Selects: Thrill to the Stunning Bicameral Mind Hypothesis

12:33Josh Clark:I see what this guy is doing now.

12:34Chuck Bryant:Okay, but the thing is there's like a lot of scholarly discussion on like, okay, what did Jaynes mean exactly? How literal was he? Because he used words like automaton. He never called them zombies. Other people called them like zombies. Yeah, no one talked about zombies back then. No, that's true. But, well, Evil Dead had, or not Evil Dead, Living Dead. Not the Living Dead had come out by then.

12:56Josh Clark:Yeah, but it wasn't like today. Okay.

12:59Chuck Bryant:No, no, I know. They're definitely overdone today. Automatons. So he called them automatons, and it's essentially the same thing, that they just behaved automatically. They didn't stop and think about how they felt. And this is really important too, Chuck. of course they still had feelings. They had feelings about the people that were in their kin group. They had feelings about their local ruler. They had feelings about, you know, stubbing their toe. It's not like they just had no inner life whatsoever. It's that they weren't, they didn't reflect on their inner life. They didn't think about thinking.

13:33Chuck Bryant:They didn't, they didn't have what we would recognize as consciousness. And in the terms that James is describing consciousness, which is a really narrow definition of consciousness. And then on top of that, he also goes to great lengths to say, hey, I understand that you're going to get all up in a tizzy that I'm saying that these people weren't conscious. I'm not talking about consciousness in general. And I think that you overestimate just how much consciousness makes up our lives. Okay.

14:03Josh Clark:How about we take a break?

14:05Chuck Bryant:Okay.

14:06Josh Clark:I'm going to go rip a bong. Kidding. We'll take a break. We'll come back and we'll talk about what, lots of other stuff right after this.

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16:15All right.

16:16Josh Clark:So I've kind of wrapped my head around what this guy is saying now. It's, I will admit, it's a little navel-gazy for me. When it comes to certain types of philosophy and hypotheses, I get a little bit like, what's the word? Maybe I can be a little too concrete, or as the French might say, concrete and literal in my thinking, because it's not Friday night in college, like two in the morning kind of discussion. Right. So I think that's where I am now. But I do think it's very interesting in that he, I mean, I think a lot of this is very interesting, But I think it's interesting that he thought around the first or second millennium BC is when things to him changed and a consciousness began to emerge because of, well, eventually language, but specifically metaphor, which is to say that all of a sudden we could make analogies in our brain.

17:13Josh Clark:We could link things together. we saw ourselves as almost as if they were characters ourselves were characters that had choices that they could make as characters and as these things connected in the brain then it created just an effect like a domino effect basically where all of a sudden we could work out our own solutions or we knew we were capable of working out our own solutions. And then it wasn't God saying, a God saying, walk around the rock. They realized it was ourselves making the decision to walk around the rock.

17:56Chuck Bryant:Yes. But in part of that, that also required them to be able to reflect on the idea, like you said, that they were able to now make their own decisions, right? And you said something earlier where you're like, you know, you were talking about your own internal dialogue where you think, hey, I should get up and go outside for a second. Like, that's different, right? You're thinking about you, yourself, and you realize that you are thinking about yourself. That's modern consciousness. What somebody who was a bicameral person during this time would have thought is, get up and go outside. And they would stand up and go outside without questioning because God had just instructed them to do that.

18:39Chuck Bryant:So it must be important. And they didn't think about where it came from. They definitely didn't think it was from themselves. And they didn't reflect on it. They just obeyed it. That's Jane's position. And that if you compare those two things, you're talking about two totally different forms of mental life. And it's so different, he said, that this is – that what we understand as consciousness just wasn't around until a couple thousand years ago. Okay.

19:03Josh Clark:I can buy that. I like it as a hypothesis. I can swim in this pool.

19:09Chuck Bryant:Okay, good, good. For the next 30 minutes. Here's the thing. It's really important to realize, like, you said something that you're a literalist, right? That's actually really appropriate to approach this because Julian Jaynes, one of the very radical things that he did was he took the ancients literally. Because when he started looking around, and we'll talk more about this later, but he was looking for those artifacts that would prove his hypothesis or lend support to it at least. And he was an expert in ancient languages, right? So he was – it was really appropriate. He could actually read Sumerian and Mesopotamian and he took what they were saying when they said things like, you know, the gods told us to do this, that they thought that the gods told them to do this, not that they were using metaphor.

19:54Chuck Bryant:So he took them literally on their word and that is a real departure from anybody else who's ever examined the ancients of what they were saying. Yeah, and I think it's also something we should point out now, even though it comes up later in our research, is that when you think of an, I guess, an automatic society or a society of automatons, that's not to

20:17Josh Clark:say that they weren't successful. He's describing some of the most successful, you know, ancient civilizations that existed. But I think his contention is that it was a hive mind all working together as automatons that allowed this stuff to get accomplished and not the conscious mind. Right.

20:36Chuck Bryant:And he didn't, I don't think he ever used it as like, I don't think he ever explicitly said that it was an emergent property of a hive mind. But that's kind of what he was describing, kind of like if you take one stone cutter and one stone mason and three stone carriers and multiply that unit by 500 and give it a year, you have a ziggurat built. That's just all those people knew what to do. They knew their position and their place and they just did it. And so, yeah, you could totally do that with people who are thinking in this way and weren't conscious. You could probably actually get it done more easily than you could with people who stopped and thought, I'm above this.

21:15Chuck Bryant:This work is not suited for me. I should be doing something else. Or why is the foreman being so mean to me today? Like they didn't think like that under Jane's hypothesis. So they would probably get the work done more efficiently, at least more quietly, I would guess.

21:32Josh Clark:Oh, I mean, consciousness proposed or brought along a whole host of problems. It's true. I imagine. If you're the ruling class, I think one thing that's interesting is that you mentioned about what – is it Jane's? Not Jines. Jane's?

21:49Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

21:50Josh Clark:Jane's thought about – I love Robert Lamb's Jane's Addiction joke in here, by the way. That was mine. Oh, that was yours? Mm-hmm. Oh, well, way to go. Thanks. You said Jane's says, and then in parentheses you put, ha. It's a very good joke. But what Jane said was that – and it's something you mentioned earlier was that consciousness – I think we think consciousness plays too big of a role in what is actually a life that is – can largely be still automatic on a lot of levels. Yeah. And this is from the actual book in 1976. And it's a little mind-blowy. I kind of like it. Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we're conscious of.

22:36Josh Clark:Mm-hmm. because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. It's like asking a flat, and this is where it kind of comes home to me. It's like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. So that's where it comes home to me is when you, and hey, it's metaphor, so how about that? He lays down a metaphor that makes me understand it a little bit more.

23:05Chuck Bryant:Yeah, because, you know, wherever the flashlight looks, there's light. There's light. Yeah. And his point is, is wherever your conscious mind looks, there's consciousness. But that doesn't mean that there's consciousness all over the place. And, yeah, Robert Lamb uses a really good example of unloading a dishwasher, right? Like when you're unloading the dishwasher, especially if you're one of those people who put, like, all of your knives in one place, all of your forks in one part of the basket, all of your spoons and so on, right? A maniac, in other words. Sensible human. If you do it like that, you can just be on autopilot because you've done it so many times.

23:44Chuck Bryant:But when you do something like drop a fork, that's out of the norm. That's a novel thing. That doesn't happen every time. And so in the bicameral mind, God would have said, I command thee to pick up thine fork, butterfingers. And you would lean over and pick up the fork, and that was that. Instead, you might not even think about picking up the fork. You might do that automatically. But it's still out of the norm. It's still different. And you have to kind of think about it a little more than just unloading the dishwasher. Now, if you take that dishwasher metaphor, Chuck, and you realize that three, five, nine thousand years ago, there were no dishwashers.

24:24Chuck Bryant:There was no ice cream scoop. There was no cookie scoop. There was no avocado splitter. There was nothing like that. Wait, what's that? Is that a thing now? Yeah, you don't have one of those? No. Oh, I'll send you one. You're missing out. It's a multi-tool for cutting avocados, getting the pit out, and then slicing them as you scoop them out. They're essential, as a matter of fact.

24:48Josh Clark:All right. I do pretty well with my knife, but I would love to see one of these.

24:51Chuck Bryant:Okay. I'm going to get you one for Christmas. Okay. So the point is that, like, there wasn't a big variety of stuff. So there wasn't that many novel situations. Like we encounter novel situations like almost constantly. That's just modern life. And that's the basis of James' like hypothesis that the reason that consciousness evolves is because we started to get faced with more and more novel situations on a much more frequent basis. So maybe it became inefficient for God to be talking to us every 30 seconds. Or maybe we just got better at thinking for ourselves and consciousness kind of evolved out of that.

25:31Chuck Bryant:But the point is life was much less complex back then, so you could have something like a bicameral mind. You could have somebody who consciousness hadn't evolved in yet because they hadn't been introduced to enough experience in life.

25:44Josh Clark:And with that experience came the fork falling on the floor, in other words?

25:51Chuck Bryant:Yeah, or, you know, there's a lot more dishes to put away and much more different dishes to put away rather than just forks, you know? Okay, sure. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Or you have one fork and you just carry it with you everywhere, you know? Like you don't have to think about that. There was just less stuff to think about is what I'm saying.

26:09Josh Clark:Well, now you're speaking my language because if I had it my way, every member of my family would have one fork, one spoon, one knife, one bowl, one cup, one plate.

26:18Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

26:19Josh Clark:And they were all responsible for keeping them clean and put away.

26:22Chuck Bryant:Man, every time I hear one cup, I'm like, there's a joke in there somewhere. But even if I could come up with it, I wouldn't be able to say it.

26:29Josh Clark:Oh, yeah, that's true. All right. So now we're at the point where we can talk a little bit more about this idea of metaphor and language sort of bringing about this change. And so what Janes was throwing down in 1976, besides apparently a bunch of roach clips, was the emergence of agricultural societies kind of changing everything. And that all of a sudden we are not living in groups of, you know, 10 or 12 people that are hunting and gathering where even if there was sort of a leader within that group, it was very easy to disseminate information and follow that leader. once we started settling down, planting and growing things, engaging in trade with other peoples that did a lot of things that complicated every process.

27:22Josh Clark:And it meant that societies were much, much larger and that rulers couldn't necessarily speak directly to people anymore.

27:32Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So another part of -

27:35Josh Clark:Not to specific people, like they could lay down an edict and that would get disseminated, in other words.

27:41Chuck Bryant:Right. So like I've read before back when I was an anthropology student that hunter gatherer bands usually numbered no more than 30 people. Like that was the absolute max. And once you reach that, you'd split off into two different bands. So yeah, like the person in charge was like part of your moment to moment life. And if you're, if you have, if you're suddenly in a civilization and you're building a ziggurat for somebody, he's probably not deigning to talk to you. And part of Jane's hypothesis is that this bicameralism emerged from, you know, all those new novel situations like learning to plant crops, learning to domesticate cows, learning to engage in trade and talk to other people that we started to like need direction from the gods more and more.

28:27Chuck Bryant:And it started to kind of get faster and faster. But in the meantime, it was a form of social control because one of the people you could think was talking to you was that local ruler who you were building the ziggurat for. So that would be a way to keep an increasingly large population in check.

28:47Josh Clark:Right. And as they got bigger and bigger and they started trading with people, like we were saying, that was sort of the beginning of the end for his, not his bicameral mine, but the bicameral mine. And one of the biggest problems with all of that was when we started writing stuff down because all of a sudden these auditory hallucinations that he felt like everyone was having to instruct them on what to do, there was now stuff down on paper that you could read and you could refer to and go back to and pass around and post on tablets at the walls of the city or whatever. and that was all of a sudden you weren't waiting around for a god to tell you what to do.

29:34Josh Clark:You could just go read that tablet.

29:35Chuck Bryant:Yeah, so the power that we gave to the god's commands were kind of transferred to the written word. And yeah, that seems to have been like the death knell for the bicameral mind, right? And there's something really interesting that's worth pointing out. Now, Jaynes apparently didn't have any hypothesis on what came before the bicameral mind because he said it started as a result of the increasing organization that agriculture brought along and that there wasn't bicameral minds before then. But he doesn't say what was before then. And people even asked him like, okay, what about, you know, hunter-gatherer societies that are still around today?

30:19Chuck Bryant:You know, where would they have gotten consciousness? And he never really answered that. But it's definitely worth pointing out that that's an open question. But he basically says bicameralism or the bicameral mind, I should say. Bicameralism is the Senate in the House. But the bicameral mind lasted from the advent of agriculture about 11 ,000 years ago till about 2 ,000-ish, maybe 1 ,500 or no, 3 ,000-ish years ago. So it was about a 7 ,000-year span of bicameral mind. And then as life got more and more sophisticated, we started thinking for ourselves. And what he says is that language, and in particular the written word, but also language got more and more sophisticated.

31:08Chuck Bryant:And as it got more sophisticated, there was more of a potential for us to start thinking in metaphors. And metaphors, as you said, is the basis of consciousness and the way we think in Julian Jayne's mind. And there's actually a lot of support for that, Charles. May I? Oh, please. So that post by Hazard on Less Wrong.

31:30Josh Clark:Oh, yeah. Let's see what Hazard has to say.

31:31Chuck Bryant:It's called Consciousness as Metaphor, What Jayne's Has to Offer. And what Hazard says is that – like Hazard just puts out like a paragraph from like an economic report. And it's about recessions. in Europe. And it talks about Germany plunging into a recession, or the UK falling deeper into a recession, or France emerging from a recession. And what Hazard points out is that all of these descriptors imagine a recession as a three-dimensional physical thing that we can, entire nations can move into and out of. That's not true. Recessions aren't three-dimensional. They aren't physical things. You can't emerge from them.

32:12Chuck Bryant:You can't fall into them. But we just think about it like that, and that's metaphor. So we think in metaphors so frequently, we don't even recognize it anymore. And that was Jane's point, that when we gain the ability to think in metaphors, we became conscious. We started thinking for ourselves. We became capable of introspection. And it was the evolution of language that led us to that point. Like basically it just – we just hit a threshold where suddenly language is sophisticated enough that it could unlock new thoughts in our brains and in turn unlock consciousness.

32:47Josh Clark:I mean that makes sense because, you know, a metaphor is literally not literal. And if you were – if you did – if that was not a thing yet, then it chives with the whole notion that everything they were doing was very literal up until that point. Yes. And that would have been a pretty seismic shift. if you can compare like with like, you know, all of a sudden.

33:11Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and you even see this in like movies that are trying to emphasize how backwards or back in time, you know, some group is. And they emphasize it by having that group take everything literally, usually to comic effect. Like in Kingpin when Randy Quaid was an Amish person, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He took everything literally and it was hilarious. Hilarity ensued. but it was also to demonstrate how just simple and behind he was. He couldn't engage in metaphors. He didn't think like that. That's actually based on, I don't know whether on purpose or not, but that's based on Julie and Jane's hypothesis.

33:50Josh Clark:Yeah, and you know what? That's a nice segue to children because when you have a human child, it's very funny to see how literal they are for those first years and that they don't understand metaphor. They don't understand, certainly don't understand things like sarcasm. And you have to change the way you talk to little kids because they do take everything so literally and think so literally. And children are referenced with Jane's, the idea that I think what age, like kids up until the age of five, basically, don't really have much of a human consciousness. and it's, you know, the idea that children are just little narcissists walking around is a fun joke, but it's true because they don't know that other people think differently than they think up until about the age of five.

34:48Josh Clark:They don't realize there are other lines of thought and ways of thinking and ways of feeling about things that other people have.

34:56Chuck Bryant:Exactly. That's what's called theory of mind, right? And on Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander went to great lengths to basically say that Julian James using the term consciousness just really muddied the waters unnecessarily. And if he had just used theory of mind, it would have made a lot more sense. And Scott Alexander, I think I said Anderson, Scott Alexander makes a really good case for it. And that's kind of what he's pointing out is, you know, like it's possible that because you learn, you're not born with it. You learn it through experience. It just kind of evolves in you as you grow as a person and experience more and more novel stuff and interact with people more.

35:40Chuck Bryant:Almost like a microcosm of what happened in civilization a few thousand years ago. Yeah. You gain theory of mind. So the fact that you can learn and that you do learn something that integral to consciousness really supports the idea that maybe consciousness as we understand it was learned. It did evolve. It was an emergent property of an increasingly sophisticated language.

36:07Josh Clark:It's a fascinating thing to see happen in a child's life, to see these little light bulbs come on seemingly out of nowhere, but you realize it is very much a learned thing. Man, I'll bet. Very fascinating. All right. I say we take a break, and we'll talk a little bit about just some other fascinating stuff when we get back right after this.

36:32Chuck Bryant:Learning things with Chuck and Chuck. Shining all the things. Stuff you should know.

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38:34Josh Clark:Learning things with Chuck and Josh. Stuff you should know.

38:45Josh Clark:I was going to summarize what we were going to talk about, but I didn't feel like it all of a sudden before the break.

38:50Chuck Bryant:I think it's nice. It's loosey-goosey.

38:53Josh Clark:Can I talk about one of my favorite parts of this hypothesis? Definitely. Is we were kind of jumping around now, but jumping back to where we talked about writing things down all of a sudden. It was around here in human history that there was a collapse of societies in the Mediterranean, around the Middle East. It was called the Late Bronze Age Collapse. And it didn't take that long. And it met like these very advanced sort of societies in a matter of decades. A number of them, a lot of their culture was lost. It was – it sort of – they called it, in fact, the Greek Dark Ages. And it lasted for hundreds of years.

39:36Josh Clark:And jiving with this was when humans started to lose, and it kind of all makes sense that they were losing, with the written word, with metaphor and language coming along, they were losing this voice as a god. They felt like they were losing their gods because all of a sudden the gods were silent to them. They weren't speaking to them in their mind because they were gaining consciousness. And here's where it gets super interesting. James has a hypothesis that says it's about here where the organized religions that we know today were born out of a kind of nostalgia, basically, for these gods that left them.

40:18Right. Yeah.

40:19Josh Clark:I think that idea is really interesting.

40:22Chuck Bryant:It is. And I mean, the timetable really jibes. And it is really interesting that that late Bronze Age collapse happened when it did. But the idea is not just nostalgia, but also desperation. Because these people had guidance. They didn't have to think. And this poor set of generations over a few hundred years are maybe some of the most pitiful humans that ever lived. Because they went from just knowing what to do because the gods told them what to do to having no idea what to do because their gods had abandoned them. And as a result of that, they started forming religions. They started, you know, beseeching the gods to give them a sign.

41:07Chuck Bryant:This is when oracles started to become a thing. Prophets started to become a thing. Superstitions, like omens grew. Like there was a Sumerian omen. If a horse comes into your house and bites you, you will soon die and your family will soon be scattered. Stuff like that, right? So this didn't exist before because the gods were in charge of everything. Now they were suddenly gone. And I just think it must have been really pitiful and dark to live through that time.

41:34Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, they were lost, I guess, as a people.

41:39Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And that was figuratively they were lost, but literally too, because that late Bronze Age collapse, they think, was brought on at least in part by climate change and probably invasion. There's this mysterious group called the Sea Peoples that seem to have overrun different cultures. And so, like, culture after culture would fall. Those people would become refugees, descend upon another culture, end up pushing that to the breaking point. That culture would fall. It was just like a domino effect of collapsing cultures all at once. So they really felt like the gods had abandoned them, like they'd angered them or something like that.

42:12Chuck Bryant:They were genuinely lost.

42:14Josh Clark:So what Janes did to help support his hypothesis, which makes sense, was to go back and look at literature of the time and see if it sort of supported this. I know one of the things he wrote a lot about in his book in 1976 was Homer's Iliad because he's kind of like, here's proof right here. I mean, if you look at the Iliad, they were basically automatons. They just listened to the gods and did what the gods said. and they substituted, like the words that we would use to substitute in for the Iliad to indicate consciousness just weren't there. Right.

42:51Chuck Bryant:So they were more like physical descriptors, like my belly was quivering or my heart was fluttering or something like that. I think the example that's used is fear-filled Agamemnon's mind. Well, there wasn't a mind. So they would describe fear in other physical terms, right? Like a stomachache. Yeah. And that it wasn't until later on when new translations were coming along that people who were now conscious turned the stuff into metaphor. And James is saying they didn't mean it as metaphor before. They meant it as literally and they didn't have descriptors for minds. And when they say the gods were guiding them along, they meant it literally.

43:28Chuck Bryant:And he was saying that the Iliad in particular started to be written about 1100 BCE. And then around 700 BCE, it was like in its form that we see it today. But along the way, it was kind of added to, and it was written during the transition from bicameral mind to modern consciousness. So he sees it as basically a document that traces that transition.

43:51Josh Clark:Yeah, very interesting. There was some other stuff too, right, literature-wise?

43:55Chuck Bryant:Yeah, so that wasn't the only one. He also found in some of the religious texts, like evidence that people felt like God had abandoned them. There's something, a Mesopotamian poem called the Ludlul Bel-Nemeke. And it says, my God has forsaken me and disappeared. My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance. The good angel who walked beside me has departed. And again, most other scholars would say there's something happened. This guy was blue. He was in a funk. Who knows? But it's all metaphorical. And James is saying, no, this guy had God talking to him. Now he doesn't anymore.

44:31Josh Clark:So should we talk a little bit about actual science here with the brain?

44:35Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I think so.

44:35Josh Clark:Because this is something we've covered before in the past when we talked about alien hand syndrome. Oh, is that where it came out? From a gazillion years ago. There was evidence that when the – there were certain epilepsy patients where it was so severe that they would sever the corpus callosum, undergo a corpus callostomy. and the corpus callosum is basically the thing that makes the two hemispheres of the brain communicate with one another. And with alien hand syndrome, I think they found that it could be brought on by this surgery where all of a sudden the left arm was doing something without being told to do it by the right brain.

45:22Josh Clark:And they have – Janes, I think, or people since Janes – was it Janes or was it just people trying to sort of prove his theory?

45:32Chuck Bryant:I think that people saw these experiments as support for Janes' theory.

45:37Josh Clark:Okay. So they looked at these surgeries, these corpus colostomies, and they're called split brain patients basically where they – after the surgery, it's not like they felt all out of whack. They felt like a regular whole human being. But they learned that there were these little things that would pop up where a hemisphere would take an action based on this information that it didn't have access to. And the example they gave was if they instructed the right hemisphere to just walk to the kitchen, and they would get up and walk to the kitchen. But they would say, hey, why did you get up and walk to the kitchen?

46:16Josh Clark:And the language, the left hemisphere, the language dominant hemisphere is the only part that can respond to that. But the left hemisphere doesn't know why it got up. And the really fascinating part is that they wouldn't say, well, I don't know. I'm not sure why I just did that. I just did it. They would make something up on the spot and say, you know, I felt like getting up and going to make a bowl of cereal. Right. And it's almost like we had this natural instinct to BS somebody when faced with a question that we can't answer about why we did something.

46:50Chuck Bryant:Yeah, because the left hemisphere wants to explain things. It wants to tell the story using metaphors usually. And this became the left brain interpreter theory. And it kind of supports Jane's idea that the consciousness is a flashlight looking for a dark spot in a room and it just can't find it. And the idea is that the left hemisphere creates the explanation, the stories for our behavior, even if it doesn't know why we did something. But that's just what it does. And there's a saying in consciousness research among people who subscribe to the left brain interpreter theory is that consciousness isn't in the oval office like it thinks it is.

47:34Chuck Bryant:It's more in the press office. Like it's the one that's public facing and explaining what you're doing. But it might not have all the information. So sometimes it's just BSing.

47:43Josh Clark:That's very interesting stuff.

47:45Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

47:45Josh Clark:And sort of tying in with the kid thing, who is this – how do you pronounce the name of that one researcher? Kushtian? Ashton Kuchar? K-U-I-J-S-T-E-N. Oh, yeah. I'm just going to say Kushtian.

48:02Chuck Bryant:I think that's pretty dead on. That's the person who runs the Julian Jaynes Society.

48:09Josh Clark:Today, because James died in 1997. I don't think we ever pointed that out.

48:12Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

48:13Josh Clark:But this person basically says, hey, if you look at people who hear voices, and that's not necessarily to say someone that has schizophrenia because that is 1 % of the population. Apparently as high as 10 % of the population can, you know, does hear things basically. So these, it's the idea of the command voice basically is to do something. And if you're hearing a voice that says, you know, move to the window and look out on the street, that's one thing. If you hear a voice that says, take the knife from the drawer and, you know, put it in someone's head, then that's another thing altogether. and we were talking about kids earlier you know the idea of the imaginary friend kind of jives with this lack of consciousness 65 % of kids have imaginary friends I had imaginary friends my daughter had for years what she called her ghost friends which is a lot creepier way to put it but I think that's all just sort of to say that like that 9 % of people who are hearing voices who are not suffering from schizophrenia, that's proof of that initial bicameral mind at work, right?

49:33Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and I mean, Julie and Jane believe that children go from a bicameral state to a conscious state as evidenced by that development of theory of mind or as evidenced by imaginary friends and that they're kind of recreating what society or the human species went through thousands of years ago as they age and develop.

49:54Josh Clark:Very interesting.

49:56Chuck Bryant:So you might be out there, especially if you're a concretist like Chuck, thinking like you might be rocking in your seat right now, face flushed, about to faint out of rage. Oh, wait, is my camera on? Because this is by definition unscientific. It's not provable in the form that James put it forth. It's more of a concept. an idea. And apparently he was well aware of that. He didn't tout it as anything more than that. But Kustin, the director of the Julian Jayne Society, likes to point out that he was basically laying the groundwork for an entirely new way of looking at things so that other people could come along and take it up and figure out how he was wrong, how he was right, what needed fleshing out, what made sense in that form.

50:49Chuck Bryant:And people have been doing that. Again, this is like a crackpot theory that has never gone away because the more people pay attention to it and the more we start to understand about the brain, the more sense it kind of makes. And it seems to be gaining traction rather than losing it over the 50 years that it's been around. I think it's interesting. I don't hate this stuff.

51:12Josh Clark:I'm not rocking in my chair.

51:14Chuck Bryant:David Bowie loved it. He said that the origin of consciousness as the breakdown of bicameral mind. I think that was it. The book. Is that a song? No. He said it was one of the top 100 books to read. Oh, all right.

51:31Josh Clark:I believe that. Totally. It's a very Bowie thing.

51:34Chuck Bryant:For sure. And other people, too. Yeah. And then one other thing, another way to put all this, to kind of sum it up that I saw it put, is that we developed at some point back in history a left brain bias. That's it. You know, which kind of ties into your original view of the whole thing, which was, you know, they weren't conscious that they were conscious.

51:57Josh Clark:Right.

51:58Chuck Bryant:I like that. You got anything else?

52:02Josh Clark:I might, but I might just not be aware of it. Man.

52:07Chuck Bryant:As I said, this is the best episode we've ever done. Since Chuck giggled, which everybody loves, I think then it's time for listener mail.

52:17Josh Clark:This is about the Freedom of the Press episode. And this was a Josh request. Hey, guys. How Freedom of the Press works struck a particular chord with me. I used to work as a science teacher, but was finding more and more students were being duped by pseudoscience on the Internet and weren't being provided the tools to recognize this. So I did a master's in library and information science and now a school librarian on a mission to vanquish disinformation.

52:45Chuck Bryant:Awesome.

52:46Josh Clark:While I've included the topic of journalism in terms of approaching news critically, as with any online source of information, your recent podcast on how Freedom of the Press works really inspired me to put forward more information and content about media freedoms and the risks for journalists. Here in Sweden, it's very easy to take Freedom of the Press for granted. Last year, in sympathy with my American colleagues, I put up a display of banned books tracked by the ALA, and each book had a tag listing the years and ranking a book was challenged. And I encouraged the students to guess what for.

53:21Josh Clark:It led to a lot of really good—I love this experiment with students— led to a lot of really good discussions. Many students hadn't realized the scale of how many books had been banned or challenged, were horrified to see their own favorite books on display, and we're also shocked by the justification as are we always. Now that COVID restrictions are being lifted I'm very much looking forward to taking students to the world's first library of censored books the Dawit Isaac Library in the Malmur Archives. That's a new amount. So that students can see the extent of limitations on the press and media freedoms around the world.

54:00Josh Clark:Thanks again for the fascinating show an all-around amazing series. Kind regards. Med vengligar helsnegar. That must just be a salutation in Swedish. That comes from Ms. Alice

54:19Chuck Bryant:Antunson. She, her, hers. Thank you, Alice. That is amazing. I'm so glad we got to that listener mail because I've been proud of that person for a very long time, ever since that email came in. Totally. How about Sweden, huh? Keeping the American dream alive. I love it. And Chuck, also, before we sign off, there's something I've been meaning to address that you said earlier. You said you have a dumb brain. No, you don't. Did I say that? Yeah, you did.

54:45Josh Clark:Okay.

54:45Chuck Bryant:So if you want to get in touch with us like Alice did and show the world what a hero you are, we would love to hear that kind of thing. You can email us to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

54:59Chuck Bryant:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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