Does this solve the biggest PARADOX in the Theory of the Bicameral mind? 

I wonder what the next egoic stage for consciousness is.

Thoughtful analysis. I've read Jaynes and all the secondary literature, and rarely come across a criticism or review that doesn't misunderstand him. Well-done sir

Hi fam. So this is a topic which i touched upon in my recent "iceberg" video, and it is very interesting to me due to the Parallels between Janes' theory and the theory of consciousness structures developed by Jean Gebser (whose ideas ive covered in much more detail than those of Janes). Overal i think you are correct here in suggesting that modern ego-awareness has a kind of "viral" aspect which is able to bleed over into other human lifeworlds. However i would suggest that there is a distinction between bicameral (mythic) awareness and shamanic (magical) awareness; neither of which are exactly "unconscious" per se, but certainly pre-egoic. There is a conflation here between self awareness in general and ego awareness more specifically; even lower primates have some sense of self, but what is significant is *where* exactly that sense of self is localized; The sense that we literally *are* our thoughts (the internal voices) is very new in historical terms, and this is what Janes stumbled upon, perhaps without truly grasping the big picture here. Prior to ego-awareness, the sense of self was located within the personality and behavior, rather than within the inner monologue. Prior to that - mythic - phase, the sense of self was located within ones "life body" or mana. We can think of it as a gradual "upward" migration of the sense of selfhood in which the self comes to increasingly "contract" as it goes (moving from a kind of tribal, collective selfhood into a sense of individual selfhood). Great video btw

It is facinating that there seems to be a "natural" development that with growing consciousness one becomes self-aware but loses connection to the gods and thus is in danger to lose connection to ones unconscious/Self (which is still there even in modern man). There seems to be a delicate balance between a strong ego and the receptivity to the multiplicity in oneself.

I got into this topic after stumbling across _"Orality And Literacy"_ from Walter J. Ong. (There's a free PDF on Monoskop, should be top google hit.) Where he talks about Jaynes, and thinks that perhaps the thing that caused us to jump from a bicameral to a conscious mentality was literacy. Rowan Partridge's description sounds exactly like what Ong was talking about, once literacy went up, the voices went quiet. Ong believes oral thinking and literate thinking work differently. Even illiterate people in literate societies are affected. Literacy comes with disadvantages. People back in the day may not have had a chance in hell of landing on the moon, but they could bury you in a debate and tell campfire stories more exhilarating than your favorite action movie. _"How could you ever call back to mind what you had so laboriously worked out? The only answer is: Think memorable thoughts. In a primary oral culture, to solve effectively the problem of retaining and retrieving carefully articulated thought, you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence."_ Maybe voices in your head are like books on a shelf. Daedalus pipes up when you're building a table, Poseidon whispers some pointers about how to trim a sail, Dionysus reminds you how to party, etc. We know how powerful loci memory is, where you place memories in familiar locations in your head. So what about storing ideas in the ethos of imaginary peers? Before we had carpentry handbooks, sailing guides, or the autobiographies of entertainers, we had full surround-sound introjects. Which to me says: Think like an pre-literate person, think memorable thoughts. The more you can do that, the closer you'll be to whatever humans have always described as 'God'. Embrace the conversations in your head. But also _read and write._ If the gods got sucked into books like Slimer from Ghostbusters, and communing with them does you good, then don't waste time, find/create the books where you hear voices the loudest. Respect your superstitious side like you would respect your fear instincts. It doesn't have to be real gods speaking to you for it to be the truth.

Glad you decided to continue making videos. Keep them rolling 👍

Thank you! A brilliant analysis that addresses some of my questions about the theory and provides cogent insight in viewing bicameral/conscious as a scale rather than an either/or. This way of looking at things allows us to contemplate how we, at any given moment, may be sliding back and forth on this scale. If, as Julian Jaynes suggests, we are not necessarily in a conscious state when driving a car, for example, then there may indeed be times that we shift toward the bicameral end of the spectrum. Fascinating. Again, an excellent video which has earned my “subscribe.” I was lucky to find your channel after Xelosoma decided to shut down.

I wasn’t familiar with the theory of the bicameral mind previously, but this video gives me a lot to chew on when thinking about theories of consciousness. Thank you. Three things come to mind. One, I presented as autistic until I was about five. I remember a clear delineation at age four, when thanks to an adult scolding me for stimming in a mud puddle, the voices of the earth and flowers all went silent and it felt like I died. The adult’s ego harshly imposed seemed to make me aware of myself as separate from the world around me. Second, I was raised by intellectuals who had both had a strong church background. I remember consciously holding both God and reason as two distinct realities in my world schema, probably because I didn’t want to disappoint either my parents or my grandparents. I learned to code-switch early. Third, in the USA, I am concerned about intentional atavism as relates to the political climate. Some groups of people seem to have a need for egoic authority or authoritarianism - to the extent that they will ignore physical evidence that does not fit with their beliefs. I’m not sure if this could be called bicameral mind or something else… any (respectful) ideas on how to interpret this phenomena?

Not sure if anyone’s touched on this yet, but wouldn’t this all directly apply to Socrates’ inner daemon that existed as a voice in his head that gave him warnings against making mistakes?

Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance could also potentially be used to explain the spread of the egō. I would strongly recommend looking into it.

Omg this is so fascinating! Why aren't more people talking about it!

200th like!👍 Awesome video!🤘

Glad you're back at it

Great video, amazing content.

That was excellent analysis excellent video I love it thank you

Amazing video! Watching this video immediately clicked a similar experience I had, to what the tribesman describe. But in reverse.... So, I grew up in Mississauga most of my life. Worked some interesting jobs, military for sometime, paramedic, and I worked at the coroner's office in Toronto. Plus I was acting in some films in Toronto on the side. To summarize it, my fiancé broke up with me, and I spent some time crying in morgue at work heartbroken. Had a MASSIVE EGO DEATH. Left the military, lost the girl, lost my ability to work as a medic, Lost the concept and respect for time and materialize. (Since I thought, from "God(s)" point of view, time does not exist, and in his eyes we are already dead.) Did not help that I was acting (playing pretend) in one part of my life and cutting down hangers and scooping brains of the sidewalk in an another. I Lost all sense of what was reality. My mind split in two. When the pandemic hit, to save my mind I moved to Costa Rica. Spent 3 years there. Moved in the center of the main city. Costa Rica is an amazing place with spectacular beaches and vase Mountain ranges. But the city is pretty run down and some parts are riddled with addiction and homelessness. But it’s Extremely Peaceful since the military has been abolished in 1949. Costa Rica is also one of the last western countries that has not separated the catholic church and state. So the country is highly religious. Like it's completely normal to be chilling on a park talking about god and nature with an addict. So now that I am explaining the setting and the reason. This is the part that was getting to in regards to the Bicameral Mind. After a year of living there, I was in my garage repairing my 1991 Montero. It was a beautiful sunny day and you can hear the church bells going off all over the city. I was minding my own business, and I was deeply concentrated in figuring out a mechanical problem I had in the car. There was no one around. There was no music playing, and I was the only one at my home besides my dog. Then I heard in an extremally deep and dominating voice my name, “DAVID” I jump up and start looking around searching for the voice. Then I hear it again, “DAVID” and the voice had such heavy intense base to it. Ran on to the street to see if someone was messing with me around the corner, but there was no one. My heart was racing and had the feeling I was being watched. So, just like Carl Jung described when he went to the native tribes, and they said when the English arrived, they stopped dreaming, what if this case is similar but in reverse?

The issue is simply that the idea that you aren't conscious if you don't have volition is very weird. I am unconscious when I am unconscious, not when I am unresponsive or unthinking. I don't even need consciousness to have volition and often I exercise volition without self-awareness of what I do other than expressing volition. You invented a whole construct you call consciousness that I simply fail to understand. You seem to imply that the complexity of your decision making informs your consciousness while it's simply the magnitude of your experience that does, and for your volition the complexity of your understanding of your decision making, not the complexity of your decision making itself or how involved you are in it. You are conscious because you experience, not because you decide. My conscious capacity is limited, when I focus inward I am less conscious of what's outside and vice-versa but my consciousness is more or less the same. What changed significantly aren't the genes behind our brain structure in a mere 10 thousand years, what changed are our environments, there is much less of a need to focus on the outside so our conscious experience changed to reflect that. The difference is that your decision making makes you more proactive while bicameral decision making makes you more reactive, the issue is that in our society our lives can't happen without us making them happen because we are fucking fragmented, everyone has their house, their room, their individual lives, people in the past lived their group much more throughly, they didn't need to think up "I want to talk with that guy, I should hit him up" because they just turned around and talked to them just like you, hopefully, don't bloody decide every single thing you do when you are with your Friends, you want to speak, you speak and thinking about whether to speak or not and what to speak about etc. are the consequences of you being in your head too much, not of you being super conscious. Our brains capacity for consciousness hardly changed with or without the bicameral mind, our experience changed. I have schizophrenia, if I say that I am less conscious now than when I used to not be schizophrenic I know exactly what I mean and what I mean is that there is a tendency of shit to interfere with shit so internal communication between parts of the brain gets harder and therefore I can focus on less stuff because now I have to constantly deal with internal communication issues I didn't have prior but my consciousness didn't actually change, it's just tied up with dealing with annoying bullshit and waiting on communications that take forever to go through, it's like sitting in an uncomfortable chair, you aren't less conscious, you are just less able to focus because you are bloody uncomfortable. What's even weirder to me is that somehow I am pretty sure some people consider being more conscious the states you consider downright unconscious, like a zen or flow state, many people would consider it the peak of self-awareness while for you the absence of complex decision making processes from the conscious experience make them downright unconscious. I am not saying you can't use consciousness as a word however you deem, but I feel like it would help knowing exactly what you mean when you say consciousness. I am pretty sure Jaynes made a series of assumptions about consciousness like, for example, that it involved having an inner monologue because he was probably unaware at the time that a good percentage of the population entirely lacks an inner voice. They aren't unconscious beings for Christ's sake, they just don't express their thoughts like you do, it doesn't mean they don't have them. People with schizophrenia often rely less on expressing their own thoughts because the voices anticipate them and reacting to them is simply a more effective usage of their brain capacity. Imagine instead of thinking your thoughts hearing someone else say something related to them right before you express them, it would be more efficient making your thoughts become a reaction to the voice in order to contextualize it instead of repeating everything you heard from scratch with your own take. That wouldn't make you less conscious. You still express the same thoughts only through a dialogue instead of a monologue.

I barely dream but when I do it's reminders to pay bills, do documents, an extension of work if I'm particularly busy lol.

To throw something in here. I had a cerebellum haemorrhage years ago. I’m fortunate in I didn’t lose any cognitive ability after some rehab & I was aware throughout. My balance is shocking & I have some coordination issues. Anyway to jump on your point about fatigue & cognition I experience this all of the time. Using a computer, too many conversations, busy places, lots of people/noise tire me out so fast. Whereas despite being impaired I can do physical stuff no problem (balance allowed for). I go to the gym almost daily, walk a lot, hardly sit still as I’m a ‘doer’ I guess. No idea if this is relevant or not! 😂

Votre réflexion ouvre une piste très intéressante à développer. 🙏

I believe the bicameral mind is a fenomena. And, of course, it is related to the language and the amount of vocabulary you have. Probably, traumatic situations when you are very young together with a lack of right education can cause you to not being able to think correctly and some sentences might keep repeting in their minds when they feel different feelings. Maybe the bicameral mind was a way of control, in different societies, like in the ones you said, this fenomena doesn't happened.

Its not the brain, since the brain is not the seat of conciousness. Its this ”materialistic” realm and the spiritual realm. That is the ”bi-camerality”.

@Nexus Void what role do you think the right hemisphere plays in man today for people with strong egos? Is it just floating around purposelessly, or so you think it has been hijacked by culture to act as a conduit for the hive mind to talk to the left?

Finally! This criticism is one I’ve had from day one of coming across the theory.

Maybe what Jaynes calls consciousness should not be viewed in a necessarily historical or progressive manner, rather it is like you said a "reorganization" of the mind that occurs to reflect outward realities.

Shiva sent me. Thank you Shiva

This is fascinating. Have you read “House Made Of Dawn” by M Scott Momaday (sp?) - one way to read it might be about a person trapped between a bicameral world vs a modern world

In regard to your hypothesis of "reorganizing of the mind". Take a look at the research of what happens to people who are isolated for prolonged periods of time. In the 1950s a professor of psychology at McGill University had volunteers spend days, or even weeks, in sound-proof cubicles, deprived of human contact. Their cognitive abilities declined, with them struggling to do math and word association tests. Eventually, many of them began having hallucinations, both visual and auditory. Similar stories occur about people forced to be alone (shipwreck, etc.) So your example of indigenous minds becoming "modern" and reorganizing due to interactions with other peoples with strong egos... So maybe these isolation stories are about "modern" people's minds regressing in the other direction, due to being segregated from social structure.

Astonishing! I was surprised to learn that aardvarks are perceived as sent by evil spirits, because a few days ago I learned about a similar myth that existed in my homeland in South India, where pangolins (eenampechi in Malayalam) were seen as an evil spirit harming pregnant women. I would recommend watching an animated short film titled "Kandittund! (Seen It!)", which is in Malayalam language, but with English subtitles; the film is basically a narration by a 90 year old man who describes about different types of demonic spirits that he and people in his generation used to experience. Interestingly, another demon in the narration called Anamarutha seem to resemble the aardvark itself, although the animal is native to only Africa. There are very interesting interviews with this 90 year old (but unfortunately with no English subtitles), where he talks so enchantingly about this folklore spiritual realm of demons and how they vanished with modernity... I believe evidencing the Bicameral mind theory.

Can I be next on your show? I watched the episode of you and Shadow talking about Canada. Very interesting I have been thinking about asking for several months as I see others are interested this can be no coincidence. Quite possibly the test of our generation.

I find exceedingly bizarre that anyone would equate having a strong ego with being "more conscious." In Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism, it is the dissolution of the ego that brings Enlightenment and higher consciousness. Strange that science would try to turn that around the other way. Incidentally, I come from a neuroscience background and think Jaynes used a misleading definition of consciousness.

A from Kenya and i am watching this channel after watching matrix 4, i think it's just the evolution of the matrix 😂

NEW VIDEO!! Praise the God(s) or divinity or whatever. Your content is gold to me.

very accurate explanation of Jaynes, the bicameral mind and consciousness. I am surprised this theory is not given more credence in academia.

Also, have you heard of Marshall McLuhan and the Gutenberg Revolution? It may have interesting parallels to this idea

I don't think i am intelligent enough to fully comprehend this video. That being said, I've always been fascinated with this topic because of the sort of upbringing I had and how that lead me to perceive the world in both a magical realism way, and a sceptical curious way, all at the same time. For me the world is not all black or all white or all nouance. It is both black and white and nouance all at the same time. What stuck with me the most in your video is when you talked about people making decisions, because I similarily have a very hard time making decisions especially when they are important ones. It's like a war in my mind, sometimes I don't even know enymore which voice is the instinct and which one is the ego, both of them are making very valid and compelling points. Also sometimes I get hints via dreams, which dreams are very vivid, extremely detailed and full of symbolism, and they rarely take place in the real world. Sometimes I don't even wanna wake up because I am having a totally separate life in the dream and I wanna stay there some more. I remember reading this interesting thing in a book once, about dreams being "when the soul takes a break from the burden of a body and reunites momentarily with the realm of the source". So I guess that would be like your instinct hiding from your ego for a few hours to catch a break and relax. I would be curious to some day talk to someone like a shaman or a good psychoanalist who could shed some light on all this, not because it's a burden, but because i find it fascinating and would like to hear an opinion.

Projecting of our mentality … that could be said about ANY other consciousness though. There’s no way to prove or know that another being is conscious

I definately experienced bicameral mind while growing up... there was a times, especially after leaving a city and living on my ranch when after a solid sleep i had experiences with dreams being so vivid that theye were indistinguishable with the reality and everything i see there felt like it was a extension of real reality, but taken out of dreams with dragon, gods and real feelings of connetions to a higher realm made of this entities. This theory is definite possible, and i would say probably true. Especialy when people wasnt structurized by knowledge and they had mind of wild animals. I think that in my case the reason for vividness was also high temperature, thats why more gods might be in the medditerrain contries.

Dude I read that comment and messaged that dude.

Does anyone discussing Jaynes' work focus on the explanatory power it has for the religious experience? It seems like an afterthought in discussions of consciousness, but Jaynes' theory perfectly describes my religious experiences. Perhaps i retain some vestiges of bicameralism, and I'd bet money that anyone who claims to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ still has some degree of the bicameral system.

I am a Chinese and I have the a similar but not the same experience

If your god told you to? More like ancestors? Just wait young Jedi and be careful what you wish for. Navigate with love and the force of others will be with you. May the force of others be with you. ❤❤❤❤❤

Coincidentally, the aardvark is the animal most closely resembling the Seth deity of Ancient Egypt fame, which consistently echoes what you described here. Great info! To me it seems our modern adversarial mindset has sprung up out of a need for challenge, which was in turn brought forth from the elimination of the constant need for survival within the sphere of the elements. To reiterate: we have eliminated our struggle with nature and by relying on society to provide our basic necessities, our existance is no longer constantly tested so we have to invent an adversarial network in which we are each of us our own contenders. This, I believe, is what makes the constant totalitarian rule of the ego within our psyche worthwhile for the brain upon which to spend that many resources. Within traditional societies there is a lack of this constant need of self reaffirmation and so the brain can afford to be in 'listening' mode instead of 'projection' mode. Cos if you think about it, the ego is always just a projection coming in after the fact, like a self-inposed narrative that reaffirms what has been handed to it thus making a consistent narrative for use by which to make sense of the world around it, with it as the main character. A demiurge, if you will.

Gotta be careful not to slip into ethnocentrism and casual racism when talking about "primitive" people and a lack of consciousness...

holy cap

I really can't take this hypothesis seriously. How's having gods evidence of lacking a consciousness?. And this one 10:25 Makes me take it even less seriously.

You should watch @formscapes could be great crossover