Is the Self a Recent Invention

• “Jaynes calls this a “bicameral” mind, with the voices coming from the right brain hemisphere, as hallucinations. The change to modern consciousness occurred around 1000 BC, occasioned by societal and geopolitical upheavals, making bicameralism no longer good enough for people to get by with.” ⤴️
• “it does appear fairly certain that the self is not a particularized or localized brain module, but rather an emergent property of the system as a whole. It doesn’t arise in computers because their system complexity is still actually orders of magnitude below ours. Jaynes is nevertheless arguing that you could have our level of complex mental functioning without the emergent property of self. Yet that’s contradicted by the evidence of our own example, wherein the complexity does produce a self.” ⤴️
• “the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did.”” ⤴️
• “It took time to develop the panoply of behaviors, adaptations and practices we’re familiar with; but that doesn’t mean the early and necessarily primitive stages signified a consciousness fundamentally different.” ⤴️
• “Jaynes similarly explains the bicameral mind as resembling the hypnotized mind” ⤴️
• “The Iliad was written the way it was because that was the convention of the time for how tales were told.” ⤴️
• “The very idea of portraying a character’s inner life is actually an advanced literary technique whose absence in the earliest works would be entirely expected.” ⤴️
• “Jaynes makes much of how early cuneiform messages were written as though addressed to the clay tablet itself, asking it to pass the message along to the recipient. Only later (“post-bicameral”) were letters addressed directly to recipients. But surely this was a mere change of cultural convention. Written language had only just been invented; letter writing too had to be invented, as a concept, and it evolved. The early concept was perfectly logical, and understandable to us.” ⤴️
• “human consciousness is a phenomenon of such subtle complexity that it’s a wonder we can sustain it so stably through life, and easy to envision how it can be disrupted or go on the fritz, akin to a computer program getting corrupted. That doesn’t tell us the program evolved from a state of primordial corruptedness. Schizophrenia and hypnosis are both special mental states considerably removed from normal functioning. While it’s true that normal minds can hold delusions (as in religious beliefs), mass pervasive hallucination simply is not part of human experience.” ⤴️
• “If human consciousness were a product of intelligent design, perhaps we could expect it to be more robust and impervious to the kinds of malfunctions at issue. But that’s not how evolution works. It develops new adaptations by modifying what already exists” ⤴️
• “Jaynes speculates that schizophrenia itself is an evolutionary adaptation” ⤴️
• “Certainly his arguments invoking social upheavals 3000 years ago would have no applicability in those other regions with very different histories.” ⤴️
• “It seems likely that we evolved our especially big and introspective brains to facilitate the complex social cooperation that figured so large in survival for our early forbears.” ⤴️
• “we got our minds to cope with a terribly hostile, danger-filled, stressful environment – long, long before 1000 BC.” ⤴️
• “There is ample evidence that an instinct for morality, justice, and even altruism is deeply wired into us by evolution, an adaptation responsive to the environment faced by our earliest ancestors, where it would have been advantageous for group survival.” ⤴️