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Thrill to the Stunning Bicameral Mind Hypothesis · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
0:04
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
0:13
Speaker 1: and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is
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Speaker 1: Stuff You Should Know, the ongoing, amazing, mind blowing edition.
0:23
Speaker 1: You've been into this stuff lately? What's going on with you?
0:25
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know, man, but yes, I'm
0:28
Speaker 1: definitely into it lately. It's weird approaching fifty existential crisis.
0:35
Speaker 1: I don't know about crisis, maybe more like pondering, existential pondering.
0:40
Speaker 1: I don't think it's a crisis yet. I've still got
0:42
Speaker 1: five years, still fifty, So give me time now, you
0:45
Speaker 1: forty five, I'm forty five and eight ninths. Uh, yeah,
0:52
Speaker 1: you got time. Yeah, great, thank you for that. But no,
0:57
Speaker 1: there's no like one thing that's making me say, like, hey,
1:00
Speaker 1: when did humans become conscious? Or when did humans become intelligent?
1:03
Speaker 1: Or what do we do if aliens come down? Like
1:05
Speaker 1: for some reason, it's just maybe a little more appealing
1:08
Speaker 1: to me than it has been in the past lately.
1:10
Speaker 1: I don't know, but yes, I'm definitely into this kind
1:14
Speaker 1: of thing right now. And this stuff, well, we're gonna
1:16
Speaker 1: talk about today It's based on a how Stuff Works
1:18
Speaker 1: article that Robert Lamb wrote, and I'm not at all
1:21
Speaker 1: surprised that Robert Lamb is into this, but I just
1:24
Speaker 1: want to note that I've heard about this years and
1:26
Speaker 1: years and years ago and have been meaning to do
1:28
Speaker 1: an article or an episode on it. So I don't
1:31
Speaker 1: want you to think this is something who just stumbled across.
1:33
Speaker 1: This is actually the fruition of years of planning and
1:37
Speaker 1: hope and dreams coming to to pass in the in uh,
1:42
Speaker 1: maybe the best episode will ever make. Uh. And of
1:45
Speaker 1: course Robert and not Robert Lamb, the lead singer of
1:50
Speaker 1: the band Chicago. There's another Robert Lamb, and he was
1:54
Speaker 1: in Chicago. In Chicago, is that Peter Sata's stage name
1:59
Speaker 1: No Stara was the bass player and part lead singer
2:03
Speaker 1: along with Robert Lamb, who played keyboards and also sang
2:06
Speaker 1: lead on some and before Terry Cats died, he played
2:10
Speaker 1: guitar and also sang So they had three singers in
2:14
Speaker 1: the early days of Chicago. Just confusing, but none of
2:18
Speaker 1: them are our colleague Robert Lamb, who, along with our
2:21
Speaker 1: colleague Joe, had been doing stuff to blow your mind
2:24
Speaker 1: for many, many years. Another great show. Yeah, and I
2:27
Speaker 1: didn't check, but I would place a substantial amount of
2:30
Speaker 1: money on the idea that they have their own episode
2:34
Speaker 1: on this Julian James by Camra Mind. I bet they have.
2:37
Speaker 1: And we should also shout out Philosophy for Life, Psychology
2:40
Speaker 1: Today and Frontiers in Psychology. And I'm gonna make one
2:45
Speaker 1: up um psychology food Young. Okay, I've got two more
2:49
Speaker 1: that aren't made up late Star Codex and um uh
2:54
Speaker 1: poster her name Hazard on the site less Wrong. That
2:58
Speaker 1: sounds like a great source. It is, Hazard knows what
3:01
Speaker 1: he's talking about. Oh. In one more, I'm sorry, a
3:03
Speaker 1: guy named Jeff Ward or jeff Ward but you know
3:06
Speaker 1: when they say jeff um on medium. So all of
3:10
Speaker 1: those combined with Robert Lamb's article the Coalesce and again,
3:14
Speaker 1: probably the greatest episode we'll ever do. Yeah, and I
3:18
Speaker 1: sort of get some of this. Um, I think you're
3:20
Speaker 1: gonna help me out some because I do have some
3:22
Speaker 1: questions that I'll just throw out here and there, because
3:25
Speaker 1: at times I found myself reading and stuff and going, yeah,
3:28
Speaker 1: but isn't that just blank? Okay, great, I'll do my
3:31
Speaker 1: best to answer, and you're probably right, um, when you're
3:34
Speaker 1: thinking that, which is probably like, yes, all right, well,
3:38
Speaker 1: I mean I guess we should say then that the
3:40
Speaker 1: whole hypothesis is that we're going to be kind of
3:43
Speaker 1: breaking down today. Is controversial and it's not provable necessarily
3:49
Speaker 1: scientifically speaking. So it's sort of one of those Um,
3:53
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it goes beyond thought experiment for sure,
3:56
Speaker 1: definitely into true hypothesis land. But it was proposed by
4:01
Speaker 1: a psychologist here in the United States named Julian Jaynes
4:05
Speaker 1: in the mid nineteen seventies. Of course, yeah, the ear
4:08
Speaker 1: was born. So what he proposed was an answer to
4:15
Speaker 1: a longstanding question, and that was when did humans become conscious?
4:20
Speaker 1: Like when did consciousness emerge? Is it something that came
4:23
Speaker 1: along like in the earliest archaic humans? Is it something
4:27
Speaker 1: that came along much later than that? And how could
4:30
Speaker 1: we ever possibly answer that, like what relics have been
4:33
Speaker 1: left in history, um, in prehistory that would say like, hey,
4:39
Speaker 1: this is evidence of of consciousness um. And Julian James
4:43
Speaker 1: took that up, and he did it as an outsider,
4:46
Speaker 1: which was a huge strike against him because automatically legitimate
4:49
Speaker 1: scientists are like, well, I can't build upon this theory.
4:52
Speaker 1: Possibly this man is in actually in my field of
4:55
Speaker 1: consciousness studies. Um. But the thing is is this, this
4:59
Speaker 1: hypothesis is so well liked, it's just roundly like people
5:04
Speaker 1: just like it. It's just such an interesting hypothesis that
5:07
Speaker 1: it just won't go away. It hasn't gone away. And
5:10
Speaker 1: in fact, there's like a Julian James Institute, there's like
5:13
Speaker 1: groups that have sprung up based on this hypothesis. And
5:16
Speaker 1: what he says, in a very small nutshell is that
5:20
Speaker 1: sometime about one thousand, two thousand years ago humans became
5:26
Speaker 1: conscious in the way that we understand consciousness today. They
5:32
Speaker 1: developed the ability to think about thinking, They developed the
5:35
Speaker 1: ability to think about that other people are thinking. They
5:38
Speaker 1: developed basically what's called subjective introspection, and then as a
5:43
Speaker 1: result of that, they almost automatically gained free will and volition.
5:49
Speaker 1: So what he's saying is that if we went back
5:52
Speaker 1: in time in the Way Back Machine, Chuck, and we
5:53
Speaker 1: met somebody who lived three thousand years ago, four thousand
5:57
Speaker 1: years ago, they would not be a kind just human
6:00
Speaker 1: in the way that we understand conscious humans. That's right,
6:04
Speaker 1: And he thinks that it was a learned thing. And
6:07
Speaker 1: the idea that he throws down is that our our mind,
6:11
Speaker 1: our brain is, or was rather very important was because
6:17
Speaker 1: it no longer is bicameral, which means split into two parts.
6:22
Speaker 1: And we'll get to some actual science about the hemispheres
6:25
Speaker 1: of the brain later on, but in this case he
6:28
Speaker 1: means split into two parts where you have a part
6:31
Speaker 1: that makes decisions and a part that follows. And that
6:35
Speaker 1: neither one of them were conscious. And and here's where
6:39
Speaker 1: I get a little tripped up right out right out
6:42
Speaker 1: of the gate. Is Basically he says that instead of
6:46
Speaker 1: an internal dialogue, which we all have and which indicates
6:50
Speaker 1: a consciousness, uh, like us talking to ourselves, us saying
6:54
Speaker 1: things like everything from like you know, hey, get up
6:58
Speaker 1: and go do this, to just internally thinking about things
7:02
Speaker 1: like humans do that instead of that, we were sort
7:09
Speaker 1: of like human zombies and that we were creatures of habit.
7:12
Speaker 1: We had routines and behaviors that we followed to a
7:15
Speaker 1: t and whenever something disrupted that behavior, which is when
7:20
Speaker 1: like a conscious mind you would think, would speak up
7:24
Speaker 1: that instead of that that an external agent in this case, Uh,
7:31
Speaker 1: they thought there were gods would enter their brain and
7:35
Speaker 1: create an auditory hallucination. Yeah, and that they unquestioningly obeyed
7:41
Speaker 1: that auditory hallucination, and that's what help them get through
7:45
Speaker 1: novel situations that they didn't have like a basically a
7:48
Speaker 1: prescribed script for you know, a mindless automatic thing. Something
7:53
Speaker 1: new came along, they got in their way. This god
7:55
Speaker 1: would speak to them and say, go around that rock.
7:59
Speaker 1: It wasn't there yesterday. Don't worry about it, just go
8:02
Speaker 1: around it. And it could be one of their gods.
8:05
Speaker 1: It could be an ancestor guiding them. I think um one,
8:08
Speaker 1: um one. I think the Sumerians maybe made reference to
8:12
Speaker 1: angels walking beside them um or. And this is really
8:15
Speaker 1: important later on. It's a big part of Jane's hypothesis.
8:19
Speaker 1: It could be your local ruler, the divine king who's
8:23
Speaker 1: in charge of you and everybody else that you know
8:25
Speaker 1: and love and have ever lived among. It could be
8:27
Speaker 1: that person guiding you in your life too. And the
8:31
Speaker 1: idea is they these people heard this in the same
8:34
Speaker 1: way like you said that we hear our own internal dialogue,
8:37
Speaker 1: but they never chalked it up to themselves. It was
8:39
Speaker 1: always coming from the outside. All right, Well, here's I
8:43
Speaker 1: guess where I had my first issue kind of grasping
8:45
Speaker 1: this is there were no gods speaking to them and
8:49
Speaker 1: guiding them. This was just their internal dialogue. They just
8:53
Speaker 1: didn't know it. Yes, yes, yes, there was no gods.
8:58
Speaker 1: But to them, and this is a really important point
9:01
Speaker 1: to them, it definitely was a god talking to them
9:05
Speaker 1: or an ancestor talking to them. And in the same
9:08
Speaker 1: way that if if an actual god got into your
9:12
Speaker 1: brain and like was speaking to you and you responded
9:14
Speaker 1: to it, if you could have looked at their brains
9:16
Speaker 1: lighting up, presumably in like a wonder machine, it would
9:20
Speaker 1: it would respond the same way. So it was entirely
9:23
Speaker 1: real to them, and the same way that a placebo
9:25
Speaker 1: effect has real effects on your body. Um, this would
9:28
Speaker 1: have been the same thing. And then in addition to that,
9:31
Speaker 1: it was culturally supported. Everyone that they knew believed the
9:35
Speaker 1: same thing that the gods were talking to them, and
9:37
Speaker 1: so like that just lent support to this idea so
9:40
Speaker 1: that no one, no one questioned it. It was just
9:42
Speaker 1: that's the way it was. Well, so this, I guess
9:44
Speaker 1: brings me to let me macro this out a little
9:48
Speaker 1: bit in my own dumb brain, and it may just
9:49
Speaker 1: be twenty twenty one century person thinking that I'm engaging
9:54
Speaker 1: in But if the idea is that, uh, before this,
9:59
Speaker 1: there was consciousness. But what we're really saying is there
10:02
Speaker 1: actually was consciousness that they just didn't recognize it as such.
10:06
Speaker 1: Is that the whole point was that if you do
10:08
Speaker 1: not recognize it as consciousness, therefore you are not conscious. Yes,
10:13
Speaker 1: because you're not. You're not experiencing consciousness in any way
10:18
Speaker 1: that we would recognize as you being conscious. You're just
10:21
Speaker 1: kind of um Julian James referred to now. Okay, so so,
10:25
Speaker 1: but the thing is is there's like a lot of
10:27
Speaker 1: scholarly discussion on like, Okay, what did James mean exactly?
10:31
Speaker 1: How literal was he because he used words like automaton.
10:35
Speaker 1: He never called him zombies. Other people call them like zombies,
10:38
Speaker 1: but that no one talked about zombies back then. Hard, No,
10:41
Speaker 1: that's true. But um, well evil Dead had or not
10:44
Speaker 1: evil Dead, living dead now the Living Dead had come
10:46
Speaker 1: out by then. Yeah, but it wasn't like today. Okay, no, no,
10:50
Speaker 1: I know. They're definitely over the automatons. So he called
10:53
Speaker 1: them automatons, and it's essentially the same thing that they were.
10:56
Speaker 1: They just behaved automatically. They didn't stop and think about
11:00
Speaker 1: how they felt. They and this is really important to Chuck.
11:04
Speaker 1: Of course, they still had feelings. They had feelings about
11:07
Speaker 1: the people that were in their kin group, they had
11:09
Speaker 1: feelings about their local ruler, they had feelings about um,
11:13
Speaker 1: you know, stubbing their toe. It's not like they just
11:16
Speaker 1: had no inner life whatsoever. It's that they weren't. They
11:21
Speaker 1: didn't reflect on their inner life, they didn't think about thinking.
11:24
Speaker 1: They didn't they didn't have what we would recognize as consciousness,
11:28
Speaker 1: and in the terms that James is describing consciousness, which
11:31
Speaker 1: is a really narrow definition of consciousness. And then on
11:35
Speaker 1: top of that, he also goes to great links to say, Hey,
11:39
Speaker 1: I understand that you're gonna get all up in a
11:41
Speaker 1: tizzy that I'm saying that these people weren't conscious. I'm
11:44
Speaker 1: not talking about consciousness in general. And I think that
11:47
Speaker 1: you over overestimate just how much consciousness makes up our
11:52
Speaker 1: our lives. Okay, how about we take a break. Okay,
11:57
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go rip a boll uh. We'll take a break,
12:02
Speaker 1: we'll come back and we'll talk about what lots of
12:05
Speaker 1: other stuff right after this and stop shot stop all right.
12:34
Speaker 1: So I've kind of wrapped my head around what this
12:35
Speaker 1: guy is saying. Now it's uh. I will admit it's
12:38
Speaker 1: a little naval gazey for me. Uh On when it
12:42
Speaker 1: comes to certain types of philosophy and hypotheses, I get
12:45
Speaker 1: a little bit like, uh, what's the word? Maybe I
12:51
Speaker 1: can be a little too concrete or is the French
12:54
Speaker 1: concrete and literal in my thinking, because it's not you know,
12:59
Speaker 1: Friday night in college, like two in the morning kind
13:02
Speaker 1: of discussion. So I think that's where I am now.
13:05
Speaker 1: But I do think it's very interesting and that he
13:08
Speaker 1: I mean, I think a lot of this is very interesting,
13:10
Speaker 1: But I think it's interesting that he thought around the
13:13
Speaker 1: first or second millennium BC is when things to him
13:18
Speaker 1: changed and a consciousness began to emerge because of uh, well,
13:24
Speaker 1: eventually language, but specifically metaphor, which is to say that
13:28
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, we could make analogies in our brain.
13:31
Speaker 1: We could link things together. Uh. We saw ourselves as
13:37
Speaker 1: um almost as if they were characters. Ourselves were characters
13:44
Speaker 1: that had like choices that they could make his characters,
13:48
Speaker 1: and that as these things like connected in the brain,
13:53
Speaker 1: then it created just an effect like a domino effect
13:56
Speaker 1: basically where all of a sudden we could work out
14:00
Speaker 1: our own solutions, or we we knew we were capable
14:04
Speaker 1: of working out our own solutions, And wasn't God saying
14:07
Speaker 1: God saying walk around the rock? They realized it was
14:11
Speaker 1: ourselves making the decision to walk around the rock. Yes,
14:14
Speaker 1: but it's but in part of that that also required
14:17
Speaker 1: them to be able to reflect on the idea. Like
14:19
Speaker 1: you said that that they were able to now make
14:22
Speaker 1: their own decisions, right, And you said something earlier where
14:25
Speaker 1: you're like, you know, you were talking about your own
14:26
Speaker 1: internal dialogue where you you think, hey, I should get
14:29
Speaker 1: up and go outside for a second. Um, Like, that's
14:34
Speaker 1: that's different, right, You're thinking about you yourself, and you
14:38
Speaker 1: realize that you are thinking about yourself. That's modern consciousness.
14:42
Speaker 1: What somebody who was a bicameral person during this time
14:47
Speaker 1: would have thought is get up and go outside. And
14:51
Speaker 1: they would stand up and go outside without questioning because
14:55
Speaker 1: God had just instructed them to do that, so it
14:57
Speaker 1: must be important. And they didn't think about where it
15:00
Speaker 1: came from. They definitely didn't think it was from themselves,
15:02
Speaker 1: and they didn't reflect on it. They just obeyed it.
15:05
Speaker 1: That's Jane's position, and that if you compare those two things.
15:09
Speaker 1: You're talking about two totally different forms of mental life,
15:13
Speaker 1: and that's so different. He said that this is that
15:16
Speaker 1: what we understand is consciousness just wasn't around until a
15:19
Speaker 1: couple of thousand years ago. Okay, I can buy that.
15:23
Speaker 1: I like it as a hypothesis. I can swim in
15:26
Speaker 1: this pool. Okay, good, good. Here's the thing it's really
15:30
Speaker 1: important to to to realize, like you said something, that
15:32
Speaker 1: you're you're a literalist, right, that's actually really appropriate to
15:36
Speaker 1: approach this because Julian Jaynes one of the very radical
15:40
Speaker 1: things that he did was he took the ancients literally
15:44
Speaker 1: because when he started looking around and we'll talk more
15:47
Speaker 1: about this later, but he was looking for those artifacts
15:50
Speaker 1: that would prove his hypothesis or lend support to it
15:53
Speaker 1: at least, and he was an expert in ancient languages, right,
15:56
Speaker 1: so he was it was really appropriate. He could actually
15:59
Speaker 1: read Sumerian and Mesopotamian, and he took what they were
16:03
Speaker 1: saying when they said things like, um, you know, the
16:06
Speaker 1: gods told us to do this, that that they thought
16:09
Speaker 1: that the gods told him to do this, not that
16:11
Speaker 1: they were using metaphors. So he took them literally on
16:13
Speaker 1: their word and that's a real departure from anybody else
16:16
Speaker 1: who's ever examined the ancients of what they were saying. Yeah,
16:20
Speaker 1: and I think it's also something we should point out now,
16:23
Speaker 1: even though it comes up later in our research. Is that, um,
16:28
Speaker 1: when you think of an auto, I guess an automatic
16:31
Speaker 1: society or society of automatons. Uh. That's not to say
16:35
Speaker 1: that they weren't successful. He's describing some of the most successful,
16:39
Speaker 1: you know, ancient civilizations that existed. But I think his
16:43
Speaker 1: contention is that it was a hive mind all working
16:47
Speaker 1: together as automatons that allowed this stuff to get accomplished,
16:51
Speaker 1: and not the conscious mind, right, And he didn't I
16:54
Speaker 1: don't think he ever used it as like, I don't
16:56
Speaker 1: think ever explicitly said that it was an emergent prop
17:00
Speaker 1: pretty of a hive mind. But that's kind of what
17:02
Speaker 1: he was describing, kind of like if you take one
17:05
Speaker 1: stone cutter and one stone mason and three stone carriers
17:10
Speaker 1: and multiply that unit by five hundred and give it
17:13
Speaker 1: a year, you have a zigguratte built. That That's just
17:17
Speaker 1: that's just all those people knew what to do, they
17:19
Speaker 1: knew their position in their place, and they just did it,
17:22
Speaker 1: and so yeah, you could totally do that. With people
17:24
Speaker 1: who are thinking in this way and weren't conscious, you
17:27
Speaker 1: could probably actually get it done more easily than you
17:30
Speaker 1: could with people who stopped and thought, I'm above this,
17:33
Speaker 1: this work is is not suited for me. I should
17:35
Speaker 1: be doing something else, or why is the foreman being
17:38
Speaker 1: so mean to me today? Like they didn't think like
17:40
Speaker 1: that under Jane's um hypothesis, So they would probably get
17:45
Speaker 1: the work done more efficiently, at least more quietly. I
17:48
Speaker 1: would guess. Oh, I mean consciousness proposed or brought along
17:53
Speaker 1: a whole host of problems. I imagine if you're the
17:57
Speaker 1: ruling class. Uh. I think one thing that's interesting is
18:01
Speaker 1: that you mentioned um about what what is it? Jane's
18:06
Speaker 1: not Johns, Jane's Jane's thought about I love Robert Lamb's
18:11
Speaker 1: James Addison joke in here by that Oh that was yours?
18:16
Speaker 1: Oh well, where to go? Thanks, you said, Janes says,
18:20
Speaker 1: and then in parentheses you put it's a pretty good joke.
18:25
Speaker 1: But what Jane said was that, um, and it's something
18:30
Speaker 1: you mentioned earlier, was that consciousness. I think we think
18:32
Speaker 1: consciousness plays too big of a role. And what is
18:37
Speaker 1: actually a life that is can largely be still automatic
18:42
Speaker 1: on a lot of levels. And this is from the
18:45
Speaker 1: actual book in nineteen six and it's a little little
18:48
Speaker 1: mind blowy. I kind of like it. Consciousness is a
18:51
Speaker 1: much smaller part of our mental life than we're conscious
18:53
Speaker 1: of because we cannot be conscious of what we are
18:57
Speaker 1: not conscious of. It's like asking a flat and this
19:00
Speaker 1: is where it kind of comes home to me. It's
19:02
Speaker 1: like a asking a flashlight in a dark room to
19:05
Speaker 1: search around for something that does not have any light
19:09
Speaker 1: shining upon it. So that's where it comes home to meet,
19:14
Speaker 1: is when you and hey, it's metaphor. So how about
19:17
Speaker 1: that he lays down a metaphor that makes me understand
19:22
Speaker 1: it a little bit more. Yeah, because you know, wherever
19:25
Speaker 1: the flashlight looks, there's light. And his point, yeah, and
19:28
Speaker 1: his point is is wherever your conscious mind looks, there's consciousness.
19:33
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that there's consciousness all over the place.
19:37
Speaker 1: And um, yeah. Robert Lamb does use as a really
19:39
Speaker 1: good example of unloading a dishwasher, right, like when you're
19:43
Speaker 1: unloading the dishwasher, especially if you're one of those people
19:46
Speaker 1: who put like all of your knives in one place
19:48
Speaker 1: all of your forks in one part of the basket,
19:50
Speaker 1: all of your spoons and so on. Right, a maniac
19:53
Speaker 1: in other words, sensible human. If you do it like that,
19:58
Speaker 1: it's you can you can just be on a pilot
20:00
Speaker 1: because you've done it so many times. But when you
20:03
Speaker 1: do something like drop a fork, that's out of the norm.
20:07
Speaker 1: That's a novel thing that doesn't happen every time. And
20:09
Speaker 1: so in in the bi cameral mind, God would have said, um,
20:14
Speaker 1: I command thee to pick up thine fork butter fingers,
20:18
Speaker 1: and you would lean over and pick up the fork,
20:20
Speaker 1: and that was that. Instead you you might not even
20:24
Speaker 1: think about picking up the fork. You might do that automatically,
20:26
Speaker 1: but it's still out of the norm. It's still different.
20:29
Speaker 1: You have to kind of think about it a little
20:30
Speaker 1: more than just unloading the dishwasher. Now, if you take
20:33
Speaker 1: that dishwasher metaphor chuck, and you realize that three five,
20:38
Speaker 1: nine thousand years ago, there were no dishwashers. There was
20:43
Speaker 1: no ice cream scoop, there was no cookie scoop, there
20:46
Speaker 1: was no avocado splitter, there was nothing like that. Wait,
20:50
Speaker 1: what's that thing? Now? Yeah, you don't know, you don't
20:53
Speaker 1: have one of those. No, I'll send you one. You're
20:55
Speaker 1: missing out. It's a it's a multi tool for cutting avocados,
21:00
Speaker 1: getting the pit out, and then slicing them as you
21:02
Speaker 1: scoop them out. They're essential. As a matter of fact,
21:07
Speaker 1: I do pretty well with my knife, but I would
21:08
Speaker 1: love to see one of these. Okay, I'm gonna get
21:10
Speaker 1: to you one for Christmas. Okay. So the point is that, like,
21:15
Speaker 1: there wasn't a big variety of stuff, so there wasn't
21:19
Speaker 1: that many novel situations, like we encounter novel situations like
21:22
Speaker 1: almost constantly. That's just modern life. And that's the basis
21:26
Speaker 1: of James um uh Like hypothesis that the reason that
21:30
Speaker 1: consciousness evolves is because we started to get faced with
21:33
Speaker 1: more and more novel situations on a much more frequent basis.
21:37
Speaker 1: So it maybe it became inefficient for God to be
21:41
Speaker 1: talking to us every thirty seconds um or maybe we
21:44
Speaker 1: just got better at thinking for ourselves and consciousness kind
21:48
Speaker 1: of evolved out of that. But the point is life
21:50
Speaker 1: was much less complex back then, so you could have
21:53
Speaker 1: something like a bi camera mind. You could have somebody
21:55
Speaker 1: who who consciousness hadn't evolved in yet because they hadn't
21:59
Speaker 1: been introduced to enough experience in life, and with that
22:03
Speaker 1: experience came the the fork falling on the floor. In
22:08
Speaker 1: other words, yeah, or you know, there's a lot more
22:11
Speaker 1: dishes to put away, in much more different dishes to
22:14
Speaker 1: put away rather than just forks, you know, you know
22:18
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. Or you have one fork and you
22:20
Speaker 1: just carry it with you everywhere, you know, like you
22:22
Speaker 1: don't have to think about that. There was just less
22:24
Speaker 1: stuff to think about, is what I'm saying. Well, now
22:27
Speaker 1: you're speaking my language, because if I had it my way,
22:30
Speaker 1: every member of my family would have one for one spoon,
22:33
Speaker 1: one knife, one bowl, one cup, one plate, and they
22:37
Speaker 1: were all responsible for keeping them clean and put away. Man,
22:40
Speaker 1: every time I hear one cup there, I'm like, there's
22:42
Speaker 1: a joke in there somewhere, But even if I could
22:44
Speaker 1: come up with it, I wouldn't be able to say it.
22:46
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's true. All right. So now we're at
22:50
Speaker 1: the point where we can talk a little bit more
22:51
Speaker 1: about this idea of metaphor and language sort of bringing
22:55
Speaker 1: about this change. And uh so what James was throwing
23:01
Speaker 1: down in ninety six, besides apparently a bunch of roach
23:06
Speaker 1: clips was a the emergence of agricultural society is kind
23:11
Speaker 1: of changing everything, and that all of a sudden, we
23:16
Speaker 1: are not living in groups of you know, ten or
23:19
Speaker 1: twelve people that are hunting and gathering, where even if
23:23
Speaker 1: there was sort of a leader within that group, it
23:26
Speaker 1: was very easy to disseminate information and follow that that leader.
23:31
Speaker 1: Once we started settling down planting and growing things, engaging
23:35
Speaker 1: in trade with other people's that that did a lot
23:38
Speaker 1: of things that complicated every process, and it meant that
23:42
Speaker 1: societies were much much larger and that rulers couldn't necessarily
23:47
Speaker 1: speak directly to people anymore. Yeah, so the another not
23:53
Speaker 1: two specific people, like they could lay down an edict
23:56
Speaker 1: and that would get disseminated in other words, right, and
23:59
Speaker 1: so like um, I've read before back when I was
24:02
Speaker 1: an anthropology student that hunter gatherer bands usually numbered no
24:06
Speaker 1: more than thirty people, Like that was the absolute maps
24:09
Speaker 1: and once you reach that, you'd split off into two
24:11
Speaker 1: different bands. So yeah, like the person in charge was
24:15
Speaker 1: like part of your moment to moment life. And if
24:18
Speaker 1: you're if you have if you're suddenly in a civilization
24:21
Speaker 1: and you're building a ziggurat for somebody's probably not deigning
24:24
Speaker 1: to talk to you. And part of Jane's um hypothesis
24:28
Speaker 1: is that this this bicameralism emerged from you know, all
24:32
Speaker 1: those new novel situations like learning to plant crops, learning
24:35
Speaker 1: to domesticate cows, learning to engage in trade and talk
24:39
Speaker 1: to other people, that we started to like need direction
24:43
Speaker 1: from the gods more and more, and uh, it started
24:46
Speaker 1: to kind of get faster and faster. Um. But in
24:50
Speaker 1: the meantime it was a form of social control because
24:54
Speaker 1: one of the people you could think was talking to
24:56
Speaker 1: you was that local ruler who you were building the
24:59
Speaker 1: ziggerat for. So that would be a way to keep
25:01
Speaker 1: an increasingly large population in check, right, And as they
25:06
Speaker 1: got bigger and bigger, uh, and they started, you know,
25:10
Speaker 1: trading with people like we were saying that. You know,
25:13
Speaker 1: that's was sort of the beginning of the end for
25:15
Speaker 1: his uh, not his bi camera mind, but the b
25:19
Speaker 1: camera mind. And one of the biggest problems with all
25:22
Speaker 1: of that was when we started writing stuff down, because
25:26
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, um, this these auditory hallucinations that
25:31
Speaker 1: he felt like everyone was having to instruct them on
25:34
Speaker 1: what to do. There was there was now stuffed down
25:37
Speaker 1: on paper that you could read and you could refer
25:39
Speaker 1: to and go back to and pass around and post
25:43
Speaker 1: on the you know, on tablets at the walls of
25:46
Speaker 1: the city or whatever. And that was all of a sudden,
25:50
Speaker 1: you weren't waiting around for God to tell you what
25:51
Speaker 1: to do. You could just go read that tablet. Yeah,
25:54
Speaker 1: so the power that we gave to the god's commands
25:57
Speaker 1: were kind of transferred to um, the written word. And yeah,
26:02
Speaker 1: that seems to have been like the death knell for
26:05
Speaker 1: the bicamera mind, right, um. And there's something really interesting
26:09
Speaker 1: that's worth pointing out. Jaynes apparently didn't have any hy
26:13
Speaker 1: hypothesis on what came before the bicamera mind because he
26:19
Speaker 1: said it started as a result of the increasing um
26:23
Speaker 1: organization that agriculture brought Alonge and that there wasn't bi
26:27
Speaker 1: camera minds before then, But he doesn't say what was
26:29
Speaker 1: before then? Um, And people even asked him like, okay,
26:32
Speaker 1: what about you know, um hunter gatherer societies that are
26:35
Speaker 1: still around today, you know, where would they have gotten consciousness?
26:39
Speaker 1: And he never really answered that, but it's it's definitely
26:42
Speaker 1: worth pointing out that that's an open question. But he
26:44
Speaker 1: basically says bicameralism, Uh, or the bi camera mind. I
26:49
Speaker 1: should say bi cameralism is the senate in the house. UM,
26:54
Speaker 1: but the bi camera mind lasted from the advent of
26:57
Speaker 1: agriculture about eleven thousand years ago, all about two thousand
27:01
Speaker 1: ish maybe fred or no. Three thousand is years ago,
27:06
Speaker 1: so it was about a seven thousand year span of
27:10
Speaker 1: UM B camera minded. Then as life got more and
27:13
Speaker 1: more sophisticated, we started thinking for ourselves. And what he
27:18
Speaker 1: says is that language and in particular the written word,
27:23
Speaker 1: but also language got more and more sophisticated, and as
27:27
Speaker 1: it got more sophisticated, there was more of a potential
27:30
Speaker 1: for us to start thinking in metaphors and metaphors, as
27:33
Speaker 1: you said, is the basis of consciousness and the way
27:37
Speaker 1: we think in Julian Jane's mind. And there's actually a
27:40
Speaker 1: lot of support for that. Charles, may I oh please?
27:44
Speaker 1: So that post by Hazard on Less wrong, it's called
27:50
Speaker 1: consciousness as metaphor. What James has to offer and what
27:53
Speaker 1: Hazard says, um is that like Hazard just puts out
27:57
Speaker 1: like a paragraph from like an economic report, and it's
28:00
Speaker 1: about recessions in Europe and it talks about Germany plunging
28:05
Speaker 1: into recession or the UK falling deeper into recession or
28:09
Speaker 1: France emerging from a recession. And what Hazard points out
28:13
Speaker 1: is that all of these descriptors imagine a recession as
28:17
Speaker 1: a three dimensional physical thing that we can entire nations
28:22
Speaker 1: can move into and out of. That's not true. Recessions
28:26
Speaker 1: aren't three dimensional. They aren't physical things. You can't emerge
28:29
Speaker 1: from them, you can't fall into them. But we just
28:32
Speaker 1: think about it like that, and that's metaphor. So we
28:35
Speaker 1: think in metaphors so frequently we don't even recognize it anymore.
28:40
Speaker 1: And that was Jane's point that when we gain the
28:44
Speaker 1: ability to think in metaphors, we became conscious, We started
28:48
Speaker 1: thinking for ourselves, we became capable of introspection. And it
28:51
Speaker 1: was the evolution of language that led us to that point.
28:55
Speaker 1: Like basically, it just we just hit a threshold where
28:57
Speaker 1: suddenly languages sophisticated enough that it could unlock new thoughts
29:01
Speaker 1: in our brains and in turn unlocked consciousness. I mean
29:05
Speaker 1: that makes sense because you know, in a meta a
29:08
Speaker 1: metaphor is literally not literal, and if you were, if
29:13
Speaker 1: you did, if that was not a thing yet, then
29:16
Speaker 1: it chives with the whole notion that everything they were
29:19
Speaker 1: doing was very literal up and to that point, and
29:22
Speaker 1: that that would have been a pretty seismic shift. Uh.
29:25
Speaker 1: If you can compare like with like, you know, all
29:28
Speaker 1: of a sudden. Yeah, and you even see this in
29:30
Speaker 1: like Um, like movies that are trying to emphasize how
29:35
Speaker 1: backwards or back in time, you know, some group is
29:39
Speaker 1: um and they emphasize it by having that group take
29:42
Speaker 1: everything literally, usually to comic effect, like in Kingpin when
29:46
Speaker 1: Randy Quaid was an Amish person. Right, yeah, he took
29:49
Speaker 1: everything literally and it was hilarious. Hilarity ensued, but it
29:53
Speaker 1: was also to demonstrate how just simple and behind he was.
29:57
Speaker 1: He couldn't he couldn't engage in metaphor, you didn't think
30:00
Speaker 1: like that. That's actually based on I don't know whether
30:03
Speaker 1: on purpose or not, but that's based on Julian James hypothesis. Yeah.
30:08
Speaker 1: And you know what, that's a nice segue to children,
30:12
Speaker 1: because when you have a human child, Uh, it's very
30:16
Speaker 1: funny to see how literal they are for those first
30:18
Speaker 1: years and that they don't understand metaphor, they don't understand
30:23
Speaker 1: certainly don't understand things like sarcasm, and you have to
30:27
Speaker 1: change the way you talk to little kids because they
30:30
Speaker 1: do take everything so literally and think so literally. And uh,
30:35
Speaker 1: children are are references are referenced with Jane's Uh the
30:39
Speaker 1: idea that, um, I think what age like, kids up
30:44
Speaker 1: until the age of five basically, uh don't really have
30:47
Speaker 1: much of a human consciousness. Uh. And it's and you know,
30:52
Speaker 1: the idea that children are are just little narcissist walking
30:56
Speaker 1: around is a fun joke, but it's true because they
31:00
Speaker 1: don't know that other people think differently than they think.
31:04
Speaker 1: Up until about the age of five, they don't realize
31:07
Speaker 1: there are other lines of thought and ways of thinking
31:10
Speaker 1: and ways of feeling about things that other that other
31:13
Speaker 1: people have exactly. That's what's called theory of mind, right
31:16
Speaker 1: and um On Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander went to
31:20
Speaker 1: great links to basically say that Julian Jaynes using the
31:24
Speaker 1: term consciousness just really muddied the waters unnecessarily and if
31:29
Speaker 1: you just use theory of mind, it would have made
31:31
Speaker 1: a lot more sense. And Scott Anderson Scott Alexander, I think,
31:34
Speaker 1: I said Anderson Scott Alexander makes some really a really
31:37
Speaker 1: good case for it, and that's kind of what he's
31:40
Speaker 1: pointing out is um. You know, like it's it's possible
31:43
Speaker 1: that because you learn it's not you're not born with it.
31:48
Speaker 1: You you learn it through experience. It just kind of
31:51
Speaker 1: evolves in you as you grow as a person and
31:54
Speaker 1: experience more and more novel stuff and interact with people more,
31:58
Speaker 1: almost like a micro azum of what happened in civilization
32:02
Speaker 1: a few thousand years ago, you gain theory of mind.
32:07
Speaker 1: So the fact that you can learn and that you
32:09
Speaker 1: do learn something that integral to consciousness really supports the
32:16
Speaker 1: idea that maybe consciousness, as we understand it, was learned.
32:20
Speaker 1: It did evolve, It was an emergent property of an
32:22
Speaker 1: increasingly sophisticated language. It's a fascinating thing to see happen
32:27
Speaker 1: in a child's life. Um, to see these little lightbulbs
32:31
Speaker 1: come on seemingly out of nowhere, but you realize it,
32:34
Speaker 1: as you know, very much a learned thing. Very fascinating.
32:38
Speaker 1: All Right, I say, we take a break and we'll
32:41
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about, uh, just some other fascinating
32:45
Speaker 1: stuff when we get back. Right after this things s
33:15
Speaker 1: I was gonna summarize what we're going to talk about,
33:18
Speaker 1: but I didn't feel like it all of a sudden
33:19
Speaker 1: before they break. I think it's nice it's loose. Can
33:24
Speaker 1: can I talk about one of my favorite parts of
33:26
Speaker 1: this this hypothesis definitely is we were we're kind of
33:31
Speaker 1: jumping around now, but jumping back to where we talked
33:34
Speaker 1: about writing things down. All of a sudden, it was
33:38
Speaker 1: around here in human history that there was a collapse
33:43
Speaker 1: of societies, uh, in the Mediterranean around the Middle East.
33:47
Speaker 1: It was called the Late Bronze Age collapse. And it
33:51
Speaker 1: didn't take that long, and it meant like these very
33:53
Speaker 1: advanced sort of societies, in a matter of decades, a
33:55
Speaker 1: number of them, uh, a lot of their culture was lost.
34:00
Speaker 1: That was it's sort of They called it, in fact,
34:02
Speaker 1: the Greek Dark Ages, and it lasted for hundreds of years.
34:06
Speaker 1: And jibing with this was when humans started to lose.
34:12
Speaker 1: And it kind of all makes sense that they were
34:13
Speaker 1: losing um with a written word, with metaphorign language coming along,
34:18
Speaker 1: they were losing this voice as a god. They were
34:21
Speaker 1: they felt like they were losing their gods because all
34:24
Speaker 1: of a sudden, the gods were silent to them. They
34:26
Speaker 1: weren't speaking to them in their mind because they were
34:29
Speaker 1: gaining consciousness. And here's where it gets super interesting. James
34:34
Speaker 1: has a hypothesis that says, it's about here where the
34:40
Speaker 1: organized religions that we know today were born out of
34:44
Speaker 1: a kind of nostalgia basically for these gods that left them. Right. Yeah,
34:50
Speaker 1: I think that idea is really interesting. It is and
34:53
Speaker 1: I mean that the timetable really jibes, and it is
34:56
Speaker 1: really interesting that that late Bronze Age collapse happened when
34:59
Speaker 1: it did. Um. But but the idea is not just
35:03
Speaker 1: nostalgia but also desperation. Because these people had guidance, they
35:08
Speaker 1: didn't have to think, and this poor set of generations
35:12
Speaker 1: over a few hundred years are maybe some of the
35:16
Speaker 1: most pitiful humans that ever lived, because they went from
35:20
Speaker 1: just knowing what to do because the gods told them
35:23
Speaker 1: what to do, to having no idea what to do
35:25
Speaker 1: because their gods had abandoned them. And they that as
35:29
Speaker 1: a result of that, they started forming religions. They started, um,
35:34
Speaker 1: you know, beseeching the gods to give them a sign.
35:37
Speaker 1: This is when oracles started to become a thing. Profits
35:40
Speaker 1: started to become a thing. Superstitions um like omens grew
35:44
Speaker 1: like there was a Sumerian omen. If a horse comes
35:47
Speaker 1: into your house and bite you you will soon die
35:50
Speaker 1: and your family will soon be scattered. Stuff like that. Right,
35:53
Speaker 1: So this this didn't exist before because the gods were
35:56
Speaker 1: in charge of everything. Now they were suddenly gone, and
36:00
Speaker 1: I just think it must be must have been really
36:02
Speaker 1: pitiful and dark to live through that time. Yeah, I
36:05
Speaker 1: mean they were lost, I guess as a people. Yeah,
36:09
Speaker 1: And and I mean that was figuratively they were lost,
36:12
Speaker 1: but literally too because that late Bronze Age collapse they
36:15
Speaker 1: think was brought on at least in part by climate
36:17
Speaker 1: change and probably invasion. There's this mysterious group called the
36:20
Speaker 1: Sea People's that seem to have overrun different cultures, and
36:24
Speaker 1: so like culture after culture would fall, those people would
36:27
Speaker 1: become refugees, descend upon another culture, end up pushing that
36:32
Speaker 1: to the breaking point that culture would fall. It was
36:34
Speaker 1: just like a domino effect of collapsing cultures all at once.
36:38
Speaker 1: So they really felt like the gods had abandoned him,
36:40
Speaker 1: like they had angered him or something like that. They
36:42
Speaker 1: were genuinely lost. So what James did, uh to help
36:47
Speaker 1: support his hypothesis, which makes sense, was to go back
36:50
Speaker 1: and look at literature, uh and at the time and
36:53
Speaker 1: see if it's sort of supported this I know one
36:56
Speaker 1: of the things he wrote a lot about in his
36:58
Speaker 1: book in six was that was Homer's Iliad, because he's
37:02
Speaker 1: kind of like, here's proof right here. I mean, if
37:04
Speaker 1: you look at the Iliad, they were basically automatons. They
37:08
Speaker 1: they just listened to the gods and did what the
37:09
Speaker 1: gods said, and they substituted, um, like, the words that
37:15
Speaker 1: we would use to substitute in for the Iliad to
37:18
Speaker 1: indicate consciousness just weren't there, right, So they were more
37:22
Speaker 1: like physical descriptors like my belly was quivering or my
37:25
Speaker 1: heart was fluttering or something like that, not um. I
37:28
Speaker 1: think the example that's used as fear filled Agamemnon's mind,
37:33
Speaker 1: and well, there wasn't a mind, so they would describe
37:36
Speaker 1: fear and other physical terms, right yeah. And that it
37:40
Speaker 1: wasn't until later on when um new translations were coming along,
37:45
Speaker 1: that people who were now conscious turned the stuff into metaphor.
37:49
Speaker 1: And James is saying they didn't mean it as metaphor before,
37:51
Speaker 1: they meant it as literally, and they didn't have descriptors
37:53
Speaker 1: her mind. And when they say the gods were guiding
37:56
Speaker 1: them along, they meant it literally. And he was saying
37:59
Speaker 1: that the Eliot in particular, UM started to be written
38:02
Speaker 1: about eleven d b C. And then around seven b C.
38:06
Speaker 1: It was like in its form that we see it today,
38:09
Speaker 1: but along the way it was kind of added to
38:11
Speaker 1: and it it was written during the transition from bicameral
38:15
Speaker 1: mind to modern consciousness. He sees it as basically a
38:19
Speaker 1: document that that traces that transition. Very interesting. There was
38:23
Speaker 1: some other stuff too, right literature wise, Yeah, so that
38:26
Speaker 1: wasn't the only one. UM. He also found in some
38:28
Speaker 1: of the religious texts, like evidence that people felt like
38:31
Speaker 1: God had abandoned them. There's something a Mesopotamian poem called
38:35
Speaker 1: the ludlul bell Nmecki, and it says, my God has
38:40
Speaker 1: forsaken me and disappeared. My Goddess has failed me and
38:43
Speaker 1: keeps at a distance. The good angel who walked beside
38:46
Speaker 1: me has departed. And again, most other scholars would say,
38:51
Speaker 1: there's something happened. This guy was blue, he was in
38:53
Speaker 1: a funk. Who knows, but it's all metaphorical. And James
38:56
Speaker 1: is saying, no, this guy had God talking to him.
38:59
Speaker 1: Now he doesn't anymore. So should we talk a little
39:03
Speaker 1: bit about actual science here with the brain, because this
39:07
Speaker 1: is something we've covered before in the past when we
39:09
Speaker 1: talked about alien hands syndrome where it came from a
39:14
Speaker 1: gazillion years ago. Um, we there were there was evidence
39:20
Speaker 1: that when the um there there were certain epilepsy patients
39:24
Speaker 1: who where it was so severe that they would uh
39:28
Speaker 1: sever the corpus colossum, undergo a corpus colostomy, and the
39:32
Speaker 1: corpus colossum is basically the the thing that makes the
39:35
Speaker 1: two hemispheres of the brain communicate with one another. And
39:40
Speaker 1: with alien hands syndrome, I think they found that it
39:42
Speaker 1: could be brought on by this surgery where all of
39:45
Speaker 1: a sudden, the left arm was doing something and without
39:48
Speaker 1: being told to do it by the the right brain.
39:52
Speaker 1: And they have uh James, I think, or people since James,
39:58
Speaker 1: And was it James or was it just people trying
40:00
Speaker 1: into uh sort of proof his theory. I think that
40:03
Speaker 1: people saw this these experiments as support for Jenes's theory. Okay,
40:08
Speaker 1: So they looked at these surgeries, these corpus colostomies, and
40:13
Speaker 1: they're they're called split brain patients basically where they you know,
40:17
Speaker 1: after the surgery, it's not like they felt all out
40:19
Speaker 1: of whack. They felt like a regular you know, whole
40:22
Speaker 1: human being. But they learned that there were these little
40:26
Speaker 1: things that would pop up where a hemisphere would take
40:28
Speaker 1: an action based on this information that it didn't have
40:33
Speaker 1: access to. And the example they gave was UH, if
40:36
Speaker 1: they like instructed the right hemisphere to just walk to
40:40
Speaker 1: the kitchen, uh, and they would get up and walk
40:43
Speaker 1: to the kitchen. But they would say, hey, why did
40:45
Speaker 1: you get up and walk to the kitchen? The language
40:48
Speaker 1: the left hemisphere, the language dominant hemisphere, UH, is the
40:52
Speaker 1: only part that can respond to that. But the left
40:56
Speaker 1: hemisphere doesn't know why it got up, and they're really
40:59
Speaker 1: fast nating. Part is that they wouldn't say, well, I
41:02
Speaker 1: don't know, I'm not sure why I just did that.
41:04
Speaker 1: I just did it. They would make something up on
41:07
Speaker 1: the spot and say, you know, I felt like getting
41:09
Speaker 1: up and going to make a bowl of cereal. And
41:13
Speaker 1: it's it's almost like we had this natural instinct to
41:15
Speaker 1: bs somebody when faced with a question that we can't
41:19
Speaker 1: answer about why we did something. Yeah, Because the left
41:22
Speaker 1: hemisphere wants to explain things. It wants to tell the
41:25
Speaker 1: story um using metaphors usually and this was this became
41:29
Speaker 1: the left brain interpreter theory and um, it kind of
41:33
Speaker 1: supports um Uh Jane's idea that the consciousness is a
41:38
Speaker 1: flashlight looking for a dark spot in a room and
41:40
Speaker 1: it just can't find it. And um, the idea is
41:44
Speaker 1: that the left hemisphere creates the explanation the stories for
41:49
Speaker 1: our behavior, even if it doesn't know why we did something.
41:52
Speaker 1: But that's just what it does. And there's a saying
41:55
Speaker 1: in consciousness research among people who subscribe to the left
41:59
Speaker 1: brain Interpreter theory is that consciousness isn't in the oval
42:03
Speaker 1: office like it thinks it is. It's more in the
42:05
Speaker 1: press office, like it's the one that's public facing explaining
42:08
Speaker 1: what you're doing, but it might not have all the information,
42:11
Speaker 1: so sometimes it's just b s NG. It's very interesting stuff. Uh,
42:16
Speaker 1: And sort of tying in with the kid thing, Um,
42:19
Speaker 1: who is this? How do you pronounced the name of
42:21
Speaker 1: that one researcher Kushtian Lastian Couture k k U I
42:28
Speaker 1: J S c E. N Oh, yeah, I'm just gonna
42:31
Speaker 1: say Chustian. I think that's pretty pretty dead on. That's
42:34
Speaker 1: the person who runs the Julian James um Uh Society
42:39
Speaker 1: today because James died in I don't think we ever
42:42
Speaker 1: pointed that out. But this person basically says, hey, if
42:47
Speaker 1: you look at people who hear voices, and that's not
42:51
Speaker 1: necessarily to say someone that has schizophrenia, because that is
42:55
Speaker 1: one percent of the population apparently is the highest ten
43:01
Speaker 1: percent of the population. Can you know, does hear things basically?
43:07
Speaker 1: So these Uh, it's the idea of the command voice
43:11
Speaker 1: basically is to to do something. And uh, if you're
43:15
Speaker 1: hearing a voice that says, you know, moved to the
43:17
Speaker 1: window and look out on the street, that's one thing.
43:19
Speaker 1: If you hear a voice that says, take the knife
43:21
Speaker 1: from the drawer and you know, put it in someone's head,
43:26
Speaker 1: then that's another thing altogether. And uh, we were talking
43:30
Speaker 1: about kids earlier, you know, the idea of the imaginary
43:33
Speaker 1: friend kind of jobs with this lack of consciousness of
43:37
Speaker 1: kids have imaginary friends. I had an imaginary friends. My
43:41
Speaker 1: daughter had for years what she called her ghost friends,
43:45
Speaker 1: which is a lot creepier way to put it. But
43:49
Speaker 1: I think that's all just sort of to say that,
43:51
Speaker 1: like that nine percent of people who are hearing voices
43:55
Speaker 1: who are not suffering from schizophrenia, is that proof of
44:01
Speaker 1: that initial bicamera mind at work. Right, yeah, and and
44:05
Speaker 1: I mean, um, Julian James believed that children go from
44:08
Speaker 1: a bicamera state to a conscious state, as evidenced by
44:11
Speaker 1: that development of theory of mind, or as evidenced by
44:14
Speaker 1: imaginary friends. Um, and that they're they're kind of recreating
44:19
Speaker 1: what society or the human species went through thousands of
44:22
Speaker 1: years ago as they age and develop. Very interesting. So um,
44:27
Speaker 1: there you might be out there, especially if you're a
44:30
Speaker 1: concretist like Chuck Um thinking like you might be rocking
44:35
Speaker 1: in your seat right now, face flushed about to faint
44:38
Speaker 1: out of rage, Cameron, because like, this is by definition unscientific.
44:46
Speaker 1: It's not provable in the form that James put it forth.
44:51
Speaker 1: It's more of a concept, uh, an idea, and apparently
44:55
Speaker 1: he was well aware of that. He didn't touted as
44:57
Speaker 1: as anything more than that. But question uh. The director
45:02
Speaker 1: of the Julian Jane Society likes to point out that, um,
45:05
Speaker 1: it was he was basically laying the groundwork for an
45:08
Speaker 1: entirely new way of looking at things so that other
45:10
Speaker 1: people could come along and you know, take it up
45:13
Speaker 1: and and figure out how he was wrong, how he
45:16
Speaker 1: was right, what needed fleshing out, what made sense, and
45:19
Speaker 1: it's that form and people have been doing that again.
45:22
Speaker 1: This is this is like a crackpot theory that has
45:25
Speaker 1: never gone away because the more people pay attention to
45:29
Speaker 1: it and the more we start to understand about the brain,
45:31
Speaker 1: the more sense it kind of makes. Uh. And it
45:34
Speaker 1: it seems to be gaining traction rather than losing it
45:37
Speaker 1: over the like fifty years that it's been around. I
45:41
Speaker 1: think it's interesting. I don't hate this stuff. I'm not
45:43
Speaker 1: rocking in my chair. David Bowie loved it. He said
45:46
Speaker 1: that the origin of consciousness is the breakdown of bicameral mind.
45:52
Speaker 1: I think that was it. No, he said it was
45:56
Speaker 1: one of the top hundred books to read. Oh all right,
46:01
Speaker 1: I believe that totally. It's very Bowie thing for sure,
46:07
Speaker 1: and other people too. Um. And then one other thing
46:10
Speaker 1: another way to put all this to kind of sum
46:12
Speaker 1: it up that I saw it put is that, um,
46:14
Speaker 1: we developed at some point back in the in history
46:17
Speaker 1: a left brain bias, you know, which kind of ties
46:22
Speaker 1: into your original view of the whole thing, which was,
46:25
Speaker 1: you know, they weren't conscious that they were conscious? Right?
46:28
Speaker 1: You like that? You got anything else? Uh? I might,
46:33
Speaker 1: but I might just not be aware of it man,
46:37
Speaker 1: as I said, this is the best episode we've ever
46:39
Speaker 1: done since Chuck Giggles, which everybody loves. I think. Then
46:44
Speaker 1: it's time for a listener mail. Uh, this is about
46:48
Speaker 1: the freedom of the Press episode and this was a
46:53
Speaker 1: Josh request. Hey guys, how freedom of the press word
46:57
Speaker 1: struck a particular chord with me. I used to work
47:00
Speaker 1: as a science teacher but was finding more and more
47:03
Speaker 1: students were being duped by pseudoscience on the Internet and
47:05
Speaker 1: weren't being provided the tools to recognize this. So I
47:08
Speaker 1: did a master's in the library and information science and
47:11
Speaker 1: now a school librarian on a minute mission to vanquish disinformation.
47:16
Speaker 1: While I've included the topic of journalism in terms of
47:19
Speaker 1: approaching news critically as with any online source of information,
47:23
Speaker 1: your recent podcast on how Freedom the Press works really
47:26
Speaker 1: inspired me to put forward more information and content about
47:29
Speaker 1: media freedoms and the risks for journalists. Here in Sweden,
47:34
Speaker 1: it's very easy to take freedom to press for granted.
47:37
Speaker 1: Last year, in sympathy with my American colleagues, I put
47:39
Speaker 1: up a display of banned books tracked by the a
47:42
Speaker 1: l A, and each book had a tag listing the
47:46
Speaker 1: years and ranking a book was challenged, and I encouraged
47:49
Speaker 1: the students to guess what for. It led to a
47:52
Speaker 1: lot of really good That's what I loved. This experiment
47:54
Speaker 1: with students led to a lot of really good discussions.
47:57
Speaker 1: Many students hadn't realized the scale of how many books
48:00
Speaker 1: have been banned or challenged. Were horrified to see their
48:02
Speaker 1: own favorite books on display. Uh And we're also shocked
48:05
Speaker 1: by the justification, as are we always. Now that COVID
48:10
Speaker 1: restrictions are being lifted, I'm very much looking forward to
48:12
Speaker 1: taking students to the world's first library of censored books,
48:16
Speaker 1: the Dowitt Isaac Library in the Malmer Archives as a
48:23
Speaker 1: new mole so that students can see the extent of
48:27
Speaker 1: limitations on the press and media freedoms around the world.
48:31
Speaker 1: Thanks again for the fascinating show and all around amazing series.
48:35
Speaker 1: Kind regards uh Met van liga Hell's Niggar that is
48:43
Speaker 1: must just be a salutation and Swedish that comes from
48:47
Speaker 1: ms ms Alice Antonsen. She hear hers, thank you, Alice.
48:52
Speaker 1: That is amazing. I'm so glad we've we got to
48:55
Speaker 1: that listener meal because I've been proud of that person
48:58
Speaker 1: for a very long time. Ever since that you came
49:00
Speaker 1: in totally. How about Sweden Hunt, keeping the American Dream alive?
49:06
Speaker 1: And Chuck Also, before we sign off, there's something I've
49:08
Speaker 1: been meaning to address that you said earlier. You said
49:10
Speaker 1: you have a dumb brain. You know you don't? Did
49:13
Speaker 1: I say that? Yeah? You did. So if you want
49:17
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us like Alice did and
49:18
Speaker 1: show the world what a hero you are, we would
49:21
Speaker 1: love to hear that kind of thing, you can email
49:23
Speaker 1: us to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff
49:30
Speaker 1: you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio.
49:32
Speaker 1: For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
49:36
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.