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

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