize out the deception of others, the Inca and
Speaker 1: his lords were captured like helpless automatons. Oh man, it's
Speaker 1: a horrible thing to imagine, as I mean, reading anything
Speaker 1: about the European conquest of the Americans is always like
Speaker 1: a horrible thing to Yeah, you don't have hold have
Speaker 1: to imagine a separate state of mind for it to
Speaker 1: be a rather horrific uh encounter, But yeah, that is
Speaker 1: One of the features of his hypothesis is, so one
Speaker 1: of the things that consciousness gives us is a capability
Speaker 1: for treachery. Yes, that really the bicameral person, and it's
Speaker 1: not very much capable of treachery. I mean, they can't
Speaker 1: prolong a deceptive behavior, right because they can't run this
Speaker 1: internal narrative of how they should behave if they were
Speaker 1: to believe one thing versus how they you know, really
Speaker 1: what goal they'll be working towards secretly, it just doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like that works out very well. But these conscious
Speaker 1: people are capable of extreme deception and treachery and the
Speaker 1: ability to just be jerks all right. Now. Another area
Speaker 1: that that he brings up is that of essentially the
Speaker 1: love to dead. He points to the burial of the
Speaker 1: dead as if they were still alive as being a
Speaker 1: key evidence for by the bicameral mind. So we've covered
Speaker 1: a number of different mommification practices on the show over
Speaker 1: the year. So I think everyone here knows the drill
Speaker 1: the corpse as an astronaut on a cosmic journey to
Speaker 1: the other side. You know, there's some sort of an
Speaker 1: elaborate tomb. Maybe fill that tomb with items that that
Speaker 1: individual loved in a low life and therefore might continue
Speaker 1: to need on a trip. And then beyond that, you
Speaker 1: may even supply them, as we see in the case
Speaker 1: of Egyptian tombs with food stuffs, with with perishable goods
Speaker 1: to to aid them in the journey. And the idea
Speaker 1: here is that if this goes beyond the mere idea
Speaker 1: that oh, well, they like to cheeseburger, so let's put
Speaker 1: a cheeseburger in there as a you know, a token
Speaker 1: is some sort of uh, just a tribute to them.
Speaker 1: It's the idea that that no, I still hear their voice,
Speaker 1: they are still speaking to me, even though the body
Speaker 1: has stopped moving. I will put a cheeseburger in there
Speaker 1: for them to eat, exactly. Yeah. So we think of
Speaker 1: tokens to the dead today primarily as uh, it's something
Speaker 1: representing the way the living feel. Yeah, But no, the
Speaker 1: belief here was that the dead person still needed that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And he says that this spills over to the treatment
Speaker 1: of ordinary dead as well as royal dead in many
Speaker 1: of these ancient cultures. But the concept of bearing the
Speaker 1: dead in massive tombs, pres irving their bodies, providing them
Speaker 1: with physical luxuries and even food. Uh, this is key.
Speaker 1: And and in cases where there was no food, such
Speaker 1: as the graves at Larsa and Mesopotamia from around that Uh,
Speaker 1: he says there these areas were foodless because the tombs
Speaker 1: were beneath human habitation, so that the dead essentially still
Speaker 1: lived among the living, so that they would wander up
Speaker 1: into the house and you would literally hallucinate them doing
Speaker 1: so and telling you what to do. Yeah. Now, James
Speaker 1: admits that grief could have been the core motivation and
Speaker 1: most of these rights, and certainly, I think that's the
Speaker 1: way we think about it when we're trying to put
Speaker 1: ourselves in the shoes of ancient people. Right. I Mean,
Speaker 1: another very plausible and perhaps the more probable answer is
Speaker 1: just that people wished their loved ones were still alive
Speaker 1: and wanted to behave as if they could be. Now. Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: he argues that grief alone wouldn't be able to account
Speaker 1: for all of these practices. I mean, I think it
Speaker 1: depends on your example and uh, and you know what
Speaker 1: your experience with bereavement is. I think that a lot
Speaker 1: of his can a test that. Yeah, that that the
Speaker 1: loss of a loved one or even the loss of
Speaker 1: just a you know, I loved celebrity in many cases
Speaker 1: can can have a big impact, a huge impact on
Speaker 1: your life. So uh yeah, I don't know to what
Speaker 1: extent I completely agree with that assessment, but I still
Speaker 1: think it's a it's an interesting case to be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, in a bicameral culture, you could imagine that
Speaker 1: when Prince died, everybody would still be hearing him sing
Speaker 1: into their ear. Yeah, because what is Prince but a
Speaker 1: you know, royal of the modern age. All Right, we're
Speaker 1: gonna take a quick break, and when we come back,
Speaker 1: we will keep looking at evidence from the ancient world
Speaker 1: that may indicate a bicameral past. Okay, we're back. You know, Joe,
Speaker 1: you mentioned uh uh statue of Lincoln to the top
Speaker 1: of this episode. I know, Oh, you know what, I think.
Speaker 1: I think I was talking about what's it called the
Speaker 1: obelisk the Washington Oh, I think you mean when you
Speaker 1: were talking about a statue of a tall, slender figure.
Speaker 1: I thought you meant Lincoln. You know this can tell
Speaker 1: slender dude. There's a miscommunication that so easily comes with
Speaker 1: our conscious inability to communicate. Well, you've been you've seen
Speaker 1: Lincoln his statue in Washington. Yeah, he's just sitting in
Speaker 1: that chair, but he probably has not spoken to you.
Speaker 1: And I mean I don't mean that in a in
Speaker 1: a metaphorical sense or anything. I mean that statue has
Speaker 1: not literally spoke. You have not heard the voice of
Speaker 1: that statue. No, But if I were a bicameral person,
Speaker 1: apparently I might, like I could go to pay reverence
Speaker 1: to that statue, but I wouldn't just be paying reverence,
Speaker 1: I'd be getting advice on what to do exactly. So
Speaker 1: that's the next point that the James made, is that
Speaker 1: we have these idols of the speaking stone that that
Speaker 1: that play into all these different cultures. So we've already
Speaker 1: mentioned that, all right, your your father's voice is still
Speaker 1: in your head, like literally in your head. You're still
Speaker 1: hearing it after they have died because of this confusion
Speaker 1: to take place about about the nature of death. So
Speaker 1: your your parents did die, yet you still hear their admonitions, right,
Speaker 1: and then the king dies, you still hear the voice
Speaker 1: of the king. So one of the first humans just
Speaker 1: raised up the corpses and skulls of their dead loved
Speaker 1: ones and their dead leaders. Uh, and after that we
Speaker 1: would turn more and more to two various artificial likenesses
Speaker 1: of those individuals in varying degrees of detail. So we
Speaker 1: we can find crude humanoid figurings dating back to a
Speaker 1: roughly UM fifty six hundred BC in what's modern day
Speaker 1: Turkey and Uh and relatively these are relics that were
Speaker 1: already ancient when the pyramids were built. Now Frasier would
Speaker 1: have classified such carvings as just fertility figures, but James
Speaker 1: points out that that was the horse. He was right,
Speaker 1: and he was trying to cram everything into those boxes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But but James points out that you you can find
Speaker 1: them in very fertile parts of the world, such as
Speaker 1: what they all metal civilization, and he points to some
Speaker 1: of the areous um attributes of these likenesses open mouths,
Speaker 1: exaggerated ears, as if the statue is going to listen
Speaker 1: to you and speak to you. And in the case
Speaker 1: of the Old Mix, the creation of such idle skyrocketed
Speaker 1: about seven hundred see but Jayne's questions whether this was
Speaker 1: due to the cease of the voices, So did the
Speaker 1: voices stop so that you you were crafting more and
Speaker 1: more of these details to try and bring them back
Speaker 1: or was it due to a multiplication of them, So
Speaker 1: you know, you're having to deal with the chaos of
Speaker 1: all these voices. Now, he argues that many artifacts might
Speaker 1: have been quote semi hallucinatory uh mnemonic aids for the
Speaker 1: non conscious people. So they're all it's also about remembering
Speaker 1: things and um, you know, adding order to life. But
Speaker 1: he argues that quote some of these small objects, we
Speaker 1: may be confident we're capable of assisting with the production
Speaker 1: of bicameral voices, and he points to Mesopotamian ie idols
Speaker 1: from around three thousand bees. He and the eyes of
Speaker 1: these and numerous others were figures were important to focus
Speaker 1: because of our involved dependency on eye contact for communication.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, and then it's only left for the statue
Speaker 1: to speak to us and speak they did, uh, not
Speaker 1: only according to bicameral mind theory here, but also just
Speaker 1: according to various accounts. Um Uniform literature he writes provides
Speaker 1: examples of speaking statues. If you turn in your Old
Speaker 1: Testament to a sequel one, there's an example of a
Speaker 1: Babylonian king who said to speak to idols, which were
Speaker 1: known as a terrup Yeah, they're there are all kinds
Speaker 1: of accounts of this throughout the ancient world of us.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is another case of like we were
Speaker 1: talking about in the last episode with ancient literature. You know,
Speaker 1: you read it and you feel you send something alien
Speaker 1: about the characters, and you're like, is that something I'm
Speaker 1: just not getting that's getting lost in translation or were
Speaker 1: they truly alien to my mentality? A similar thing is
Speaker 1: going on with when it describes the practices of hearing
Speaker 1: God speak. You could think like, okay, well I don't
Speaker 1: usually hear God speak. Um, so maybe there's just something this,
Speaker 1: you know, this like a literary device or something that's
Speaker 1: getting lost in translation. Or you could just say, no,
Speaker 1: I'll just take this literally. I'll take it at face value.
Speaker 1: Something was speaking to them and it was the other
Speaker 1: hemisphere of their brain. Yeah, So we get to this
Speaker 1: point where these statues, these artifacts become kind of focus
Speaker 1: points for the voice, like in a way to in
Speaker 1: a way summon the voice even when it's not, you know,
Speaker 1: directly called up by stressful circumstance. He has numerous tidbits
Speaker 1: to support this. Some of the really fun ones I
Speaker 1: found was he adds that to quote the conquered Aztecs
Speaker 1: told the Spanish invaders how their history began when a
Speaker 1: statue from a ruined temple belonging to a previous culture
Speaker 1: spoke to their leaders. So I just love the mental
Speaker 1: image of you know, these tribal individuals coming across the
Speaker 1: statute built by someone else, and it it summons the
Speaker 1: voices just to look at it. You can also imagine, though,
Speaker 1: how if this model is correct, conscious people would react
Speaker 1: very negatively to encountering bi cameral people and and the
Speaker 1: voices of their gods. Right, Oh yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 1: another example he makes is that you have the Spaniards,
Speaker 1: who again are conscious individuals steeped in Catholicism, and they
Speaker 1: come in and they encounter the native peoples and they
Speaker 1: actually reported that the people of the of Peru were
Speaker 1: a quote commanded by the devil. In that quote, the
Speaker 1: devil himself actually spoke to the Incas out of the
Speaker 1: mouths of their statues. So that could just be you know,
Speaker 1: historical cultural slander, or it could be them trying to
Speaker 1: make sense of practices they saw. Yeah, you know, before
Speaker 1: really getting into the bi cameral mind theory, I would
Speaker 1: have easily just said, well, that's just obviously just a
Speaker 1: bunch of xenophobic foreigners from another continent coming in and saying, oh,
Speaker 1: they have statues. They probably stand around listening to their
Speaker 1: voices and they obey the statues. I mean, either way,
Speaker 1: they are putting their their dominant racist spin on it.
Speaker 1: But it could be that they were actually observing a practice. Yes.
Speaker 1: Now again we always get into the same situation though,
Speaker 1: where they was this a practice that was based on
Speaker 1: on an existing bicameral experience or is it an echo
Speaker 1: of a bicameral past. Yeah, it could be either one.
Speaker 1: If there's anything to this theory. Another thing that I
Speaker 1: think is one of the most important takeaways of this
Speaker 1: whole theory is that if James is correct, it's not
Speaker 1: that people used to be more religious and now they're
Speaker 1: less religious. That's not the progression. It's that ancient bicameral
Speaker 1: religion and modern conscious religion are completely different types of things.
Speaker 1: Conscious religion requires an emphasis on things like faith and
Speaker 1: belief and organized systems of dogma. You know, they say
Speaker 1: here's what we believe and here's why you should believe it,
Speaker 1: and so it's like regulated by ecclesiastical authorities. It's addressed
Speaker 1: to an object that is not immediately apparent. Not so
Speaker 1: for bicameral religion. Right, So bicameral religion would have had
Speaker 1: no need for the concept of faith, because what's the
Speaker 1: point in telling people to believe in the gods that
Speaker 1: literally talk to them and appear before them all the time?
Speaker 1: That's right, I mean, the gods are speaking to you household,
Speaker 1: God's household spirits are speaking to you. Uh so you
Speaker 1: really there's not really any room to doubt there if
Speaker 1: doubt was even a thing that your mind can do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, our modern concept of religion you could look
Speaker 1: at as something that came to exist after the disappearance
Speaker 1: of the direct experience of the gods. Likewise, I mean
Speaker 1: could it could heresy even exist in such a world
Speaker 1: like everybody is I mean, certainly you're still going to
Speaker 1: have a structure to society, but everyone is hearing voices
Speaker 1: of the God. Everyone has has their their their radio
Speaker 1: set to the other world. Yeah, I mean, this is
Speaker 1: a world where the voices are speaking to everyone. Okay,
Speaker 1: I think we should look at one more thing about
Speaker 1: features we see of the organization of ancient societies before
Speaker 1: we start to look at some ancient literature. So how
Speaker 1: about the theocratic organization of ancient society. What what does
Speaker 1: that tell us about whether or not a bicameral mind
Speaker 1: ever existed? According to Julian James, well, in this we're
Speaker 1: getting into a topic that we've discussed before, the idea
Speaker 1: of divine kings. What does it mean that the king
Speaker 1: is either you know, the right hand man of God,
Speaker 1: works for God, or in some cases is God. That's
Speaker 1: an important distinction, and James makes that distinction. You know,
Speaker 1: there are two main types of kings for him, the
Speaker 1: steward king and the god king. Right, that's right, the
Speaker 1: steward king, this is where the king is a stand
Speaker 1: in for God and then the god king. The king
Speaker 1: is God. And James believe that both tides developed out
Speaker 1: of the more primitive bicameral situation where a new king
Speaker 1: ruled by obeying the hallucinated voice of a dead king,
Speaker 1: which sort of that gives you, like the you know,
Speaker 1: the succession order, right, Yeah, in fact, you're never really
Speaker 1: obeying you're never really obeying the new king, You're always
Speaker 1: obeying the old king through a sort of intermediary And
Speaker 1: in this he I mean, he even argues that the
Speaker 1: ziggurat centered civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia that in these cases
Speaker 1: it's not you can't even really look at it, like
Speaker 1: the human beings were the ones that were ruling, Like
Speaker 1: the ruling powers were the hallucinated voices of the various gods. Right,
Speaker 1: So it was not the left brain or the dominant
Speaker 1: side of the brain of the actual king, but it
Speaker 1: was the other hemisphere of their brain ruling, the dominant
Speaker 1: side ruling the people. Right. And he also gets into how,
Speaker 1: you know, we've talked about, Okay, you're reacting to statues
Speaker 1: humanoid figures, but on top of this we also end
Speaker 1: up with all additional uh, religious imagery symbology. That's that's
Speaker 1: this used even written language. Uh. He points out the
Speaker 1: quote reading in the third millennium BC may therefore have
Speaker 1: been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating
Speaker 1: the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than
Speaker 1: visual reading of syllables in our sense. Oh, that's that's fascinating.
Speaker 1: So you think about how reading takes place for us today.
Speaker 1: It is largely an unconscious thing if you're an adult
Speaker 1: that's been reading, not if you're a kid who's learning
Speaker 1: to read. Or if you know, at any point in
Speaker 1: your life, if you're learning to read, you do have
Speaker 1: to think about the constituent parts of words and sentences,
Speaker 1: like you have to sound them out and put them
Speaker 1: together in your mind using your conscious mind. Eventually reading
Speaker 1: becomes unconscious. I mean, I wonder if in this, in
Speaker 1: this bicameral framework, you would learn to read in an
Speaker 1: entirely unconscious way, the same way that maybe you get
Speaker 1: better at shooting basketballs or something in an unconscious way. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's so. Now. No, another thing that another point that
Speaker 1: he makes about language is that in reference to ancient Egyptians, uh,
Speaker 1: much like the language of the ancient Sumerians, he says
Speaker 1: that these languages were concrete from first to last, and
Speaker 1: that interpretations involving abstract thought, uh, these are the These
Speaker 1: are modern modern intrusions, and that basically the gods commanded
Speaker 1: rather than created. Yeah, and we'll see that more when
Speaker 1: we look in literature in the next section. Now, I
Speaker 1: I think I made reference already to household gods and
Speaker 1: household spirits. You encounter these in a lot of different cultures.
Speaker 1: If it's not household gods, then maybe it's a you know,
Speaker 1: just a memorial of various members of the family, right,
Speaker 1: And a lot of those traditions still carry on to
Speaker 1: this day. But the idea here is that not everyone
Speaker 1: can hear the voice of the ruling God, right, that
Speaker 1: would seem to be kind of chaotic if the even
Speaker 1: if it's just a simple model of the previous dead
Speaker 1: king speaking to the current king. I mean, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: make sense for everyone to hear that king's voice and
Speaker 1: have their authority. But everyone in this scenario, in the
Speaker 1: bicameral scenario, is hearing voices, So who are those voices? Well,
Speaker 1: there's a hierarchy of God's isn't exactly like because we
Speaker 1: there are different types of stressful situations. Imagine a scenario
Speaker 1: where one is cooking, preparing a meal in one's hut
Speaker 1: and um, let's say you've only got one piece of meat.
Speaker 1: I mean, you accidentally drop it onto the ground. There
Speaker 1: is a moment of panic. What do I do? Well,
Speaker 1: the household cooking God chimes in and says take it
Speaker 1: and wash it in the river or something to that effect,
Speaker 1: you know, and and it's solved. So that's five second
Speaker 1: rule us. Yeah, So this would be the case of
Speaker 1: a of a lesser deity coming in and calling the shot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. One of the things about ancient Religionny mentions
Speaker 1: in the book that is very interesting is his discussion
Speaker 1: of the evolution of the concepts of the car and
Speaker 1: the bar in h in Egyptian theology, where it's hard
Speaker 1: to I guess we can't summarize it here, but if
Speaker 1: you get a chance to read the book yourself, look
Speaker 1: out for that section. It's really interesting. It's it's about
Speaker 1: the way we're you know, words for theological concepts sort
Speaker 1: of transition into other into having other meanings. Now, part
Speaker 1: of the whole timeline, of course, is that as we've
Speaker 1: already stressed, that the gods cease speaking to everyone after
Speaker 1: a while and then cease all together for the most part.
Speaker 1: We'll get into the details of that as we we go.
Speaker 1: But but then when that happens, there's uh, their order collapses, uh.
Speaker 1: Cultures end up retreating into the jungles, and for many
Speaker 1: people everything has to be built up again. Basically, the
Speaker 1: idea here is that the bicameral mind, this, this whole
Speaker 1: system of hearing voices, this hold society together. This is
Speaker 1: it's it's an instrument of social control. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: it's it's like playing jinga with gravity and then gravity
Speaker 1: goes away, and then how do you hold the blocks together? Well,
Speaker 1: then suddenly have to come with new novel ways to
Speaker 1: do it, such as gluing them all together, I guess.
Speaker 1: Is so the political organization equivalent of that would be
Speaker 1: what it would be brutal dictatorship. Yeah, things like brutal
Speaker 1: dictatorship have to step in. Uh. Suddenly, you know, you
Speaker 1: have all these wars and just total bloodshed occurring because
Speaker 1: the voices that organized society have have stopped speaking or
Speaker 1: have certainly stopped speaking with enough regularity to hold everything together. So,
Speaker 1: in closing on this, he argues quote that man in
Speaker 1: his early civilizations had a profoundly different mentality from our own.
Speaker 1: That in fact, men and women were not conscious as
Speaker 1: we are. We're not responsible for their actions and therefore
Speaker 1: cannot be given the credit or blame for anything that
Speaker 1: was done over these vast millennia of time. That instead,
Speaker 1: each person had a part of his nervous system which
Speaker 1: was divine, by which he was ordered about like any
Speaker 1: slave of voice or voices, which indeed were what we
Speaker 1: call volition and empowered what they commanded and were related
Speaker 1: to the hallucinated voices of others in a carefully established hierarchy.
Speaker 1: And this mindset would have again developed over the over
Speaker 1: the ninth century BC to the second millennium BC, a
Speaker 1: gradual procession progression. Right, So that's the hypothesized era of
Speaker 1: the bicameral mind, which around the first millennium BC starts
Speaker 1: to decompose and fall apart. All right, we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a quick break, and when we come back, we will
Speaker 1: look at signs of the bicameral mind in ancient literature.
Speaker 1: Than all right, we're back, alright, So obviously it would
Speaker 1: make sense that we'd see examples or the examples could
Speaker 1: be made in literature, because, after all, the bicameral mind
Speaker 1: is uh is, according to the theory, according to the the
Speaker 1: hypothesis here an offshoot of the acquisition of language. Right,
Speaker 1: Jane says, language makes it exist. So could you could
Speaker 1: you look at ancient uses of language to find evidence
Speaker 1: of it? Now, another thing that complicates this is that
Speaker 1: James thinks that one of the causes of the decomposition
Speaker 1: of the bicameral mind into the conscious mind is the
Speaker 1: widespread introduction of language so this also writing ends up
Speaker 1: undermining the bicameral mind. But can we see signs of
Speaker 1: the bi cameral mind in ancient literature? I think he's
Speaker 1: got some interesting stuff to talk about here. Yet again,
Speaker 1: I want to be clear that I'm not endorsing his
Speaker 1: theory as correct, but I do think some of his claims,
Speaker 1: especially about what we see in Greek literature, are fascinating
Speaker 1: and a little terrifying. I have to admit when I
Speaker 1: was reading, you know, I kind of kind of gave
Speaker 1: me the willies at various points to try to imagine
Speaker 1: ancient people ruled by bicameral mind. But when you started
Speaker 1: talking about the Iliad in particular, kind of gave me
Speaker 1: chill bumps. So totally. So, the Iliot is one of
Speaker 1: Jane's chief examples of bicameral literature. So, of course the
Speaker 1: Iliad if you're if you never read it, It's an
Speaker 1: epic war poem that tells the story of an alliance
Speaker 1: of Greek kings and their warriors, primarily the warrior Achilles,
Speaker 1: laying siege to the city of Troy. This is the
Speaker 1: historical event now known as the Trojan War, and Jane's
Speaker 1: claims that the Iliad was develo by a group of
Speaker 1: oral storytellers or bards known as the ao E d
Speaker 1: And that's in contrast to sort of the traditional received
Speaker 1: knowledge that they were composed by an individual named Homer.
Speaker 1: I think it's probably more widely believed now that these
Speaker 1: are the works of many people of time. But anyway,
Speaker 1: that that war took place about twelve thirty b C.
Speaker 1: Or sorry, it was first composed around the time the
Speaker 1: war took place around twelve thirty BC, and it was
Speaker 1: first transcribed into written form around nine hundred or eight
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty b C. And scholars may believe some
Speaker 1: different dates now, but that's what James is working with.
Speaker 1: So when we look at the thoughts and behaviors of
Speaker 1: characters in the Iliad, it should tell us something about
Speaker 1: the mental life of people who composed and wrote the
Speaker 1: story about three thousand years ago. And when we examine this,
Speaker 1: what do we find. Well, James makes a really striking
Speaker 1: claim about the Iliad. It is a work of literature
Speaker 1: in which the characters are almost entirely devoid of any
Speaker 1: thing recognizable as consciousness. You do not really see introspection
Speaker 1: in the Iliad. There are a few passages which serve
Speaker 1: as exceptions to this. Generally, James thinks that they look
Speaker 1: like late additions to the text or signed or they
Speaker 1: could possibly be signs of early protoconscious thoughts seeping through.
Speaker 1: But primarily, the characters of the Iliad do not introspect,
Speaker 1: they do not narrotize, they do not seem to have
Speaker 1: conscious consideration. Instead, when they're faced with the need for
Speaker 1: novel behavior, what happens. They're told what to do by
Speaker 1: a god. A god makes them do it. Now, it's
Speaker 1: it's generally when we look back on pieces of literature
Speaker 1: like this, we think, well, this is just this was
Speaker 1: a primitive form of literature, This was a this is
Speaker 1: a more archaic um in a form of storytelling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you see it as a literary device, which very well
Speaker 1: could be. It makes me think, you know, all these
Speaker 1: various bad films that you and I enjoy, and sometimes
Speaker 1: they're enjoyably bad because the craftsmanship isn't there at various levels.
Speaker 1: Um if bicameral, if the bicameral mind hypothesis is true,
Speaker 1: could it be possible that that sometimes we love bad
Speaker 1: movies because they seem to have been created by a bicameral. Mind.
Speaker 1: I was with you every step of the way there, Robert.
Speaker 1: I can believe that there are movies that feel quite bicameral. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that feel as if they were like dictated by a
Speaker 1: divine presence rather than consciously thought through. All right, but
Speaker 1: but but back to the discussion here. So, yeah, we
Speaker 1: have this this war going on. There's no introspection, there's
Speaker 1: nothing that resembles consciousness, and at all the pivotal plot
Speaker 1: points are punctuated by a God stepping in and saying
Speaker 1: do this or do that. Yeah. So there might be
Speaker 1: like a scene where Achilles is going to reach out
Speaker 1: and kill his king Agamemnon, but instead it says, a
Speaker 1: God grabs him and tell and makes him not do it. Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 1: I would like to see more of that in our films, though,
Speaker 1: where you just have God's pop up and direct the
Speaker 1: course of action. You know, even in the words of
Speaker 1: the Greek, Jane says, uh, we can see something of
Speaker 1: bicamerality here because there are Greek words that later come
Speaker 1: to be used to refer to consciousness, and they appear
Speaker 1: throughout the Iliad, but through contextual clues we can tell
Speaker 1: that they mean something entirely different in the Iliad than
Speaker 1: what they mean when they later come to mean consciousness.
Speaker 1: For example, the word see he it's spelt psyche, you know,
Speaker 1: in the English pronunciation see he. In later centuries, this
Speaker 1: clearly comes to mean consciousness or mind or soul. That's
Speaker 1: how it is used in Greek, but in the Iliad
Speaker 1: phase it appears to refer to something more like physical
Speaker 1: life substances. Jane says it means something more like blood
Speaker 1: or breath, like if a soldier gets killed on the battlefield,
Speaker 1: his see he bleeds out onto the ground, or the
Speaker 1: word thumos. In later writings, Jane says this means something
Speaker 1: more like emotional mind or soul. In the Iliad, once again,
Speaker 1: it seems to have this base level animal meaning. It's
Speaker 1: something more like animation or motion. So when a soldier
Speaker 1: stops moving, the thumos goes out of his limbs, But
Speaker 1: it also seems to mean this weird kind of organ
Speaker 1: in the body that can be filled with the impetus
Speaker 1: for motion or activity. Next is noose. In later Greek,
Speaker 1: it certainly comes to mean consciousness, it's like a conscious mind,
Speaker 1: but in the Iliad it appears to mean something much plainer.
Speaker 1: It means like sight or field of vision. So when
Speaker 1: you see something, the thing is in your noose. Now,
Speaker 1: this next point, this is the exact place where he
Speaker 1: really gave me the creeps, and I got actual chill bumps.
Speaker 1: He points out that the Iliad, as well as a
Speaker 1: Greek art of the time quote, shows man as an
Speaker 1: assembly of strangely articulated limbs, the joints under drawn and
Speaker 1: the torso almost separated from the hips. It is graphically
Speaker 1: what we find again and again in Homer, who speaks
Speaker 1: of hands, lower arms, upper arms, feet, calves, and thighs
Speaker 1: as being fleet, sinewy in speedy motion, etcetera, with no
Speaker 1: mention of the body as a whole. Yeah. So it's
Speaker 1: just this idea of of just these automatons waging war, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, killing each other with without this concrete sense
Speaker 1: of self guiding. It so alien to comprehend. Oh, it
Speaker 1: really is. And so if you buy into Jane's theory,
Speaker 1: or if you just want to entertain it as we
Speaker 1: are doing, these characters simply do not seem to introspect.
Speaker 1: They argue, they rage, they desire, they act out on desires,
Speaker 1: but they don't seem to have access to a mind
Speaker 1: space where they can perform introspective, metaphor based activities like
Speaker 1: we described in the previous episode, they don't have access
Speaker 1: either to the conscious aspect of decision making. Instead, when
Speaker 1: they got to make a novel decision, the iliot is
Speaker 1: very clear about what happens. The God tells them what
Speaker 1: to do and they do it. Hm. Maybe this is
Speaker 1: one of the reasons we like like a very classic
Speaker 1: action hero, you know, because it's like they don't think,
Speaker 1: they just do. They are a man of action. They
Speaker 1: are a bicameral hero. I mean, you sometimes do get
Speaker 1: that sense, right that there is a kind of there's
Speaker 1: a kind of unthinking charisma to the action hero in
Speaker 1: most action movies. Uh. I guess that is what you'd
Speaker 1: call that, that man of action cliche. I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess it. Technically usually is a man in these movies,
Speaker 1: and he's got this kind of macho swagger that does
Speaker 1: not seem to involve thinking, It doesn't seem to involve
Speaker 1: self reflection. They've just got this. Uh, this like violent intuition,
Speaker 1: can't be bargained with, can't be reasoned with, and absolutely
Speaker 1: will not stop. I mean this that's the terminator. Uh.
Speaker 1: In a nutshell, the by the terminator is is a
Speaker 1: is a machine. Everybody was the terminator in the Iliad.
Speaker 1: That's the scary part. Oh man, So what I what
Speaker 1: I'm thirsting for now? It's almost like this theory is
Speaker 1: too interesting and I'm too tempted to want it to
Speaker 1: be true. So what I want now is for a
Speaker 1: great classic scholar to say, like, no, no, no, he's
Speaker 1: got it all wrong. Here's why, here's how. You can
Speaker 1: definitely find lots of signs of consciousness in the Iliad.
Speaker 1: And they're not later editions. They are part of the
Speaker 1: original text. I want that, or I don't want that.
Speaker 1: I feel like I need that. Yeah, Otherwise I feel
Speaker 1: like I'm just buying into the idea that Stanley Kubrick
Speaker 1: faith them in landing or something. Right. Yeah, it is
Speaker 1: just such a radical hypothesis. Okay, Well, let's leave the
Speaker 1: Iliad and look at some other literature from the ancient world.
Speaker 1: How about Jewish literature. This is interesting. I'd not run
Speaker 1: across this before either. This is a so this deals
Speaker 1: with him. Yeah. The Elohim, one of the names of
Speaker 1: God used in the in the Hebrew Bible, very often
Speaker 1: just translated as God as singular, right, right, But he
Speaker 1: argues that to translate it as merely God is to
Speaker 1: miss the plural nature of the word in Hebrew Uh,
Speaker 1: which is something I've independently read, like eloheim is essentially
Speaker 1: a plural word, but it's rendered in the modern sense
Speaker 1: and as a singular word. Yeah. It says that it
Speaker 1: comes from the root of to be powerful. But better
Speaker 1: translations of Him might be the great ones, the prominent ones,
Speaker 1: the Majesty's, the judges, the mighty ones, etcetera. And so these,
Speaker 1: he argues, are the vote could be the voice visions
Speaker 1: of the bicameral mind. And he also argues that one
Speaker 1: can really see the decline of the bicameral vision in
Speaker 1: the Bible. And now this is I really love this,
Speaker 1: because he's basically talking about all right, if you pick
Speaker 1: up the Old Testament and you read it front to back,
Speaker 1: you can see this transition. So in the he says, quote,
Speaker 1: in the true bicameral period, there was usually a visual
Speaker 1: component to the halluciated hallucinated voice, either it's self hallucinated
Speaker 1: or as the statue in front of which and in
Speaker 1: front of which one listened so even as a modern
Speaker 1: reader of the Bible will find this. You go from
Speaker 1: a physical God who physically does stuff like kick people
Speaker 1: out of the garden or shut the door on the arc,
Speaker 1: to a God that merely speaks to everyone, and a
Speaker 1: purely auditory God that we account that we encounter with Moses,
Speaker 1: you know, with additional visual flares here and there, and
Speaker 1: crucially after that, a God of law and religion rather
Speaker 1: than of direct experience. So you go from this robustly
Speaker 1: imagined God who physically does stuff to a God who
Speaker 1: is a voice, to a God who is not experienced
Speaker 1: directly and rather as experience through his tradition of teachings
Speaker 1: and law and so um so yeah. James argues that
Speaker 1: the Hebrew Bible is essentially a long narrative of the
Speaker 1: transition from myth to bicameral humankind, too conscious humankind, and
Speaker 1: you can see the whole thing there. You've got the
Speaker 1: older prophets like Amos, who Jans identifies as clearly bicameral,
Speaker 1: to Ecclesiastes, who uh. James thinks the author shows all
Speaker 1: the markers of consciousness, and he claims you can also
Speaker 1: see this painful transition from bicameral society to conscious society
Speaker 1: in many aspects of the canon. A couple of examples,
Speaker 1: he says people are constantly begging for contact with a
Speaker 1: god or gods that no longer speak to them in
Speaker 1: the literature that he believes comes from the conscious period
Speaker 1: of this history. So one quote he gives from Psalm
Speaker 1: forty two, and this is with the name of God
Speaker 1: rendered directly to the plural rather than the singular, as
Speaker 1: it would usually be rendered as the stag pants after
Speaker 1: the water brooks. So pants my mind after you, Oh Gods,
Speaker 1: my mind thirsts for God's, for living gods. When shall
Speaker 1: I come face to face with God's. Yeah, it's almost
Speaker 1: like a like a gradual breakup story, like what he
Speaker 1: used to He used to see God all the time.
Speaker 1: We hung out, and now, yeah, we talk on the
Speaker 1: phone sometime, but it's not quite the same. And now
Speaker 1: it's like he won't even call. We just keep exchanging texts,
Speaker 1: and suddenly, you know, that's all I have to go on.
Speaker 1: It's just the not even new texts, but the old texts.
Speaker 1: But then again, there are there are definitely in Jane's vision,
Speaker 1: partisans of the conscious version of the religion that don't
Speaker 1: want anything to do with the direct experience version of
Speaker 1: the religion. Like he says that there are many signs
Speaker 1: throughout the books of the Hebrew Bible that the Bicameral
Speaker 1: people may have been actively persecuted by conscious people for
Speaker 1: religious reasons. I'll just read one quote, he says. Quote.
Speaker 1: A further vestige from the Bicameral era is the word obe,
Speaker 1: often translated as a familiar spirit. A man also or
Speaker 1: a woman that have an obe shall surely be put
Speaker 1: to death, says Leviticus. And similarly, Saul drives out from
Speaker 1: Israel all those that had an obe in First Samuel.
Speaker 1: Even though an obe is something that one consults with,
Speaker 1: according to Deuteronomy eighteen eleven, it probably had no physical embodiment.
Speaker 1: It is always bracketed with wizards and witches, and thus
Speaker 1: probably refers to some Bicameral voice that was not recognized
Speaker 1: by the Old Testament writers as religious. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: you get into this scenario where you know, obviously the
Speaker 1: individuals who don't hear the voices, they've built up all
Speaker 1: this this law and order based on the old texts
Speaker 1: in the old stories. It becomes dangerous if other individuals
Speaker 1: are attempting to to add new material to it. No,
Speaker 1: I'm hearing God's right now, and they're telling me something different. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it reminds me of the fact that the
Speaker 1: church that I attend they have this saying God is
Speaker 1: still speaking, which, as it's intended, the idea is God
Speaker 1: is still real and a part of everyone's lives, and
Speaker 1: you know, this is not just a story. But on
Speaker 1: the other hand, there's it's kind of scary to think, well,
Speaker 1: if God is still speaking, what's he going to say?
Speaker 1: You know, Um, the conflict comes. It could provide license
Speaker 1: for some very uh, for some very disturbing content, yea,
Speaker 1: or some great stuff. Yeah indeed. Yeah, it's just sort
Speaker 1: of like it provides you with a blanket authorization for
Speaker 1: action that is not so there if you have a
Speaker 1: written and codified law. So again, all of this just
Speaker 1: ends up playing into the conflict of the downfall of
Speaker 1: the bicameral mind. As the voices blink out and this
Speaker 1: a new system of of order and social stability has
Speaker 1: to take hold. So let's try to summarize real quick
Speaker 1: what James is saying is the basic contours of the
Speaker 1: transition through the bicameral period to the conscious period. Let's
Speaker 1: see Robert tell me what you think of this. As
Speaker 1: I've tried to summarize his view, I think James argues
Speaker 1: that bicameral society emerged with language and the increasing size
Speaker 1: of tribal groups. So when one could encode mental content
Speaker 1: into grammatical sentences, it was possible to code action motivation
Speaker 1: efficiently through language. So you have a big group where
Speaker 1: your authority figure can't be around to constantly tell you
Speaker 1: what to do because the group's too big. So a
Speaker 1: command heard from one's parents or one's tribal chieftain is
Speaker 1: hallucinated to recur over and over again provide continuous motivation
Speaker 1: for action. And this is the non dominant hemisphere commanding
Speaker 1: the dominant hemisphere. This is the first version of bi camerality.
Speaker 1: So when you've got words and sentences that can be hallucinated,
Speaker 1: then over time these admonitory voices, eventually they become not
Speaker 1: just repetitive but synthetic. So they're not just telling you
Speaker 1: what these authority figures have told you in the past,
Speaker 1: but they're telling you what these authority figures would command
Speaker 1: if they were present now. And of course we know,
Speaker 1: the mind has the power to synthesize information and imagine
Speaker 1: what somebody else would command. We do that consciously now,
Speaker 1: But here it's saying, what if the right hemisphere and
Speaker 1: in most people, or the non dominant hemisphere generally did
Speaker 1: that automatically, nonconsciously. Uh So, over time, parents and chieftains
Speaker 1: die and their voices are still heard instead of internal
Speaker 1: copies of authority figures, they become imbued with disim bodied authority.
Speaker 1: The voice itself provides inherent authorization, magical authority, as from
Speaker 1: a God. Then for a long time, bicameral society grows
Speaker 1: and develops, and bicameral people build technologies and kingdoms and
Speaker 1: begin to write works of ancient literature. But what happens
Speaker 1: to make it all disappear? Essentially, his answer is a
Speaker 1: combination of catastrophe and literature. Would you agree with that, Robert, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems to be the basic idea catastrophe and literature. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the story of the story of our lives. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: that that is the roof collapsing on the bicameral mind.
Speaker 1: So the catastrophe he singles out is the widespread failure
Speaker 1: of civilization throughout the Eastern Mediterranean close to the end
Speaker 1: of the second millennium BC. This is a period that's
Speaker 1: coming off of what's now referred to as the Late
Speaker 1: Bronze Age collapse, where ancient empires fell apart and dispersed
Speaker 1: and people were displaced, and there was a lot of
Speaker 1: war and raiding and collapse of infrastructure. Trade was interrupted,
Speaker 1: education stifled, and it led to what some would consider
Speaker 1: a dark Age of the ancient world. And he also
Speaker 1: argues that a certain a small amount of natural selection
Speaker 1: may have come into play as well, because as all
Speaker 1: this is going on, in the enormous, enormous bloodshed that's
Speaker 1: playing out here at the end of the second century BC,
Speaker 1: those who had the best chance to survive were those
Speaker 1: who could resist the commandments of the gods and the
Speaker 1: literal you know, the voice of compulsion, right, who were
Speaker 1: more adaptable and could narrotize out solutions to problems, and
Speaker 1: who had the ability to practice prolonged deception and treachery. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's another huge idea here. So yeah, So he's got
Speaker 1: a summary of of the several factors he thinks led
Speaker 1: to in this period around the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia.
Speaker 1: The collapse of the bicameral mind and the beginnings of
Speaker 1: widespread consciousness in culture. So what are these main things
Speaker 1: he offers? He's talking about, first of all, one, the
Speaker 1: weakening of the auditory by the advent of writing. Okay,
Speaker 1: A good example would be the invention of written law,
Speaker 1: right clearly distinguishing acceptable from non acceptable behavior in a
Speaker 1: way that does not require the intervention of an internal God. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've got these tablets here. He didn't have to speak
Speaker 1: to you all the time. Just refer to the tablets. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is how I feel about any kind of power
Speaker 1: point presentation. Just give me the power point. I don't
Speaker 1: need the voice of God telling me the things. Just
Speaker 1: give me a list. Yeah, okay, okay, what's the next thing?
Speaker 1: Number two? The inherent fragility of hallucinatory control. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can see that there's some instability in the system there.
Speaker 1: Number three, the unworkable nous of God's in the chaos
Speaker 1: of historical upheaval. Okay, So the God's prevented problem that
Speaker 1: they caused problems when when society and hierarchy was falling apart. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again, the voice of the gods was just there
Speaker 1: was not actually the voice of a divine being with
Speaker 1: superior knowledge. It was still originating from within the individual, right, Okay.
Speaker 1: The fourth one, the fourth one is the depositing of
Speaker 1: internal cause and the observation of difference in others. Okay,
Speaker 1: So you see other people are behaving differently, and you
Speaker 1: begin to wonder if maybe they're just behaving on their
Speaker 1: own and not being commanded by God's maybe undermining your
Speaker 1: own authorization of god belief. Yeah, I can see where
Speaker 1: it would be. Um, I mean it would it would
Speaker 1: It would be contagious in that in that respect. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: Number five the acquisition of anatization from epics, the introduction
Speaker 1: of stories. Number six the survival value of deceit, which
Speaker 1: we already touched on, and number seven a modicum of
Speaker 1: natural selection, which we also discussed here. But to be clear,
Speaker 1: I think James is primarily thinking about these transitions in mindset,
Speaker 1: not as changes in the physical brain brought about by
Speaker 1: you know, mutation and natural selection, though there might be
Speaker 1: a little bit of selection towards levels of predisposition for it.
Speaker 1: But he's primarily thinking about this as cultural change. Right
Speaker 1: that there there are cultures of bi camerality and cultures
Speaker 1: of consciousness. Yes, all right, we're gonna take one more break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we're going to jump into
Speaker 1: modern traces of the bicameral mind. Thank you, thank alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So we've examined the evidence that James claims
Speaker 1: to offer for the existence of a bicameral mind and
Speaker 1: history and his conception of how the bicameral mind arose
Speaker 1: and then collapsed into society's based on conscious mentality. So,
Speaker 1: if there truly was a bicamerality in the past, if
Speaker 1: our brains are still so wired as to be perhaps
Speaker 1: capable of bi cameral culture in the present, if we
Speaker 1: just practiced it, what would the evidence of that be. Well,
Speaker 1: you would think there'll be some practices in human behavior
Speaker 1: that would give you evidence that we used to be
Speaker 1: b cameral and that we could still be bicameral if
Speaker 1: we tried. That's right. And he first of all, he
Speaker 1: makes uh, he makes some examples out of religion. So
Speaker 1: at this point I think everyone can pretty well imagine
Speaker 1: the sorts of religious examples that James is going to make.
Speaker 1: After all, we've been discussing the trans like nature of
Speaker 1: biocameral existence. Uh. In the Commanding words of corpses and statues,
Speaker 1: you know, all you know, very magical and scenarios that
Speaker 1: we can imagine lining up with both religious stories and
Speaker 1: religious right. So expectantly he points to spirit possession. There's
Speaker 1: a topic we come back to on a few different
Speaker 1: episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and it ranges
Speaker 1: from demonic possession across various cultures to you know, tribal
Speaker 1: African beats that threatened Carl Young's sanity, and more positive
Speaker 1: forms of spirit possessions such as oracles, which which Jane
Speaker 1: spends a lot of time with. Um. We have a
Speaker 1: recent episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind that covers
Speaker 1: the the Thaie tattoo festival in which uh, the animal
Speaker 1: tattoo ends up overtaking the individual individual. So we have
Speaker 1: examples of this this throughout different cultures. The speaking of
Speaker 1: tongues uh and similar religious experiences may also play into this,
Speaker 1: and of course we have examples of this in ancient
Speaker 1: writings as well. So as early as a fourth century BC,
Speaker 1: Socrates wrote of odd possessed men, so and clearly like
Speaker 1: that's not the kind of thing you would uh necessarily
Speaker 1: speak about if if you were immerged within a bicameral
Speaker 1: uh world anyway, right, Um, Yeah, these might be more
Speaker 1: vestiges of the bicameral culture. Right. And James points to
Speaker 1: a number of different examples, mainly those dealing with Greek oracles, uh,
Speaker 1: with the idea being that the oracle the individual here
Speaker 1: would have would have ramped themselves up, but they basically
Speaker 1: ramped up right hemisphere activity in relation to the left
Speaker 1: as a result, as a response to complex ritual stimuli,
Speaker 1: you know, the use of all these various and we've
Speaker 1: talked about statues and language and and all of all
Speaker 1: of these aspects playing into passed bicameral experiences. And therefore
Speaker 1: the idea here is that even as we're shifting out
Speaker 1: of the bicameral age, even as the bicameral ages behind us,
Speaker 1: you have conscious individuals who are able to sort of
Speaker 1: resurrect the bicameral experiences. Yes, he enter into trance like states, etcetera,
Speaker 1: by engaging in these rituals. Yeah. And these would be
Speaker 1: rituals where they channel the output of what Jans identifies
Speaker 1: as in most people the right hemisphere speech associated sections
Speaker 1: of course, right a speech usually coming from the left hemisphere,
Speaker 1: So it would be like the voices of the gods
Speaker 1: that spoke in the bicameral minds of the ancients, but
Speaker 1: speaking out through the mouths of these oracles and prophets.
Speaker 1: And you know what, those oracles and prophets, they didn't
Speaker 1: necessarily speak in even in a commanding tone. In many
Speaker 1: cases they may have they may have sung yes. And
Speaker 1: so this is a really interesting section James gets into
Speaker 1: in the in the third book of his book where
Speaker 1: he talks about the evidence of pasted bicamerality in poetry
Speaker 1: and music. So remember that Jane's neurological hypothesis, uh is
Speaker 1: that the bicameral mind consisted of the non dominant hemisphere,
Speaker 1: which is the right brain in most people, speaking directly
Speaker 1: as an auditory hallucination to the dominant hemisphere, which is
Speaker 1: the left brain in most people. Keep that in mind here,
Speaker 1: that's right now. His his his thesis here is quote,
Speaker 1: the first poets were God's poetry began with the bicameral mind.
Speaker 1: The God's side of our ancient mentality, at least in
Speaker 1: a certain period of history, usually or perhaps always spoke
Speaker 1: in verse. This means that most men, at one time
Speaker 1: throughout the day, we're hearing poetry of a sort composed
Speaker 1: and spoken within their own minds. That's terrifying and beautiful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that kind of sums up a lot of the
Speaker 1: bicameral hypothesis in general. So evidence is scanned for this,
Speaker 1: but he argues that quote individuals who remained by cameral
Speaker 1: into the conscious age, that these individuals continue to express
Speaker 1: the voice of God or God's and poetry um the
Speaker 1: so you know, the Indian Veda dictated by the gods,
Speaker 1: the oracle at Delphi, early Arabic poets, etcetera. And this
Speaker 1: concerns music too, because early poetry was musical in nature.
Speaker 1: Janes says absolutely. I mean, you could still say that
Speaker 1: poetry is musical and nature, especially insofar as it invokes
Speaker 1: any kind of scanning or rhythm. That's right. And speech
Speaker 1: is a function again primarily of the left cerebral hemisphere,
Speaker 1: but song is primarily a function of the right hemisphere.
Speaker 1: Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind.
Speaker 1: That's an interesting hypothesis in itself. Now there's a he
Speaker 1: presents a fair amount of of evidence for this, which
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna roll through here. Joe jump in
Speaker 1: as we go. Hit me man, all right. So, first
Speaker 1: of all, many elderly patients who have suffered cerebral hemorrhages
Speaker 1: on the left hemisphere such that they cannot speak, they
Speaker 1: can still sing. We also have the Wada test to
Speaker 1: determine a person's cerebral dominance. This is when sodium amatal
Speaker 1: is injected into the carotid artery on one side, putting
Speaker 1: the corresponding hemisphere under heavy sedation, and the other side
Speaker 1: remains awake. So when this case case, if the left
Speaker 1: hemisphere is sedated, the patient can't speak, but they can sing.
Speaker 1: If the right hemisphere is sedated, the patient can't sing,
Speaker 1: but they can speak. So like, the centers for speech
Speaker 1: and singing are lateralized and the situation is more pronounced
Speaker 1: in cases where there's actual physical damage to one hemisphere
Speaker 1: or the other, or you know, it's it's completely removed. Also,
Speaker 1: electrical stimulation of the right hemisphere in regions adjacent to
Speaker 1: the posterior temporal lobe often produces hallucinations of singing and music.
Speaker 1: Oh and he also he presents an experiment that you
Speaker 1: can try. He says says that you can prove the
Speaker 1: latter though the laterality of music yourself. Try hearing different
Speaker 1: musics on two earphones at the same intensity. You will
Speaker 1: perceive and remember the music on the left ear phone better.
Speaker 1: This is because the left ear has greater neuro representation
Speaker 1: on the right hemisphere. Now, he points out that Plato
Speaker 1: spoke of poetry as possession. Yeah, said, poets then around
Speaker 1: four b C. Were comparable in mentality to the oracles
Speaker 1: of the same period and went through similar um psychological
Speaker 1: transformation when they performed. And then there's this idea. We've
Speaker 1: all heard talk of the muses, right right. I mean,
Speaker 1: so ancient epics might start saying like sing muse blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. So the authors telling their personal composition God
Speaker 1: to start going Yeah, Now, when we talk about the muses,
Speaker 1: where you know, we're just talking about inspiration or you know,
Speaker 1: or attention even or just you know, the will to
Speaker 1: get a project done. It's a literary device we think of. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But but back back then, the argument is is that
Speaker 1: the bicameral human would literally need to hear the voice
Speaker 1: of the muse. Yeah, the muse was literally real, and
Speaker 1: so it wasn't just something they imagine, it was something
Speaker 1: they experienced though it all was in the brain. Now,
Speaker 1: he points out that by the sixth century BC, the
Speaker 1: poet is no longer just naturally imbued with their long
Speaker 1: They have to learn the gift of the muse in
Speaker 1: order to hear it. So societea that the voice is
Speaker 1: becoming harder and harder for everyone to hear. So this
Speaker 1: might be kind of like how the oracles of these
Speaker 1: later periods, living in conscious societies have to go through
Speaker 1: elaborate rituals to get into the altered state of consciousness
Speaker 1: where they channel their non dominant hemisphere and let the
Speaker 1: voice of God speak. That's right, And he says that
Speaker 1: in the fifth century b C, we hear the very
Speaker 1: first hints of poets being peculiar with poetic ecstasy. That's
Speaker 1: that's his quote there. So I want to use that
Speaker 1: from now on. If I'm like trying to get some
Speaker 1: writing done and somebody interrupts me, I'm like, hang on,
Speaker 1: I'm being peculiar. Yeah, So it basically just gets harder
Speaker 1: and harder to hear the voices of the gods until
Speaker 1: you're having to essentially make up the words yourself. It
Speaker 1: reminds me a lot of of how magic works in
Speaker 1: dungeons and dragons, because dungeons and Dragons you basically have
Speaker 1: three different types of magic users. You have the warlock
Speaker 1: who works their magic the enslavement to a god or
Speaker 1: god like being, So that's a bicamera being. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that would be the bicameral experience. A sorcerer learns to
Speaker 1: better channel magic that naturally emerges from their being. So
Speaker 1: this is like a transitional being. This is like one
Speaker 1: of the oracles in the late antiquity. Yeah, like it
Speaker 1: still flows through them, it still can flow through them,
Speaker 1: but they have to manage it. And then finally you
Speaker 1: have the arcane wizard, who has to master the workings
Speaker 1: of magic through study and academic effort alone. So these
Speaker 1: are the pathetic poets of the modern era who have
Speaker 1: to consciously compose their works exactly. Yeah, and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: in the same way that within Dungeons and Dragons you
Speaker 1: can you can have that, you can have sort of
Speaker 1: the attitudes of what the wizard is. And this is
Speaker 1: also kind of based on attitudes involving witches and wizards
Speaker 1: and in the real world in earlier periods. But there's
Speaker 1: the idea that the arcane wizard is a master of
Speaker 1: of these forces where lesser models are um you know,
Speaker 1: the magic is a master of them, which is, you
Speaker 1: know not unlike the comparison between the bicamera and the
Speaker 1: conscious human right. And of course the idea is as uh,
Speaker 1: conscious society exists for longer and longer, and the bicameral
Speaker 1: society goes farther and farther into the past. Our ability
Speaker 1: to access these states of consciousness, to be an oracle,
Speaker 1: or to be a muse possessed poet gets further and
Speaker 1: further from our grasp. Exactly he writes, And then the
Speaker 1: muses hush and freeze into myths, nymphs, and shepherds dance
Speaker 1: no more. Consciousness is a witch beneath whose charms pure
Speaker 1: inspiration gasps and dies into invention. The oral becomes written
Speaker 1: by the poet himself, and written it should be added
Speaker 1: by his right hand, worked by his left hemisphere. The
Speaker 1: muses have become imaginary and invoked in their silence as
Speaker 1: a part of man's nostalgia for the bicameral mind. That
Speaker 1: is gorgeous. Yeah, and the whole book is filled with
Speaker 1: passages like that that are just beautifully written and uh
Speaker 1: in and just really drive home often emotionally the subject matter.
Speaker 1: That's another reason I guess I got to be skeptical
Speaker 1: and suspicious of this hypothesis is that it's so well written.
Speaker 1: I feel like I need to be especially cautious about it.
Speaker 1: Like he he communicates it so well and it's so
Speaker 1: beautiful in the book that that it's like getting an
Speaker 1: unfair advantage as a scientific hypothesis. Yeah, yeah, I can
Speaker 1: definitely get that argument. Maybe that's why most scientific papers
Speaker 1: are so horrible to read, Like why you know, it's
Speaker 1: really rare you come across the one that's really well
Speaker 1: well written, and it's because, well, maybe maybe you shouldn't
Speaker 1: let your writing skills make it stand out more than
Speaker 1: the theory itself deserves in terms of content. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: what's another lingering example of of the bicameral mind. Hey,
Speaker 1: can you think of a state in which people have
Speaker 1: altered consciousness or reduced consciousness and a tendency to obey
Speaker 1: verbal commands? Who sounds a lot like hypnosis to me,
Speaker 1: ding ding ding. There you go. Now, we've talked hypnosis
Speaker 1: on the podcast before, but just to reiterate, what's going
Speaker 1: on with hypnosis is people seem to have wildly differing
Speaker 1: levels of susceptibility to hypnosis. Some people just can't be hypnotized,
Speaker 1: but for those that can, hypnosis does seem to be
Speaker 1: a genuine altered state of consciousness at some level in
Speaker 1: which the body is relaxed, focus is narrowed, inhibition is lowered,
Speaker 1: consciousness is reduced, and verbal obedience is increased. Sounds kind
Speaker 1: of like the model of bicamerality, with a lot of
Speaker 1: these public demonstrations of hypnosis that you see you know,
Speaker 1: or that you're on a cruise ship and somebody's doing
Speaker 1: a show. I think people following the hypnotist commands is
Speaker 1: not necessarily always a highly altered state of consciousness. It
Speaker 1: could be partially just a performance brought on by social pressure.
Speaker 1: But this is actually part of Jane's theory. He talks
Speaker 1: about the idea of collective cognitive imperative. Group pressure enables
Speaker 1: different states of mind and this is why you can
Speaker 1: have uh basically a culture dictating which mindset you adopt,
Speaker 1: the bicameral mindset or the conscious mindset. And it's also
Speaker 1: the reason that you can, through these elaborate rituals, say
Speaker 1: like the Oracle at Delphi, produce these these amazing. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, metered prophecies out of your right brain because
Speaker 1: group cognitive pressure is putting you into that mindset. And
Speaker 1: so he's saying hypnosis maybe maybe in fact a modern
Speaker 1: reapproximation of the left brain operation of a bicameral person.
Speaker 1: But instead of having the right brain talk, you're having
Speaker 1: the hypnotists talk. And again this makes me think of
Speaker 1: yoga classes where I just let the individual tell me
Speaker 1: what to do for an hour and a half and
Speaker 1: it it feels so liberate. Now, another big area that
Speaker 1: the James spends a lot of time with is the
Speaker 1: condition of schizophrenia. Now, this is obviously going to be
Speaker 1: very relevant because it's one of the features of schizophrenia
Speaker 1: is hallucinations, especially auditory hallucinations. Yeah, it is a condition
Speaker 1: defined by voices, by auditory hallucination voices, the crew, the size,
Speaker 1: voices that tell us what to do it with. Under
Speaker 1: the tent of the bicameral mind hypothesis, it would seem
Speaker 1: to line up pretty well. And uh, and so James
Speaker 1: argues that schizophrenia is essentially a relapse into the bicameral mind. Now,
Speaker 1: he argues that in the sculptures literature, murals and other
Speaker 1: artifacts of the great biicare bicameral civilizations. We do not
Speaker 1: see instances of individuals who suffer madness in a way
Speaker 1: that differentiates them from their fellow humans. There's idiocy, but
Speaker 1: but he says, there's no madness. Uh there, like there's
Speaker 1: no insanity in the Iliad, for instance. Yeah. Now, by
Speaker 1: the time we get to Plato, Plato speaks of madness,
Speaker 1: but in these ancient civilizations, Jane says, you don't see it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He says that the first instance of insanity discussed in
Speaker 1: the conscious period, uh is in Phaedrus or Plato calls
Speaker 1: insanity quote a divine gift and the source of the
Speaker 1: chiefest blessings granted two men. And then he goes on
Speaker 1: to a Plato ends up identifying four types of madness.
Speaker 1: And you'll and just again think of the bicameral mind
Speaker 1: and reference to all of these prophetic madness, ritual madness,
Speaker 1: poetic madness, and of course the erotic madness. Huh okay,
Speaker 1: So these kind of line up with some of the
Speaker 1: categories we've just been talking about. The Greeks wrote on paranoia,
Speaker 1: he argues, which is literally having of two minds, Over time, however,
Speaker 1: madness is no longer and no longer has these sort
Speaker 1: of divine categories that Plato identified, But it becomes a
Speaker 1: part of an ill, a part of a disease. There's something,
Speaker 1: there's an ailment at work with the human being. Now
Speaker 1: this maybe James thinks, as there is more conscious takeover
Speaker 1: of society by the conscious culture, that it becomes untenable
Speaker 1: for for bicameral society to exist and work within itself.
Speaker 1: So people who experienced the bicameral mindset within a conscious
Speaker 1: culture have they essentially have no cover. They have no
Speaker 1: nobody to like be part of their culture right now.
Speaker 1: He also points out that the voices of schizophrenia these
Speaker 1: tend to be When I say the voices of schizophrenia,
Speaker 1: the voice is heard by individuals with schizophrenia. They tend
Speaker 1: to be authority figures created out of cultural expectation. And
Speaker 1: the hallucinations also seem to have access to more memories
Speaker 1: in the patient. There in many cases and in many
Speaker 1: cases they replace thought. The they frequently take on religious
Speaker 1: overtones because he says, the condition emerges from the neurological
Speaker 1: structures bound to the birth of religious thought. To begin
Speaker 1: with and he says that the there's also a frequency
Speaker 1: of religious experience overall in the waking state for human consciousness,
Speaker 1: the the hypnopompic state that is often accompanied by vivid,
Speaker 1: lingering imagery. We've discussed this in terms of sleep paralysis
Speaker 1: and supernatural experience before. James writes that these parts of
Speaker 1: the brain are quote released from their normal inhibition by
Speaker 1: abnormal biochemistry in many cases of schizophrenia, and particularized into experience.
Speaker 1: This is also telling. He points to the relative inability
Speaker 1: of schizophrenics to draw a person. Think again to our
Speaker 1: discussions of I and me. There's this draw a person
Speaker 1: test or adapt test, and it's used to help identify
Speaker 1: schizophrenia and other conditions by asking the individual to draw
Speaker 1: a person. Now, if you have trouble drawing a whole person,
Speaker 1: that kind of makes me think about those disembodied body
Speaker 1: parts you talked about with reference to the iliad. And
Speaker 1: and I have to point out this is another thing
Speaker 1: I see my son having to do on kindergarten tests
Speaker 1: and uh, in evaluations draw a person and and see,
Speaker 1: I mean they're also looking to see with what degree
Speaker 1: of accuracy you can pull them together. But uh, but Yeah,
Speaker 1: in this case, are you able to draw a complete
Speaker 1: person at all? Now, not all people who have schizophrenia
Speaker 1: are going to have trouble drawing a person, right, but
Speaker 1: when they do, it is uh, it is extremely diagnostic.
Speaker 1: Also with schizophrenia, neurotization can also become impossible. You see
Speaker 1: these like fractured self stories, right hues. And then there's
Speaker 1: also body image boundary disturbance or boundary loss and this
Speaker 1: again this ties into this uh, this lost sense of
Speaker 1: eye or me. And remember too that schizophrenia has a
Speaker 1: genetic inherited basis to the underlying biochemistry. Natural selection, James
Speaker 1: argue would have favored it for a while. There's a
Speaker 1: certain tirelessness in schizophrenic individuals. They seem to have a
Speaker 1: lot of energy, and in the bicameral individual this would
Speaker 1: have become this would have become very important if you were, say,
Speaker 1: building pyramids or are there great works? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: we were talking about. One of the advantages, or one
Speaker 1: of the possible advantages of a bicameral mind would be
Speaker 1: mental endurance, much more so than a conscious person could muster.
Speaker 1: So James basically says that the modern schizophrenic is an
Speaker 1: individual that's essentially in search of a bicameral culture. Quote,
Speaker 1: but he retains usually some part of the subjective consciousness
Speaker 1: that struggles against this more emitive mental organization, that tries
Speaker 1: to establish some kind of control in the middle of
Speaker 1: a mental organization in which the hallucination ought to do
Speaker 1: the controlling. In effect, he is a mind barred to
Speaker 1: his environment, waiting on God's in a godless world. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you convinced yet, Joe. I mean, it's tough because
Speaker 1: I do find his argument very compelling, but it just
Speaker 1: may be the case that he was wrong about how
Speaker 1: about some of the evidence that he claims, or about
Speaker 1: how he interprets some of that evidence. So I don't know.
Speaker 1: I find the bi cameral mind thesis very interesting and
Speaker 1: very compelling, but I do not consider myself convinced that
Speaker 1: it is correct true. And with like with the schizophrenia evidence,
Speaker 1: for instance, is this is this truly more evidence in
Speaker 1: support of bicameral mind theory or is this schizophrenia as
Speaker 1: explained with bicameral mind. Yeah. I mean, one way you
Speaker 1: could look at the bi cameral mind is you could
Speaker 1: say it's a theory that explains a lot or you
Speaker 1: could say that it is a very interesting, carefully conducted
Speaker 1: story that's overlaid on lots of evidence that we already
Speaker 1: knew about. So what would be really interesting about it
Speaker 1: would be can it predict new discoveries like, based on
Speaker 1: the assumption of the bicameral mind hypothesis, would you be
Speaker 1: able to predict will find X, Y, and z about
Speaker 1: the ancient world and about neuroscientific discoveries in the future,
Speaker 1: say with you know, uh a neuroimaging, and that would
Speaker 1: be a real good way of testing whether it has
Speaker 1: any predictive power and thus whether we can have any
Speaker 1: confidence that it will continue to have predictive power in
Speaker 1: the future, which is pretty much synonymous with saying there's
Speaker 1: something to it, that it might be true. Uh So
Speaker 1: I tried to look up you know what if people
Speaker 1: said about it and the theory. It's had lots of critics,
Speaker 1: It has lots of people, you know, it's always been
Speaker 1: controversial ever since it was first introduced. It's had supporters.
Speaker 1: Some people think that it's it's really interesting, there's something
Speaker 1: to it. Some people think it might shed some light
Speaker 1: on some issues, even if it's wrong. Overall, it's had
Speaker 1: a lot of people who think it's just bunk. So
Speaker 1: you know, there's opinions all over the place. One paper
Speaker 1: I found that I thought summarized well some of the
Speaker 1: neuro scientific evidence and implications is a paper by Leo
Speaker 1: Share published in the Journal of Psychology or Psychiatry and
Speaker 1: Neuroscience in two thousand. Leo Share is a professor of
Speaker 1: psychiatry at Mount Sinai and New York, and in the
Speaker 1: short piece he collects some relevant reactions to Jane's hypothesis
Speaker 1: and argument. Uh Some reactions to Jane's include He finds
Speaker 1: that in seven Assade and Shapiro published a criticism of
Speaker 1: Jane's work in the American Journal of Psychiatry, and they write, quote,
Speaker 1: the difficulty which we find with Jane's hypothesis is that
Speaker 1: the conclusions he draws have a questionable basis in neuropsychiatric
Speaker 1: fact and quote. If Jane's hypothesis were to coincide more
Speaker 1: accurately with anatomic fact facts about what we find in
Speaker 1: the body, the right temporal area in question would more
Speaker 1: likely coincide with Broca's expressive area, a notion that does
Speaker 1: not conveniently fit Jane's theoretical constructs. Assad and Shapiro. Shapiro
Speaker 1: also claim, according to Share that quote lesions of the
Speaker 1: right sided areas corresponding to Broca's and Wernicke's areas seem
Speaker 1: more related to the negative symptoms of schizophrenia like restricted
Speaker 1: affect than to the positive hallucinatory symptoms unquote, and they
Speaker 1: also claim that Jane's oversimplified the phenomenology of hallucinatory experience
Speaker 1: to make them fit his hypothesis better. Um. Also in nine,
Speaker 1: the International Journal of Psychophysiology published a letter that wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: after many years of psychophysiological studies mainly carried out in
Speaker 1: the field, if evoked to neurocognitive bioelectrical events, I feel
Speaker 1: I can safely state that the concepts of the mind
Speaker 1: slash brain and the brain slash behavior dualisms, with their ancient,
Speaker 1: widespread and persistent philosophy, are now all outdated, as are
Speaker 1: those of the bicameral mind or the double brain. Then again, however,
Speaker 1: Shares says in nine paper published in The Lancet by
Speaker 1: Olan claimed that research in neuroimaging has quote illuminated and
Speaker 1: confirmed the importance of Jane's hypothesis. And this research includes
Speaker 1: a paper in the Lancet nine by Lennox at All,
Speaker 1: in which a right handed person with schizophrenia underwent neuroimaging
Speaker 1: during hallucinations, and the authors found that the auditory hallucinations
Speaker 1: occurred in the right hemisphere but not the left hemisphere,
Speaker 1: which would match up with Jane's predictions, the predictions made
Speaker 1: by the bicameral mind hypothesis. So I'd say it's still
Speaker 1: in the realm of something that is interesting but definitely
Speaker 1: not proven. But just imagine how fascinating it would be
Speaker 1: if more and more studies start lining up with stuff
Speaker 1: that could be predicted directly by the bicameral mind hypothesis. Indeed, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's that's the great thing about the about
Speaker 1: this particular hypothesis is that we can continue to study it.
Speaker 1: We can continue to see how how it potentially lines
Speaker 1: up with their modern scientific understanding of consciousness and the brain.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I guess we can start wrapping up here.
Speaker 1: But I want to say, in the end, though I'm
Speaker 1: not convinced by I'm not advocating it as true, it's fascinating,
Speaker 1: very well argued, I would say, arguably quite brilliant in
Speaker 1: the way it pulls from so many disciplines into a
Speaker 1: coherent picture of a cross disciplinary hypothesis, but can't yet
Speaker 1: endorse it. Yeah, yeah, I would, I would agree, But
Speaker 1: it is it is fascinating to use it as a
Speaker 1: thought exercise for looking back on past cultures. And uh,
Speaker 1: you know, after I was reading it, I kept I
Speaker 1: was wondering, well, why don't we see this reference to
Speaker 1: more works of fiction. Well, it turns out it was
Speaker 1: apparently one of the key influences on Neil Stephens snow Crash,
Speaker 1: which we mentioned in our Tower of Babble episode. It's
Speaker 1: a cyberpunk classic then involves a linguistic momentic weapons um
Speaker 1: which you know, go back and listen to that episode
Speaker 1: of certainly read snow Crash if you want more than that.
Speaker 1: But I was not familiar with this book. There is
Speaker 1: a two thousand nine novel by Terence Hawkins titled The
Speaker 1: Rage of Achilles and get this. It's a novel of
Speaker 1: the Trojan War told within the confines of the bicameral
Speaker 1: mind hypothesis. So Odysseus is a conscious modern man in
Speaker 1: this and Achilles is a bicameral killing machine. That is
Speaker 1: a brilliant concept for a novel, and if there's any
Speaker 1: truth to Jane's vision, this might have actually been possible.
Speaker 1: Like during the long slow breakdown to the bicameral mind,
Speaker 1: conscious people and bicameral people would have had to encounter
Speaker 1: and deal with one another. And can you just imagine
Speaker 1: all the difficulty that would create. Yeah, but for both sides,
Speaker 1: because on one hand, the conscious human is capable of
Speaker 1: deception that the bicameral human has no ability to. Like
Speaker 1: basically comes down to that that duel in a game
Speaker 1: of Thrones between the Mountain and uh, what's his name?
Speaker 1: The over and Martel. Yeah, yeah, where one is one
Speaker 1: is crafty and deceptive and the other one is just
Speaker 1: pure brute strength and NonStop killing action. Yeah. So you're
Speaker 1: saying the Mountain is bicameral and the Red Viper of
Speaker 1: Dorn is conscious. I think so. And really, I mean
Speaker 1: he only becomes more bicameral story progresses, all right, So
Speaker 1: there you have it. Do you have an anything else, Joe? No,
Speaker 1: I guess that's it for now. I I found this
Speaker 1: a really fascinating topic to explore. It's one of those
Speaker 1: that I've said this a few times now, but I
Speaker 1: just want to stress again it's like I feel this
Speaker 1: conflict within me about the ideas that are so cool.
Speaker 1: I feel like I have to be especially suspicious of them,
Speaker 1: Like the more interesting they are, the more I feel
Speaker 1: like I have to really check my desire for it
Speaker 1: to be true. Yeah, especially an idea that's this expansive
Speaker 1: that concerns the history of our species and our civilizations
Speaker 1: and the very nature of consciousness. So it's not like
Speaker 1: buying into a single idea like, oh well, actually I
Speaker 1: think the Chinese discovered North America, you know, before the
Speaker 1: Vikings something like that, which I'm not saying that doesn't
Speaker 1: have large historical ramifications, but it's not something that just
Speaker 1: affects the absolute understanding of our species in our way
Speaker 1: of thinking. All right, well, of course we'd love to
Speaker 1: hear from all of you out there. What are your
Speaker 1: thoughts on the bicameral mind. Do you buy into it?
Speaker 1: Do you do you think it's complete bunk? Do you
Speaker 1: have some sort of middle ground there? And what are
Speaker 1: some really cool examples of its utilization in various sorts
Speaker 1: of fiction that you've encountered. Here's something I would like
Speaker 1: to employ your imagination on, if this could happen, If
Speaker 1: you could go from a bi cameral mind to a
Speaker 1: conscious mind. How much more could human mentality change? Like
Speaker 1: if you go three thousand years into the future from now,
Speaker 1: could our mindsets be as different from from hours now
Speaker 1: as the conscious mind is from the hypothetical bi cameral mind? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, am I engaging in a bicameral experience when
Speaker 1: I let my GPS device tell me where to drive?
Speaker 1: I don't know, do you totally relinquish conscious control? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I almost, It's almost to that level. Uh that I
Speaker 1: was hanging out with my family over the weekend and
Speaker 1: my sisters were like asking me, like, why did you
Speaker 1: make this turn in that it's said of this turn?
Speaker 1: And I'm like, I just do what the machine tells
Speaker 1: me to told me to drive into the ocean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I put my trust in the machine. It's by and large,
Speaker 1: there's a less uh, there's less of a chance that
Speaker 1: it will drive me in the ocean that I will
Speaker 1: drive me into the ocean. So uh, that's how it
Speaker 1: shakes out, all right. Well, you can find is It's
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