One of my favorite speculative hypotheses is Bicameral Mind Theory, which asserts that something like schizophrenia was relatively common until relatively recently, about 3000 BC. It argues that it was relatively normal for humans to hear voices in their head directing them. So when we read religious texts about the gods commanding so-and-so to do such-and-such, it wasn't just a spiritual metaphor, but an actual voice people heard in their heads and interpreted as higher powers.
In buddhism (I'm not a specialist by any means), I think awareness and consciousness is a central concept too. "The light of awareness", "awakening" is seen as holy. I really think that awareness is essential to enabling us to have hope to improve and specially understand our life and our problems; besides making us more connected, participating in reality. I like Thich Nhat Hanh's saying of a "serene encounter with reality" he finds through meditation. Different, each in its own poetry, ways of saying the similar things.
And I think the profound realization and awareness of the reality of others can bring no other outcome than compassion. That's why I think awareness is extremely important too for living in a society and enable living in a civilization.
Humans migrated to the Americas by at the latest 8900 BC when the land bridge disappeared, and we have evidence for migrations way before that. There's no way any kind of genetic change that occurred around 3000 BC could have made it to the Americas, and the indigenous population does not seem to exhibit such divergent modes of thought. They are essentially modern humans. So this date needs to be pushed way back.
No, Jaynes posits it happened as recently as 3000 BC, and bases the hypothesis on evidence from sources that are far more recent than 70 kya (not that we have any literary sources that are 70 kya old)
I’d speculatively propose the reverse: that a change occurred that led to our suppressing these “voices” to our subconscious, where they are still present but suppressed below the threshold of conscious awareness. Interestingly, in parts of the world, these voices persist (eg Ethiopia where a high percentage of people report regularly hearing voices in their heads). Also interestingly, this book you mention was one of David Bowie’s favourites - yes, he of the multiple pop personas.
The two hemispheres started to communicate (better) so wouldn't feel each other as strangers anymore. Or at least that was my understanding, in very simple words and without asking any AI :)
In market economics and evolution alike, when we posit that an organism/industry became more effective through some kind of change, we also require an explanation for "And why hadn't it already done this? What was stopping it from doing so earlier, and what was the mechanism that this constraint was removed?"
Genuinely unexploited niches and entirely novel strategies exist, but they are extraordinarily rare.
Do other primates show strong bicameral connectivity in terms of physical brain structures?
The phenomenon of auditory hallucinations often attributed to schizophrenics in modern day, was, far from being an aberrant condition, in fact the normal every day condition of ancient bicameral man. There was no concept of "I" or "free will;" the gods merely issued their auditory commands, and man obeyed, not having any choice in the matter. This was simply every day life for the bicameral man, who lived in a community of other "like-minded" beings that also experienced similar auditory hallucinations, often commands or admonishments, from the same god-king ruling the civilization.
Neurologically Jaynes locates these voices, and even defines gods to be those particular neurological phenomena located in the right hemisphere of the brain, that communicated its preverbal judgements to "man," located in the left hemisphere, which interpreted such judgments as speech:
The gods were in no sense "figments of the imagination" of anyone. They *were* man's volition. They occupied his nervous system,
probably his right hemisphere, and from stores of admonitory and preceptive experience, transmuted this experience into articulated
speech which then "told" the man what to do.
Several factors were attributed to its decline: the development of written language localizing a disembodied voice that was once omnipresent into a stele or rock carving; the emergence of trade and the contact of other societies, governed by different god-kings, leading to proto-theories of mind meant to explain the differing behaviour of the rival civilization; selective pressures against the viability of such "bicameral theocracies;" the development of free will. Reasons abound, but what followed was the collapse of bicameral mind and the disappearance of the voices, substantiated by various observations of ancient cultural artifacts: hypnotic induction of trance at the Oracle of Delphi, the practices of divination and omen reading, the production of artistic works in Mesopotamia depicting empty thrones and absent gods, or the crying out to the gods for their assistance and return, as in The Babylonian Theodicy, or the Psalms. All this in order to "re-awaken" the voices of gods that had once dispensed wisdom and now fell dormant with the emergence of modern, self-conscious, free-willed, individualistic man.
I don't know how far back "back in the day" is, but the UK sources below seem to show that alcohol (particularly spirits)[1] seemed to be quite popular in the late 1800s[0], and that in the 1550s it was Ale, 1650s it was Gin, 1750s saw a drop during the industrial revolution.
It's really a non-scientific idea, in the Popplerian sense. How would you debunk it? How would you confirm it? It's not in that class of idea.
A lot of people have been taught to read that as "therefore it's false" or "therefore it's true" or "therefore it's unimportant", but really all it means is that it is not amenable to scientific confirmation or debunking. That, and nothing more. Many things are not amenable to scientific confirmation or debunking that are true and false and important and unimportant and everything else.
Oh, you've debunked it? That's pretty cool. I look forward to your published interviews with people from the time.
You have an opinion that the hypothesis is false. I share that opinion. We probably have fairly radically different reasons for our opinions, though. Either way, they are just opinions, however well informed. We don't have proof.
Richard Dawkins called Julian Jaynes’s 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind “either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between”
Idea or theory can be great, well constructed and intellectually interesting without being true.
Aquatic ape hypothesis is similar. It's a initially a great theory and explains many things. Only when you start to investigate other explanations, the theory starts to fall a apart.
Endurance running hypothesis on the other hand seems to hold. Incidentally it explains many of the same things as aquatic ape hypothesis, and there is more supporting evidence.
