The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we're conscious of because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

It's like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it.

And his point is, is wherever your conscious mind looks, there's consciousness. But that doesn't mean that there's consciousness all over the place.

My God has forsaken me and disappeared. My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance. The good angel who walked beside me has departed.

David Bowie loved it. He said that the origin of consciousness is the breakdown of bicameral mind.

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we're conscious of because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

It's like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it.

And his point is, is wherever your conscious mind looks, there's consciousness. But that doesn't mean that there's consciousness all over the place.

David Bowie loved it. He said that the origin of consciousness is the breakdown of bicameral mind.

It's a very Bowie thing.

I know one of the things he wrote a lot about in his book in 1976 was Homer's Iliad because he's kind of like, here's proof right here...

You're not going to ask him, hey, what's your feeling about the Julian Jaynes book, The Origins of Consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind, Mr. Joe Clown? He may be the smartest clown in the world, but you really don't care about his opinion.

Julian Jaynes wrote this classic back in 1976 called The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and one of the things that's great about it is that it's a beautifully written book.

About 50 years ago, a psychologist named Julian Jaynes wrote what is, for my money, one of the most interesting books of all time. Even if the central thesis is almost certainly completely wrong, the book was called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Consciousness, Jaynes proposes, is a developed trait and a relatively new one in the grand scheme of things. He argues that human beings only became selfaware about 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

The mind was split between the two hemispheres, like it is now, but the two together did not create a cohesive conscious whole as they do now.

Jaynes' theory was that the right side of the brain would speak to the left side of the brain in a literal, audible sense, so that ancient people were hearing voices in their head all the time.

He argues that the left side of the brain considered the voice coming from the right side to be the voice of God, or of the gods.

Someone emailed and recommended that I read Julian Jaynes, the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. And so I did. I did read it. I this is a weird book because I don't agree with almost any of it. I disagree with 98 percent of this book, but I kind of loved it because it was really fascinating. I read it almost more as a sort of science fiction than anything else.

He argues that consciousness arose in the human population very recently, about 3,000 years ago, and before that humans operated with a bicameral mind, essentially hearing voices they interpreted as gods.

West world story about the genesis of consciousness is scientifically inaccurate. So it's due to the psychologist Julian Jaynes back in the 70s. I remember when his book the origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral.

Yeah, it was a good one. Yeah. There's a big thick bottle that we thick books. There's a big thick book.

Yeah, so that's been discredited.

West world story about the genesis of consciousness is scientifically inaccurate

So it's due to the psychologist Julian Jaynes back in the 70s. I remember when his book the origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral.

Yeah, what a great title. I read that book.

Yeah, it was a good one.

There's a big thick bottle that we thick books. There's a big thick book.