I have absolutely no memory of how I came across 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' or who recommended it to me. If it was you, many thanks. Not only was a fascinating read in its own right, it seems to have inducted me back into challenging nonfiction. For the last two months my mind kept skittering around too much for anything not focused on narrative. Jaynes is undoubtedly an engaging writer, with a delightful intellectual panache, for example: 'A theory is thus a metaphor between a model and data. And understanding in science is the feeling of similarity between complicated data and a familiar model.'

Jaynes starts strongly by briefly explaining why he considers all pre-existing theories of consciousness to be badly flawed. This is quite jaw-dropping for the casual reader like me who has not previously studied the subject, or even given it sustained thought. Despite his conviction and excellent explanations, though, I must admit that his sweeping theory on the bicameral mind did not entirely persuade me. His book was enjoyable in part because it gave me the opportunity to systematise my own thoughts about consciousness. The most satisfyingly thought-provoking books do this, by presenting a theory clearly and thoroughly but not dogmatically. I was pleased to find my main point of contention discussed in the 1990 afterword; the book was first published 1977. Consciousness is incredibly difficult to unpick, at least for me, as the experience of it seems so cohesive. It jolted me to realise that memory is not really part of consciousness, for instance, although the sense of self and process of contemplation both lean heavily upon it. Or rather, the presence of memory does not necessarily mean consciousness follows.

When I mentioned to people that I was reading this book, they tended to ask, "What is the bicameral mind?" It is the name Jaynes gives to his hypothesis of how pre-conscious human brains worked, based on changed relations between the right and left hemispheres. Bicameral humans did not have a sense of self or internal mindspace as we do, Jaynes claims. They made decisions based essentially on auditory and visual hallucinations, experienced as separate from their own minds. Perhaps more shocking, at least to me, is the timing that Jaynes suggests for the change from bicameral to conscious brains: a mere three thousand years ago. Personally, I found the proposition that the architecture, technology, organisation, and art created by early human civilisations did not require consciousness hard to accept. Indeed, I am only willing to agree with the weaker version of Jaynes' theory, which he admits to the existence of only in the afterword and of which more later. However, I found it invigorating to contemplate what consciousness actually is, whether what we call civilisation requires consciousness, and how the mental life of humans may have utterly changed over thousands of years.

One of the strongest points of the argument for a bicameral mind, in my view, was its explanation of the intense and consistent veneration of the dead across the ancient world. Jaynes suggests that statues of gods and bodies of rulers were accorded great privileges as their voices lived on as auditory hallucinations, which allowed power structures to persist. This is a compelling explanation for the fact that the spectacular ruins that survive to this day are mausoleums and temples, built to glorify the intangible and the dead rather than serve practical functions for the living. On the ancient Eygptian pantheon:

If it is assumed that all of these figures are particular voice hallucinations heard by kings and their next in rank, and that the voice of a king could continue after his death and 'be' the guiding voice of the next, and that the myths about various contentions and relationships with other gods are attempted rationalisations of conflicting admonitory authoritative voices mingled with the authoritative structure in the actuality of the society, at least we are are given a new way to look at the subject.

Osiris, to go directly to the important part of this, was not a 'dying god', not 'life caught in the spell of death', or 'a dead god' as modern interpreters have said. He was the hallucinated voice of a dead king whose admonitions could still carry weight. And since he could still be heard, there is no paradox in the fact that the body from which the voice once came should be mummified, with all the equipment of the tomb providing life's necessities: food, drink, slaves, women, the lot.

This is by no means the only point when Jaynes critiques translators for projecting modern ideas onto the distant past. He also does this in some detail for both the Iliad and Old Testament, as well as complaining that applying terms like 'money' to the Code of Hammurabi is simply inaccurate. ([b:Debt: The First 5,000 Years|6617037|Debt The First 5,000 Years|David Graeber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390408633l/6617037._SY75_.jpg|6811142] by David Graeber echoed this, I believe.) While Jaynes certainly has a point, it is impossible to completely avoid projecting contemporary ideas on the past. Translation is an active interpretation of text by a mind anchored in a particular point in history. The history of the Iliad can be traced through its translations, all of which say something about the person who did the translating and the culture in which they lived.

An important feature of Jaynes' thesis is that consciousness cannot exist without language and that it began to emerge with writing. It is less plausible, at least to me, that written language developed for more than a thousand years in the absence of consciousness. The question is, what level of complexity in technical innovation, interpersonal organisation, and literary endeavour could be possible without consciousness? Many mammals, birds, and insects manage incredible feats of architecture and co-operation, apparently without consciousness. Constructing a pyramid perhaps did not require it, but I cannot believe that the Iliad was composed by pre-conscious minds. While reciting it from memory needn't necessarily require consciousness, its creation surely involved some sense of the characters as conscious beings. It cannot be only the act of translation that gives the Iliad its emotional depth. The poem begins with the anger of Achilles, based on vanity, frustration, and arrogance. I find it very hard to reconcile such emotions with a bicameral person whose every action is directly motivated by voices of the gods. Jaynes argues that the gods control everything that happens in the Iliad, which is broadly justifiable from what I know of it. I've only ever read the Iliad in translation, however I vividly remember the feelings of love, hate, compassion, and cruelty that the characters exhibit. To my mind, consciousness is a necessity for such depths of emotion. Is romantic love, resentment, or mercy possible without consciousness? I'm inclined to think not. Each requires a sense of self and of others as having selves separate from one's own. Perhaps translators have added all of this to the poem, however I think it more likely that the Iliad has retained its appeal through the ages in part due its intensity of feeling. Now I want to re-read it, of course.

Returning to what is and isn't possible without consciousness, I agreed with this comment:

Consciousness and morality are a single development. For without gods, morality based on a consciousness of the consequences of action must tell men what to do. The dike or justice of the Works and Days is developed even further in Solon. It is now moral right that must be fitted together with might in government (Fragment 36) and which is the basis of law and lawful action.

While the law of the Iliad is that of the gods, I still would not describe it as wholly amoral. Although that could be due to the work of translators. I'd love to discuss this book with my high school classics teacher, who actually knew ancient Greek.

The final third of 'The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' considers the vestiges and legacy of the bicameral mind, including oracles, hypnosis, and schizophrenia. These are as ingenious and compelling as the theory itself. Given when the book was first published, the neuroscience and psychiatric material is rather speculative. I'd be very interested to find out whether Jaynes' hypotheses have been supported or not by more recent fMRI research. That said, a great strength of the book is the emphasis on neuroplasticity (which I know subsequent research has supported) and the culturally mediated nature of human consciousness. This is sensibly put and convincing:

The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space. That is, they should not be considered as isolated phenomena that simply appear in a culture and loiter around doing nothing but leaning on their own antique merits. Instead, they always live at the very heart of a culture or subculture, moving out and filling up the unspoken and the unrationalised. They become indeed the irrational and unquestionable support and structural integrity of the culture. And the culture in turn is the substrate of its individual consciousnesses, of how the metaphor 'me' is 'perceived' by the analog 'I', of the nature of excerption and the constraints on narratisation and conciliation.

That final sentence seems technical, but this book is very good at explaining its terms and is very readable even at its most theoretical.

Now back to the afterword, which considers the reception of the bicameral mind theory and research since. In this Jaynes touches upon the point about emotions, which I was apparently not the only reader to pick up on. He also concedes this:

The third general hypothesis is that consciousness was learned only after the breakdown of the bicameral mind. I believe this is true, that the anguish of not knowing what to do in the chaos resulting from the loss of the gods provided the social conditions that could result in the invention of a new mentality to replace the old one.

But actually there are two possibilities here. A weak form of the theory would state that, yes, consciousness is based on language, but instead of being so recent, it began back at the beginning of language, perhaps even before civilisation, say, about 12,000BC, at about the time of the beginning of the bicameral mentality of hearing voices. Both systems of mind then could have gone on together until the bicameral mind became unwieldy and was sloughed off, leaving consciousness on its own as the medium of human decisions. This is an extremely weak position because it could then explain almost anything and is almost undisprovable.

Although he presents this as the weaker theory, I consider it the stronger because I find it more plausible. I do not see why bicameral hallucinations could not coexist with some, initially subordinate, sense of self. As for disprovability, even if humanity developed time travel, we would struggle to conclusively determine exactly how the mental worlds of people in 3000BC differed from our own. Maybe if we developed telepathy, but even then I doubt it. (Parenthetically, I think telepathy would be a dubious research tool, because any mind-reading would require the mind-reader to engage in translation. Thoughts are slippery and ambiguous things. Surely two telepaths could read the same mind very differently; I wish more fiction explored this possibility.)

Jaynes convinced me that ancient peoples very likely heard the voices of the dead and of gods, and that such hallucinations preceded consciousness. He did not convince me that such hallucinations could not coexist with consciousness, albeit with a sense of self perhaps very different to our own. I very much enjoyed thinking this through and was thrilled by the vertiginous sense of how much consciousness could have changed in thousands of years, and how it might continue changing in the future. 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' was an excellent lockdown read. I highly recommend it as an escape into the distant past and the recesses of the human brain. ( )

This book blew my mind. The more I read, the less I believed, but it was filled with ambitious thinking and a grand narrative.
Food for thought! ( )

Novelty of idea and style make this a winner. ( )

If valid, Jaynes’ theory has far-reaching ramifications. ( )

Here's an idea: what if consciousness - self-awareness, the 'I' and that private inner 'space' it seems to inhabit - is no emergent phenomenon, result of millions of years of brain evolution, but a purely cultural one derived from language, via metaphor, and which didn't appear sometime back in the Pleistocene, but recently (very recently, around 1200 BC in Julian Jaynes' estimation)?
   As ideas go, it's a corker. By that date we were already tilling fields and founding the first cities, the Pyramids had been built and the Iliad written - all by non-conscious human beings according to Jaynes. He was no crank though: graduate of Yale and lecturer at Princeton, the nature of consciousness was the lifelong focus of his work as an ethologist. His theory was presented at a meeting of the American Psychological Society in Washington DC (admittedly to a mostly nonplussed audience) and The Origin of..., published in 1976, was runner-up in the USA's National Book Awards' nonfiction category a couple of years later. His theory rests on the brain's division into two hemispheres: earlier than around 1200 BC, instead of the introspective thinking familiar to us today, the right hemisphere solved problems non-consciously, passing on its instructions to the left where they were experienced as hallucinations (particularly auditory hallucinations) which the people themselves interpreted as the voices of gods. The gods, in other words, seemed entirely real to them and directed their lives; the resulting societies were authoritarian, rigidly stratified and stable, almost like those of social insects (think Ancient Egypt). In the Near East though, around Jaynes' critical date, this 'bicameral' mentality broke down due to demographic (and other) stresses, and was gradually replaced by the self-aware modern mind; the resulting societies, this time, were composed of true individuals.
   This book is in three parts: the first outlines the theory, the second examines the evidence and the third considers possible vestiges of the bicameral mind still around today; and if all this sounds like Velikovsky or von Daniken, well it isn't exactly. In Jaynes' case the most common reaction, from academics in particular, has been a sort of head-scratching bafflement. I think this is at least partly because The Origin is beautifully written - even its trickiest ideas are explained simply, clearly, and in prose which a lot of good fiction writers would envy. What criticism there has been has focused mostly on the extraordinary timescale involved, and on Jaynes' interpretation of the Iliad - and anyone interested in Mesopotamian archaeology, or who knows the Iliad well (or the Old Testament, or the Epic of Gilgamesh) will soon see why.
   I can't help wondering, too, how much of the scepticism is a gut-reaction to Jaynes' choice of the term 'hallucinations' (a word which comes with a lot of baggage: drug use, mental disorder) and the idea of Achilles and Abraham resembling schizophrenics. There's also the presence of the Julian Jaynes Society which issues newsletters and books defending and promoting the theory, but which has precisely the opposite effect (on me at least): it makes the whole thing look a bit cultish, like Scientology. My own scepticism comes from a different direction altogether though: another implication of this theory is that, if true, it would mean that only human beings are conscious - something I don't believe for a minute. Apes, elephants, cetaceans, corvids and perhaps others all show every sign of self-awareness.
   Overall, I'm left with the feeling that this isn't all nonsense, that there's truth lurking at the heart of Jaynes' theory; I thought the first chapter, where he outlines what consciousness is not, what it doesn't do, by far the best - I agreed with every word of that. It's just that, from that starting point, he immediately veered off in a direction very different from the one I would have gone in. It's still, though, as thought-provoking a read as I've come across for some time. ( )