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Speaker 1: Comic Con dot com slash NYCC hyphen presents Welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind from How Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Into Day. This is
Speaker 1: going to be part two of our two part series
Speaker 1: on Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind and the origin
Speaker 1: of consciousness in the Breakdown of the bi cameral Mind.
Speaker 1: So as this is part two of a two part episode.
Speaker 1: If you haven't heard part one yet, you should go
Speaker 1: back and listen to that one first. Sometimes we say,
Speaker 1: you know, if you feel like jumping right in and
Speaker 1: go for it, This is one where I feel like
Speaker 1: you're really going to have a hard time following us
Speaker 1: if you haven't heard part one yet, because that's gonna
Speaker 1: be where we explain what Julian james main hypothesis is
Speaker 1: and how he arrived at it, and then in the
Speaker 1: second episode we're gonna be talking about evidence for it
Speaker 1: from the ancient world and from the modern world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this episode is going to be full of like falling
Speaker 1: kingdoms and whispering statues and other great stuff, but you
Speaker 1: need that first episode to understand it. Now, as with
Speaker 1: the first episode, we want to make clear that we're
Speaker 1: not necessarily endorsing this hypothesis. This is a very controversial hypothesis.
Speaker 1: It's not something that is at all considered proven or
Speaker 1: even necessarily very well attested by evidence. It's something that
Speaker 1: is controversial but very fascinating and I think worth exploring
Speaker 1: as a hypothetical. Yeah, it is a it is a
Speaker 1: radical hypothesis, and if nothing else, it is just a
Speaker 1: fascinating thought. Experiment. So as we discuss it again, you're
Speaker 1: going to hear us Uh discussing it as if it
Speaker 1: was fact, as if this is actually how ancient people thought.
Speaker 1: But that is just a part of our exploration of
Speaker 1: the hypothesis. Now to briefly recap the core of Julian
Speaker 1: James theory, and we should say Julian James, when did
Speaker 1: he live? Nine? Yeah? So seven. Julian James was an
Speaker 1: American psychologist. He's primarily known for this book that was
Speaker 1: published in nineteen seventy six called The Origin of Consciousness
Speaker 1: in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. And the thrust
Speaker 1: of that book is, until about three thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: human beings were not conscious. They did not possess consciousness
Speaker 1: in the way we do today. And around that time,
Speaker 1: roughly three thousand years ago, modern human consciousness be and
Speaker 1: as a cultural invention, probably in Mesopotamia that's spread around
Speaker 1: the world over time. And before that time, for thousands
Speaker 1: of years, almost all humans were not conscious in the
Speaker 1: way we are, but instead we're unconscious beings commanded in
Speaker 1: all novel behaviors by hallucinated voices that they called gods
Speaker 1: or another way of putting it and uh, and James
Speaker 1: himself put it this way, everybody was schizophrenic sort of. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, so schizophrenia, as James imagines, it is one
Speaker 1: form or a modified version of a regression to this
Speaker 1: bicameral mind state that used to be the norm for
Speaker 1: how humans and ancient civilizations lived. And so this norm
Speaker 1: would be that most of the time you would be
Speaker 1: going around unconsciously behaving out of habit you know, you
Speaker 1: have a stimulus response behaviors, and you would have habitual
Speaker 1: behaviors that you would enact, and this would serve to
Speaker 1: do most things that would be you know, recurrent repetitive
Speaker 1: behaviors over the day. Whenever something new happened, whenever you
Speaker 1: needed to make a decision and there was a stress
Speaker 1: point induced by that decision, you would be told what
Speaker 1: to do by a hallucinated auditory voice that you would
Speaker 1: perceive as a god, and that you would enact that. Now,
Speaker 1: this is, as you said, a radical hypothesis. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: again the idea here is that everybody heard these voices,
Speaker 1: that this was the universal human experience, this was the norm, right,
Speaker 1: And so obviously I mean that that sounds kind of
Speaker 1: crazy to us now, like, what really could could that
Speaker 1: be true? So, if there is any truth to Jane's theory,
Speaker 1: and as we said before, we're not necessarily endorsing it
Speaker 1: is true, just entertaining it as an interesting hypothesis, we
Speaker 1: should be able to find some evidence of that theory.
Speaker 1: And so we can look at psychiatry, and we can
Speaker 1: look at neuroscience, and we can look at evidence from
Speaker 1: the ancient world. And today we're gonna start by looking
Speaker 1: at evidence from the ancient world, from history, from archaeology,
Speaker 1: from ancient literature. If there was a bicam moral mind state,
Speaker 1: this divided mind state, where one half of the brain
Speaker 1: spoke to the other as the voice of a god
Speaker 1: and commanded the unconscious other half, we should be able
Speaker 1: to see that in the behaviors of ancient people's and
Speaker 1: the traces left of those behaviors. Right, So a lot
Speaker 1: of this episode is going to be UH, Joe and
Speaker 1: I discussing some of the examples that James brings up
Speaker 1: in the book. We can't possibly touch on all of
Speaker 1: the examples because much of the book, and much of
Speaker 1: the real joy of the book is UH is him
Speaker 1: bringing up these various examples from from historical accounts, from archaeology,
Speaker 1: from literature, and using that to support the idea of
Speaker 1: the by bicameral mind. Yeah. And one of the pleasures
Speaker 1: of the book is even if Jane's hypothesis does turn
Speaker 1: out to be entirely incorrect, you know, if there never
Speaker 1: was any bicameral mind, if consciousness is not a recent invention,
Speaker 1: if he's wrong about all that, it's still a fascinating
Speaker 1: book just because of the way he pulls in so
Speaker 1: many different disciplines and ranges throughout history, incorporating evidence in
Speaker 1: such an amazing and fascinating way. All right, well, let's
Speaker 1: jump into it a bit here and start discussing some
Speaker 1: of the evidence that James brought up in the book. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: one of the things that we probably should be able
Speaker 1: to think about is if ancient people's perceived auditory hallucinations
Speaker 1: that they regarded as gods, and these gods told them
Speaker 1: what to do, there should be some evidence of this
Speaker 1: in what traces they left of their relationship to the
Speaker 1: gods they believed in, right, Yeah, And one of those examples,
Speaker 1: James argues, is the positioning of the houses of the gods.
Speaker 1: So this is the basic idea. Well, today, you travel
Speaker 1: to a big city. Let's say you go to Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Okay, this is our example, not James. So
Speaker 1: I'm in Washington, all right, and you seek out the grandest,
Speaker 1: most centralized home, the one that just really stands out
Speaker 1: from the rest, is the most protected. It has them,
Speaker 1: you know that, the most central status of any other
Speaker 1: um habitat. Okay, so I'm imagining it is the home
Speaker 1: of an extremely tall, thin person that stands looking out
Speaker 1: over the water. Yeah, that's that's one one interpretation. No way,
Speaker 1: that thing isn't a home, is it. No, well, it's
Speaker 1: not a home, But I mean that is an example
Speaker 1: of a of a building of prominence with a with
Speaker 1: a statue in it, which kind of gets into some
Speaker 1: additional arguments that we're going to make here. But no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, you'd expect to find the home of a king, right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you would. That's the thing, right, you would want to
Speaker 1: you would expect a right, this is the center of
Speaker 1: the town. The whole town is built around this. It
Speaker 1: occupies a spatial center as well as just the center
Speaker 1: of meaning and purpose. Or maybe sorry that that was
Speaker 1: probably my sexism talking to a king or a queen.
Speaker 1: In any case, you would expect the ruling person to
Speaker 1: live there. But what have you entered into this grand
Speaker 1: building at the center of the city and you found
Speaker 1: that it was home only to a quote hallucinated presence,
Speaker 1: perhaps the statue of that presence in the case of
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln, if you will, but still you for our
Speaker 1: purposes here an unreal entity, a god, a goddess. Um.
Speaker 1: You can also look to to cities in which a
Speaker 1: church still occupies the central ground, and James argues that
Speaker 1: this is an perhaps an echo of the bicameral past.
Speaker 1: So why would that why would that be evidence of
Speaker 1: a bicameral past, to find churches or temples at the
Speaker 1: center of a city as opposed to the house of
Speaker 1: a king. Well, the idea here is that the voice
Speaker 1: occupied the center of our thoughts, and so to it
Speaker 1: occupied the center of the town or the city, and
Speaker 1: that the house of the God or the house of
Speaker 1: the gods was quite literally the house of the gods. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is true. So if I remember hearing when I
Speaker 1: was a kid people saying, you know, be be respectful
Speaker 1: when you're in church because it's God's house. But the
Speaker 1: churches I was going to didn't literally believe that the
Speaker 1: God they worshiped lived in the church. That was just
Speaker 1: where humans congregated to worship. That's not so much the
Speaker 1: case in ancient religions. It really does seem like in
Speaker 1: many ancient religions, the place of worship or the the
Speaker 1: you know, the sacred building was literally where the God inhabited. Yeah,
Speaker 1: where the God inhabited, and then his things sort of
Speaker 1: go on the place where God may visit, the place
Speaker 1: where God may be contacted. So he draws on examples
Speaker 1: from the God houses at Jericho, uh the ziggarat of
Speaker 1: r which we discussed in our Tower of Babel episode,
Speaker 1: as well as the city of Hatasus, the Bronze Age
Speaker 1: capital of the Hittite Empire, and in the Ladder this
Speaker 1: was actually a mountain shrine with images of the overwatching
Speaker 1: gods rather than a city center, but he said it's
Speaker 1: kind of an exception that that also lines up with
Speaker 1: the argument. He also looks to the Old mec and
Speaker 1: Mayan empires as Bicameral Mesoamerican empires due to the presence
Speaker 1: of quote huge, otherwise useless, centrally located buildings in chief
Speaker 1: among these the pyramid of TiO Tiwakan in modern Mexico.
Speaker 1: And I love how he mentioned, you know, otherwise useless buildings,
Speaker 1: because is this touches on on our discussions in the
Speaker 1: Tower of Battle episode regarding the ziggurats. A lot of
Speaker 1: our our study of the past has been us trying
Speaker 1: to figure out what was this for what purpose? And
Speaker 1: a lot of times we try and figure out a
Speaker 1: 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 highest and well defended
Speaker 1: building in the middle of 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: these are areas that again we're inhospitable, and they may
Speaker 1: have been abandoned at some point later on. Uh. And
Speaker 1: this is because they were linked to the commands of
Speaker 1: quote hallucinations, which in certain periods could be not only
Speaker 1: irrational but downright punishing. Now that's possible, but it's also
Speaker 1: possible that we in the modern world are just not
Speaker 1: seeing correctly what the benefits of these spaces were. That's right,
Speaker 1: I mean, we're always working with imperfect data. Um. He
Speaker 1: does not reference this, but I couldn't help but think
Speaker 1: of Montezuma Castle in modern Arizona. These were cliff side
Speaker 1: dwellings of the Senegua culture that were abandoned around four
Speaker 1: s 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, just religious inclination to move. Now,
Speaker 1: you can get into a discussion of of how that
Speaker 1: would possibly line up with james timeline for the bicameral mind.
Speaker 1: But he does uh point out that by the time
Speaker 1: the Incans encountered Europeans in the fifteenth century. Uh, there
Speaker 1: was perhaps a combination of things bicameral and things protosubjective, subjective. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that is one feature of his theory that for
Speaker 1: a long period of time it wasn't just like everyone
Speaker 1: was bicameral and then everyone was conscious. You had a
Speaker 1: long period of the slow death of bicameral society turning
Speaker 1: into being taken over by conscious people. You know, this
Speaker 1: makes me think of shows like Game of Thrones and
Speaker 1: other fantasy worlds where magic slowly bleeds out of the world,
Speaker 1: because that's essentially the argument here is that over time,
Speaker 1: fewer and fewer people are hearing the voice voices of
Speaker 1: the gods, Fewer people are hearing the voices of the
Speaker 1: spirits of the departed loved ones, etcetera. And yet they're
Speaker 1: surrounded by the cultural memory of people who did hear
Speaker 1: the voices of the gods, or people who still hear
Speaker 1: the voices of the gods today even though they can't.
Speaker 1: So you have this society in which there are conscious
Speaker 1: people who are are constantly being reminded that they could
Speaker 1: be in contact with the gods, but they're not, and this,
Speaker 1: I imagine is very distressing and frustrating to these people.
Speaker 1: And you know, this is also interesting in that you
Speaker 1: eventually have this clash between the Inca Empire and the
Speaker 1: Spanish Empire. And he says that this was as close,
Speaker 1: too close to anything in our history as to a
Speaker 1: meeting of these two different minds, of the bicameral mind
Speaker 1: and the conscious mind, like two different cultures, uh, encountering
Speaker 1: each other. Um. And and yet he points to a
Speaker 1: number of different arguments for and against the Inca Empire
Speaker 1: at being a bicameral empire. Well, it could have been
Speaker 1: an empire in transition, as many of these others were
Speaker 1: for so long. Yeah, I think Basically, he says that
Speaker 1: he believes that if there was a transition from a
Speaker 1: bicameral society to a conscious society, that it began in
Speaker 1: Mesopotamia about you know, roughly one thousand BC. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a few hundred years on each side. It was a
Speaker 1: 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 politics,
Speaker 1: we're probably beyond something that a purely bicameral culture could handle.
Speaker 1: Yet they had a god king who was the Inca
Speaker 1: among them, and there were you know, other aspects of
Speaker 1: bi cameral culture as well. Uh. And then these may
Speaker 1: have been again to your point, mere traditional echoes of
Speaker 1: the past. But he points out that, uh that you
Speaker 1: you had these gold and jeweled spools that members of
Speaker 1: the top of Inca hierarchy they wore in their ears,
Speaker 1: and sometimes with images of the sun on them that
Speaker 1: these may have indicated that those same ears we're hearing
Speaker 1: the 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 uh
Speaker 1: as showing that that the individual or the statue is
Speaker 1: somehow involved in speech or hearing. Now, one of the
Speaker 1: things I wanted to revisit from our last episode is
Speaker 1: just the idea that James is not necessarily saying that,
Speaker 1: for example, the bicameral mind is not as good as
Speaker 1: the conscious mind. I know, we our conscious bias, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, would naturally kind of feel that way, But
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily that conscious minds are better or more
Speaker 1: valuable or even smarter. I mean, that's not just that's
Speaker 1: just not necessarily the case. It's that they have different
Speaker 1: adaptive strengths, and so having different strengths a a sudden
Speaker 1: clash of a conscious culture against a bicameral culture could
Speaker 1: be very disastrous for one or the other. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is this is basically the the the key example
Speaker 1: of an outside context problem in our world and Uh,
Speaker 1: and James has a just a beautiful little description of
Speaker 1: how this would have gone down. Assuming that this is
Speaker 1: a meeting of a bicameral or partially bicameral culture in
Speaker 1: the Inca and a conscious culture and that of the Spaniards,
Speaker 1: he says, quote, it is possible that it was one
Speaker 1: of the few confrontations between subjective and bicameral minds, that
Speaker 1: for things as unfamiliar as Inca at a Wappa was
Speaker 1: confronted with these rough, milk skinned men with hair drooling
Speaker 1: from their chins instead of from their scalps, so that
Speaker 1: their heads looked upside down, clothed in metal, with avertive
Speaker 1: eyes writing strange lama like creatures with silver hoofs having
Speaker 1: arrived like gods in gigantic quampas uh teared like mockagan
Speaker 1: temples over the sea, which to the Inca was unsailable
Speaker 1: that for all this there were no bicameral voices coming
Speaker 1: from the sun or from the golden statues of Cuzco
Speaker 1: in their dazzling towers. Not subjectively conscious, unable to deceive
Speaker 1: or to nar narrat a rise out the deception of others,
Speaker 1: the Inca and his lords were captured like helpless automatons.
Speaker 1: It's a horrible thing to imagine, as I mean, reading
Speaker 1: anything about the European conquest Americans is always like a
Speaker 1: horrible thing to Yeah, you don't have told have to
Speaker 1: imagine a separate state of mind for it to be
Speaker 1: a rather horrific, uh encounter. But yeah, that is of
Speaker 1: the features of his hypothesis. Is so one of the
Speaker 1: things that consciousness gives us is a capability for treachery. Yes,
Speaker 1: that really, the bicameral person is not very much capable
Speaker 1: of treachery. I mean, they can't prolong a deceptive behavior,
Speaker 1: right because they can't run this internal narrative of how
Speaker 1: they should behave if they were to believe one thing
Speaker 1: versus how they you know, really what goal they'll be
Speaker 1: working towards secretly, It just doesn't seem like that works
Speaker 1: out very well. But these conscious people are capable of
Speaker 1: extreme deception and treachery and the ability to just be
Speaker 1: jerks all right. Now. Another area that that he brings
Speaker 1: up is that of essentially the loved dead. He points
Speaker 1: to the burial of the dead as if they were
Speaker 1: still alive as being a key evidence for by the
Speaker 1: bicameral mind. So we've covered a number of different momification
Speaker 1: practices on the show over the year. So I think
Speaker 1: everyone here knows the drill the corpse as an astronaut
Speaker 1: on a cosmic journey to the other side. You know,
Speaker 1: there's some sort of an elaborate tomb. Maybe you fill
Speaker 1: that tomb with items that that individual loved in life
Speaker 1: and therefore might continue to need on a trip. And
Speaker 1: then beyond that, you may even supply them, as we
Speaker 1: see in the case of Egyptian tombs, with food stuffs,
Speaker 1: with with perishable goods to uh to aid them in
Speaker 1: the journey. And the idea here is that if this
Speaker 1: goes beyond the mere idea that oh, well, they like
Speaker 1: to cheeseburger, so let's put a cheeseburger in there as
Speaker 1: a you know, a token is some sort of uh,
Speaker 1: just at tribute to them. It's the idea that that no,
Speaker 1: I still hear their voice, they are still speaking to me,
Speaker 1: even though the body has stopped moving, I will put
Speaker 1: a cheeseburger in there for them to eat, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we think of tokens to the dead today primarily
Speaker 1: as uh it's something representing the way the living feel Yeah,
Speaker 1: but no, the belief here was that the dead person
Speaker 1: still need at that. Yeah. And he says that this
Speaker 1: spills over to the treatment of ordinary dead as well
Speaker 1: as royal dead and many of these ancient cultures. But
Speaker 1: the concept of bearing the dead and massive tombs preserving
Speaker 1: their bodies, providing them with physical luxuries and even food, uh,
Speaker 1: this is key. And and and and in cases where there
Speaker 1: was no food, such as the graves at Larsa and
Speaker 1: Mesopotamia from around the uh. He says there these areas
Speaker 1: were foodless because the tombs were beneath human habitation, so
Speaker 1: that the dead essentially still lived among the living, so
Speaker 1: that they would wander up into the house and you
Speaker 1: would literally hallucinate them doing so and telling you what
Speaker 1: to do. Yeah. Now, James admits that grief could have
Speaker 1: been the core motivation and most of these rights. And certainly,
Speaker 1: I think that's the way we think about it when
Speaker 1: we're trying to put ourselves in the shoes of ancient people, right.
Speaker 1: I Mean, another very plausible and perhaps the more probable
Speaker 1: answer is just that people wished their loved ones were
Speaker 1: still alive and wanted to behave as if they could 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 this 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 step said, I know, oh you know what
Speaker 1: I think I think I was talking about. What's it
Speaker 1: called the Obelisk the Washington I thought you meant when
Speaker 1: you were talking about a statue of a tall, slender figure,
Speaker 1: I thought you meant Lincoln slender dude. There's a miscommunication
Speaker 1: that so easily comes with our conscious inability to communicate. Well,
Speaker 1: you've been you've seen Lincoln his statue in Washington. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's just sitting in that chair. But he probably has
Speaker 1: not spoken to you. And I mean I don't mean
Speaker 1: that in a in a metaphorical sense or anything. I
Speaker 1: mean that statue has not literally spoke. You have not
Speaker 1: heard the voice of that statue. No, But if I
Speaker 1: were a bicameral person, apparently I might, like I could
Speaker 1: go to pay reverence to that statue. But I wouldn't
Speaker 1: just be paying reverence. I'd be getting advice on what
Speaker 1: to do exactly. So that's the next point that the
Speaker 1: James made, is that we have these idols of the
Speaker 1: speaking stone that that that play into all these different cultures.
Speaker 1: So we've already mentioned that, all right, your your father's
Speaker 1: voice is still in your head, like literally in your head,
Speaker 1: you're still hearing it after they have died. Because of
Speaker 1: this confusion to take place about about the nature of death.
Speaker 1: So your your parents did die, yet you still hear
Speaker 1: their admonitions, right, and then the king dies, you still
Speaker 1: hear the voice of the king. So one of the
Speaker 1: first humans just raised up the corpses and skulls of
Speaker 1: their dead loved ones and their dead leaders. Uh. After that,
Speaker 1: we would turn more and more to two various artificial
Speaker 1: likenesses of those individuals in varying degrees of detail. So
Speaker 1: we we can find crude humanoid figurings dating back to
Speaker 1: a roughly UM fifty six hundred BC in what's modern
Speaker 1: day Turkey and uh and relatively, these are relics that
Speaker 1: were already ancient when the pyramids were built. Now, Frasier
Speaker 1: would have classified such carvings as just fertility figures, but
Speaker 1: James points out that that was the horse He was right,
Speaker 1: and he was trying to cram everything into those process. 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: with the Old Metal civilization, and he points to some
Speaker 1: of the various 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 James'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 things,
Speaker 1: ings 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 BS. 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. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then it's only left for the statute to speak
Speaker 1: to us and speak they did. Uh. Not only according
Speaker 1: to bicameral mind theory here, but also just according to
Speaker 1: various accounts. Um uniform literature he writes provides examples of
Speaker 1: speaking statues. If you turn in your Old Testament to
Speaker 1: Ezekiel one, there's an example of a Babylonian king who
Speaker 1: said to speak to idols, which were known as a terrup. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're there are all kinds of accounts of this throughout
Speaker 1: the ancient world of us. I mean, this is another
Speaker 1: case of like we were talking about in the live episode,
Speaker 1: with ancient literature. You know, you read it and you
Speaker 1: feel you send something alien about the characters, and you're like,
Speaker 1: is that something I'm just not getting that's getting lost
Speaker 1: in translation or were they truly alien to my mentality?
Speaker 1: A similar thing is going on with when it describes
Speaker 1: the practices of hearing God speak. You could think like, okay,
Speaker 1: well I don't usually hear God speak. Um, so maybe
Speaker 1: there's just something this, you know, this like a literary
Speaker 1: device or something that's getting lost in translation. Or you
Speaker 1: could just say, no, I'll just take this literally. I'll
Speaker 1: take it at face value. Something was speaking to them
Speaker 1: and it was the other hemisphere of their brain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we get into this point where these statutes, these
Speaker 1: artifacts become kind of focus points for the voice, like
Speaker 1: in a way too, in a way summon the voice
Speaker 1: even when it's not, you know, directly called up by
Speaker 1: stressful circumstance. H. He has numerous tidbits to support this.
Speaker 1: Some of the really fun ones I found was he
Speaker 1: adds that to quote, the conquered Aztecs told the Spanish
Speaker 1: invaders how their history began when a statue from a
Speaker 1: ruined temple belonging to a previous culture spoke to their leaders.
Speaker 1: So I just love the mental image of you know,
Speaker 1: these tribal individuals coming across the statue built by someone else,
Speaker 1: and it it summons the voices just to look at it.
Speaker 1: You can also imagine, though, how if this model is correct,
Speaker 1: conscious people would react very negatively to encountering b cameral
Speaker 1: people and and the voices of their gods. Right, Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's another example he makes is that you
Speaker 1: have the Spaniards, who again are conscious individuals steeped in Catholicism,
Speaker 1: and they come in and uh, they encounter the native
Speaker 1: peoples and they actually reported that the people of of
Speaker 1: Peru were a quote commanded by the devil. In that quote,
Speaker 1: the devil himself actually spoke to the incas out of
Speaker 1: the mouths of their statues. So that could just be
Speaker 1: you know, historic goal cultural slander, or it could be
Speaker 1: them trying to make sense of practices they saw. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, before really getting into the bicameral mind theory,
Speaker 1: I would have easily just said, well, that's just obviously
Speaker 1: just a bunch of xenophobic foreigners from another continent coming
Speaker 1: in and saying, oh, they have statues. They probably stand
Speaker 1: around listening to their voices and they obey the statues.
Speaker 1: I mean, either way, they are putting their their dominant
Speaker 1: racist spin on it. But it could be that they
Speaker 1: were actually observing a practice. Yes. Now again we always
Speaker 1: get into the same situation though, where they was this
Speaker 1: a practice that was based on on an existing bicameral
Speaker 1: experience or is it an echo of a bicameral past. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could be either one. If there's anything to this theory.
Speaker 1: Another thing that I think is one of the most
Speaker 1: important takeaways of this whole theory is that if James
Speaker 1: is correct, it's not that people used to be more
Speaker 1: religious and now they're less religious. That's not the progression.
Speaker 1: It's that ancient bicameral religion and modern conscious religion are
Speaker 1: completely different types of things. Conscious religion requires an emphasis
Speaker 1: on things like faith and belief and organized systems of dogma.
Speaker 1: You know, they say, here's what we believe, and here's
Speaker 1: why you should believe it, and so it's like regulated
Speaker 1: by ecclesiastical authorities. It's addressed to an object that is
Speaker 1: not immediately apparent. Not so for bicameral religion. Right, So
Speaker 1: bicameral religion would have had no need for the concept
Speaker 1: of faith, because what's the point in telling people to
Speaker 1: believe in the gods that literally talked to them and
Speaker 1: appear before them all the time? That's right, I mean,
Speaker 1: the gods are speaking to you household, God's household spirits
Speaker 1: are speaking to you. Uh so you really there's not
Speaker 1: really any room to doubt there if doubt was even
Speaker 1: a thing that your mind can do. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: our modern concept of religion you could look at as
Speaker 1: something that came to exist at through the disappearance of
Speaker 1: the direct experience of the gods. Likewise, I mean, could
Speaker 1: could heresy even exist in such a world like everybody is?
Speaker 1: I mean, certainly you're you're still gonna have, you know,
Speaker 1: a structure to society but everyone is hearing voices of
Speaker 1: the God. Everyone has has their their their radio set
Speaker 1: to the other world. Yeah, I mean this is a
Speaker 1: world where the voices are speaking to everyone. Okay, I
Speaker 1: think we should look at one more thing about features
Speaker 1: we see of the organization of ancient societies before we
Speaker 1: start to look at some ancient literature. So how about
Speaker 1: the theocratic organization of ancient society? What what does that
Speaker 1: tell us about whether or not a bicameral mind ever existed.
Speaker 1: According to Julian James, well, in this we're getting into
Speaker 1: a topic that we've discussed before, the idea of divine kings.
Speaker 1: What does it mean that the king is either the
Speaker 1: you know, the right hand man of God, works for God,
Speaker 1: or in some cases is God. That's an important distinction,
Speaker 1: and James makes that this stinction. You know, there are
Speaker 1: two main types of kings for him, the steward king
Speaker 1: and the God king. Right, that's right, the steward king.
Speaker 1: This is where the king is a stand in for
Speaker 1: God and then the God king. The king is God
Speaker 1: and James believe that both tides developed out of the
Speaker 1: more primitive bicameral situation where a new king ruled by
Speaker 1: obeying the hallucinated voice of a dead king, which sort
Speaker 1: of that gives you like the you know, the succession order, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in fact, you're never really obeying you're never really obeying
Speaker 1: the new king. You're always obeying the old king through
Speaker 1: a sort of intermediary. And in this he I mean,
Speaker 1: he even argues that the ziggurat centered civilizations of ancient
Speaker 1: Mesopotamia that in these cases it's not you can't even
Speaker 1: really look at it, like the human beings were the
Speaker 1: ones that were ruling, Like the ruling powers were the
Speaker 1: hallucinated voices of the various gods. Right, So it was
Speaker 1: not the left brain or the dominant side of the
Speaker 1: brain of the actual king, but it was the other
Speaker 1: hemisphere of their brain ruling, the dominant side ruling the people. Right.
Speaker 1: And he also gets into how, you know, we've talked about, Okay,
Speaker 1: you're reacting to statues, humanoid figures, but on top of
Speaker 1: this we also end up with all with additional uh,
Speaker 1: religious imageries, symbology. That's that's this used even written language. Uh.
Speaker 1: He points out that quote reading in the third millennium
Speaker 1: b c. May therefore have been a matter of hearing
Speaker 1: the cuneiform, that is hallucinating the speech from looking at
Speaker 1: its picture symbols rather than visual reading of syllables in
Speaker 1: our sense. Woh, that's that's fascinating. So you think about
Speaker 1: how reading takes place for us today, it is largely
Speaker 1: an unconscious thing if you're an adult that's been reading,
Speaker 1: not if you're a kid who's learning to read, or
Speaker 1: if you know, at any point in your life. If
Speaker 1: you're learning to read, you do have to think about
Speaker 1: the constituent parts of words and sentences, like you have
Speaker 1: to sound them out and put them together in your mind,
Speaker 1: using your conscious mind. Eventually reading becomes unconscious. I mean,
Speaker 1: I wonder if in this, in this bicameral framework, you
Speaker 1: would learn to read in an entirely unconscious way, the
Speaker 1: same way that maybe you get better at shooting basketballs
Speaker 1: or something in an unconscious way. Yeah. Yeah, that's so. Now.
Speaker 1: Now another thing that another point that he makes about
Speaker 1: language is that in reference to ancient Egyptians, uh, much
Speaker 1: like the language of the ancient Sumerians. He says that
Speaker 1: these languages were concrete from first to last, and that
Speaker 1: interpretations involving abstract thought, uh, these are that these are modern,
Speaker 1: modern intrusions, and that basically the gods commanded rather than created. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we'll see that more we look in literature in
Speaker 1: the next section. Now, I think I made reference already
Speaker 1: to household gods and household spirits. You encounter these in
Speaker 1: a lot of different cultures. If it's not household gods,
Speaker 1: then maybe it's a you know, just a memorial of
Speaker 1: various members of the family, right, And a lot of
Speaker 1: those traditions still carry on to this day. But the
Speaker 1: idea here is that not everyone can hear the voice
Speaker 1: the ruling god, right, that would seem to be kind
Speaker 1: of chaotic if the even if it's just a simple
Speaker 1: model of the previous dead king speaking to the current king.
Speaker 1: I mean, it wouldn't make sense for everyone to hear
Speaker 1: that king's voice and have their authority. But everyone in
Speaker 1: this scenario, in the bicameral scenario, is hearing voices. So
Speaker 1: who are those voices? Well, there's a hierarchy of God's
Speaker 1: isn't exactly like because we there are different types of
Speaker 1: stressful situations. Imagine a scenario where one is cooking, preparing
Speaker 1: a meal in one's hut, and um, let's say you've
Speaker 1: only got one piece of meat and then you accidentally
Speaker 1: drop it onto the ground. There's a moment of panic,
Speaker 1: what do I do? Well, the household cooking god chimes
Speaker 1: in and says, take it and wash it in the
Speaker 1: river or something to that effect, you know, and the
Speaker 1: and it's salts. Second. Yeah, so this would be the
Speaker 1: case of a of a lesser deity coming in and
Speaker 1: calling the shot. Yeah. You know. One of the things
Speaker 1: about ancient religion he mentions in the book that is
Speaker 1: very interesting is his discussion of the evil ocean, of
Speaker 1: the concepts of the car and the ba in uh
Speaker 1: in Egyptian theology, where it's hard to I guess we
Speaker 1: can't summarize it here, but if you get a chance
Speaker 1: to read the book yourself, look out for that section.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting. It's it's about the way we're you know,
Speaker 1: words for theological concepts sort of transition into other into
Speaker 1: having other meanings. Now, part of the whole timeline, of course,
Speaker 1: is that as we've already stressed, that the gods cease
Speaker 1: speaking to everyone after a while and then cease all
Speaker 1: together for the most part. We'll get into the details
Speaker 1: of that as we we go. But but then when
Speaker 1: that happens, there's uh, there's order collapses. Uh, cultures end
Speaker 1: up retreating into the jungles, and for many people everything
Speaker 1: has to be built up again. Basically, the idea here
Speaker 1: is that the bicameral mind, this, this whole system of
Speaker 1: hearing voices, this hold society together. This is it's it's
Speaker 1: an instrument of social control. Yeah, and so it's it's
Speaker 1: like playing jinga with gravity, and then gravity goes away,
Speaker 1: 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: slow ave a voice or voices, which indeed were what
Speaker 1: we call volition and empowered what they commanded, and were
Speaker 1: related to the hallucinated voices of others in a carefully
Speaker 1: established hierarchy. And this mindset would have again developed over
Speaker 1: the over the ninth century BC to the second millennium BC,
Speaker 1: a gradual procession progression. Right, So that's the hypothesized era
Speaker 1: of the bicameral mind, which around the first millennium BC
Speaker 1: starts to decompose and fall apart. All right, we're gonna
Speaker 1: take a quick break, and when we come back, we
Speaker 1: will look at signs of the bicameral mind in ancient literature.
Speaker 1: Than all right, we're back, all right, So obviously it
Speaker 1: would make sense that we'd see examples or the examples
Speaker 1: could be made in literature, because after all, the bicameral
Speaker 1: mind is uh is according to the theory, according to
Speaker 1: the hypothes here and 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 evidens
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 written language. So this also writing ends
Speaker 1: up undermining the bicameral mind. But can we see signs
Speaker 1: of the bi cameral mind in ancient literature? I think
Speaker 1: he's 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, it 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, it kind of gave
Speaker 1: me chill bumps. Oh totally. So the Iliot is one
Speaker 1: of Jane's chief examples of bicameral literature. So, of course
Speaker 1: the Iliad if you're if you never read it, it's
Speaker 1: an epic war poem that tells the story of an
Speaker 1: alliance of Greek kings and 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 developed 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 Janes 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
Speaker 1: the what do we find? Well, James makes a really
Speaker 1: striking claim about the Iliad. It is a work of
Speaker 1: literature in which the characters are almost entirely devoid of
Speaker 1: anything 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 very well, could be.
Speaker 1: It makes me think, you know, all these various bad
Speaker 1: films that you and I enjoy. Uh, sometimes they're enjoyably
Speaker 1: bad because the craftsmanship isn't there at various levels. Um,
Speaker 1: if bicameral, If the bicameral mind hypothesis is true, could
Speaker 1: it be possible that that sometimes we love bad movies
Speaker 1: 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: they 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. So there might be like
Speaker 1: a scene where Achilles is going to reach out and
Speaker 1: kill his king Agamemnon, but instead it says a God
Speaker 1: 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 they just have God's pop up than 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 round 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 division. So when you
Speaker 1: see something, the thing is in your noose. Now, this
Speaker 1: next point, this is the exact place where he really
Speaker 1: gave me the creeps, and I got actual chill bumps.
Speaker 1: He points out that the Iliad, as well as Greek
Speaker 1: art at the time, quote shows man as an assembly
Speaker 1: of strange the 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 just these automatons waging war, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, killing each other, uh, with without this concrete
Speaker 1: sense of self guiding. It so alien to comprehend. Oh,
Speaker 1: it 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 him 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. I guess that is what you'd call
Speaker 1: that that man of action cliche. I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: it technically usually is a man in these movies. And
Speaker 1: he's got this kind of macho swagger that does not
Speaker 1: seem to involve thinking, it doesn't seem to involve self reflection.
Speaker 1: They've just got this, uh this like violent intuition, can't
Speaker 1: be bargained with, can't be reasoned with, and absolutely will
Speaker 1: not stop. I mean this, that's the terminator in a nutshell.
Speaker 1: The by the terminator is is a is a machine.
Speaker 1: Everybody was the terminator in the Iliad. That's the scary part.
Speaker 1: Oh man, So what I what I'm thirsting for now?
Speaker 1: It's almost like this theory is too interesting and I'm
Speaker 1: too tempted to want it to be true. So what
Speaker 1: I want now is for a great classic scholar to say, like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: he's got it all wrong. Here's why, here's how. You
Speaker 1: can 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 ah So this deals
Speaker 1: with Yeah, the Elohim, one of the names of God
Speaker 1: used in the the Hebrew Bible, very often just translated
Speaker 1: as God, a singular right, but he argues that it
Speaker 1: translated as merely God is to miss the plural nature
Speaker 1: of the word in Hebrew. Uh, which is something I've
Speaker 1: independently read, like Melohem is essentially a plural word, but
Speaker 1: it's rendered in the modern sense and as a singular word. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It says that it comes from the root of to
Speaker 1: be powerful. But better translations of of ela him might
Speaker 1: be the great ones, the prominent ones, the Majesty's, the judges,
Speaker 1: the mighty ones, etcetera. And so these, he argues, are
Speaker 1: the vote could be the voice visions of the bicameral mind.
Speaker 1: And he also argues that one can really see the
Speaker 1: decline of the bicameral vision in the Bible. Now, this
Speaker 1: is I really love this because he's basically talking about
Speaker 1: all right, if you pick up the Old Testament and
Speaker 1: you read it front to back, you can see this transition.
Speaker 1: So in the he says quote. In the true bicameral period,
Speaker 1: there was usually a visual component to the holluciated holy
Speaker 1: sinated voice, either it's self hallucinated or as the statue
Speaker 1: in front of in front of which one listened. So
Speaker 1: even as a modern reader of the Bible will find this,
Speaker 1: you go from a physical God who physically does stuff
Speaker 1: like kick people out of the garden or shut the
Speaker 1: door on the arc, to a God that merely speaks
Speaker 1: to everyone, and a purely auditory God that we account
Speaker 1: that we encounter with Moses, you know, with additional visual
Speaker 1: flares here and there, and crucially after that, a God
Speaker 1: of law and religion rather than of direct experience. So
Speaker 1: you go from this robustly imagined God who physically does
Speaker 1: stuff to a God who is a voice, to a
Speaker 1: God who is not experienced directly and rather as experience
Speaker 1: through his tradition of teachings and law and so um
Speaker 1: so yeah. James argues that the Hebrew Bible is essentially
Speaker 1: a long narrative of the transition from myth to bicameral
Speaker 1: humankind too conscious humankind, and you can see the whole thing. There,
Speaker 1: you've got the older prophets like Amos, who Janes identifies
Speaker 1: as clearly b cameral, to Ecclesiastes, who uh. James thinks
Speaker 1: the author shows all the markers of consciousness, and he
Speaker 1: claims you can also see this painful transition from bicameral
Speaker 1: society to conscious society in many aspects of the canon.
Speaker 1: A couple of examples, he says people are constantly begging
Speaker 1: for contact with a God or God's that no longer
Speaker 1: speak to them in the literature that he believes comes
Speaker 1: from the conscious period of this history. So one quote
Speaker 1: he gives from Psalm forty two, and this is with
Speaker 1: the name of God rendered directly to the plural rather
Speaker 1: than the singular as it would usually be rendered as
Speaker 1: the stag pants after the water Brooks, So pants my
Speaker 1: mind after you, Oh Gods, my mind thirsts for God's,
Speaker 1: for living gods. When shall I come face to face
Speaker 1: with God's. Yeah, it's almost like a like a gradual
Speaker 1: breakup story, like oh, he used he used to see
Speaker 1: God all the time we hung out, and now, yeah,
Speaker 1: we talk on the phone sometime, but it's not quite
Speaker 1: the same. And now it's like he won't even call.
Speaker 1: We just keep exchanging texts, and suddenly you know, that's
Speaker 1: all I have to go on. It's just the the
Speaker 1: not even new text but the old texts. But then again,
Speaker 1: there are there are definitely, in Jane's vision, partisans of
Speaker 1: the conscious version of the religion that don't want anything
Speaker 1: to do with the direct experience version of the religion.
Speaker 1: Like he says that there are many signs throughout the
Speaker 1: books of the Hebrew Bible that the Bicameral people may
Speaker 1: have been actively persecuted by conscious people for religious reasons.
Speaker 1: I'll just read one quote, he says. Quote. A further
Speaker 1: vestige from the Bicameral era is the word obe, often
Speaker 1: translated as a familiar spirit. A man also or a
Speaker 1: woman that have an obe shall surely be put to death,
Speaker 1: says Leviticus. And similarly, Saul drives out from Israel all
Speaker 1: those that had an obe. In First Samuel, even though
Speaker 1: an obe is something that one consults with, according to
Speaker 1: Deuteronomy eighteen eleven, it probably had no physical embodiment. It
Speaker 1: is always bracketed with wizards and witches, and thus probably
Speaker 1: refers to some Bicameral voice that was not recognized by
Speaker 1: the Old Testament writers as religious Yeah, I mean, you
Speaker 1: get into this scenario where you know, obviously the individuals
Speaker 1: who don't hear the voices, they've built up all this
Speaker 1: this law and order based on the old texts and
Speaker 1: the old stories. It 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: God is still speaking, what's he going to say? You know,
Speaker 1: um comes it could provide license for some very uh,
Speaker 1: for some very disturbing content or some great stuff. Yeah, indeed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just sort of like it provides you with a
Speaker 1: blanket authorization for action that is not so there if
Speaker 1: you have a written and codified law. So again, all
Speaker 1: of this just ends up playing into the conflict of
Speaker 1: the downfall of the bicameral mind as the voices blink out,
Speaker 1: and this a new system of of order and social
Speaker 1: stability has to take hold. So let's try to summarize
Speaker 1: real quick what James is saying is the basic contours
Speaker 1: of the transition through the bicameral period to the conscious period.
Speaker 1: Let's see Robert tell me what you think of this.
Speaker 1: As I've tried to summarize his view, I think James
Speaker 1: argues that bicameral society emerged with language and the increasing
Speaker 1: size of tribal groups. So when one could encode mental
Speaker 1: content into grammatical sentences, it was possible to code action
Speaker 1: motivation efficiently through language. So you'd have a big group
Speaker 1: where your authority figure can't be around instantly 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, providing 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 to become imbued with disembodied 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 of 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 uh and collapse of infrastructure, trade
Speaker 1: was interrupted, education stifled, and it led to what some
Speaker 1: would consider a dark age of the ancient world. And
Speaker 1: he also argues that a certain a small amount of
Speaker 1: natural selection may have come into play as well, because
Speaker 1: as all this is going on and the enormous, enormous
Speaker 1: bloodshed that's playing out here at the end of the
Speaker 1: second century BC, those who had the best chance to
Speaker 1: survive were those who could resist the commandments of the
Speaker 1: gods and the literal you know, the voice of compulsion, right,
Speaker 1: who were more adaptable and could narrotize out solutions to problems,
Speaker 1: and 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 bikeamera all mine, and in the
Speaker 1: beginnings of widespread consciousness in culture. So what are what
Speaker 1: are these main things he offers? He's talking about, first
Speaker 1: of all, one, the weakening of the auditory by the
Speaker 1: advent of writing. Okay, A good example would be the
Speaker 1: invention of written law, right, clearly distinguishing acceptable from non
Speaker 1: acceptable behavior in a way that does not require the
Speaker 1: intervention of an internal God. Yeah, we got these tablets here.
Speaker 1: He didn't have to speak to you all the time.
Speaker 1: Just refer to the tablets. Yeah, this is how I
Speaker 1: feel about any kind of power point presentation. Just give
Speaker 1: me the power point. I don't need the voice of
Speaker 1: God telling me the things. Just give me a list. Yeah, okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: what's the next thing? Number two? The inherent fragility of
Speaker 1: hallucinatory control. Okay, Yeah, we can see that there's some
Speaker 1: instability in the system there. Number three, the unworkable nous
Speaker 1: of God's in the chaos of historical upheaval. Okay, so
Speaker 1: the gods prevented problems that they caused problems when when
Speaker 1: society and hierarchy was falling apart. Yeah, and again the
Speaker 1: voice of the gods was just there was not actually
Speaker 1: the voice of a divine being with superior knowledge. It
Speaker 1: was still originating from within the individual, right. Okay. The
Speaker 1: fourth one, the fourth one is depositing of internal cause
Speaker 1: and the observation of difference in others. Okay, so you
Speaker 1: see other people are behaving differently, and you begin to
Speaker 1: wonder if maybe they're just behaving on their own and
Speaker 1: not being commanded by God's maybe undermining your own authorization
Speaker 1: of god belief. Yeah, I can see where it would be. Um,
Speaker 1: I mean it would, it would It would be contagious
Speaker 1: in that in that respect. Uh. Number five, the acquisition
Speaker 1: of a narratization from epics, the introduction of stories. Number six,
Speaker 1: the survival value of deceit, which we already touched on,
Speaker 1: and number seven a modicum of natural selection, which we
Speaker 1: also discussed here. But to be clear, I think James
Speaker 1: is primarily thinking about these transitions in mindset, not as
Speaker 1: changes in the physical brain brought about by you know,
Speaker 1: mutation and natural selection, though there might be a little
Speaker 1: bit of selection towards levels of predisposition for it. But
Speaker 1: he's primarily thinking about this as cultural change, right, that
Speaker 1: there there are cultures of bicamerality and cultures of consciousness. Yes,
Speaker 1: all right, we're gonna take one more break and when
Speaker 1: we come back, we're going to jump into modern traces
Speaker 1: of the bicameral mind. All right, we're back. So we've
Speaker 1: examined the evidence that James claims to offer for the
Speaker 1: existence of a bicameral mind and history and his conception
Speaker 1: of how the bicameral mind arose and then collapsed into
Speaker 1: society's based on conscious mentality. So, if there truly was
Speaker 1: a bicamerality in the past, if our brains are still
Speaker 1: so wired as to be perhaps capable of bicameral culture
Speaker 1: in the present, if we just practiced it, what would
Speaker 1: the evidence of that be. Well, you would think that
Speaker 1: there'd be some practices in human behavior that would give
Speaker 1: you evidence that we used to be bi cameral, and
Speaker 1: that we could still be bicameral if we tried. That's right,
Speaker 1: And he first of all, he makes uh he makes
Speaker 1: some examples out of religion. So at this point I
Speaker 1: think everyone can pretty well imagine the sorts of religious
Speaker 1: examples that James is going to make. After all, we've
Speaker 1: been discussing the trans like nature of biocameral existence uh
Speaker 1: in the commanding words of corpses and statues, you know, all,
Speaker 1: you know, very magical and scenarios that we can imagine
Speaker 1: lining up with both religious stories and religious right. So
Speaker 1: expectantly he points to spirit possession. There's a topic we
Speaker 1: come back to on a few different episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind, and it ranges from demonic possession
Speaker 1: across various cultures to you know, tribal African beats that
Speaker 1: threatened Carl Young's sanity, and more positive forms of spirit
Speaker 1: possessions such as oracles, which which Jane spends a lot
Speaker 1: of time with. UM. We have a recent episode of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind that covers the the Thaie
Speaker 1: Tattoo festival, in which uh, the animal tattoo ends up
Speaker 1: overtaking the individual individual. So we have examples of this
Speaker 1: this throughout different cultures. H Speaking of tongues, UH and
Speaker 1: similar religious experiences may also play into this, and of
Speaker 1: course we have examples of this in ancient writings as well.
Speaker 1: So as early as a fourth century BC, Socrates wrote
Speaker 1: of God possessed men, so and clearly like, that's not
Speaker 1: the kind of thing you would necessarily speak about if
Speaker 1: if you were immerged within a bicameral UH world anymore. Right, Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: these might be more vestiges of the bicameral culture, right.
Speaker 1: And James points to a number of different examples, mainly
Speaker 1: those dealing with Greek oracles UH, with the idea being
Speaker 1: that the oracle the individual here would have would have
Speaker 1: ramped themselves up, but they basically ramped up right hemisphere
Speaker 1: activity in relation to the left as a result, as
Speaker 1: a response to complex ritual stimuli, you know, the use
Speaker 1: of all these various and we've talked about statues and
Speaker 1: language and and all of all of these aspects playing
Speaker 1: into passed by cameral experiences. And therefore the idea here
Speaker 1: is that even as we're shifting out of the bicameral age,
Speaker 1: even as the bicameral ages behind us, you have conscious
Speaker 1: individuals who are able to sort of resurrect the bicameral
Speaker 1: experience enter into trance like states, etcetera. By engaging in
Speaker 1: these rituals. Yeah, and these would be rituals where they
Speaker 1: channel the output of what Jans identifies as in most
Speaker 1: people the right hemisphere speech associated sections of course, right
Speaker 1: a speech usually coming from the left hemisphere. So it
Speaker 1: would be like the voices of the gods that spoke
Speaker 1: in the bicameral minds of the ancients, but speaking out
Speaker 1: through the mouths of these oracles and prophets. And you
Speaker 1: know what, uh, those oracles and prophets, they didn't necessarily
Speaker 1: speak in a 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 passed by camera reality
Speaker 1: in poetry and music. So remember that james neurological hypothesis, uh,
Speaker 1: is that the bi cameral mind consisted of the non
Speaker 1: dominant hemisphere, which is the right brain in most people,
Speaker 1: speaking directly as an auditory hallucination to the dominant hemisphere,
Speaker 1: which is the left brain in most people. Keep that
Speaker 1: in mind here, that's right now. His his his thesis
Speaker 1: here is quote, the first poets were God's poetry began
Speaker 1: with the bicameral mind, the God's side of our ancient mentality,
Speaker 1: at least in a certain period of history, usually or
Speaker 1: perhaps always spoke in verse. This means that most men
Speaker 1: at one time throughout the day, we're hearing poetry of
Speaker 1: a sort composed and spoken within their own minds. That's
Speaker 1: terrifying and beautiful. Yeah, that that kind of sums up
Speaker 1: a lot of the bicameral hypothesis in general. So evidence
Speaker 1: is scanned for this, but he argues that quote individuals
Speaker 1: who remained bicameral into the conscious age, that these individuals
Speaker 1: continue to express the voice of God or God's in poetry.
Speaker 1: Uh the so you know, the Indian Vada dictated by
Speaker 1: the gods, the oracle at Delphi, early Arabic poets, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And this concerns music too, because early poetry was musical
Speaker 1: in nature. Jane's says absolutely. I mean, you could still
Speaker 1: say that poetry is musical and nature, especially insofar as
Speaker 1: it invokes any kind of scanning or rhythm. That's right.
Speaker 1: And speech is a function again primarily of the left
Speaker 1: cerebral hemisphere, but song is primarily a function of the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere. Poetry begins as the divine speech of the
Speaker 1: bicameral mind. That's an interesting hypothesis in itself. Now there's
Speaker 1: a he presents a fair amount of of evidence for this,
Speaker 1: which I'm gonna I'm gonna roll through here. Joe, jump
Speaker 1: in as we go. Hit me man, all right. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, many elderly patients who have suffered cerebral
Speaker 1: hemorrhages on the left hemisphere such that they cannot speak,
Speaker 1: they can still sing. We also have the Wada test
Speaker 1: to determine in a person's cerebral dominance. This is when
Speaker 1: sodium amatal is injected into the karatid artery on one side,
Speaker 1: putting the corresponding hemisphere under heavy sedation, and the other
Speaker 1: side remains awake. So in this case case, if the
Speaker 1: left hemisphere is sedated, the patient can't speak, but they
Speaker 1: can sing. If the right hemisphere 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: Latin 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 of the left ear
Speaker 1: phone better. This is because the left ear has greater
Speaker 1: neuro representation on the right hemisphere. Now it points out
Speaker 1: that Plato spoke of poetry as possession. Yeah, I said,
Speaker 1: poets then around four b C. Were comparable in mentality
Speaker 1: to the oracles of the same period and went through
Speaker 1: similar uh psychological transformation when they performed. And then there's
Speaker 1: this idea. We've all heard talk of the muses, right right,
Speaker 1: I mean, so ancient epics might start saying like sing
Speaker 1: muse blah blah blah. So the authors telling their personal
Speaker 1: composition God to start going. Yeah, Now, when we talk
Speaker 1: about the muses, where you know, we're just talking about
Speaker 1: inspiration or you know, or attention even or just you know,
Speaker 1: the will to get a project done. It's a literary device.
Speaker 1: We think of. Yeah, but but back back then, the
Speaker 1: argument is that the bicameral human would literally need to
Speaker 1: hear the voice of the Muse. Yeah, the muse was
Speaker 1: literally real, so it wasn't just something to imagine, It
Speaker 1: was something 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 in just naturally imbued with their song.
Speaker 1: They have to learn the gift of the muse in
Speaker 1: order to hear it. So the society that the voice
Speaker 1: is becoming harder and harder for everyone to hear. So
Speaker 1: this might be kind of like how the oracles of
Speaker 1: these later periods, living in conscious societies have to go
Speaker 1: through elaborate rituals to get into the altered state of
Speaker 1: consciousness where they channel their non dominant hemisphere and let
Speaker 1: the voice of God speak. That's right, And he says
Speaker 1: that in the fifth century b C, we hear the
Speaker 1: very first hints of poets being peculiar with poetic ecstasy.
Speaker 1: That's this is quote there, So I want to use
Speaker 1: that from now on. If I'm like trying to get
Speaker 1: some 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 Dragons you basically have three
Speaker 1: different types of magic users. You have the warlock who
Speaker 1: works their magic via enslavement to a god or god
Speaker 1: like being. So that's a bicamera being. Yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: would be the bicamera experience. A sorcerer learns to better
Speaker 1: channel magic that naturally emerges from their being. So this
Speaker 1: is like a transitional being. This is like one of
Speaker 1: the oracles in the late antiquity. Yeah, like it still
Speaker 1: flows through them, it still can flow through them, but
Speaker 1: they have to manage it. And then finally you have
Speaker 1: the arcane wizard, who has to master the workings of
Speaker 1: magic through study and academic effort alone. So these are
Speaker 1: the pathetic poets of the modern era who have to
Speaker 1: 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 chews and wizards
Speaker 1: and in the real world in earlier periods. But there's
Speaker 1: the idea that the the arcane wizard is a master
Speaker 1: of of these forces, where lesser models are um you know,
Speaker 1: the magic is a master of them, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: not unlike the comparison between the bicamera and the conscious
Speaker 1: 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 in 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're just beautifully written and uh and
Speaker 1: and 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 I
Speaker 1: can definitely get that argument. Maybe that's why most scientific
Speaker 1: papers are so horrible to read, Like why you know,
Speaker 1: it's really rare you come across the one that's really
Speaker 1: well well written, And it's because, well, maybe maybe you
Speaker 1: shouldn't let your writing skills make it stand out more
Speaker 1: than 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 about
Speaker 1: hypnosis on the podcast before, but just to reiterate what's
Speaker 1: going on with hypnosis is people seem to have wildly
Speaker 1: differing levels of susceptibility to hypnosis. Some people just can't
Speaker 1: be hypnotized, but for those that can, hypnosis does seem
Speaker 1: to be a genuine altered state of consciousness at some
Speaker 1: level in which the body is relaxed, focus is narrowed,
Speaker 1: inhibition is lowered, consciousness is reduced, and verbal obedience is increased.
Speaker 1: Sounds kind of like the model of bicamerality. With a
Speaker 1: lot of these public demonstrations of hypnosis that you see
Speaker 1: you know, or that you're on a cruise ship and
Speaker 1: somebody's doing a show. I think people following the hypnotist
Speaker 1: commands is not necessarily always a highly altered state of consciousness.
Speaker 1: It could be partially just a performance brought on by
Speaker 1: social pressure. But this is actually part of Jane's theory.
Speaker 1: He talks about the idea of collect of cognitive imperative.
Speaker 1: Group pressure enables different states of mind, and this is
Speaker 1: why you can have, uh, basically a culture dictating which
Speaker 1: mindset you adopt, the bicameral mindset or the conscious mindset.
Speaker 1: And it's also the reason that you can, through these
Speaker 1: elaborate rituals, say like the Oracle at Delphi, produce these
Speaker 1: these amazing uh you know, metered prophecies out of your
Speaker 1: right brain because group cognitive pressure is putting you into
Speaker 1: that mindset. And so he's saying hypnosis maybe maybe in
Speaker 1: fact a modern reapproximation of the left brain operation of
Speaker 1: a bicameral person. But instead of having the right brain talk,
Speaker 1: you're having the hypnotists talk. And again this makes me
Speaker 1: think of yoga classes where I just let the individual
Speaker 1: tell me what to do for an hour and a
Speaker 1: half and it it feels so liberating. Now, another big
Speaker 1: area that the Jane spends a lot of time with
Speaker 1: is the condition of schizophrenia. Now, this is obviously going
Speaker 1: to be very relevant because it's one of the features
Speaker 1: of schizophrenia is hallucinations, especially auditory hallucinations. Yeah, it is
Speaker 1: a condition defined by voices, by auditory hallucination, voices that criticize,
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 bare 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. They're 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, uh,
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 experience 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, Uh, they
Speaker 1: tend to be authority figures created out of cultural expectation.
Speaker 1: And the hallucinations also seem to have access to more
Speaker 1: memories in the patient. There in many cases and in
Speaker 1: many cases they replace thought. The they frequently take on
Speaker 1: religious overtones because he says the condition emerges from the
Speaker 1: neurological structures bound to the birth of religious thought to
Speaker 1: begin with right, and he says that the there's also
Speaker 1: a frequency of religious experience overall in the waking state
Speaker 1: for human consciousness, the the hypnopompic state that is often
Speaker 1: accompanied by vivid, lingering imagery. We've discussed this in terms
Speaker 1: of sleep paralysis and supernatural experience before. James writes that
Speaker 1: these parts of the brain are quote released from their
Speaker 1: normal inhibition by abnormal biochemistry in many cases of schizophrenia
Speaker 1: and particularized into experience. This is also telling. He points
Speaker 1: to the relative inability of schizophrenics to draw a person.
Speaker 1: Think again to our discussions of eye and me. There's
Speaker 1: this draw a person test or adapt test, and it's
Speaker 1: used to help identify schizophrenia and other conditions by asking
Speaker 1: the individual to draw a person. Now, if you have
Speaker 1: trouble drawing a whole person, that kind of makes me
Speaker 1: think about those disembodied body parts you talked about With
Speaker 1: reference to the iliad and UH. And I have to
Speaker 1: point out this is another thing I see my son
Speaker 1: having to do on kindergarten tests and UH in evaluations
Speaker 1: draw a person and and see I mean they're also
Speaker 1: looking to see with what degree of accuracy you can
Speaker 1: pull them together. But but yeah, in this case, are
Speaker 1: you able to draw a complete person at all? Now,
Speaker 1: not all people who have schizophrenia are going to have
Speaker 1: trouble drawing a person, right, but when they do it
Speaker 1: is UH is extremely diagnostic. Also with schizophrenia, narratization can
Speaker 1: also become impossible. You see these like fractured self stories rtues.
Speaker 1: And then there's also body image boundary disturbance or boundary loss.
Speaker 1: And this again this ties into this UH, this lost
Speaker 1: sense of I or me. And remember too that schizophrenia
Speaker 1: has a genetic inherited basis to the underlying biochemistry. Natural
Speaker 1: selection James Argue would have favored it for a while.
Speaker 1: There's a certain tirelessness in schizophrenic individuals. They seem to
Speaker 1: have a lot of energy, and in the bicameral individual
Speaker 1: this would have become this would have become very important
Speaker 1: if you were say building pyramids or are there great works? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we were talking about one of the advantages,
Speaker 1: or one of the possible advantages of a bi cameral
Speaker 1: mind would be mental endurance, much more so than a
Speaker 1: conscious person could muster. So James basically says that the
Speaker 1: modern schizophrenic is an individual that's essentially in search of
Speaker 1: a bicameral culture quote, but he retains usually some part
Speaker 1: of the subjective consciousness that struggles against this more primitive
Speaker 1: mental organization, that tries to establish some kind of control
Speaker 1: in the middle of a mental organization in which the
Speaker 1: hallucination ought to do the controlling. In effect, he is
Speaker 1: a mind barred to his environment, waiting on God's in
Speaker 1: a godless world. Okay, So you convinced yet, Joe. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's tough because I do find his argument very compelling,
Speaker 1: but it just may be the case that he was
Speaker 1: wrong about how about some of the evidence that he claims,
Speaker 1: or about how he interprets some of that evidence. So
Speaker 1: I don't know. I find the bicameral mind thesis very
Speaker 1: interesting and very compelling, but I do not consider myself
Speaker 1: convinced that it is correct true and with like with
Speaker 1: the schizophrenia evidence, for instance, is this is this truly
Speaker 1: more evidence in supported by cameral mind theory, or is
Speaker 1: this schizophrenia as explained with bicameral mind. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: one way you could look at the bicameral mind is
Speaker 1: you could say it's a theory that explains a lot,
Speaker 1: or you could say that it is a very interesting,
Speaker 1: carefully conducted story that's overlaid on lots of evidence that
Speaker 1: we already knew about. So what would be really interesting
Speaker 1: about it would be can it predict new discoveries like,
Speaker 1: based on the assumption of the bicameral mind hypothesis, would
Speaker 1: you be able to predict will find X, Y and
Speaker 1: z about the ancient world and about neuroscientific discoveries in
Speaker 1: the future, say with you know, uh a neuroimaging, And
Speaker 1: that would be a real good way of testing whether
Speaker 1: it has any predictive power and thus whether we can
Speaker 1: have any confidence that it will continue to have predictive
Speaker 1: power in the future, which is pretty much synonymous with
Speaker 1: saying there's something to it that it might be true.
Speaker 1: Uh So I tried to look up you know what
Speaker 1: if people said about it and the theory. It's had
Speaker 1: lots of critics, It has lots of people, you know,
Speaker 1: it's always been controversial ever since it was first introduced.
Speaker 1: It's had supporters. Some people think that it's uh, it's
Speaker 1: really interesting, there's something to it. Some people think it
Speaker 1: might shed some light on some issues, even if it's wrong. Overall,
Speaker 1: it's had a lot of people who think it's just bunk.
Speaker 1: So you know, there's opinions all over the place. One
Speaker 1: paper I found that I thought summarized well some of
Speaker 1: the neuro scientific evidence and implications is a paper by
Speaker 1: Leo Share published in the Journal of Psychology or Psychiatry
Speaker 1: and Neuroscience in two thousand. UH. Leo Share is a
Speaker 1: professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai and New York, and
Speaker 1: in the short piece he collects some relevant reactions to
Speaker 1: Jane's hypothesis and argument. Uh. Some reactions to Jane's include
Speaker 1: He finds that in nine seven, Assade and Shapiro published
Speaker 1: a criticism of Jane's work in the American Journal of Psychiatry,
Speaker 1: and they write, quote, the difficulty which we find with
Speaker 1: Jane's hypothesis is that the conclusions he draws have a
Speaker 1: questionable basis in neuropsychiatric fact and quote. If Jane's hypothesis
Speaker 1: were to coincide more accurately with anatomic fact facts about
Speaker 1: what we find in the body. The right temporal area
Speaker 1: in question would more likely coincide with Broca's expressive area,
Speaker 1: a notion that does not conveniently fit Jane's theoretical constructs.
Speaker 1: Assad and Shapiro. Shapiro also claim, according to Share that
Speaker 1: quote lesions of the right sided areas corresponding to Broca's
Speaker 1: and Wernicke's areas seem more related to the negative symptoms
Speaker 1: of schizophrenia, like restricted affect than to the positive hallucinatory
Speaker 1: symptoms unquote, and they also claim that Jane's oversimplified the
Speaker 1: phenomenology of hallucinatory experience to make them fit his hypothesis better. Um.
Speaker 1: Also in ninet, the International Journal of Psychophysiology published a
Speaker 1: letter that wrote, quote, after many years of psychophysiological studies
Speaker 1: mainly carried out in the field, if evoked to neurocognitive
Speaker 1: bioelectrical events, I feel I can safely state that the
Speaker 1: concepts of the mind slash brain and brain slash behavior dualisms,
Speaker 1: with their ancient, widespread and persistent philosophy, are now all outdated,
Speaker 1: as are those of the bicameral mind or the double brain.
Speaker 1: Then again, however, Share says in nineteen a paper published
Speaker 1: in The Lancet by Olan claimed that research in neuroimaging
Speaker 1: has quote illuminated and confirmed the importance of Jane's hypothesis.
Speaker 1: And this research includes a paper in The Lancet nine
Speaker 1: by Lennox at All in which a right handed person
Speaker 1: with schizophrenia underwent neuroimaging during hallucinations and the authors found
Speaker 1: that the auditory hallucinations occurred in the right hemisphere but
Speaker 1: not the left hemisphere, which would match up with Jane's predictions,
Speaker 1: the predictions made by the bicameral mind hypothesis. So I'd
Speaker 1: say it's still in the realm of something that is
Speaker 1: interesting but definitely not proven. But just imagine how fascinating
Speaker 1: it would be if more and more studies start lining
Speaker 1: up with stuff that could be predicted directly by the
Speaker 1: bicameral mind hypothesis. Indeed, Yeah, I mean, that's that's the
Speaker 1: great thing about the about this particular hypothesis is that
Speaker 1: we can continue to study it. We can continue to
Speaker 1: see how how it potentially lines up with their modern
Speaker 1: scientific understanding of consciousness and the brain. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess we can start wrapping up here. But I want
Speaker 1: to say in the end, though I'm not convinced by it,
Speaker 1: I'm not advocating it as true. It's fascinating, very well argued,
Speaker 1: I would say, arguably quite brilliant in the way it
Speaker 1: pulls from so many disciplines into a coherent picture of
Speaker 1: a cross disciplinary hypothesis. But can't yet endorse it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would, I would agree, But it is it is
Speaker 1: fascinating to use it as a thought exercise for looking
Speaker 1: back on past cultures. And uh, you know, after I
Speaker 1: was reading it, I kept I was wondering, well, why
Speaker 1: don't we see this reference to more works of fiction. Well,
Speaker 1: it turns out it was apparently one of the key
Speaker 1: influences on Neil stephen snow Crash, which we mentioned in
Speaker 1: our Tower of Babble episode. It's a cyberpunk classic of
Speaker 1: that involves a linguistic momentic weapons um which you know,
Speaker 1: go back and listen to that episode of certainly reads
Speaker 1: snow Crash if you want more than that. But I
Speaker 1: was not familiar with this book. There is a two
Speaker 1: thousand nine novel by Terence Hawkins titled The Rage of Achilles,
Speaker 1: and get this it's a novel of the Trojan War
Speaker 1: told within the confines of the bicameral mind hypothesis. So
Speaker 1: Odysseus is a conscious modern man in this and Achilles
Speaker 1: is a bicameral killing machine. That is a brilliant concept
Speaker 1: for a novel. And if there's any truth to Jane's vision,
Speaker 1: this might have actually been possible. Like during the long
Speaker 1: slow breakdown to the bicameral mind, conscious people and bicameral
Speaker 1: people would have had to encounter and deal with one another.
Speaker 1: And can you just imagine all the difficulty that would create. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but for both sides, because on one hand, the conscious
Speaker 1: human is capable of deception that the bicameral human has
Speaker 1: no ability to. Like basically comes down to that that
Speaker 1: duel in a game of throwing owns between the Mountain
Speaker 1: and uh, what's his name? The Ober and Martel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: where one is one is crafty and deceptive and the
Speaker 1: other one is just pure brute strength and NonStop killing action. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you're saying the Mountain is bicameral and the Red
Speaker 1: Viper of Dorn is conscious. I think so, And really,
Speaker 1: I mean he only becomes more bicameral. Story progresses. All right,
Speaker 1: So 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 ideas that are so cool. I
Speaker 1: 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: The 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? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like if you go three thousand years into the future
Speaker 1: from now, could our mindsets be as different from from
Speaker 1: hours now as the conscious mind is from the hypothetic
Speaker 1: call bicameral mind? Yeah? I mean, am I engaging in
Speaker 1: a bicameral experience when I let my GPS device tell
Speaker 1: me where to drive? I don't know, you totally relinquished
Speaker 1: conscious control? Yeah? Almost, It's almost to that level. Uh
Speaker 1: that I was hanging out with my family over the
Speaker 1: weekend and my sisters were like asking me, like, why
Speaker 1: did you make this turn in that it's said of
Speaker 1: this turn? And I'm like, I just do what the
Speaker 1: machine tells me to told me to drive into the ocean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I put my trust in the machine. It's by and
Speaker 1: large there's a less uh, there's less of a chance
Speaker 1: that it will drive me in the ocean. That I
Speaker 1: will drive me into the ocean. So uh, that's how
Speaker 1: it shakes out, all right. Well, you can find is
Speaker 1: It's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where
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