Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: That means time to go into the vault for a
Speaker 1: classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This one
Speaker 1: originally aired September. And if you've heard us on the
Speaker 1: show making casual references here and there to a strange
Speaker 1: hypothesis from the history of psychology called bicameralism or the
Speaker 1: bicameral mind, and you've wondered what we were talking about,
Speaker 1: here you are. Here's our episode on it. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: these were These were really popular episodes, and they were
Speaker 1: really fun to put together. I will have to drive
Speaker 1: home that you know that we have we we have
Speaker 1: recorded a number of episodes since uh these episodes originally aired, Like,
Speaker 1: for instance, I believe in one of these two episodes,
Speaker 1: I mentioned the book by Terrence Hawkins, uh, The Rage
Speaker 1: of Achilles, and how it sounds interesting. Why I've since
Speaker 1: then read that book, loved that book. And also I
Speaker 1: think in general all we've had a lot of time
Speaker 1: to sort of continue to to turn the concepts of
Speaker 1: Julian Janes around in our mind and think more about them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll say, as far as the credibility of the full
Speaker 1: hypothesis goes about the origins of consciousness and the breakdown
Speaker 1: of the bi cameral mind, I'm no more convinced by
Speaker 1: it than I was when I first read the book,
Speaker 1: And in fact, I think now I have even stronger
Speaker 1: doubts than I originally did, so I ultimately I think
Speaker 1: I've come to the conclusion I think Jans was mostly wrong.
Speaker 1: But this remains one of the most interesting books I've
Speaker 1: ever read. It's just a really fascinating way to approach
Speaker 1: a difficult problem like the origin of consciousness, and bringing
Speaker 1: together so many different disciplines and and all that. Another
Speaker 1: thing I've mentioned on episodes since then, but that I've
Speaker 1: definitely been thinking about, is how well I think his
Speaker 1: whole hypothesis about the origin of consciousness is probably wrong.
Speaker 1: I think there could be something in his idea that
Speaker 1: the quality of religious behavior was was fundamentally different back
Speaker 1: then that perhaps may be in the ancient world, like
Speaker 1: true hallucinations were much more common within religion and some
Speaker 1: things like that. Uh, there could be bits of truth
Speaker 1: in it, even if ultimately a bicameral mind never existed
Speaker 1: in humans. Yeah, my trajectory with the idea was I
Speaker 1: was really super into it for a little bit, and
Speaker 1: I probably backed off on it a fair amount. I
Speaker 1: still I still really like it, and I think there's
Speaker 1: probably a fair amount of truth in it. I think
Speaker 1: one of the most attractive things about it, though, is
Speaker 1: that it provides an hypothesis for how the gods could
Speaker 1: have spoken to people, like how the voice of God
Speaker 1: could have been true, and how this thing that we
Speaker 1: see in all of these different myths and religions could
Speaker 1: actually be occurring from a you know, from more of
Speaker 1: a grounded, skeptical um mindset. So anyway, we'll just dive
Speaker 1: back into it. We're gonna you know, going back in time,
Speaker 1: and it's re exploring our first episode on the Bicameral Mind.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuffworks
Speaker 1: dot Com. Hey you, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: today we're gonna be returning to one of our favorite
Speaker 1: mind blowing topics here on the show, and that's going
Speaker 1: to be the problems inherent in our experience of consciousness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a great one because there's no danger of
Speaker 1: us really explaining it and figuring out consciousness anytime soon.
Speaker 1: And there have been so many different approaches to it,
Speaker 1: right from the neuroscientific to the psychological to the philosophic,
Speaker 1: everyone trying to understand this question. Who am I? What
Speaker 1: am I? What is this thing I'm experiencing? One of
Speaker 1: the most persistent, fascinating questions in the study of mind
Speaker 1: and biology is the question of the function of consciousness,
Speaker 1: not just what is it, but what does it do?
Speaker 1: I mean, you know that you have an internal subjective experience,
Speaker 1: that you're aware of your awareness, that you can turn
Speaker 1: your mind's eye to work over content in this deep
Speaker 1: place in your brain. And by analogy, you believe everybody
Speaker 1: else has this ability as well. They seem to have it,
Speaker 1: But biologically speaking, why does anybody have it? Now? You
Speaker 1: might think it's just a necessary part of being an
Speaker 1: animal with a brain, right, Like, I've got stuff to do.
Speaker 1: I've got to eat, got to go get the groceries,
Speaker 1: got to seek shelter, got to check the coin returns
Speaker 1: in all these candy machines. So my brain needs to
Speaker 1: be able to think about doing that stuff in order
Speaker 1: to do it right. But hold up for a second.
Speaker 1: I wonder if you've ever had this experience, Robert, tell
Speaker 1: me if you have. Do you ever have that experience
Speaker 1: where you're driving a car and you arrive at your
Speaker 1: destination and you suddenly realize and sort of like the
Speaker 1: transition between activities when you get there, that you were
Speaker 1: not conscious of the act of driving. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you go on a sort of autopilot. I've had that
Speaker 1: happened with generally with routine ta asks. Uh, it might
Speaker 1: be driving, it might be emptying a dishwasher, loading a dishwasher,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing, you know, taking dealing with laundry. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so when in the example with driving, this is
Speaker 1: often known as highway hypnosis. Maybe you were lost in
Speaker 1: your thoughts while on the road and you just managed
Speaker 1: to drive from one place to another without consciously thinking
Speaker 1: about driving at all, and yet you did it. Driving
Speaker 1: is this highly complicated mental task. It involves massive integration
Speaker 1: of sense, information, and coordination of different parts of the body.
Speaker 1: You've got a time, everything just right, and yet your
Speaker 1: brain has the power to make your body do it
Speaker 1: without you thinking about it at all. And unlike dealing
Speaker 1: with laundry or unloading the dishwasher. If you do it wrong,
Speaker 1: people die, So right, it's it's I think it's one
Speaker 1: of the reasons we tend to highlight it is because
Speaker 1: you think about the fact, Oh, I don't really remember
Speaker 1: driving to work, I just kind of did it. And
Speaker 1: it's such a dangerous thing for us to engage in
Speaker 1: and seemingly turn our brain off to. Yeah, it can
Speaker 1: be a terrifying experience for multiple reasons. I mean, one
Speaker 1: is the danger, but the other is just how alien
Speaker 1: it feels to realize that your body is capable of
Speaker 1: doing complex behavior without your knowledge, essentially without you really
Speaker 1: being aware of the entire time. So now, the next
Speaker 1: step I want to take you on is very simple.
Speaker 1: Just imagine everything you do is like this, cooking, cleaning, working, talking, fighting, parenting.
Speaker 1: Imagine your brain is just as capable of doing everything
Speaker 1: it does, but simply without reflecting upon those actions within
Speaker 1: the mental theater of your consciousness. So it's highway hypnosis
Speaker 1: for your entire life. It's total behavior hypnosis. Is it
Speaker 1: possible for you to imagine this? It's difficult to imagine
Speaker 1: this sort of thing, for sure, because because in this scenario,
Speaker 1: being conscious of your drive like that would be the
Speaker 1: abnormality you're talking about, you know, an abnormal state of
Speaker 1: consciousness or or even a lack of consciousness really would
Speaker 1: be the normal, That would be the predominant human experience exactly.
Speaker 1: And now that you're considering that possibility, we ask again,
Speaker 1: if that's possible, what does consciousness do and where does
Speaker 1: it come from? And why? You know, I think we
Speaker 1: often turned to various metaphors to partially explain our thought processes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how often, I mean, how often do we fall back
Speaker 1: on computer program movie or or written fiction is a
Speaker 1: loose means of understanding at all. But one of the
Speaker 1: you know, the real damnable things about trying to understand
Speaker 1: consciousness is that like we're stuck within it. It's like
Speaker 1: it's like trying to understand that the Earth is not flat. Right.
Speaker 1: We have all of these various means of of of
Speaker 1: of testing it, of of looking at the data and
Speaker 1: knowing for a fact that the world is not like
Speaker 1: just a flat plane, and we can even in into
Speaker 1: satellite or even a human being up into orbit to
Speaker 1: look back down on the Earth and see it for us.
Speaker 1: But with consciousness, it's not that easy. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: despite whatever different tools you might be using neuroscientific, psychological
Speaker 1: philosophical to step outside of our consciousness and understand what
Speaker 1: it actually is. Yeah, I mean one of the problems
Speaker 1: is you can't really be conscious of the fact that
Speaker 1: you do things unconsciously, Like you can't feel what that's
Speaker 1: like in the moment, because as soon as you pay
Speaker 1: attention to it to feel it, you're conscious again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's wouldn't be the same thing, really. Perhaps you
Speaker 1: agree or disagree as not remembering doing something, right, you
Speaker 1: could have been conscious of doing something and then had
Speaker 1: amnesia and forgotten about it. Yeah, Or you know, you
Speaker 1: hear people about here about people who consume too much
Speaker 1: alcoholics have a blackout experience, or accounts of people who
Speaker 1: who use ambient to sleep and uh, and they do
Speaker 1: something that they do not remember, and you know, various
Speaker 1: other psychological fact us that can create that experience like
Speaker 1: this order thirty frying pans on Amazon, right, right. But
Speaker 1: for for the for what we're talking about here, this
Speaker 1: is a case where yes, you remember driving to work,
Speaker 1: but you weren't really there for it. Yeah. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know it happened, but it's just your mind was not present, right, likewise,
Speaker 1: it's not like undergoing anesthesia and just being out for
Speaker 1: the course of a surgery. In thinking about all this,
Speaker 1: you know, I often come back to a quote from
Speaker 1: the author are Scott Baker, who was recently an honor show,
Speaker 1: and he he said this about consciousness. The magic can
Speaker 1: only vanish as soon as the coin trick is explained.
Speaker 1: In this case, we are the magic. So, uh, I
Speaker 1: have to think about that when trying to unravel consciousness,
Speaker 1: like we're we're within consciousness, we're creatures of consciousness. And
Speaker 1: then to try and take it apart as to take
Speaker 1: about ourselves. Well, I know Scott has some anxieties about
Speaker 1: the Well I don't want to put words into his mouth,
Speaker 1: but I think he has some anxieties about you know,
Speaker 1: the consequence is of explaining consciousness too much, Like if
Speaker 1: you do explain it, does that create a sort of
Speaker 1: crisis of meaning of existence? Yeah, the sonantic apocalypse. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this leads us into what we're gonna be talking
Speaker 1: about for the next two episodes of the show. This
Speaker 1: is going to be the first part of a two
Speaker 1: part series where we're going to be discussing a fascinating
Speaker 1: hypothesis in the history of psychology known as bicameralism. Now, specifically,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be looking at the work of the American
Speaker 1: psychologist Julian Jaynes in his nineteen seventy six book The
Speaker 1: Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Speaker 1: The two episodes that we're gonna do, we're gonna break
Speaker 1: down roughly like this. In the first episode, we're going
Speaker 1: to just try to explain what Julian Jane's theory of
Speaker 1: the bicameral mind and of modern consciousness is and how
Speaker 1: he gets there from the problem of consciousness. And then
Speaker 1: in the second episode, we want to discuss his argument,
Speaker 1: like his evidence for the theory of the bi cameral mind,
Speaker 1: how he sees evidence of this in history, and maybe
Speaker 1: some reactions to the idea since the bicameral mind. And
Speaker 1: we should be super clear here at the beginning that
Speaker 1: this was and still is a controversial hypothesis. For the
Speaker 1: purposes of discussion today, we're going to be entertaining it
Speaker 1: as a hypothetical, but you should not take this to
Speaker 1: be an endorsement of the hypothesis as fact. It's not
Speaker 1: widely believed to be correct and full though it has
Speaker 1: had many supporters, and even if it's not correct and full,
Speaker 1: which is probably not, it might be correct in part. Yeah. Indeed,
Speaker 1: there are gonna be a lot of points in this
Speaker 1: episode where we're discussing the theory of the bicameral mind
Speaker 1: as if it is something that we are totally convinced of. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this book I just mentioned the origin of consciousness
Speaker 1: in the Breakdown of the bi cameral Mind. I would
Speaker 1: compare it to the work of, for example, James Fraser
Speaker 1: because I think it's one of those books that's worth
Speaker 1: reading even if it's almost completely wrong, because it's just
Speaker 1: such a fascinating synthesis of so many disciplines. Today and
Speaker 1: the next episode, we're going to be diving through history, archaeology,
Speaker 1: ancient literature, philosophy, psychiatry, neuroscience, and just direct phenomenological experience.
Speaker 1: I read that Dawkins criticized, Well, what Dawkins said of
Speaker 1: the book is that it's either Richard Dawkins either said
Speaker 1: that it's brilliant or it's rubbish, and that there's no
Speaker 1: in between. I disagree with that, Yeah, I would. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that it's very possible that it is both
Speaker 1: brilliant and wrong. Yeah, if nothing else, I think it
Speaker 1: serves as a fascinating thought experiment. Yeah, what if this
Speaker 1: is true? What if this were true? And how does
Speaker 1: it force us to reinterpret the past and the legacy
Speaker 1: of our species? Yeah? So, even though I suspect its
Speaker 1: conclusions are probably wrong or at least wrong in part,
Speaker 1: this is one of the most interesting books I've ever
Speaker 1: read in my life. So, strap in, I think we
Speaker 1: should start just by giving a straight version of Jane's
Speaker 1: conclusion and then work our way back to it. Does
Speaker 1: that make sense to you, Robert, Oh, Yeah, that's pretty
Speaker 1: much what he does in the book. Yeah, here's this
Speaker 1: amazing theory of what consciousness consists of and what it
Speaker 1: used to consist of or not consist of, and then
Speaker 1: he works backwards from there. Right, And so here's the
Speaker 1: most basic summary I can give of his conclusion. Until
Speaker 1: roughly three thousand years ago, human beings were not conscious.
Speaker 1: Around that time, modern human consciousness began as a cultural invention,
Speaker 1: probably in Mesopotamia that's spread across the world over time.
Speaker 1: And before that time, for thousands of years, almost all
Speaker 1: humans were not conscious in the way we are, But
Speaker 1: instead we're commanded in all novel behaviors by hallucinated voices
Speaker 1: that they called gods. And I just want to drive
Speaker 1: home the impact of this. The argument is that ancient
Speaker 1: people's did not think like we think. The god run human,
Speaker 1: as he refers to him, at one point experience something
Speaker 1: that for us would feel like an altered state of
Speaker 1: consciousness or spiritual event. Is if we were hypnotized by
Speaker 1: a voice like that of a god and it just
Speaker 1: told us what to do, and then catastrophe forces us
Speaker 1: to learn consciousness, and in doing so, we ceased hearing
Speaker 1: the voices of the gods as we once did. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: just to be clear about this, what is being proposed
Speaker 1: is in this period, which he calls the period before consciousness,
Speaker 1: is the period of the bicameral human being. In the
Speaker 1: bicameral mind, there was no consciousness. There was just action
Speaker 1: commanded by hallucinated voices from another part of the brain
Speaker 1: that was believed to be a god. Yeah. And what
Speaker 1: we'll get into the idea of schizophrenia as it released
Speaker 1: all of this in the second episode. But James does
Speaker 1: say that, like straight up, this was a time when
Speaker 1: everybody was essentially schizophrenic. Now One of the things that's
Speaker 1: interesting about this is it runs own or to a
Speaker 1: lot of what we do when we read ancient literature
Speaker 1: and and flip through ancient history, is that here's I
Speaker 1: would describe my experience this way. Maybe maybe you'll tell
Speaker 1: me whether you think it's the same for you. When
Speaker 1: I read a work of ancient poetry, or I read
Speaker 1: about you know, very very ancient, like the ancient Egypt
Speaker 1: or ancient Mesopotamia, stuff that goes way way back from
Speaker 1: before the Roman Empire, say, I feel like, on the
Speaker 1: face of it, I encounter humans who are completely alien
Speaker 1: to me. I feel like I can't identify with them,
Speaker 1: and I don't understand the way they're being described. And
Speaker 1: what usually happens is I say, okay, well, this is
Speaker 1: just a problem of translation, Like I'm not getting some
Speaker 1: things about the cultural ways that their lives are communicated
Speaker 1: through this literature and recorded. Um so I just need
Speaker 1: to find ways of seeing the analogies between people like
Speaker 1: us and people like them and say, Okay, here they
Speaker 1: were really more like us, and here's why things are
Speaker 1: being misunderstood. But another way, do you kind of have
Speaker 1: that same experience? Um? Yeah, well it depends I mean definitely.
Speaker 1: I would say with the oldest civilization that we continually
Speaker 1: discuss here, it is probably you know, ancient Egypt, and
Speaker 1: you know, we've touched on the fact that like the
Speaker 1: religion of ancient Egypt did not did not travel well
Speaker 1: beyond its borders, and that that's they were, They were
Speaker 1: really alien people to try and understand. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: definitely feel that when I'm whenever we're researching the ancient Egyptians, uh,
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, I felt that we were talking about, uh,
Speaker 1: the you know, ancient ancient Mesopotamia as it relates to
Speaker 1: the Tower of Babel. But but there's I feel like
Speaker 1: there's often also this issue that I guess is best
Speaker 1: summed up by the various medieval pieces of art where
Speaker 1: you know, such as you know, the stuff by Brugal
Speaker 1: the Elder, where you have some sort of mythic thing
Speaker 1: going on, like the Tower of of Babel, but then
Speaker 1: you also have scenes of everyday life. And so I think, well,
Speaker 1: if I'm encountering something that doesn't feel very human and
Speaker 1: looking at an ancient culture, then perhaps that's because this
Speaker 1: is just like the skeleton of experience. This is just
Speaker 1: the heroes the gods, the myths, and very little is
Speaker 1: recorded of daily struggles and daily life. Yeah, but what
Speaker 1: if the issue is not so much that the ways
Speaker 1: they're similar to us is being lost in translation, but
Speaker 1: it's that we're reading that basically correct at face value,
Speaker 1: and they just weren't like us. Yeah. I feel like
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of a challenging perspective to try and
Speaker 1: wrestle with because I want to humanize figures of the past,
Speaker 1: especially you know, people in other cultures. It feels wrong
Speaker 1: to say, look at at at ancient Egyptians, individuals and
Speaker 1: you know, in ancient civilizations of Asia or Africa, and
Speaker 1: and think of them as alien, to think of them
Speaker 1: as having a different thought process than than we have, right.
Speaker 1: I Mean, one way I think that we're resistant to
Speaker 1: that is that there's a sort of implied like denigration
Speaker 1: in that saying like, oh, if they were very different
Speaker 1: from us, they weren't as good as us, And we
Speaker 1: certainly don't want to think that way, but we it
Speaker 1: might just be the case that their internal mental life
Speaker 1: was very different than the internal mental life of people
Speaker 1: on Earth today. Yeah, And before we dive in any deeper,
Speaker 1: I do want to point out that, yes, the bicameral
Speaker 1: mind is referenced in HBO's Westworld, UH. And I really
Speaker 1: love Westward. I think it's a wonderful show. However, I
Speaker 1: think you'll find that the the idea of the bicameral
Speaker 1: mind and the ramifications of bicameralism are far more complex, rewarding,
Speaker 1: and terrifying, uh than anything that's explored in that show.
Speaker 1: I totally agree. I remember that it came up, but
Speaker 1: I don't remember there being much about it in the show. Well, Robert,
Speaker 1: I think maybe we should start where Jane's starts in
Speaker 1: his book, which is with the problem of consciousness. And
Speaker 1: he's got he's got an introduction to his book that
Speaker 1: just get is a brief history of all the solutions
Speaker 1: that people have tried to offer to the problem of
Speaker 1: consciousness over the years, which, even if you don't if
Speaker 1: you're not interested in his bicameral theory, this is a
Speaker 1: cool intro to read because it's such a well written
Speaker 1: and concise summary of the history of people trying to
Speaker 1: deal with with what consciousness is and where it came
Speaker 1: from up until the mid nineteen seventies. And he's got
Speaker 1: a quote where he describes the you know, the question
Speaker 1: at the root of the problem of consciousness that is
Speaker 1: so good I had to read it. So consciousness is
Speaker 1: quote a secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel,
Speaker 1: an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, and
Speaker 1: infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where
Speaker 1: each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will,
Speaker 1: commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may
Speaker 1: study out the troubled book of what we have done
Speaker 1: and yet may do. An introcosum that is more myself
Speaker 1: than anything I can find in a mirror, This consciousness
Speaker 1: that is myself of selves, that is everything and yet
Speaker 1: nothing at all. What is it? And where did it
Speaker 1: come from? And why? I should also say that the
Speaker 1: description and an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries a
Speaker 1: perfect review for Disney World. Wait, what are the discoveries
Speaker 1: the discoveries of disappointments or no, no no, the discoveries are
Speaker 1: you are discoveries. It's full of just wonders and disappointments.
Speaker 1: So I mean, I loved it, but yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: it's a it's it's hard to contemplate the discovery of
Speaker 1: what other people throw in the trash. Maybe, isn't that
Speaker 1: one of the most interesting things about going to an
Speaker 1: amusement park is looking in the trash can and seeing
Speaker 1: what people throw away. Maybe this is just me um,
Speaker 1: Maybe this is a huge Joe. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: don't remember the trash cans of Disney World so that much.
Speaker 1: But maybe that's just because it was you know, stimulation overload. No,
Speaker 1: it's great when you let you see a our glasses
Speaker 1: in there or something and it's like, huh hm. Anyway
Speaker 1: back to the problem of consciousness. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: it's not hard to understand where human beings came from.
Speaker 1: Biology and evolution seemed totally sufficient to explain the existence
Speaker 1: of bipedal primates eating and reproducing and making tools. But
Speaker 1: the question is not why are those creatures here? It's
Speaker 1: why are we here? These entities of reflection and awareness
Speaker 1: that seemed to inhabit the bodies of these bipedal primates,
Speaker 1: and so one can easily imagine, as we talked about
Speaker 1: earlier in the introduction, bipedal primates that do all the
Speaker 1: same stuff we do, but our automata there's no inner
Speaker 1: awareness or capacity for deliberative thought or reflection. So if
Speaker 1: if we're evolved beings, at what point in our evolution
Speaker 1: did consciousness appear? And so he he offers a few
Speaker 1: thoughts of this. One of them is the idea that
Speaker 1: consciousness is a property of matter. Right, so the relationship
Speaker 1: of consciousness to what we are conscious of is not
Speaker 1: fundamentally different from the relationship between objects interacting physically by
Speaker 1: contact or by gravity. It's only different in complexity. Of course,
Speaker 1: Jaynes is not persuaded by this view, And I would
Speaker 1: just say, if consciousness is an inherent property of matter,
Speaker 1: like a can of baked beans is in some way conscious,
Speaker 1: why do we completely lose consciousness under general anesthesia? Like
Speaker 1: if you've ever been put under for surgery, you know
Speaker 1: what it's like. There's no consciousness whatsoever. It's just a
Speaker 1: black hole in your in your experience. But so yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no reflection, no internal experience, no memory, no choice,
Speaker 1: no dreams. Your mind just ceases until you wake up.
Speaker 1: But while you're under anesthesia, you still have the same
Speaker 1: mass you did. So if it's something about matter that
Speaker 1: would see, I don't see why changing the chemical uh,
Speaker 1: you know, chemicals flowing through your brain would cause you
Speaker 1: to completely lose consciousness. It's just that some part of
Speaker 1: the brain has been chemically deactivated. The signals to me
Speaker 1: that consciousness has something to do with something happening in
Speaker 1: the brain. Yeah, And I think distinctions like this tend
Speaker 1: to make a lot of sense to modern humans, in
Speaker 1: large part because we have that handy metaphor of hardware
Speaker 1: and software, Right, so it's really easy for us to
Speaker 1: think of of consciousness arising as essentially like software arising
Speaker 1: from the hardware um of the of the brain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not there in the hardware. It has to it
Speaker 1: has to be run by the hardware. Okay, so so
Speaker 1: maybe it's not there in all living matter. But maybe
Speaker 1: Jane says, what if it's a property of all living
Speaker 1: things like amba's have some form of consciousness. It's just
Speaker 1: when life arises, that's when you start having consciousness. Apparently
Speaker 1: Darwin was fond of this idea. He's he sort of
Speaker 1: saw a rudimentary consciousness in all living things. But according
Speaker 1: to Jane's and I think I'd probably have to with them,
Speaker 1: there is just not any evidence that simple organisms possess consciousness.
Speaker 1: Our tendency to project consciousness onto them is just some
Speaker 1: fallacy of sympathy. Like we see behavior and sympathizing with
Speaker 1: the consciousness behind similar types of behaviors in human beings,
Speaker 1: we assume consciousness is behind those similar behaviors in all creatures.
Speaker 1: In Amiba's because you know what, a human being fleeing
Speaker 1: a needle would be conscious. You imagine an amiba fleeing
Speaker 1: a needle would be conscious, But there's just no evidence
Speaker 1: that that's true. Yeah, I think it's important to remember
Speaker 1: that as humans, we we anthropomorphize like mad gods. We're
Speaker 1: wired to see faces, but we're also wired to detect
Speaker 1: minds totally even when there's nothing there. Right, Okay, So
Speaker 1: maybe here's another theory. Jane says, what if consciousness is learning.
Speaker 1: He says a lot of people were persuaded this by
Speaker 1: this view for many years. And here's a quote. If
Speaker 1: an animal could modify its behavior on the basis of
Speaker 1: its experience, it must be having an experience. It must
Speaker 1: be conscious. Thus, if one wished to study the evolution
Speaker 1: of consciousness, one simply studied the evolution of learning. And
Speaker 1: in fact, James himself along with many other psychologists, worked
Speaker 1: under this assumption for many years of psychological research before
Speaker 1: rejecting it. For example, he tells stories about how he
Speaker 1: did experiments to see if a mimosa plant could be
Speaker 1: trained through conditioning, and he in the end determined that
Speaker 1: the mimosa plant was not conscious. Uh. He he found
Speaker 1: that species with synaptic nervous systems like fish, flatworms, earthworms,
Speaker 1: and so forth, could learn, and originally he took this
Speaker 1: as evidence that they possessed some form of consciousness, but
Speaker 1: later research has shown this to be just obviously wrong.
Speaker 1: You don't need consciousness for learning, because we can show
Speaker 1: in human beings that there's a tremendous amount of totally
Speaker 1: unconscious learning, unconscious conditioning. Yeah. Plus we need only think
Speaker 1: to the slime mold for an example of learning taking
Speaker 1: place in the absence of a brain. So um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like we've we've moved beyond that. Okay, the
Speaker 1: next one is just consciousness is a metaphysical, metaphysical imposition.
Speaker 1: It's it's magic, you know. And Okay, well, if if
Speaker 1: you think it's magic, enjoy, But that's that's not really
Speaker 1: something that's very productive to proceed with from a scientific
Speaker 1: point of view, it's hard to do experiments to see
Speaker 1: if consciousness is magic. So uh so you believe that
Speaker 1: if you want, but that's not really going to give
Speaker 1: you a program of experimentation to work with. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think we can only engage in dualism so far from
Speaker 1: a scientific standpoint, because the mind that stands apart from
Speaker 1: body must still be rooted in our universe. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we can't really do much with magic. Here's another one.
Speaker 1: We've talked about this one on the show before. Here's
Speaker 1: the helpless spectator theory. Consciousness does nothing, and in fact
Speaker 1: it can do nothing. So the idea is that at
Speaker 1: some point an evolution, sufficiently complex brains begin to create
Speaker 1: this sense of awareness of deliberate thought. Uh. And the
Speaker 1: relationship between this sensation of experience and the actions in
Speaker 1: your body is a complete illusion. Your consciousness does not
Speaker 1: in fact control your body. Your body acts, and your
Speaker 1: consciousness watches you act. It's a helpless passenger. You're essentially
Speaker 1: watching a movie of your own mind, suffering from the
Speaker 1: delusion that you're participating in the movie. This is also
Speaker 1: known sometimes as epiphenomenalism, that consciousness is just an epiphenomenal, uh,
Speaker 1: byproduct of mental processes. Yeah. Thomas Huxley was fond of this,
Speaker 1: and he would compare conscious mind and the physical brain
Speaker 1: to a genie and a lamp. Yeah. But so a
Speaker 1: lot of people have found this not very productive. I mean,
Speaker 1: one would one question would be well, but still what
Speaker 1: is it? Another thing would be the American psychologist William James,
Speaker 1: the guy who wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience. He
Speaker 1: argued against this view, as paraphrased by Jane's quote, If
Speaker 1: consciousness is the mere, impotent shadow of action, why is
Speaker 1: it more intense when action is most hesitant? And why
Speaker 1: are we least conscious when doing something most habitual? I
Speaker 1: think that's a reasonable question. So Janes ends up saying
Speaker 1: that he thinks any viable theory of consciousness should at
Speaker 1: least try to explain a relationship between consciousness and behavior. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're getting close to the end of this timeline. How
Speaker 1: about consciousness as an emergent property. We've talked about this
Speaker 1: idea before too, Right, So, hydrogen is not wet, oxygen
Speaker 1: is not wet, but you combine them into H two oh,
Speaker 1: and you can create the property of wetness with enough
Speaker 1: of these atoms. So in that sense, consciousness would be
Speaker 1: a property of certain arrangements of matter. Uh, that is
Speaker 1: more than the sum of its parts. It's sort of
Speaker 1: a feature emerging from interactions, like from a sufficiently complex
Speaker 1: biological system. Exactly. So this may be true. And for Janes,
Speaker 1: I think he rectially reacts to this by saying, well,
Speaker 1: it's not that that's false, it's just that that doesn't
Speaker 1: answer the question. Consciousness may in fact be emergent, but
Speaker 1: so what if it is? Still what is it and
Speaker 1: what does it do? Then we get into the middle
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century with a really really distressing viewpoint
Speaker 1: consciousness doesn't exist. This is often identified with the behaviorist
Speaker 1: school of psychology like B. F. Skinner, very strong in
Speaker 1: mid century psychology. Uh, Jane's says, quote, it is an
Speaker 1: interesting exercise to sit down and try to be conscious
Speaker 1: of what it means to say that consciousness does not exist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, some would call that kind of mental exercise meditation. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: I believe it's Kartole who frequently advises one to think
Speaker 1: the following I wonder what my next thought is going
Speaker 1: to be in order to clear the mind and uh,
Speaker 1: paralyzing thought. Well, no, I wouldn't say paralyzing is rating.
Speaker 1: You know, if you just sort of set there and
Speaker 1: if you start, if you ask yourself, well, what my
Speaker 1: next thought is going to be? What's my next thought
Speaker 1: going to be? And then you kind of or at
Speaker 1: least I kind of feel things that feel like that
Speaker 1: the weight of the default mode network, the weight of
Speaker 1: consciousness kind of lifting for a second. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like standing on one leg to relieve the weight on
Speaker 1: the other. Yeah, that's appealing. So Jane's has a fairly
Speaker 1: substantial discussion about the influence of behaviorism, and so the
Speaker 1: behavior As School of Psychology had a research program that,
Speaker 1: just to summarize it, tried to focus exclusively on externally
Speaker 1: measurable behaviors, and it posited that these behaviors could be
Speaker 1: explained by the interplay of mere instinctual reactions and stimuli,
Speaker 1: or not just instinctual ones, I mean conditioned reactions. It
Speaker 1: was big on conditioning and it was not really interested
Speaker 1: in the inner experience. And Jane says that in the beginning,
Speaker 1: what behavior is we're really saying was consciousness is not important.
Speaker 1: And this sort of transformed into the doctor and that
Speaker 1: consciousness does not exist. And James actually believes that by
Speaker 1: focusing on these externally miasurable actions, behaviorism was very useful.
Speaker 1: It sort of got psychology out of that squashy realm
Speaker 1: of philosophy that you think about with like Freud and
Speaker 1: Young and made it a more respectable experimental science. But
Speaker 1: Jane says, quote, but having once been part of its
Speaker 1: major school, I confess that it was really not what
Speaker 1: it seemed off the printed page. Behaviorism was only a
Speaker 1: refusal to talk about consciousness. Nobody really believed he was
Speaker 1: not conscious. So the way I interpret that is that
Speaker 1: behaviorism was in fact a method, not a theory, and
Speaker 1: it did a lot of good for psychology. But now
Speaker 1: that psychology has sort of like had had its room
Speaker 1: cleaned up by this process of going through a behaviorist phase,
Speaker 1: you can return to introspective experience, the internality. What is consciousness?
Speaker 1: What does it do? Where did it come from? Now,
Speaker 1: one last thing he deals with, and I think this
Speaker 1: is a very good point to make, is he focuses
Speaker 1: on neuroscience. So that you may have read studies, or
Speaker 1: not studies, maybe news reports that say, like, hey, scientists
Speaker 1: have identified the X as the source of consciousness in
Speaker 1: the brain. Maybe it was the reticular activating system, or
Speaker 1: maybe it was the clos strum or something else in
Speaker 1: the brain. There's some region of the brain that some
Speaker 1: neuroscientists now think they've identified as the place where consciousness
Speaker 1: happens or is made possible. You they may be right.
Speaker 1: It may be that you can isolate some sort of
Speaker 1: on off switch for consciousness in the brain. But yet again,
Speaker 1: I would say, this doesn't answer the fundamental question. You've
Speaker 1: just basically narrowed down the physical space of the tissue
Speaker 1: that generates it. You still have the question of what
Speaker 1: is it, where did it come from, and what does
Speaker 1: it do? Yeah? If I draw a hole through um
Speaker 1: like a hard drive, am I necessarily drilling a hole
Speaker 1: through like the seat of like the center of computation,
Speaker 1: or I mean just disrupting the the integrated system that
Speaker 1: makes it possible? Yeah? Yeah, you could identify some part
Speaker 1: of a computer that says, as you say, well, without
Speaker 1: this part of the computer, he couldn't compute. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I can. I can steal like the battery off
Speaker 1: of somebody's laptop, right, But that really doesn't necessarily answer this,
Speaker 1: Like deeper question of like, what is the nature of
Speaker 1: computing and why does it occur? Much easier to answer
Speaker 1: in the nature in the discussion of the nature of
Speaker 1: a computer. Yeah, and I have to say we we
Speaker 1: went into this a little bit in the episode Where
Speaker 1: Is My Mind? Yeah, there's a good one to refer
Speaker 1: back to if anyone wants more on this topic. Alright,
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna take a quick break and when
Speaker 1: we come back, we will dive right back into consciousness
Speaker 1: than alright, we're back. All right. We've been discussing in
Speaker 1: trying to work our way up to Julian Jane's theory
Speaker 1: of the origins of consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Speaker 1: Bicameral Mind. We're starting with his discussion of what consciousness
Speaker 1: is um So another thing that he points out in
Speaker 1: his book is that there's an important distinction to be
Speaker 1: made between consciousness and reactivity. So this is something interesting
Speaker 1: to think about. You know, we talked about the the
Speaker 1: high the highway hypnosis state where you can drive without
Speaker 1: really being conscious of it. It's a fact that people
Speaker 1: in some nambulistic states, meaning sleepwalking, can react without being conscious,
Speaker 1: like you put an obstacle in their path. And they
Speaker 1: might go around it, or they can they can react
Speaker 1: to their environment and yet not be conscious the entire time.
Speaker 1: That people don't know what they're doing, and so we
Speaker 1: react unconsciously to all kinds of things. For example, unconscious
Speaker 1: learning through conditioning and reactivity can also be explained through
Speaker 1: neurology and behavior, but consciousness not so easily. I've got
Speaker 1: another thing to ask you, you listener, right now, Where
Speaker 1: are you now? Before I ask you that question, I
Speaker 1: think it's very likely that you were not conscious of
Speaker 1: where you were. And that's not the same thing as
Speaker 1: saying you didn't know where you or like, if somebody
Speaker 1: asks you, you can turn your attention to the answer
Speaker 1: to that question and immediately provide the answer. But you
Speaker 1: were not thinking about where you were. The fact of
Speaker 1: your physical location was not present in the theater of
Speaker 1: your mind at that moment, unless it just happened to
Speaker 1: be by chance. Yeah, Like kind of a more extreme
Speaker 1: example of this would be if I am reading a
Speaker 1: really exciting book in my living room, Am I really
Speaker 1: in my living room? Or am I on that you
Speaker 1: know that that epic battlefield that I'm reading about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a great example. I mean, one of the interesting
Speaker 1: things about engaging with fiction and like watching a movie
Speaker 1: or reading a book, is that you enter this kind
Speaker 1: of unconscious flow state, or what you're unconscious about is
Speaker 1: your own physical life and your surroundings, and that you're
Speaker 1: engaged deeply with the ongoing narratives, such that you forget
Speaker 1: yourself and where you are, yeah, or you know. Another
Speaker 1: example would be if someone is played by traumatic memory.
Speaker 1: You know, you you're aware of your actual physical surroundings,
Speaker 1: though your mind is continually going back to this one
Speaker 1: place or time and experience. So with those really simple experiments,
Speaker 1: you can demonstrate that consciousness is actually a much narrower
Speaker 1: part of your mental experience than your entire mental life. Right.
Speaker 1: Not everything you do with your brain is conscious. In fact,
Speaker 1: most of what you do with your brain is not
Speaker 1: conscious consciousness. James uses this one image that I think
Speaker 1: is very effective. It's sort of like a flashlight shining
Speaker 1: around in a dark room. The whole room is there,
Speaker 1: but you can use your You can use the flashlight
Speaker 1: to shine on any individual object. And then once you
Speaker 1: shine it there and you try to imagine, Okay, what
Speaker 1: what is going on in my brain that's not conscious?
Speaker 1: So you move the flashlight around to look at things
Speaker 1: that you're not conscious of, you immediately become conscious of
Speaker 1: them when you shine the light on them. Yeah. This
Speaker 1: gets into ideas too that we've discussed about consciousness as
Speaker 1: being potentially being just like basically an ass act of
Speaker 1: who of awareness, which is not exactly the same as
Speaker 1: James is going to propose for the definition of consciousness,
Speaker 1: but we're getting there. So James gives this list of
Speaker 1: things saying what consciousness is not. So he says, it's
Speaker 1: not mental activity. We have demonstrated that tons of mental
Speaker 1: activity is Unconsciousness is unconscious. Uh, it's not recording information
Speaker 1: because a whole lot of memory is clearly established unconsciously.
Speaker 1: Think about the ways that, Uh, there are things that
Speaker 1: you could not physically draw a picture of because you
Speaker 1: don't remember what they look like, but you would notice
Speaker 1: if something was wrong with them. To think about, like
Speaker 1: if you came home from your house today and somebody
Speaker 1: had moved the pictures around on the wall. You might
Speaker 1: not be able to consciously recall where all the pictures
Speaker 1: are if you tried to draw a picture of it
Speaker 1: right now, but you might notice something was off if
Speaker 1: they had been moved. You know. It kind of reminds
Speaker 1: me how some you know, some books you read there
Speaker 1: is a very detailed description of a particular character. Other
Speaker 1: times there's not. And I know when I was younger,
Speaker 1: I used to engage in an exercise where I would
Speaker 1: basically pick a movie star and slot them in as
Speaker 1: that character, and uh, I don't. I haven't done that
Speaker 1: really in years. Occasionally, like there'll be an actor or
Speaker 1: some you know, a particular face that kind of becomes
Speaker 1: that character in my mind always Jeff Goldblum. Just universe
Speaker 1: is full of Goldblums. It's not a bad choice. But
Speaker 1: but I find a lot of times if if the
Speaker 1: author is not giving a very detailed description, I kind
Speaker 1: of have a loose idea of what that character looks like.
Speaker 1: And I don't think about it much. But if you
Speaker 1: were to present me with an artist sketch of that character,
Speaker 1: I could instantly tell you if I liked it or not,
Speaker 1: or if you know, whether it matched my, uh my
Speaker 1: vision of what that character would be, even though my
Speaker 1: vision of the character is rather abstract, like in your
Speaker 1: mental theater, it's like they're wearing the scramble masks from
Speaker 1: a scanner darkly. You know that they look like many
Speaker 1: things at once as kind of a blur, but you
Speaker 1: can identify particular that you think it does not fit
Speaker 1: that character as soon as you see it. Okay, So
Speaker 1: it's not recording of information, he says, it's not the
Speaker 1: basis for forming concepts. I think he's right about this,
Speaker 1: because how about the concept of a tree. Now he
Speaker 1: talks about the idea that no one has ever seen
Speaker 1: a tree. In fact, you've only seen this tree or
Speaker 1: that tree. But he sort of disagrees with it because
Speaker 1: he says, you know, animals have to have categories of
Speaker 1: things that they react to in a certain way. So
Speaker 1: it would kind of be hard to imagine the life
Speaker 1: of a squirrel if a squirrel did not have something
Speaker 1: like the concept of a tree. It's got to be
Speaker 1: able to scramble into a tree that's never scrambled into
Speaker 1: before by recognizing it as a thing that can be
Speaker 1: scrambled into, which is a tree. Yeah, And it's difficult,
Speaker 1: I think for us to think about that kind of
Speaker 1: thing because it's very difficult for us to think about
Speaker 1: it outside of language. Yeah. So Jane says that consciousness
Speaker 1: is not, in fact the basis of learning, and we
Speaker 1: we know this to be true through experience menation. Now,
Speaker 1: signal learning happens automatically. Now that's just like you know conditioning,
Speaker 1: Pavlovian conditioning. You see a signal and you expect something
Speaker 1: to happen according to association with it. UH. Skill learning
Speaker 1: also seems to happen when we're least conscious. Think about training.
Speaker 1: You ever trained for like some kind of athletic feed
Speaker 1: or trained on a musical instrument, you probably know from
Speaker 1: experience that you can't focus too much on your actions.
Speaker 1: You have to sort of let go and not overthink it.
Speaker 1: How about solution learning? Uh? He he talked about how
Speaker 1: even even the solutions to like working toward a goal
Speaker 1: or a problem, the solutions are things we arrive at unconsciously.
Speaker 1: So he describes this experiment where UH students were performing
Speaker 1: an experiment on their professor, where every time the professor
Speaker 1: moved to the right side of the room, the students,
Speaker 1: instead of being board paid rapped attention and they laughed
Speaker 1: really hard when you would make a joke. And so
Speaker 1: by you know, the end of a week, he's basically
Speaker 1: so far to the right of the room that he's
Speaker 1: going out the door, and he was not aware that
Speaker 1: they had been training him this way. Interesting, he says,
Speaker 1: consciousness is also not the process of thinking, thinking, like
Speaker 1: making judgments. So here's a quick test. Hold two objects
Speaker 1: in each hand or one, sorry, one object in each hand?
Speaker 1: Which one is heavier? All right? So you think about
Speaker 1: that and you make a judgment, but you're not conscious
Speaker 1: of how the judgment arises. Your brain just sort of
Speaker 1: presents the answer to you. Right, one feels heavier, and
Speaker 1: your brain tells you that's the one that's heavier. But
Speaker 1: you you don't, like you've done some kind of unconscious
Speaker 1: arithmetic and you're not aware of the process by which
Speaker 1: the answer was generated. Yeah, it's kind of difficult to
Speaker 1: show your work exactly. It's sort of like saying, why
Speaker 1: is too greater than one? Or like I give you
Speaker 1: two numbers, you know, six and four? Which one is larger?
Speaker 1: You can't explain a conscious process of deciding which one
Speaker 1: was larger. Well, I mean I intrinsically know that that
Speaker 1: six is greater than one and I and those are
Speaker 1: small enough numbers two that I can I can visualize
Speaker 1: the quantity. Yeah, I can imagine six eggs and four eggs.
Speaker 1: So I can engage in that kind of like basic
Speaker 1: visual uh judgment. But you didn't have to do that,
Speaker 1: did you. You just had the answer immediately. Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 1: I guess it does become tricky like that because you
Speaker 1: because because I'm doing it all in in reverse. I'm
Speaker 1: looking back on my decision making, looking back at my
Speaker 1: judgment and trying to figure out how it took place
Speaker 1: in the mind. Yeah, you're trying to consciously reverse engineer
Speaker 1: your unconscious thought process. So here's another one. He he mentions.
Speaker 1: Let's go with a pattern. Tell me if you say
Speaker 1: what comes next A B, A B A question mark B. Right,
Speaker 1: everyone can get the answer. It's totally simple. But notice
Speaker 1: how you're not consciously aware of how the answer is generated.
Speaker 1: You can consciously reflect on the answer once you have it,
Speaker 1: but it's not generated by consciousness, it's just there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This is actually a standard part of of of testing
Speaker 1: for kindergarteners. By the way, my son just went through this,
Speaker 1: and I get to see like the questions he was asking,
Speaker 1: and one of them involves a couple of different rounds
Speaker 1: of this to see if they what kind of pattern
Speaker 1: recognition they have. Yeah. Uh, so here's a crazy thing.
Speaker 1: He says that consciousness is not even the process of reasoning.
Speaker 1: How would that be the case. Surely we think reason
Speaker 1: has something to do with consciousness, and it may have
Speaker 1: something to do with consciousness, like, for example, reasoning may
Speaker 1: require conscious laying of the groundwork of sort of the
Speaker 1: reasoning space. But it is curious to pay attention to
Speaker 1: stories of scientists coming up with answers to like complex
Speaker 1: mathematical problems or physics problems. They very very often report
Speaker 1: that the solutions come to them out of the blue
Speaker 1: when they're doing unrelated activities. Like there's a story about
Speaker 1: how Einstein had be careful when he was shaving because
Speaker 1: suddenly solutions to problems in physics would leap into his
Speaker 1: mind and surprise him when he hadn't been thinking about them,
Speaker 1: and he had to be careful not to cut his
Speaker 1: own throat with his razor when this happened. That's interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think we can all relate to situations
Speaker 1: where you you know, you go out on a walk
Speaker 1: or you engage in some of their activity and yeah,
Speaker 1: that's when the thoughts begin to come. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: it's it's in the bath that you have your Eureka moment.
Speaker 1: So having excluded all that stuff in deciding what consciousness is,
Speaker 1: it's time to get to the bones here, Jane says,
Speaker 1: or would this be the meat? Would it be the bones?
Speaker 1: Would it be the fat to chew on? M let's
Speaker 1: go with Let's go with the meat, the meat. Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe this is the meat, so Jane says again, I'll
Speaker 1: just hit you with it and then we can try
Speaker 1: to explain it. Consciousness is a metaphor based model of
Speaker 1: the world, and it arises from language. Without language, according
Speaker 1: to Jane's you could not have consciousness, uh. And it
Speaker 1: comes from the way we use language to create metaphors
Speaker 1: and how those metaphors themselves lead to new ways of thinking.
Speaker 1: So how does this work? Well, let's explore real quick.
Speaker 1: So a metaphor is actually, when you think about it,
Speaker 1: one of the most fascinating things about language. It's a
Speaker 1: thing that without language we cannot do. Right. Language makes
Speaker 1: metaphors possible. And it's the use of a term for
Speaker 1: one thing to describe another because of some kind of
Speaker 1: similarity between them or between their relations to other things.
Speaker 1: That sounds kind of complex, but you use metaphors in
Speaker 1: your life you basically know what they are, right, So uh.
Speaker 1: He introduces two terms for the two halves of a metaphor.
Speaker 1: You've got the meta frand, which is a new thing,
Speaker 1: a thing to be described that you don't already know about.
Speaker 1: And then you've got the meta fire, and that's the
Speaker 1: known thing, the thing in relation used to describe the
Speaker 1: new thing. So here's an example. Let's say there's a
Speaker 1: new species of beetle that's got a large horn, protuberants
Speaker 1: branching off of its head. That's the meta frand it's
Speaker 1: something new. You've got the meta fire something you're familiar with,
Speaker 1: a stag and its antlers, and the metaphor is a
Speaker 1: stag beetle. Okay, but I'm guessing this also applies to say, like,
Speaker 1: the meta fran could be a feeling that I have exactly,
Speaker 1: and the metaphere is, say a tiger. I've seen a tiger,
Speaker 1: but this, this emotion that I'm feeling is new to me.
Speaker 1: But I can use the tigers a way to describe
Speaker 1: what I'm feeling exactly. Now. That is one of his
Speaker 1: key insights. We use meta fires based on the natural
Speaker 1: physical world around us to understand the meta frans. Of
Speaker 1: inscrutable internal consciousness. So you have mental activity that is
Speaker 1: turned into a metaphor through comparison to some concrete action
Speaker 1: in the world, and this process gives rise to conscious thought.
Speaker 1: So here's a version of that. How about your your
Speaker 1: trying to solve a problem and you've you've got going
Speaker 1: on in your mind what we just described, like you
Speaker 1: the A B A B A B problem, what comes next?
Speaker 1: If you think A comes next, you don't understand what
Speaker 1: happened in your brain to to give you that answer.
Speaker 1: So that might be the metaphrand, the thing that needs
Speaker 1: to be described, the unfamiliar thing. It's the inscrutable process
Speaker 1: of coming to comprehend the solution to a problem, and
Speaker 1: you've got to metaphire something that's totally familiar, to compare
Speaker 1: it to seeing with your eyes something that happens in
Speaker 1: the physical world. The metaphor is the conscious thought is
Speaker 1: now I see the answer. So consciousness, for Jayne's is
Speaker 1: something that is taking place in a metaphorical mind space
Speaker 1: that is an analog of physical space in reality. It's
Speaker 1: when we invent this metaphor of a world inside to
Speaker 1: match the world outside, and we use metaphors from the
Speaker 1: physical world to understand and describe our own mental activity.
Speaker 1: And through these metaphors, we generate this self reflective process,
Speaker 1: this spatialized stuff in the head, the mind space where
Speaker 1: we create narratives. We reflect on our behaviors and generate
Speaker 1: the circumstances that produce consciousness. And for James, this is
Speaker 1: how consciousness arises. I think. I'm not sure I agree
Speaker 1: with it, but I do think this is one of
Speaker 1: the most fascinating propositions for the origin of consciousness I've
Speaker 1: ever heard. Yeah, yeah, it's I agree with you, it's
Speaker 1: and I'm hesitant to, you know, endorse it because I really,
Speaker 1: for one thing, I really do like the the awareness explanation.
Speaker 1: But but but yeah, when I started thinking about about
Speaker 1: the power of metaphors, it it does. It does have
Speaker 1: a bit of it does feel true. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's amazing the way metaphors do pervade our thinking about things.
Speaker 1: It's one of the funny things about languages that language
Speaker 1: makes metaphors possible, but almost all language is built out
Speaker 1: of metaphors. Even the word metaphor is a metaphor. Like
Speaker 1: the word metaphor comes from the Greek meaning to carry across,
Speaker 1: so you've got this abstract action of taking the meanings
Speaker 1: of one word and putting them on another word, But
Speaker 1: then it is described in terms of a physical, concrete
Speaker 1: action in the world that we're familiar with, carrying one
Speaker 1: thing to another place. Yeah. So even if you think
Speaker 1: you're being very literal, yeah, you're still you're still walking
Speaker 1: on metaphors. Yeah, I mean pretty much the only language
Speaker 1: that is not based on metaphors is that of the physical,
Speaker 1: concrete world and basic activities in space. So, uh so
Speaker 1: James gets to what are the most important features of consciousness? So, like,
Speaker 1: what what is consciousness? According to him, he says, one
Speaker 1: of the main features is spatialization, and this means that
Speaker 1: conscious thoughts metaphorically seem to take place in a quote
Speaker 1: mind space, which is not a physical space, and within
Speaker 1: the mind space of consciousness, things that do not in
Speaker 1: reality have a spatial qualit ity become what he calls spatialized,
Speaker 1: that is imagined with spatial qualities. So, for example, time
Speaker 1: in direct experience, we apprehend time as this continuous, impermanent
Speaker 1: succession of moments. Right, it's hard to describe how you
Speaker 1: experience time without using a conscious metaphor that turns it
Speaker 1: into space, like can you how how can you even
Speaker 1: describe what time is without changing it into space in
Speaker 1: your consciousness? Yeah, I mean you end up having to
Speaker 1: come up with some sort of physical description, like for instance,
Speaker 1: Card Vonnegut in The slaughter House five had the description
Speaker 1: for for a linear experience of time of a man
Speaker 1: on a train with blinders on looking at mountains roll
Speaker 1: by and he can't turn his head. Yeah, exactly. So
Speaker 1: it's much like that. In our unconscious direct experience, each
Speaker 1: moment is sort of lived in and then disappears. But
Speaker 1: in our conscious mind space we can organize temporal of
Speaker 1: events into a timeline, something that does not exist in
Speaker 1: any detectable way in reality. There is no such thing
Speaker 1: as a time line in the world. It's only a
Speaker 1: mental uh construct. So consciousness makes the past and the
Speaker 1: future comprehensible and organizable to us. Suddenly, when you have consciousness,
Speaker 1: the past and the future in some sense exist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then this is a This is cool because this ties
Speaker 1: into some past discussions we've had about the difference between
Speaker 1: linear linear existence random and modern humans and the more
Speaker 1: cyclical existence of the past. Yeah, totally. Another feature he
Speaker 1: isolates of of being unique to consciousness. He calls it exerption.
Speaker 1: So this is when you isolate a detail for attention,
Speaker 1: using it to represent the whole. So I'm gonna ask you, Robert,
Speaker 1: what did you do the summer after ninth grade? I
Speaker 1: have no idea. I have no idea whatsoever. No, I'd
Speaker 1: have to really think about it. I guess I probably
Speaker 1: summer hip nosis, just totally totally. I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you if you ask the question about earlier year,
Speaker 1: I could have said, oh, I went to scout camp,
Speaker 1: you know, or I went to this camper or another.
Speaker 1: But for ninth grade, I'm not sure what I did. Well, Okay,
Speaker 1: So I want to say for most memories of time
Speaker 1: period memories, I would ask like that you probably have
Speaker 1: at least one image rise to the top from the
Speaker 1: time I ask you about, and that is the exerpt
Speaker 1: that represents the summer. And then from that one exerpted
Speaker 1: memory might be an image, you might be a specific
Speaker 1: episode you recall from that one exert you can associate
Speaker 1: around to others that have something to do with it.
Speaker 1: Rather in this imagined physical spatialized timeline or by you know,
Speaker 1: sort of theme associations and this is a process that
Speaker 1: we know as reminiscing. Right, So, think about how a
Speaker 1: human like us without consciousness could recall information about the past.
Speaker 1: It's impossible to imagine that person reminiscing. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: Like a person without consciousness might be able to use
Speaker 1: information from their past to make a decision about the future.
Speaker 1: But and so they'd have memory, and the memory could
Speaker 1: be recalled, but there would be no process of wandering
Speaker 1: through the mind space of memory, of the memory theater,
Speaker 1: looking at one exerpt of the past after another. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: that it's crazy to try to imagine that, because it
Speaker 1: would mean that you could not look longingly back on
Speaker 1: something in the past. You exactly couldn't experience nostalgia. You couldn't.
Speaker 1: I mean, one would wonder even if you could be traumatized.
Speaker 1: I mean maybe you could, because you could certainly have
Speaker 1: positive and negative associations with events. Uh, And you you
Speaker 1: could have things you wanted that would be associated with
Speaker 1: past stimuli. But you couldn't. You couldn't wander through your
Speaker 1: memory because what would you wander with. So a bicameral
Speaker 1: human who had been you know, experienced horrific burn, they
Speaker 1: might they might have a strong reaction to seeing fire,
Speaker 1: but they wouldn't just setting there eating their you know,
Speaker 1: their grass and their berries and then just think out
Speaker 1: of the blue fire is terrifying and I'm afraid of it. No,
Speaker 1: I think they probably wouldn't. Yeah, they would not have
Speaker 1: memories of that event. The memory would be accessible and
Speaker 1: useful to their brain and behavior, but they wouldn't go
Speaker 1: back to the memory and experience it with their attention.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of liberating because you you wouldn't be
Speaker 1: sitting around constantly fretting about the past and the future. Right, Okay,
Speaker 1: So I asked just the question, if you didn't have consciousness,
Speaker 1: what would you wander through your memory with? The thing
Speaker 1: you wander through your memory with is the next feature
Speaker 1: Janes identifies the analog I. So, for Jane's an analog
Speaker 1: is something that at every point is generated by the thing.
Speaker 1: It's an analog of A good example would be a map.
Speaker 1: A map is an analog of a part of the
Speaker 1: surface of the earth. So the analog I that James
Speaker 1: talks about is the mental analog of your body in reality,
Speaker 1: and it moves mentally through mind space to observe and
Speaker 1: perform metaphorical quote action within the mind space. If that's thick,
Speaker 1: just think about it's the mental version of you that
Speaker 1: does the looking. So when you wander through your memory,
Speaker 1: it's your analog eye that does the wandering. It's the
Speaker 1: mental representation of yourself as a subject Edworth noting that
Speaker 1: in his book, he he does stress that the analog
Speaker 1: I came into being towards the end of the second
Speaker 1: millennium BC. Yeah, and that's about the time that he's
Speaker 1: saying that the bi cameral mind largely began to transition
Speaker 1: into the conscious mind after the analog eye. He's also
Speaker 1: got a feature of consciousness is the metaphor me. This
Speaker 1: is the metaphorical object version of yourself that you observe.
Speaker 1: So when you say, when you say I see myself
Speaker 1: doing X in a memory, the eye in that sentence,
Speaker 1: the subject is the analog eye. The the the analog
Speaker 1: version of you that looks, and the me version of
Speaker 1: yourself offen that sentence is the metaphor me, the subject
Speaker 1: version or sorry, the object version of yourself that gets
Speaker 1: looked at. That's crazy because it's it forces you to
Speaker 1: try to imagine what if you only had I, or
Speaker 1: you only had me. Yeah, Now that affects your your
Speaker 1: your conscious experience of the world. Well, it seems to be,
Speaker 1: at least in his theory. The bicameral human has neither one,
Speaker 1: and the conscious human has both. So yeah, what if
Speaker 1: you're some kind of transitionary human where you you you
Speaker 1: can't imagine yourself, but you can wander through mental space? Yeah,
Speaker 1: or kind of like things only happen to me, but
Speaker 1: I don't do things. Uh, yeah, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: wonder if that's possible anyway. Two more features of consciousness
Speaker 1: he identifies. So he says consciousness enables neurotization. So an
Speaker 1: unconscious being could not form thoughts into coherent stories. You
Speaker 1: make a narrative that makes sense. So the non conscious
Speaker 1: brain would react to events of the present, perhaps based
Speaker 1: on things learned from experiences in the past. But the
Speaker 1: conscious mind weaves past, present, and future into a story,
Speaker 1: and the story also includes dependencies of cause and effect,
Speaker 1: and a story things didn't just happen, They happened for
Speaker 1: a reason. So this is the part of the conscious
Speaker 1: mind that makes us concerned with the question why. A
Speaker 1: final feature of consciousness is what he calls conciliation or
Speaker 1: later in his afterward, he calls concilience, and this is
Speaker 1: fusing exerpted mental contents together to make it spatially compatible
Speaker 1: in a way that makes sense. So if I, Robert,
Speaker 1: I'm going to ask you to imagine a couple of things,
Speaker 1: a plate and a bunch of spaghetti. Okay, Now you're
Speaker 1: probably imagining the spaghetti on top of the plate, yes,
Speaker 1: not the other way around. There was no hesitation there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I didn't tell you to do that. That's concilience
Speaker 1: in your mind. You're organizing things in your mind into
Speaker 1: a way that makes sense. Yeah. I would never put
Speaker 1: the plate on the spaghetti. At most, I would imagine
Speaker 1: the spaghetti in a pile here and the plate over here.
Speaker 1: But my mind didn't go there either, Yea. So here
Speaker 1: we finally worked our way up to Jane's idea of
Speaker 1: what consciousness is. He says, it's quote an operation, rather
Speaker 1: than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates
Speaker 1: by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog
Speaker 1: space with an analog I that can observe that space
Speaker 1: and move metaphorically in it. Or the even shorter version,
Speaker 1: He says, consciousness is quote an analog I neratizing, so
Speaker 1: creating stories in a mind space, which I think is
Speaker 1: a very elegant way of reckoning with what consciousness is.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that he's correct about the generative mechanism
Speaker 1: that like language creates consciousness, though I do think it's
Speaker 1: possible that he's correct about that. Um, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: he's right about that, but I do think the way
Speaker 1: he describes the phenomena of it is very credible. Yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're gonna take one more break, and
Speaker 1: when we come back, we're going to transition from James's
Speaker 1: view us on what we have now and get into
Speaker 1: this concept of the bicameral mind what came before. Thank alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, all right, So it's time to explore the
Speaker 1: bicameral mind as proposed by Julian Jaynes. So, you we
Speaker 1: we talked to the beginning about how you can have
Speaker 1: this experience of highway hypnosis. Your body can perform complex
Speaker 1: behaviors with you really just not being aware that it's happening.
Speaker 1: Your brains work in all the stuff. It's pulling the levers,
Speaker 1: it's using your vision and your hearing, and it's making
Speaker 1: your body move, but you're just not there for it.
Speaker 1: You can do all that stuff almost perfectly unconscious of
Speaker 1: the process of driving, if it's highway hypnosis or whatever else,
Speaker 1: acting purely out of habit an instinct. When suddenly there's
Speaker 1: a mime in the middle of the street pretending to
Speaker 1: be stuck in a glass box, Well that's gonna that's
Speaker 1: gonna shake you out of it right there. H yeah,
Speaker 1: So what do you do about this? Obviously, if you
Speaker 1: are a conscious human like us, you snap out of it.
Speaker 1: Your highway hypnosis goes away. You suddenly become very conscious
Speaker 1: of yourself. You become conscious of your driving. You start
Speaker 1: nearratizing your imagine self, performing possible reactions to the situation. Right,
Speaker 1: you're working through what should I do? And you compare
Speaker 1: these imagined hypotheticals to decide what's going to happen. And
Speaker 1: this is one way we often find ourselves quote using consciousness,
Speaker 1: when we have to suddenly deal with novel stimuli. A
Speaker 1: thing you didn't expect, that isn't part of your habit
Speaker 1: process gets thrown in front of you, and now you've
Speaker 1: got a novelty problem. It's an outside context problem, and
Speaker 1: you've got to deal with it. Yeah, mine in the street. Yeah,
Speaker 1: nothing has prepared you for this? How are you going
Speaker 1: to roll with this change? Right? So, in in Jane's
Speaker 1: vision of consciousness, this is what consciousness mainly does. We
Speaker 1: employ our consciousness in volition and decision making when we're
Speaker 1: encountering something that we were not used to. But so
Speaker 1: that's for us, that's conscious people. What if you were
Speaker 1: not capable of consciousness? What if you were entire earlier
Speaker 1: creature of habit behaviors like like you know, you're you're
Speaker 1: like you are when you're driving the car out of
Speaker 1: habit and you just can't turn to the internal nearrotization,
Speaker 1: What do you do well, Jane says the hypothetical bicameral
Speaker 1: person of antiquity. In this example, I've given um instead
Speaker 1: of being conscious when faced with the mime in the street,
Speaker 1: instead of becoming conscious of the novel, stimuli would instead
Speaker 1: unconsciously hear a voice telling them what to do about it,
Speaker 1: and they would obey avoid the min Yeah, it would say.
Speaker 1: It would be as if a parent said, like, go
Speaker 1: around it, and you hear the voice of maybe your
Speaker 1: mom or your dad, or some authority figure, your boss
Speaker 1: or your chieftain and whatever. Yeah, suddenly would tell you, okay,
Speaker 1: just drive to the left and go around it and
Speaker 1: then proceed as normal, and then you would obey. So
Speaker 1: in the next episode, we're going to go into the
Speaker 1: into great depth about the evidence that James presents for
Speaker 1: the bicameral mind in history. So we're gonna look at
Speaker 1: literature and archaeology and all this stuff about what what
Speaker 1: he thinks makes the case for the existence of the
Speaker 1: bicameral mind. But first I think we should just look
Speaker 1: at a couple of objections you might have to how
Speaker 1: could this be possible? How could humans be like this? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And I mean, of course when all of this we
Speaker 1: have to state the obvious that it is just it
Speaker 1: is difficult to try and imagine a default, uh human
Speaker 1: mindset that is like this. Absolutely, So here's one objection.
Speaker 1: Can people really hear hallucinatory voices that are indistinguishable from
Speaker 1: real voices? The answer to this is undoubtable. Yes, just absolutely.
Speaker 1: If you doubt this, go read about auditory hallucinations. Auditory
Speaker 1: hallucinations are number one, They're very common. Even lots of
Speaker 1: people who don't normally hallucinate at some point in their
Speaker 1: life will have an auditory hallucination, often in a period
Speaker 1: of intense stress. And auditory hallucinations are often perceived as
Speaker 1: absolutely real, not necessarily fuzzy or dreamlike, though they can
Speaker 1: be like that too, But in many cases they are
Speaker 1: perceived as as lucid and clear and real as the
Speaker 1: voices of people around them. Here's another question. You might
Speaker 1: be like, well, wait a minute, can hallucinatory voices really
Speaker 1: provide helpful information? Like don't they? Just if you're imagining
Speaker 1: the experience of a person with schizophrenia who is caused
Speaker 1: a lot of suffering by their condition, that certainly does happen.
Speaker 1: People can be, you know, told very nasty, negative, unpleasant
Speaker 1: things by voices in their head. But there are cases
Speaker 1: where these voices do seem to provide comfort and helpful
Speaker 1: information and to guide into into guide behaviors in a
Speaker 1: in a useful way. It just depends on the case. Well,
Speaker 1: and plus not every example James makes about the bi
Speaker 1: cameral mind is a case where the voice or the
Speaker 1: voice of the gods is is telling the individual to
Speaker 1: do something that's beneficial. Right, Uh right, I mean just
Speaker 1: the same way that conscious humans can make bad decisions.
Speaker 1: You're a bicameral human could have part of their brain
Speaker 1: tell them to do something that is a bad decision.
Speaker 1: It's just part of the human brain that sometimes it
Speaker 1: makes bad decisions, whether it's existing in a bicameral state
Speaker 1: or a conscious state. But so anyway, Yeah, these voices,
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily that they're omnipotent or godlike in their knowledge,
Speaker 1: but rather when they are helpful, they tend to command
Speaker 1: information and insight on about the level of a human brain.
Speaker 1: This is not really surprising because they are from a
Speaker 1: human brain. So then okay, So if you're with us
Speaker 1: so far, you might be thinking, okay, well, what actually
Speaker 1: causes hallucinations? Where they come from? If you're hearing voices? Uh,
Speaker 1: it depends on many factors. Different people have vastly different
Speaker 1: levels of susceptibility to hallucination. Some people are very prone
Speaker 1: to them experienced them all the time. Other people are
Speaker 1: not prone to them, but at some point in their
Speaker 1: life will experience one, and in almost all cases, Jane says,
Speaker 1: the trigger for hallucination is stress. In hallucination prone people,
Speaker 1: it takes very little stress to trigger one. In less
Speaker 1: prone people, it takes a lot of stress. Jane says quote,
Speaker 1: during the eras of the bicameral mind, we may suppose
Speaker 1: that the stress threshold for hallucinations was much much lower
Speaker 1: than either normal people or schizophrenics today. The only stress
Speaker 1: necessary was that which occurs when a change in behavior
Speaker 1: is necessary because of some novelty in a situation. This
Speaker 1: is what we were talking about with the mime in
Speaker 1: the road. You've suddenly had something that your habits do
Speaker 1: not account for, and you need to make a decision
Speaker 1: based on volition. So, resuming the quote, anything that could
Speaker 1: not be dealt with on the basis of habit, any
Speaker 1: conflict between work and fatigue, between attack and flight, any
Speaker 1: choice between whom do obey or what to do, anything
Speaker 1: that required any decision at all, was sufficient to cause
Speaker 1: an auditory hallucination, you know. To get back to to
Speaker 1: Westworld just a little bit. You know, I mentioned that
Speaker 1: they that they is the bicameral mind in that series,
Speaker 1: and the ideas that at at an earlier point, the
Speaker 1: robots essentially at a bicameral mind where the creators we're
Speaker 1: speaking in their head. It does remind me of a
Speaker 1: lot of the modern science of drones, where you have
Speaker 1: a quote man in a loop scenario um, where you
Speaker 1: could have you have a machine that's going about its
Speaker 1: business and when necessary a a human adjust the behavior
Speaker 1: of the machine. Yes, yes, totally. Or I think about
Speaker 1: like the hybrid machine human chess players. Have you read
Speaker 1: about this, haven't? Well, I don't know if it's still
Speaker 1: the case. For a while, so you had the point
Speaker 1: where suddenly the best chess programs could outperform the best
Speaker 1: human players. But then there was a period and we
Speaker 1: may still be in that period where, in fact, better
Speaker 1: than the best chess programs are players that are chess
Speaker 1: programs assisted by human players. Okay, so it's almost like,
Speaker 1: you know, the chess program it basically knows what to
Speaker 1: do all the time, but maybe to introduce some novelty,
Speaker 1: the human player steps in and does something clever. All right, well,
Speaker 1: what about neuro neurological evidence for this hypothesis? Right? So,
Speaker 1: this is one where I don't want to go into
Speaker 1: a whole lot of detail on Jane's hypothesis because, for
Speaker 1: one thing, a lot of it. We don't want to
Speaker 1: get too bogged down here. And in the next episode
Speaker 1: we're gonna primarily talk about evidence for that James presents
Speaker 1: for the theory um, but his neurological hypothesis may also
Speaker 1: just in some cases be proven wrong by later experiments,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about that some more in the second episode,
Speaker 1: but here's the gist. There is generally a sense in
Speaker 1: which the two hemispheres of the brain, the right hemisphere
Speaker 1: in the left hemisphere are genuinely divided and can in
Speaker 1: some senses act independently, almost as if they were two
Speaker 1: separate persons. Now, I think we've talked about some of
Speaker 1: the evidence for this before and episodes in the past, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and we only have talked about it when we've
Speaker 1: discussed uni himispheric sleep and what it would be like
Speaker 1: if a human experience uni hemispheric sleep. There's a character
Speaker 1: in an Ian and Banks culture novel that has that
Speaker 1: scenario going on, and they've essentially got two different personalities.
Speaker 1: When there different personalities because if one side is active,
Speaker 1: they're they're one way, of the other side at active
Speaker 1: they're another way. And then the if both sides are active,
Speaker 1: you know, the standard human experience, you have a mix
Speaker 1: of both. Now, it's interesting that James points out that
Speaker 1: on the left hemisphere, in most people, this is going
Speaker 1: to be the dominant hemisphere, and you know right handed
Speaker 1: people generally this will be the left left hemisphere of
Speaker 1: the brain that it can alternate for other people. Um,
Speaker 1: the left hemisphere is where speech generally happens, but James
Speaker 1: turns his attention to the analog speech areas of the
Speaker 1: right brain in most people. So under Jane's schema, in
Speaker 1: the bicameral mind, the non dominant hemisphere, which is the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere in most people, generates auditory hallucinated voices perceived
Speaker 1: by the dominant hemisphere or the left hemisphere in most people.
Speaker 1: And his explicit neurological hypothesis is quote, the speech of
Speaker 1: the gods was directly organized in what corresponds to Vernicke's
Speaker 1: area on the right hemisphere and spoken or heard over
Speaker 1: the interior commissures to or by the auditory areas of
Speaker 1: the left temporal lobe. And these commands are then obeyed
Speaker 1: more or less automatically, as an obedient child obeys the
Speaker 1: commands of a parent or a member of a social
Speaker 1: animal species submits to the authority of another individual higher
Speaker 1: up the dominance hierarchy. And he goes into great detail
Speaker 1: about about verbal dominance like the UH the research on
Speaker 1: like how people obey commands and how you can control
Speaker 1: people's minds by getting right up in their space and
Speaker 1: giving them verbal commands. Um. You know. In in reading
Speaker 1: about all of this, I kept thinking back to uh
Speaker 1: to yog class. I love going to I love doing
Speaker 1: yoga on my own or I'm essentially calling the shots
Speaker 1: and following a pattern. But I also love going to
Speaker 1: a class where there is a uh there, there is
Speaker 1: a leader, there is a teacher who is telling us
Speaker 1: how to move our bodies for for an hour and
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes, an hour and a half, And there's something
Speaker 1: very liberating in that. Yeah. Uh So. In other words,
Speaker 1: in Jane's hypothesis about the neurology of this, the non
Speaker 1: dominant hemisphere does the integration of information in the difficult
Speaker 1: thinking about how to deal with stressful situations brought about
Speaker 1: by novel stimuli, and then that that right hemisphere or
Speaker 1: the non dominant hemisphere, tells the dominant hemisphere what to do,
Speaker 1: and the dominant dominant hemisphere incorporates that information and enacts it.
Speaker 1: So he offers five main pieces of evidence for his
Speaker 1: neurological hypothesis. I just want to present his summary of
Speaker 1: them very very quickly, and some of these will get
Speaker 1: into more detail in part two. Yes, so he says
Speaker 1: the pieces of evidence are that quote one, both hemispheres
Speaker 1: are able to understand language, while normally only the left
Speaker 1: can speak. That's kind of interesting too, that there is
Speaker 1: some vestigial functioning in the right Vernicke's area in a
Speaker 1: way similar to the voices of God. So he identifies
Speaker 1: that with like activity in the right hemisphere, and most
Speaker 1: people the non dominant hemisphere in this speech associated area
Speaker 1: being associated in say, people with schizophrenia hearing voices auditory
Speaker 1: hallucinations for example, if there are somewhat severed or one
Speaker 1: is turned off essentially the other can behave as a
Speaker 1: person independently with some adaptation. Um for that, the contemporary
Speaker 1: differences between the hemispheres and cognitive functions at least echo
Speaker 1: such differences of function between man and God as seen
Speaker 1: in the literature of bicameral Man. So he's comparing. He's
Speaker 1: saying that there are some analogies between the functions of
Speaker 1: the left brain and right right brain to man God,
Speaker 1: as we will see in some ancient literature. And finally
Speaker 1: he appeals to the sort of plasticity of the brain,
Speaker 1: that the environment shapes the way the brain functions to
Speaker 1: an incredible extent. A lot of what the brain does
Speaker 1: is not determined by your genes, but is determined by
Speaker 1: how you grow up and your social environment. All right,
Speaker 1: So those are the basics, alright. So yeah, so we've
Speaker 1: established that. In the next episode, we're going to explore
Speaker 1: what James presents as the evidence for the existence of
Speaker 1: the bicameral mind and the transition from the bicameral mind
Speaker 1: to the conscious mind. But I want to end just
Speaker 1: by comparing the ideas the bicameral mind versus the conscious mind.
Speaker 1: I think one of the hardest things to recognize and
Speaker 1: keep in mind here is that we have such a
Speaker 1: pro consciousness bias. I mean, we we just tend to say, like, well,
Speaker 1: consciousness is obviously what what you know, the good life
Speaker 1: is all about. But Jane's I don't think it's ever
Speaker 1: explicitly saying that one kind of mind is better than another,
Speaker 1: or even that one kind of mind is smarter than
Speaker 1: the other, because they do just seem to offer different
Speaker 1: adaptive capabilities, right, Yeah, I mean, and as will explore,
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a strong case that when the bicameral
Speaker 1: mind goes away, I mean that it has tremendous catastrophic
Speaker 1: consequences for these these early cultures. Right. So, if there's
Speaker 1: any truth to his theory, it may be the case that,
Speaker 1: for example, people of the bicameral mind have strengths like
Speaker 1: they work better in groups. They on average have greater
Speaker 1: mental endurance, you know, they can do things more and
Speaker 1: so they're sort of like tougher in keeping at tasks,
Speaker 1: and they have more creativity, more fluid linguistic creativity. They
Speaker 1: may have been better poets, They may have been just
Speaker 1: as we've been discussing, they may have been happier, if
Speaker 1: in a way that is not like our happiness. Right.
Speaker 1: And then on the other hand, of course, people with
Speaker 1: conscious minds he's saying, are probably on average more adaptable
Speaker 1: that are able to deal with new stimuli when it
Speaker 1: comes up and the mime appears in the street. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I m I won't stop and surrender to it. Right.
Speaker 1: But but the takeaway if there's any truth to Jane's theory,
Speaker 1: I just want to stress, is not bicameral mind equals old,
Speaker 1: stupid and bad and conscious mind equals new smart and good.
Speaker 1: They're they're subjectively different models of experiencing the world, with
Speaker 1: different strengths and weaknesses. However, that the message is still
Speaker 1: that ancient people were strange. Ancient people to us, we're
Speaker 1: alien to us. Yeah, So in the next episode, we're
Speaker 1: going to run through historical, religious, and even modern cultural
Speaker 1: evidence that he says supports this theory. So if you
Speaker 1: thought there wasn't enough bloodshed in this episode, hang on,
Speaker 1: because empires will fall, gods and goddesses will rage, the whole,
Speaker 1: the whole nine yards, the whole clash of the Titans
Speaker 1: will take place in the second episode and in the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind, head on over to Stuff to
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