November 24, 2017 • 63 mins
How old is the phenomenon we call consciousness, and where did it come from? Was humanity always capable of metacognition -- the ability to think about thinking? If it wasn't, then how did our ancestors process the world around them, and how did they struggle with internal conflicts? Join Ben, Matt and Noel as they interview returning guest Joe McCormick about the strange theory of the bicameral mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
(00:25):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noel. They call me Ben. You are you?
And that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
In the beginning of our opening notes for this episode,
I had I had a relatively lame, open ended question,
but I believe in it and I want to know.
(00:46):
What's what's on your mind? How are you guys feeling today?
Are you trying to set up the topic? I you know,
originally I was when I wrote, Yeah, really, what's what's
going on with you guys? Yeah? Know, just the general
state of affairs in the country, the world, you know,
base level fear and paranoia. Um, but other than that,
(01:09):
not too bad. Yeah, feeling pretty good today. I don't
know that it looked like it was gonna storm. I
haven't seen any rain yet, so hey, it's a bright
new day, keeping it light. Yeah. So I it's weird
because that's such a common phrase in English, and it's
a very common sentiment in all of humanity. People will
(01:31):
say Hey, what's what's on your mind? As though your
mind is some sort of object like a table upon
which things can be placed, you know. And today we're
also touching on a question that has baffled, confounded, perplexed,
and uh infuriated people throughout history, which is what what
(01:54):
is a mind? You know? Is when we say a mind,
are we saying that we are observing a consciousness? You know?
Are we talking about just the brain itself and its functions? Right?
And maybe just just for set up here, let's explore
the idea of consciousness because you told us a pretty
(02:14):
impressive and fascinating quotation earlier before we went on the air. Yes. Uh,
A gentleman named Daniel Dennett who is a philosopher. I
can't speak for him. I would say he thinks of
himself as a philosopher slash cognitive scientists, um. And he
gave a Ted talk in two thousand seven, and he
had this to say on the idea of what is
(02:35):
a consciousness? He says that what we are is approximately
one hundred trillion little cellular robots. That's he says, that's
what we're made out of. No other ingredients, were just
made of cells and not one of those cells is conscious,
and not a single one of those cares who you
are or knows that you are a thing. He says. Somehow,
(02:58):
he and everybody else in his field, they have to
explain or at least their tasked with explaining when you
put like how you put together these groups of cells,
of trillions of cells, if you group them into what
he calls armies and battalions. Uh, how do those these
little robotic, unconscious cells, how do they become us? How
(03:19):
do they create ideas? How do they create memories and colors?
How do we see colors from these cells? And um?
And then what does that mean? Like is that consciousness
if you can observe those things and think about those things?
And then he he ended that thought with just somehow
all of the content, all the consciousness that we experience
(03:40):
is accomplished by the the busy activity of these hordes
of neurons that are in our brain, that are just
firing and storing information through connections. Uh. Pretty crazy. And
the biggest thing is, he says, is how is this possible? Like?
How how could that be? I really, you know, I
really appreciate that because it makes me think of our
(04:01):
examination of biomes, you know, or or microbiomes rather where
wherein we see that there's there's an entire world in
somebody's digestive system, right, And I think the first time
I learned about that was when we're doing an episode
of our show brain Stuff on farts. Yeah, and also
(04:24):
shout out to the Petalmon, the professional professional flashy lists
story for another day. I'm getting I'm getting hard side
eye from role on this one. Sorry, yeah, sorry, all
I know how I feel about farts in the podcast studio.
It's a very sensitive subject because it's a very small
room us. The concept of consciousness, how is it possible? Right? What?
(04:47):
What is a mind? People have generated multiple interpretations suppositions
about this, and when we started digging into this, we
were inspired, but we also thought, this is a lot,
This is a lot of weird stuff to unpack and explore.
(05:08):
And luckily we were able to contact one of our
recurring guests, a long time friend of the show Ladies
and Gentlemen, Joe McCormick, co host of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind. Hey, how are you guys doing today? Great
now that you're here, we were really bummed out before
you walk a little bit Yeah, thanks, thanks for walking
(05:31):
in and saving saving the day. Just gonna continue pretending
that I wasn't sitting here the whole time. What are
you talking about? You you weren't sitting here, I was
not conscious of it. Yeah, So obviously it sounds like
you guys want to talk about consciousness today. And we
actually did in a two parter on consciousness recently, on
(05:51):
stuff to blow your mind, Not so much on the
problem of consciousness broadly, because how could you cover that
in a single episode. It's a topic that comes up
over and over again on our show. It's one of
most perplexing questions in all of science and the philosophy
of mind. What is consciousness and where does it come from?
And I like that you brought up that Daniel Dennet quote, Matt,
because it calls to mind the problem of the heap
(06:13):
you all know about, like the the heapness problem. If
you have one grain of sand, that's not a heap,
and if you have two grains of sand, that's not
a heap. But at some point you keep adding grains
of sand and a heap of sand emerges. At what
point does the heap happen? It's hard to pick a number,
isn't it. Yah? Yeah, And a similar kind of problem
(06:34):
arises from the problem of consciousness that we know to
some degree, consciousness is created by brains that are processing information.
One experiment you can do to sort of prove this
to yourself is go under general anesthesia. If you go
under general anesthesia, the information processing in your brain is
suppressed and you have complete blackout. It's absolute loss of
(06:57):
consciousness for the time that you're out only podcast welcome
blacked out. Yeah. So so yeah, So you come back
from that, you're you regain your consciousness and you think, wow, okay,
so it's possible for my brain to exist and all
those cells to be there, but when they're not doing something,
my consciousness ceases. But here's a much creepier version. It
(07:21):
seems that those cells in your brain can be doing
a lot of stuff without generating consciousness. I want to
see if you guys have ever been in this scenario.
You ever gotten to a destination and parked your car
and then realize like, oh my god, I was not
conscious while I was driving here. What happened? It's a
(07:41):
blur you remember, let's call it point A, which was
your last significant memory before the drive and then all
of a sudden there's a missing gap and you're at
you you feel like you're at point B, but maybe
point H, point J. You know, any things have happened,
and you have this sort of localized amnesia, just the
(08:06):
feeling that you did I actually drive here because you
were probably lost in thought, in you know, one section
or several sections of your brain working together, in that
conscious part where you're paying attention to what my arms
are doing and what my feet are doing. It's almost
like it wasn't happening. Well, I would imagine too, Like
with wrote kind of mindless activities like that, this is
(08:28):
easier than let's say, you know, something like spending time
with a loved one or like generating new memories and
things like that. Exactly. No, So that's the important thing
is that the right repetitious aspect of it. So on
these types of activities like driving or say, you know,
other household chores boring sex, moing, mowing the lawn. Didn't
(08:51):
expect it to go that way. Mowing the lawn. Mowing
the lawn is our show's euphemism for boring sex. Okay, well, yeah,
any of these repetitive activities yeah, you can. You can
like totally lose consciousness and yet your mind is still working.
You think about all the stuff your brain has to
be doing to drive you from one place to another.
It's got to take in visual information and auditory inform constantly, constantly,
(09:15):
constantly updating your mental model of what the road is
where you need to go. It's got to coordinate all
your muscles with timing being very precise feedback from the wheel.
This is complex behavior without you being present in your
mind for it for it to happen at one point
of where just a quick interjection. In addition to this,
(09:37):
our brains are also keeping the entire human ship running right.
So many bodily processes that we are not consciously aware of.
There's a thing that used to happen to me when
I was a kid. I would lay awake at night
and I was too conscious of my breathing, and I thought, well,
if I don't forget that I've been breathing the whole time,
(09:57):
if I keep concentrating on it, then what if it
just stops? You know, I just add to the point,
it does seem mind boggling when we think about it.
How many things, not just when we're driving, but just
existing tons of what we do is unconscious. Your brain
constantly regulates activity within the body unconsciously, the regulation and
(10:19):
release of hormones, neurotransmitter reuptake, digestion, all this kind of
stuff is going on your brain telling your body what
to do, but you not being conscious of it. Meanwhile,
you're very conscious of, say, most of the running and
jumping you do, and sometimes conscious of breathing. Why is that?
Do you ever think about that? How come evolution created
(10:42):
an animal that has conscious control of running and jumping,
unconscious control of digestion, and optionally conscious control of breathing.
What if you have to consciously control your heart rate
and your digestion but unconsciously moved about through the world.
Thought of that as making my heart rate speed up
right now? Anyway, that's kind of a weird thing to ponder.
(11:04):
I mean, you can you can start to think of,
like evolutionary reasons why one might be selected for more
than the other. But that also is interesting because it
gives you reasons that consciousness might be biologically adaptive, that
it could actually be useful for something. And that's a
big question in the these all these debates about consciousness.
Does consciousness actually do anything or is it just a
(11:26):
helpless observer of what the body would be doing? Anyway,
But I want to go back to the road analogy.
There we are. We're on the road, all right. So
you are in this highway hypnosis state. You're driving from
one place to another. You for some reason, whyever this happens,
I'm not quite sure, but you are not conscious of
what's going on. You're just somewhere else and you're you know,
your your body is driving on its own, controlled by
(11:48):
your brain but not by your mind. Suddenly, along the way,
let's say you're coming to work and a long a
long I seventy five or wherever you'd be traveling, you
get to a place where there was a giant pit
in the middle of the freeway, and the god molech
is down there in the pit, accepting infant sacrifices, and
it's completely blocking your path to get to work. Okay, yeah,
(12:11):
what would happen then, Well, then you would experience a
moment of sudden lucidity. Right, yeah, you'd snap out, you'd
come out of that highway hypnosis state. And what would
happen next? You'd offer your allegiance to no, don't do that,
don't ever do that. We were split on molech in
here scrificabies. We we're all close friends, but part of
(12:37):
being good friends with someone is that you accept that
you don't always agree, and molok is one of those
things that is relatively divisive on our show. I just
want to be candidates. So we're snapped back to reality.
Right here comes gravity. But why do you nice? So
why do you snam back? Why do you snam back now?
Because because there's a threat or there's danger, Hey, you
(12:58):
gotta figure out what to do. That's suddenly that starts
to become a point where you can see what your
consciousness is being used for, that it has some kind
of biological function. Suddenly, So you have all these activities
that you can do and your body can carry out
and your brain can regulate without your consciousness, even things
(13:18):
as complex as driving. But suddenly, when you've got to
make a decision, when there is novel stimuli that you
did not expect to encounter and it doesn't seem to
fit with your you know, wrote conditioned behaviors, then suddenly
you have to use your consciousness to make a decision.
And figure out what to do next. So this reaction
(13:38):
to that novel idea brings you back to the present
moment and you begin do do you begin reevaluating the
existing stimuli? Well, I mean think about what would happen
in your own mind. I can say for me, I
think what I would start to do is I would say, Okay,
I can't go this way, so I need to figure
out what's the other way to get to work. And
(14:00):
I would imagine in my mind sort of a map
of the city and think what are the alternate routes
I could use and how would I get to them?
It would be like modeling. Yeah, I mean what what
would what? Do you all disagree? No, I don't disagree.
But I'm also wondering what happens when your base level
is constantly presenting you with unexpected things and that becomes
(14:21):
the norm. Like if you're a soldier, for example, like
in a foxhole or like in a war zone, and
you constantly have to be shifting and adjusting and you know,
looking out for threats and there's so many of them
that it's basically the norm. Well, I mean, in that case,
you were probably in a state, a state of heightened
awareness constantly, which probably leads to anxiety and stress. Right.
(14:43):
I mean, it can be very stressful to have too
many demands placed upon your consciousness, right, Like, sometimes we
kind of want to slip into that unconscious state. It's relaxing,
decision fatigue, it's a real thing. And so okay, so
I love this exploration. Right now, Malik has appeared and
we're driving to work and we say, oh, we snap
(15:06):
out of it, and we say, okay, well, maybe if
I get off at the four Street exit, there won't
be too much traffic and it'll be a little bit late,
and everybody will understand because it's muleck again. Right. But
here's a question. What if you couldn't do that, the
part where you snap back and come come to your
consciousness and you make a model in your mind of
(15:29):
how to get to work. What if your mind was
not capable of any of that. What if you were
a being for whom every activity in your life was
in that unconscious autopilot state that we get into sometimes
when highway hypnosis, or when you're mowing the lawn, any
of these things that you just do without thinking. Could
(15:49):
it be possible for a being to exist in a
permanent state like that. It seems like it could be possible, right, Yeah,
I feel pretty close to that every once in a while. Well,
they're they're also quite a few mammals who appear to
behave that way, you know, I guess is this in
any way related to medic cognition, you know, thinking about thinking? Yeah,
(16:10):
medic cognition is often associated with the basis of consciousness.
I mean, people have all kinds of debates about what
consciousness exactly is, uh, And we're obviously not going to
settle that question today. But metic cognition, which thinking about
thinking or regulating your own thinking, having the idea of
not just having a thought, but thinking about the fact
that you had a thought, is often what consciousness consists
(16:33):
of in some models at least. So would it be
possible two in What would that be like to not
think about thinking? Well, I mean it seems like it
would be okay for lots of tasks. I mean, you
could get through a lot of your life without thinking
about thinking until you hit these novel stimuli moments where
(16:54):
you needed to make a decision and think about sort
of like you needed to do some internal city mulation
and modeling, like picturing that map in your head and
trying to figure out how to get there when instinct
and conditioning won't suffice. What do you do? Now? Here's
where we're going to get to the book that is
at the center of today's conversation. So recently on Stuff
(17:16):
to Blow your Mind, my co host Robert Lamb and
I did a couple of episodes on the concept of bicameralism,
which was introduced in nineteen seventy six by the American
psychologist Julian Jaynes in his book The Origin of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. And I gotta
say at the outset, this is one of the most
(17:38):
fascinating books I've ever read. It makes an argument about
the nature of consciousness and about the history of consciousness
in the human species that ultimately I think is probably wrong,
Like I probably don't agree with it, but it is
a fascinating hypothesis to explore with him because he pulls
from so many different disciplines with tons of thoughtfulness and evidence,
(18:03):
and it's just a really fascinating ride to go on.
And it made quite a stir when it came out.
I mean, it was pretty popular for a you know what,
ultimately is an academic work, right, Yeah, It's gotten a
lot of attention over the years in in weird, odd
kind of smatterings like it is actually not something that
has been revisited a whole lot in the scientific or
(18:23):
academic literature. One of the things that's frustrating about it is, Okay,
so it introduces and we'll get to what the hypothesis
is in just a second. I hate to keep teasing you,
but it introduces this fascinating radical hypothesis about the history
of consciousness, tries to offer some evidence for it, and
seems to make some predictions about what would be found
in the future. So what you really want is for
(18:44):
a bunch of scientists to start testing what would be
predicted by this hypothesis and see if it's true. Uh,
it's it's The testing of its predictions has been somewhat
slim there. There have been a few studies that have
mentioned it, uh, some favorably, some favorably, but I guess
the best we could say is that it remains controversial.
So this is in no way consider it a widely
(19:07):
accepted hypothesis, but a lot of philosophers and scientists do
consider it interesting and valuable, even if it's not necessarily correct. Yeah,
and I appreciate that you point this out. There might
be slim testing, but there's nothing definitive either way, right,
there's no absolutely yes, absolutely no. Well, I think a
few I think a few neurologists have said, look at
(19:29):
modern neuroscience disproves his claims, but but others don't necessarily agree.
So I think what I should just do now is
start by giving you the straightforward version of Jane's conclusion,
and then we can turn back to explaining it a
little more. Yeah, yes, by cameral mind in a nutshell. Yeah. So,
Julian Jane's hypothesis in this book is that until about
(19:53):
three thousand years ago, human beings meaning our species, Homo sapiens,
was not conscious us. So that's kind of odd, like,
how do you how do you imagine that? Because there
has not been significant biological evolution in three thousand years,
you know, since about one thousand BC, So what could
have happened? Uh, we'll get to that. So he says
(20:15):
that around one thousand BC, modern human consciousness meaning our
our awareness of awareness, our internal ability to neurotize, like
we were talking about in that in that example, it
began as a cultural invention, probably in Mesopotamia that's spread
across the world. And before that time, for a long time,
(20:37):
for thousands of years, before about one thousand b C,
almost all humans were not conscious in the way we were.
But we're commanded in all novel behaviors by hallucinated voices
that they called gods. Yeah, that's that's insane. So in this,
in this uh understanding, if we have Nott driving by
(21:02):
seventy five, he sees his ancient god, he doesn't think, boy,
I've got to take the exit to street. Instead, he
hears something. What if he hears the voice of Molok
telling him watch out for Molok right there? He might
think Seeing that, he might think so now, just I mean,
I'm afraid if I overcomplicated this by introducing Molik into
(21:23):
the example. But no, I mean, my question though, is
like this is not figurative. This is like the hypothesis
is that there is an auditory hallucination of a voice.
This is not like you know, a metaphor self. No, no, no,
that that is exactly what he's saying. He's literally saying that.
Before about a thousand years ago, people were not conscious.
(21:44):
They did not have the ability to snap out of
the hypnotized state and think about what they would do. Instead,
what happened is they stayed in the hypnotized state their
entire lives, and when some kind of novel stimuli arose
something that could not be dealt with on basic instinct
and conditioned behaviors, like when we're mowing the lawn. Uh.
(22:05):
When that happened, a voice would tell them what to do,
and they would hear the voice audibly within their head
and then be uh commanded, I guess and yeah, and
they and they would obey intellectably. They would obey in
the sense that James talks in the book about instinctual obedience,
like how in you know, social animal species, when there
(22:28):
is a dominant individual that you can really very strongly
control people's behavior by. Yeah, by displaying these dominant uh
sort of signals and getting up in somebody's space and
telling them what to do very firmly, people tend to
obey uh. And so he he says that this sort
of instinct, the tendency to obey, is internalized and it
(22:52):
turns into the temporal lobe of the non dominant hemisphere
of the brain. So, and most people that's going to
be the right himis sphere. You are a right handed person,
the non dominant hemisphere is gonna be the right hemisphere,
the temporal lobe of the non dominant hemisphere generating this
auditory hallucination and commanding the dominant hemisphere what to do.
(23:14):
So part of the question would be how does the
non dominant hemisphere know what to do? And you would
say there that what appears to be happening is that
the non dominant hemisphere in Jane's model, is the place
where the integration and synthesis of information is taking place.
So it's doing the kind of judgment part that we
would normally do consciously. Like you would, you would put
(23:36):
together a bunch of stuff in your mind, some pictures
and some words and some ideas, and say, okay, here's
what I need to do. Instead of all that happening consciously,
this would happen unconsciously, isolated in the right hemisphere, delivered
as an auditory hallucination to the left hemisphere. So would this,
without getting too far into the technical details, would this
(23:59):
activity synthesis also include memory of past events? Now here's
an interesting thing. You have to imagine what memory would
consist of if you did not have the ability to
be conscious. Now, I don't think we have the space
today to fully discuss exactly what Jane's theory of consciousness
(24:19):
is because it's a complex thing. Essentially for him. I'll
try to give you the simple version for Jane's consciousness
is based on language. He says that you couldn't be
conscious without having a language. So there are some kind
of disturbing takeaways from this. One of them is that
it's impossible for say, animals to be conscious if they
don't really have a language that's capable. Here here's the
(24:41):
key part of generating metaphors. So metaphors are sort of
the ultimate workhorse of what language is. It's when you
describe an unknown thing in terms of a known thing.
One of my favorite quotes from that is from a
quotes pertaining to that is a throwaway joke or observation
in the television show community. A metaphor is a thought
(25:04):
wearing another thoughts hat. That's a good one, man. You know.
The funny thing about metaphor is even the word metaphor
is a metaphor. The word metaphor comes from Greek. It
means to carry across. So it takes this unknown concept
of the abstract idea of taking the definition of one
word and using it to help understand another word. But
(25:25):
it takes that from the literal act of carrying something
from one place to another. So the word metaphor is
a metaphor, and what's more meta than consciousness? I mean,
like the ability Consciousness basically is the ability to extend
our understanding of reality and kind of wrap it in
a sort of digestible form. Or we can think about
the past, we can think about the future, you can
(25:47):
think about the present all at the same time. That
is Jane's theory. So Jane says consciousness is a place.
It is a metaphorical mind space based on the analogy
of real space. Now that might sound kind of hard
to understand for a second, or might take a second
to segment set in. But when you start testing that
against your experience, at least for me, I often find
(26:09):
that that's true in the same way that the meaning
of the word metaphor is this abstract thing that's taken
from the literal physical action of carrying something from one
place to another. Consciousness, for Janes is this abstract space
that is based on the metaphor of real space. And
when I was reading up on this to the idea
(26:30):
of that god voice, we've basically subsumed that into this
kind of unspoken voice, unheard voice that is our consciousness.
So it's like we don't hear the voice, but we've
absorbed that essentially into our ability to you know, process
all of this stuff. Yeah, it's interesting. So here's one thing.
(26:52):
A bicameral person and a conscious person might not necessarily
do different things in the same in the same situation. Right.
They might both come to the whole in the freeway,
see the god molech not know what to do for
a second, and then take the same route to get
around to work. The only difference is how the brain
(27:12):
organizes and integrates and delivers that information. Now, there might
be other cases where a conscious person and a bicameral
person would do something different. And before we get to
too lost on this point, there there is another disturbing implication.
I want to plant the seed here for our exploration,
and that is that if Jans is correct, when we're
(27:36):
following this line of reasoning, language is a pre existing
necessity for the development of consciousness, which means that language
predates consciousness the way we would understand it. And so
that is to me, that is a real stereotype buster,
because we associate language, whether written or spoken, with this
(27:59):
act of consciousness of awareness. Yeah, I mean this is
a super radical hypothesis. I mean when I look at
this and I say, I find it interesting, but I
don't believe it. It's not necessarily because I have found
any of his particular arguments very faulty. Uh, most of
his arguments are I feel like, are moderately too strongly persuasive.
(28:21):
It's just that it goes so strongly against what you
would tend to think, is that, you know, the base
assumption that if there is such a thing as consciousness,
it's a biological invention based on how brains work, rather
than a cultural invention made possible by language. Um. But
one thing, one other thing I should mention, just to
(28:42):
make clear, is also his idea about how the evolution
of consciousness comes across. So basically you have to imagine
in human history there's a three stage evolution where human primates,
uh first without language, are like he imagines animals are,
which are just stimulus response machines automata that humans like
(29:05):
us that had very powerful brains, brains just as biologically
powerful as ours, capable of as many calculations and all
that kind of stuff, and they were just working on
instinct and conditioning. Which and that's it, right, because it's
hard to imagine that. Does that mean agriculture as well?
(29:25):
Does that mean other other things we consider completely human inventions,
you know, like cooking, hunting? Does that exist before consciousness? No?
I mean hunting, I think probably does. But once we
get to agriculture, that's the next stage. So you've got
the animal stage where we're just stimulus response machines. Then
the evolution of language makes possible the transition to buy
(29:49):
cameraality by cameraality comes after this stage, and that's when
we're in the state where we're still not conscious yet
but we're hearing these hallucinated voices. And then in the
third stay it about three thousand years ago, we make
the final transition to modern human consciousness, where we have
the ability to narratize in this metaphorical mind space. Well,
(30:11):
here we are, I think that's a good place to
take a quick break, and then we'll dive into that
metaphorical mind space, and we're back. This is already such
a head trip, you guys, I think we've got a
pretty good forty foot view, right, we understand some of
(30:34):
the basic differentiators. And now, now, if you'd be so
kind you, I know that everybody listening is wondering what
evidence does Jane's base these claims on, or what you know,
what does he draw from? Because you mentioned that it's
it's it's a far reaching argument. Yes, so it's a
it's a very multidisciplinary approach. He draws from the history
(30:57):
of literature, he draws from our key oology, he draws
from anthropology and understanding ancient religions and societies. He draws
from uh neurology, from studying the function in different regions
of the brain. That might be one of the most
limited areas. Because he was writing back in nineteen seventy six.
We know more about regions of the brain now than
(31:18):
we did then, but we still knew a decent amount then.
And like I said, that, the picture is not clear
to me what neurology since then has had to say
about his hypothesis. It seems that there are some results
that sort of go against it and others that sort
of go in favor of it. So I don't know
if that helps us in one direction yet. Um. But
(31:40):
then also psychology, of course, which was his own field,
so I might go to one of his primary examples
of how ancient literature would inform this, because literature is
a great place to look for evidence of consciousness. You
can just look at the characters and see are the
characters conscious? Do they in prospect? Do they have the
(32:01):
ability to neurotize in mind space? Here is a really
crazy thing that I never noticed before. But James makes
this argument pretty strongly. I haven't I've asked in our
audience to see if anybody with expertise in the classics,
you know, in ancient Greek literature can contradict what he
has to say. I haven't had any takers yet, but
(32:21):
he makes the argument pretty convincingly that the characters of
Homer's the Iliad are not conscious. Yeah. This this was
the mind blowing thing for me as well, because again
we I think I'm learning about what a high pedestal
we place the concept of consciousness on the understanding of
(32:45):
something like one of the world's most famous works of
literature is that it must inherently be made by conscious thought. Yeah,
I mean when you picture the writer you pick, I
mean maybe you don't. I do. I picture a person
in thought. I picture a person who is consciously introspecting
(33:09):
about what to write next. But you have to imagine
that literature before the conscious period, if the obviously, if
this is true, we're just entertaining it. Yeah, we're what
ifing if there were such a thing as a bicameral period,
what would the writing process of a bicameral author be? Like,
this is a person who does not have the power
to introspect or narratize in a mind space. It would
(33:31):
be transcription, right exactly. It would be essentially taking transcription
from literature that is compiled and integrated unconsciously by the
right brain in in most people, by the non dominant hemisphere. Wow,
it sounds like there's a plan almost uh and so
uh and so. You would see examples of this in, say,
(33:54):
how how the ancient act of composition is described. Here's
something kind of creepy. What if you took some of
what appears to be the literary conventions of ancient literature
just literally? How about sing to me? Oh, Muse, the
song of all these Greek poems starting with the invocation
(34:16):
of the Muse. Now we usually look at that as
a literary device. We say, Okay, they're just being metaphorical.
They're saying, like, I'm trying to get into the mood
about writing. I want some you know, I need this
introspective juice, and so that's my metaphor, this god, the
Muse is my metaphor. What if you just take them
at their word. They're asking the God to start telling
(34:38):
them what to write. That's amazing, well, but I mean
it also, it doesn't. It's not too far of a
jump from the way we think of ancient civilizations and
the way they treat gods and act as though all
things come directly as a result of their relationship with God.
And it's very specific. It's like, my crops grow because
I did this thing and the God's made it. So
(35:00):
it's not it's not figurative in any way. And it's
not just these external activities like what allows the crops
to grow, what changes the weather. It's internalized influence of
the gods that we see in Jane's interpretation of the iLiads.
So he looks at the Iliad, and he says, I'm
looking through this thing and trying to find places where
characters are introspecting. He says, there's maybe a couple of places,
(35:22):
and these appear to be later additions to the text,
added by scribes long after it was first composed. If
you look at the original version of the text and
what appears to be its oldest parts. Characters do not
make decisions by internal introspection. When novel stimuli arise, a
god shows up and tells them what to do. So
(35:42):
Achilles is about to strike down Agamymnon, He's like, I
I don't know what to do. I'm so angry, I'm
gonna attack my king. And then a god shows up,
grabs him by the hair and says, don't do it,
and then repeat it again and again throughout this ancient
epic poem. Whenever people are faced with novel stimuli, a
(36:03):
god shows up says do this, and they do it,
so as you said intellectively, right, yeah, And so there's
another There's one thing that really stuck out to me
about this, where James claims there is no concept of will,
nor nor a word for it in the Iliot. I
sure do remember thinking that the Odyssey was a hell
(36:24):
of a lot more interesting than the Iliad when I
was a kid, And he makes that contrast, I mean,
the Odyssey seems to have a lot more evidence of
consciousness within it than the Iliad does. For James, at last,
there's inner torment in the Odyssey characters developed. So with
a lot of his a lot of his claims with
(36:44):
the Iliad in particular, dwell on some word usage exactly. Yeah,
So James points out that in the Iliad there are
a number of words in the ancient Greek vocabulary that,
if you look to later texts, have meanings that are
clearly associated with consciousness and conscious introspection, but as deployed
in the Iliad, means something else. They have these corporeal,
(37:08):
non conscious meanings. For example, the word see. He like
our word psyche in later centuries. He says this, you know,
you can find it all throughout Greek literature. It means
consciousness or mind or soul. But in the Iliad, He's like,
it looks like this is just referring to sort of
life fluids like blood or breath. The word thumos, he says,
(37:30):
in later centuries, you look through Greek literature, and this
appears to me to mean something like emotional mind or soul.
In the Iliad, he says it means something more like motion,
like when a soldier dies on the field, the thumos
goes out of their arms and legs. The word noose,
which he says in later Greek literature, appears to means
(37:51):
something like conscious mind or consciousness. In the Iliad, he says,
it means like field of vision. So if you can
see something, it's in your noose. Kind of kind of freaky, huh,
And Zeus holds uh like Zeus holds a Disseus in
his noose. Yeah, he holds him in his eyes, and yeah, Zeus.
(38:15):
The news of Zeus. I mean it's no, no, no,
I mean it's it's kind of creepy to imagine it.
It is, no, it is, and I mean it's like
it's all entirely practical and functional stuff. You know. It's like, literally,
this is what I see, this is how I interact
with it, and yet there is still like this mystical
(38:36):
element to it where we're being fed instructions by these
like deities. So it's it's it's it's fascinating counterpoint where
there's no agency. Yeah, and it goes straight back to
Jane's idea of consciousness being a metaphor based on physical
space because or physical actions in physical space. Because think
about how often in your consciousness you express conscious content
(38:59):
or conscious behavior with the metaphor of vision, like when
somebody is explaining something to you and you don't get
it and then you finally consciously comprehend it, I see,
or or having vision, having a vision being like someone
that has foresight that can take a top down view
of something mentally, and oracles have a part to play
(39:22):
at our story later. Yeah. So this also maybe calls
to mind for some of us the concept of like
soma or sarks or numa. You know, Uh, there's the
word soma that eventually comes to mean body, right, but
it's always in the plural and homer and it just
(39:42):
means dead limbs of a corpse. And now there's a
drug called soma that gives you dead limbs like a corpse. Dole,
is that the name? For about three months? That's why
you were inning the whole past three months. I knew
it was so obviously, his his exploration of the iliad
(40:07):
is just one of the many historical avenues that James
goes down in his book, there's no way for us
to explore all of them here if you want. If
you want more detail, you can read his book, or
you can go listen to the two episodes that Robert
Lamb and I did on Stuff to Blow your Mind,
where we we go a lot more into We still
don't cover everything, but a lot of the different examples
he discusses from history. Some of the other things he
(40:28):
brings up are, for example, the theocratic organization of ancient society.
When you look at the rulers of many ancient kingdoms,
it is just almost ubiquitous that the king is a
god or a representative of a god. Now what if
instead of thinking about that metaphorically or as some kind
(40:50):
of tool of social control, we just took it literally
and said, Okay, what they're saying about the role of
the king is correct. The God tells the king what
to do, and then the king commands the people. We
are all ruled by this non dominant temboro lobe, exactly
the king's right hemisphere, or if the king was right
handed left handed, the yeah, the non dominant hemisphere of
(41:11):
the king is presenting to the king as a god
telling the king what to do, and that is being
interpreted by the king's dominant hemisphere as instructions that must
be carried out and delivered on his commands to the people.
And if that's that's the case, there's another interesting twist here.
If that's the case, it explains why God's often only
(41:35):
appear to the person they're interacting with, right person they're commanding. Yeah,
so think about this. In the history of religions, early
religions seem to have a lot of direct interaction with
idols and with God experiences directly. I mean, if you
read about the religious phenomenology of the most ancient religions
(41:56):
in the world, people talk constantly about conversations with the gods,
where the gods tell them what to do, and they
talk about going to see the gods. Oftentimes these are
represented as idols, like and part of Jane's theory is
that idols where things created to just help people trigger
their hallucinations when they wanted information, they could put themselves
(42:17):
themselves in an altered state of consciousness by interacting with
these idols that would get the hallucinations going. Now you
see that and then you see this transition to other
kinds of religion. It's not that people used to be
more religious and now they're less religious. Religion just seems
to be a very different kind of thing later on.
(42:37):
So in the last two thousand years or so, you
start to see these religions based on things like faith
and dogma, which, if you imagine a bicameral world, even
though everybody's believing in gods, what's the role for something
like faith in there, Like, you don't need to be
told to believe in a doctrine or something. It's just
like you're talking to the gods all the time. There's
(42:59):
no need for faith, and you're doing what they say instantly. Yeah,
faith sort of inherently incorporates the idea of overcoming doubt exactly,
and especially law written law. This is a big thing
for James where he talks about how one of the
major factors precipitating the transition from the bicameral mind to
(43:20):
the conscious mind is well. One thing he points out calamity.
So there will be these widespread disasters in the late
Bronze Age collapse and all that that caused problems in
the way society was working that sort of put pressures
on people and forced them to find new ways to
structure their minds in order to live. But the other
major influence he highlights is literature, and literature would include
(43:43):
written law. Think about how the presence of a written
law would undermine your relationship with the gods that tell
you what to do. Yeah. If there's any kind of
conflict there, where which side do you choose? Yeah? And
so he he actually argues that there were probably going
to be these periods where, say, within one particular religious tradition,
(44:04):
there would be a conflict between the conscious people who
are trying to practice the conscious version of that religion
and the bicameral people who are trying to practice the
bicameral version of that religion. He gives one example from
uh from the Old Testament where he says, you know,
there are these passages in the Old Testament and in
the Hebrew Bible where it says you really should not
(44:26):
tolerate anybody who has an obe. What does that mean
this word obe? And he says that what he thinks
this word means is like familiar spirit, meaning that there
could have been at the time a brotherhood of conscious
priests who are trying to enforce the conscious version of
the religion and saw the people who were trying to
practice their bicameral hallucinated voice version of the religion as
(44:49):
blasphemous and and causing trouble within their their control over
what faith in doctrine was. Does this tie into monotheism
at that point as well? Yeah, it would be hard
to have monotheism under bicameraality. You could imagine that if
the bicameral world transitioning into a conscious world, you would
probably see a concurrent transition away from polytheism and towards monotheism,
(45:13):
which kind of does line up with the timeline we see.
So you can see how fascinating this is and how
easily this becomes a very very deep rabbit hole. But
we would be remiss if we did not point out
that there is also a lot of criticism here. Sure,
I mean, there are there are tons of reasons to
(45:36):
doubt this. I mean, one would just be to say, well, okay,
he puts a lot of interesting evidence on the table,
but uh, a statement, this radical, you know, hypothesis, this
this radical doesn't really get anywhere until it makes predictions
about things yet unknown that we find out are in
fact correct, and so I would say has not yet
(45:57):
met that burden. I don't think it has predicted much
that we've discovered. Oh yeah, it's true. One thing that
might be interesting would be if we discover whole cases
of ancient documents that we've never found before. You know,
archaeologists turn up ancient literature is previously undiscovered, and we
find a transition along the lines of what he claims
(46:17):
is there for the Iliad and the Odyssey. So if
we see you know, uh, four thousand year old literature
or you know, year old literature having all these words
that later on we know in these languages mean things
about consciousness and in context do not mean anything about consciousness,
I'd say that's a good that's a good prediction. Confirmed
(46:38):
that we're seeing more things line up with the timeline
of literature not reflecting consciousness and then later reflecting consciousness.
Why there's no effort to do that kind of analysis,
I don't know. I mean, I've seen some people try
to look at other ancient works of literature and say,
you know what, how much introspective content is there? But
(46:58):
I don't know that anybody's really gone that deep on
it yet. I mean, there might be a study out
there I'm not aware of. But there's also there's also
a heap of not to make a heap problem, but
there's there's also a heap of differing constraints. If we're
talking literature of that age, then it may be radically
(47:19):
different in one place for entirely unrelated reasons. Well, right,
I mean, so think about the alternatives. Let's just assume
that the bicameral hypothesis is not correct and that people
have always been conscious. And yet at the same time,
let's just take Jane's as as correct in his argument
that those words in the Iliad don't reflect any conscious content.
(47:42):
What would explain that? That's an interesting problem in itself.
How come these conscious people creating an ancient work of
literature did not put any consciousness into the work. That's
you know, that's a fascinating question. I've got to ban
myself from using the word fascinating for ease the rest
of this episode and in this in this exploration, I
(48:05):
guess one of the big questions people would run into is, okay,
is fascinating? Even the people who criticize James and disagree
with the idea. Say, wow, what a oh, I did
it again? What a what an interesting that MAT's word?
What an interesting what? What an interesting proposal? What a
(48:25):
brain raking proposal. There we go, You've got the double oo.
That's pretty rare. Got to earn that one. But to
what end? Where does this lead us? What are the implications?
How does this exist in the modern world? But not
so fast been first we're gonna hear from our sponsor.
(48:51):
We've returned some of the implications that are pretty clear.
Here is the idea that religion is related to internal hallucinations,
which may may seem offensive to some people. At this time.
We're not advocating this, we are saying it's the argument, right. Well,
I mean, James wouldn't necessarily say that modern religions are
(49:13):
related to internal hallucinations. I think you would have said
that the ancient religions of the bicameral people's. But as
as as we were talking about earlier, modern religion is
just very different, I mean just descriptively very different from
the kinds of religion that you would imagine would have
been practiced by bicameral people. And what are what are
(49:33):
some what are some vestiges if they exist. Well, one
thing that would be quite obvious that James point out
points out is the condition of schizophrenia. So schizophrenia is
often characterized by the perception of auditory hallucinations. People hear voices,
and they hear voices with great lucidity. Often it's a
(49:54):
lot of times it's hard for people who have never
had an auditory hallucination to imagine that you could hear
a voice that isn't really there and hear it as
clearly and as you know, as as I don't know
what the word as really as as absolutely concretely as
the voice of somebody in the room. But it can.
(50:14):
I've read tons of reports that can absolutely feel like that.
Auditory hallucinations can be incredibly convincing and powerful and can
have this kind of sway over behavior. Many other things
about schizophrenia do seem to line up with some of
the phenomenology of what Jane's imagines would be the bicameral mind.
So there's a sort of loss of the ability to
(50:37):
narrotize the self. Sometimes, uh, sometimes people with schizophrenia have
difficulty imagining the like like the draw a person test.
There's a test sometimes used to diagnose schizophrenia, where um,
people who have the condition have difficulty drawing a person.
Then then there's the additional thing, for instance, the idea
(50:58):
that in some cases people suffering from schizophrenia are able
to tickle themselves. Did you hear that one? No, I
haven't heard that. But that's that seems like it couldn't
maybe be compatible with the bi cameral hypothesis just because
of the division between the hemispheres of the brain that
would be implied there. And what's another strange thing about
(51:19):
this is that regardless of whether you agree with this
idea or whether you disagree, there is no denying that
it is influenced the modern world, even if it's untrue
in very strange and meaningful ways. If part of the
argument is based on literature and art, the the concept
(51:40):
of bi cameralism itself has been driving literature and art well.
Not only that, we've talked a little bit about how
this hypothesis could be used to explain the evolution of religion,
I suppose, but I don't think we've really touched on
the idea that when those voices went away, it was negative,
it caused anguish ramatic And this is another thing that
(52:02):
ties into schizophrenia. I mean, we often think about schizophrenia
as a sense of being abandoned, you know, by your God.
Yeah exactly. I mean, like I was saying, with schizophrenia,
often people um don't necessarily perceive all of the voices
that they hear during schizophrenic hallucinations as negative. Like sometimes
they see the voices as helpful, or sometimes they see
(52:25):
them as comforting. Other times they do see them as
negative or very distressing. Um As, I would imagine in
some cases, the bicameral gods could be like the gods
in this case would have been your own mind, So
they would have been as powerful and as various as
people's own minds tend to be. So you could have
voices that would be very smart and very helpful. You
(52:46):
could have voices that are not so smart and not
so helpful. You could have voices that are illogical and
commanding you to do bad things. You could have voices
that are nice, you could have voices that are mean
and critical. I mean, just think about how much in
a visuality there is in the way our our minds
are built. And you can imagine that same thing in
the relationship between the bicameral god and the bicameral person.
(53:09):
But anyway, if you find your voices helpful and comforting,
when they go away, this can be very distressing to you.
And James pulls together a lot of evidence to suggest
that when people's gods vanished, when they made this transition
from bicamerality the consciousness, it was traumatic for them. Like
he cites all this ancient literature of people saying I
(53:29):
want my God's back. He even cites an example from
the Psalms where people are saying, my heart pants for you, Oh,
God's where are you come back? It makes me think
of the fall, the fall of Man of Adam and Eve.
Let's I was explained, is like, that's when it happened, right, Like,
that was literally what caused us to be abandoned. Before
that we were all one. It was that he calls
(53:50):
it the el aheim. I believe the great ones that
the elheim is one of the words in the Hebrew
Bible used for the name of God. It's usually translated
in modern English translations in a singular for God, but
it he he argues that really in the ancient context
it should be translated as God's It is a plural word,
but the way I understand it, it could mean singular
(54:13):
or plural um and he what just says we should
translate it plural, you know how how it would be
in the ancient context, and it's people talking about how
they want the voices back. Yeah, And just this gets
into one tiny thing that we've covered before on this show,
which is the possibilities of hallucinogens physical the eating of
substances in early man and how possibly that could have
(54:35):
played a role in the connection or a separation, you
know what, a melding of the mind in a way
because of things like psilocybin. Yeah, Terence McKenna, right, yeah, yeah,
food of the gods, Terence McKenna. Some of these ideas
are put forth there. It's fascinating stuff. Ter Grandpa Terry
talking on the ranch telling everybody what's going on. I
(54:57):
wish you guys have invited Nolan I to hang out
with him when you were when you were hanging out
and learning questions. No, I never hung out with Terence.
That would have been great. But it just makes me sorry.
It just makes me think, I wonder if there is
something there, you know, if we just forsake of argument.
Take that the bicamera roll theories are correct, and you
(55:18):
have these two separate hemispheres, and then somehow you're introducing
these chemicals that are causing other types of hallucinations physical
chemical hallucinations. Will check it out. Uh. Philip K. Dick,
the sci fi writer, he was known to dabble in
the hallucinogenic arts, shall we say. In fact, I think
(55:38):
he kind of like had this like crazy flophouse that
he owned where people would just kind of hippies and
stuff would come through and sleep on the floor and
they would share their drugs and he you know, there
was a period in his life where he just kind
of existed, I believe, in a constant hallucinogenic state. And
he absolutely adored Jane's book, And in fact, he wrote
him a letter personally, um, expressing this love of the
(56:02):
book and how it really helped him explain some things. Um.
There's a a trilogy. I think he didn't finish one
of them, but there was a trilogy of books, one
of which is called Valas that Philip K. Dick wrote,
where the character's name is horse lover Fat which horse
lover um I believe Philip is translated to mean horse lover,
and dick is the German word for fat. So he
(56:24):
basically is writing about himself, and in this book he
is narrating it as like an omniscient narrator, but then
sometimes switches to where he's talking about himself as though
he's the same person that he's narrating about. And this
the one big part of the story is based on
if the real thing that happened to him, where he
claims that a pink laser from outer space shot into
(56:45):
his brain and gave him knowledge of a strangulated um
in testicle in his son that could have potentially killed him,
and the knowledge that he received allowed him to intervene
and save his son's life. Um and from that point on,
you know, again, psychedelics, a lot of a lot of
that at play. He claimed to hear these voices. So
(57:09):
what do you say in the letter? It's a long letter,
but I'll just read you a couple of parts where
he says what I did not expect, however, was to
find myself under the jurisdiction of an ancient god who
commanded me first this way and then that, extricating me
from a highly stressful situation I had found myself in
no theory of my own, and for three years I
(57:29):
have studied in labor to come up with a theory
or by anyone else assumingly means anyone else but you
talking to Jane. Uh could account for the exquisitely beautiful voice,
the inner voice, which I heard off and on for
eleven months. At first I told my wife that the
Elheim we're talking to me. Later, during one of my
many hypnogogic dialogues between me and this articulating entity, it
(57:53):
also communicated in dreams. In written form, it informed me
that Jesus was a name for Zeus Zagreus. However, in
most dreams early on, it appeared in the form of
Sybil of Apollo, but with a third eye and lateral
lens form by which she could see and hence no everything.
He then wraps it up with this. Let me say
(58:14):
in conclusion that your superb book has now made it
possible for me to discuss my experience as openly without
being merely called schizophrenic. That's awesome. He was even a
great writer of letters, and it's heavy stuff, and of
course we were talking about modern literature. We would be remiss.
You can read that letter in full online, and UH,
(58:36):
we would be remiss if we did not at least
briefly mentioned Westworld and Westworld encounters some topics like this. Now,
given the shows, given our mutual agreement between us as
host and between our audience, we are not going to
spoil West World for you. But if you enjoy science
(59:01):
fiction and you enjoyed this episode, we do highly recommend
that you consider checking it out. If you can afford
an HBO subscription or no, friend, let me let me
spoil it. John Wayne is God. Everybody knows that, and hey,
hit us up. We'll share our HBO Go accounts or
at least our moms. So in the course of our
(59:22):
exploration today, there's another big thing we have to mention.
We have touched on a controversial topic, the concept of
hearing voices sometimes called auditory hallucinations. And if you are
listening to this and you feel that you are suffering
from a condition related to this or similar to this, UH,
(59:43):
please know that you are not alone, you are not isolated,
and there are organizations around the world that are waiting
to support you. To help you, you can call Lines
for Life at one d to seven, three eight to
five five. You can also check out If you are
someone who both feels you hear voices and you feel
(01:00:04):
at peace with this, or you want to explore it more,
you can also check out organizations like the International Hearing
Voices Network. Guys, I'm hearing a voice right now. It's
super producer Paul, and he's saying, Wow, you guys have
been recording for like an hour and fifteen minutes already.
I didn't hear that. I just Oh, you didn't hear that.
(01:00:25):
I don't think he's talking again, are you? I just
heard that the crocodile must be fed a bunch of times.
What's that? Man? I don't know. I have a voice
just whispering zanzibar at all times, at all times. Even now,
it's very difficult to focus. I can really specific form
of tenitis. It just sounds like zanzibaritis. Aside, Joe, thank
(01:00:50):
you so much for coming on the show. Than a
lot of fun. This is a very nice stove tailed
to our earlier episode with Joe as a gnosticism. Oh
that one was fun too, So if you enjoyed this episode,
please check out our earlier works on nasticism. Joe, you
were also on the show when we talked about internet
trolling and shills. Oh yeah, paid government online manipulators. Yeah,
(01:01:15):
that's uh, that's become a little more relevant since we
first talked about it. Huh, that's fake news. So it's
fake news. Um. One thing that is not fake, however,
is stuff to blow your mind. If you have checked
out our show, if you like our show even a
little bit, you're going to love these guys and the
(01:01:35):
topics that they explore. So don't delay. As soon as
this podcast ends, click over, check out Stuff to blow
your mind. Get a deep dive into the bi camera mind. Yeah.
I was on a very short trip last week, um,
and I listened to your episode on It and the Deadlights,
and I really dug it and I very much enjoyed it. Well.
(01:01:55):
Shout out to my co workers Robert Lammer Christian Sacer. No,
that was two news on there. But they do a
great just great. They talk about like you know, Penny
Wise and the deity from it and kind of cat
they couch it in terms of you know, predatory behavior
and in in nature, and it was you know, it
was really really great. I really enjoyed it. Did you
(01:02:17):
just spoil it? For me, I think Stephen spoiled kid.
I'm just kidding. We saw it together. Come on, we
did see it together. It's true. So the voices in
our respective heads are compelling us to end today's episode, However,
not the show. We'd like to hear what you think.
Is there some sand to this argument? How much a
(01:02:39):
grain to grains a heap? I'm glad you went there.
Anything you want to you want to talk about anything
we've covered on this episode, you can find us on Facebook.
You can find us on Twitter, where we're conspiracy. Stuff
is a pile smaller than a heap. I feel like
it is, intuitively, but I don't you know, I don't
(01:03:00):
know who the authority would be on that. You know what,
If you guys are an authority out there, let us know.
Send us an email. Please let us know the difference.
It's it's killing us. Uh. You can send us an email.
We are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
(00:25):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noel. They call me Ben. You are you?
And that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
In the beginning of our opening notes for this episode,
I had I had a relatively lame, open ended question,
but I believe in it and I want to know.
(00:46):
What's what's on your mind? How are you guys feeling today?
Are you trying to set up the topic? I you know,
originally I was when I wrote, Yeah, really, what's what's
going on with you guys? Yeah? Know, just the general
state of affairs in the country, the world, you know,
base level fear and paranoia. Um, but other than that,
(01:09):
not too bad. Yeah, feeling pretty good today. I don't
know that it looked like it was gonna storm. I
haven't seen any rain yet, so hey, it's a bright
new day, keeping it light. Yeah. So I it's weird
because that's such a common phrase in English, and it's
a very common sentiment in all of humanity. People will
(01:31):
say Hey, what's what's on your mind? As though your
mind is some sort of object like a table upon
which things can be placed, you know. And today we're
also touching on a question that has baffled, confounded, perplexed,
and uh infuriated people throughout history, which is what what
(01:54):
is a mind? You know? Is when we say a mind,
are we saying that we are observing a consciousness? You know?
Are we talking about just the brain itself and its functions? Right?
And maybe just just for set up here, let's explore
the idea of consciousness because you told us a pretty
(02:14):
impressive and fascinating quotation earlier before we went on the air. Yes. Uh,
A gentleman named Daniel Dennett who is a philosopher. I
can't speak for him. I would say he thinks of
himself as a philosopher slash cognitive scientists, um. And he
gave a Ted talk in two thousand seven, and he
had this to say on the idea of what is
(02:35):
a consciousness? He says that what we are is approximately
one hundred trillion little cellular robots. That's he says, that's
what we're made out of. No other ingredients, were just
made of cells and not one of those cells is conscious,
and not a single one of those cares who you
are or knows that you are a thing. He says. Somehow,
(02:58):
he and everybody else in his field, they have to
explain or at least their tasked with explaining when you
put like how you put together these groups of cells,
of trillions of cells, if you group them into what
he calls armies and battalions. Uh, how do those these
little robotic, unconscious cells, how do they become us? How
(03:19):
do they create ideas? How do they create memories and colors?
How do we see colors from these cells? And um?
And then what does that mean? Like is that consciousness
if you can observe those things and think about those things?
And then he he ended that thought with just somehow
all of the content, all the consciousness that we experience
(03:40):
is accomplished by the the busy activity of these hordes
of neurons that are in our brain, that are just
firing and storing information through connections. Uh. Pretty crazy. And
the biggest thing is, he says, is how is this possible? Like?
How how could that be? I really, you know, I
really appreciate that because it makes me think of our
(04:01):
examination of biomes, you know, or or microbiomes rather where
wherein we see that there's there's an entire world in
somebody's digestive system, right, And I think the first time
I learned about that was when we're doing an episode
of our show brain Stuff on farts. Yeah, and also
(04:24):
shout out to the Petalmon, the professional professional flashy lists
story for another day. I'm getting I'm getting hard side
eye from role on this one. Sorry, yeah, sorry, all
I know how I feel about farts in the podcast studio.
It's a very sensitive subject because it's a very small
room us. The concept of consciousness, how is it possible? Right? What?
(04:47):
What is a mind? People have generated multiple interpretations suppositions
about this, and when we started digging into this, we
were inspired, but we also thought, this is a lot,
This is a lot of weird stuff to unpack and explore.
(05:08):
And luckily we were able to contact one of our
recurring guests, a long time friend of the show Ladies
and Gentlemen, Joe McCormick, co host of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind. Hey, how are you guys doing today? Great
now that you're here, we were really bummed out before
you walk a little bit Yeah, thanks, thanks for walking
(05:31):
in and saving saving the day. Just gonna continue pretending
that I wasn't sitting here the whole time. What are
you talking about? You you weren't sitting here, I was
not conscious of it. Yeah, So obviously it sounds like
you guys want to talk about consciousness today. And we
actually did in a two parter on consciousness recently, on
(05:51):
stuff to blow your mind, Not so much on the
problem of consciousness broadly, because how could you cover that
in a single episode. It's a topic that comes up
over and over again on our show. It's one of
most perplexing questions in all of science and the philosophy
of mind. What is consciousness and where does it come from?
And I like that you brought up that Daniel Dennet quote, Matt,
because it calls to mind the problem of the heap
(06:13):
you all know about, like the the heapness problem. If
you have one grain of sand, that's not a heap,
and if you have two grains of sand, that's not
a heap. But at some point you keep adding grains
of sand and a heap of sand emerges. At what
point does the heap happen? It's hard to pick a number,
isn't it. Yah? Yeah, And a similar kind of problem
(06:34):
arises from the problem of consciousness that we know to
some degree, consciousness is created by brains that are processing information.
One experiment you can do to sort of prove this
to yourself is go under general anesthesia. If you go
under general anesthesia, the information processing in your brain is
suppressed and you have complete blackout. It's absolute loss of
(06:57):
consciousness for the time that you're out only podcast welcome
blacked out. Yeah. So so yeah, So you come back
from that, you're you regain your consciousness and you think, wow, okay,
so it's possible for my brain to exist and all
those cells to be there, but when they're not doing something,
my consciousness ceases. But here's a much creepier version. It
(07:21):
seems that those cells in your brain can be doing
a lot of stuff without generating consciousness. I want to
see if you guys have ever been in this scenario.
You ever gotten to a destination and parked your car
and then realize like, oh my god, I was not
conscious while I was driving here. What happened? It's a
(07:41):
blur you remember, let's call it point A, which was
your last significant memory before the drive and then all
of a sudden there's a missing gap and you're at
you you feel like you're at point B, but maybe
point H, point J. You know, any things have happened,
and you have this sort of localized amnesia, just the
(08:06):
feeling that you did I actually drive here because you
were probably lost in thought, in you know, one section
or several sections of your brain working together, in that
conscious part where you're paying attention to what my arms
are doing and what my feet are doing. It's almost
like it wasn't happening. Well, I would imagine too, Like
with wrote kind of mindless activities like that, this is
(08:28):
easier than let's say, you know, something like spending time
with a loved one or like generating new memories and
things like that. Exactly. No, So that's the important thing
is that the right repetitious aspect of it. So on
these types of activities like driving or say, you know,
other household chores boring sex, moing, mowing the lawn. Didn't
(08:51):
expect it to go that way. Mowing the lawn. Mowing
the lawn is our show's euphemism for boring sex. Okay, well, yeah,
any of these repetitive activities yeah, you can. You can
like totally lose consciousness and yet your mind is still working.
You think about all the stuff your brain has to
be doing to drive you from one place to another.
It's got to take in visual information and auditory inform constantly, constantly,
(09:15):
constantly updating your mental model of what the road is
where you need to go. It's got to coordinate all
your muscles with timing being very precise feedback from the wheel.
This is complex behavior without you being present in your
mind for it for it to happen at one point
of where just a quick interjection. In addition to this,
(09:37):
our brains are also keeping the entire human ship running right.
So many bodily processes that we are not consciously aware of.
There's a thing that used to happen to me when
I was a kid. I would lay awake at night
and I was too conscious of my breathing, and I thought, well,
if I don't forget that I've been breathing the whole time,
(09:57):
if I keep concentrating on it, then what if it
just stops? You know, I just add to the point,
it does seem mind boggling when we think about it.
How many things, not just when we're driving, but just
existing tons of what we do is unconscious. Your brain
constantly regulates activity within the body unconsciously, the regulation and
(10:19):
release of hormones, neurotransmitter reuptake, digestion, all this kind of
stuff is going on your brain telling your body what
to do, but you not being conscious of it. Meanwhile,
you're very conscious of, say, most of the running and
jumping you do, and sometimes conscious of breathing. Why is that?
Do you ever think about that? How come evolution created
(10:42):
an animal that has conscious control of running and jumping,
unconscious control of digestion, and optionally conscious control of breathing.
What if you have to consciously control your heart rate
and your digestion but unconsciously moved about through the world.
Thought of that as making my heart rate speed up
right now? Anyway, that's kind of a weird thing to ponder.
(11:04):
I mean, you can you can start to think of,
like evolutionary reasons why one might be selected for more
than the other. But that also is interesting because it
gives you reasons that consciousness might be biologically adaptive, that
it could actually be useful for something. And that's a
big question in the these all these debates about consciousness.
Does consciousness actually do anything or is it just a
(11:26):
helpless observer of what the body would be doing? Anyway,
But I want to go back to the road analogy.
There we are. We're on the road, all right. So
you are in this highway hypnosis state. You're driving from
one place to another. You for some reason, whyever this happens,
I'm not quite sure, but you are not conscious of
what's going on. You're just somewhere else and you're you know,
your your body is driving on its own, controlled by
(11:48):
your brain but not by your mind. Suddenly, along the way,
let's say you're coming to work and a long a
long I seventy five or wherever you'd be traveling, you
get to a place where there was a giant pit
in the middle of the freeway, and the god molech
is down there in the pit, accepting infant sacrifices, and
it's completely blocking your path to get to work. Okay, yeah,
(12:11):
what would happen then, Well, then you would experience a
moment of sudden lucidity. Right, yeah, you'd snap out, you'd
come out of that highway hypnosis state. And what would
happen next? You'd offer your allegiance to no, don't do that,
don't ever do that. We were split on molech in
here scrificabies. We we're all close friends, but part of
(12:37):
being good friends with someone is that you accept that
you don't always agree, and molok is one of those
things that is relatively divisive on our show. I just
want to be candidates. So we're snapped back to reality.
Right here comes gravity. But why do you nice? So
why do you snam back? Why do you snam back now?
Because because there's a threat or there's danger, Hey, you
(12:58):
gotta figure out what to do. That's suddenly that starts
to become a point where you can see what your
consciousness is being used for, that it has some kind
of biological function. Suddenly, So you have all these activities
that you can do and your body can carry out
and your brain can regulate without your consciousness, even things
(13:18):
as complex as driving. But suddenly, when you've got to
make a decision, when there is novel stimuli that you
did not expect to encounter and it doesn't seem to
fit with your you know, wrote conditioned behaviors, then suddenly
you have to use your consciousness to make a decision.
And figure out what to do next. So this reaction
(13:38):
to that novel idea brings you back to the present
moment and you begin do do you begin reevaluating the
existing stimuli? Well, I mean think about what would happen
in your own mind. I can say for me, I
think what I would start to do is I would say, Okay,
I can't go this way, so I need to figure
out what's the other way to get to work. And
(14:00):
I would imagine in my mind sort of a map
of the city and think what are the alternate routes
I could use and how would I get to them?
It would be like modeling. Yeah, I mean what what
would what? Do you all disagree? No, I don't disagree.
But I'm also wondering what happens when your base level
is constantly presenting you with unexpected things and that becomes
(14:21):
the norm. Like if you're a soldier, for example, like
in a foxhole or like in a war zone, and
you constantly have to be shifting and adjusting and you know,
looking out for threats and there's so many of them
that it's basically the norm. Well, I mean, in that case,
you were probably in a state, a state of heightened
awareness constantly, which probably leads to anxiety and stress. Right.
(14:43):
I mean, it can be very stressful to have too
many demands placed upon your consciousness, right, Like, sometimes we
kind of want to slip into that unconscious state. It's relaxing,
decision fatigue, it's a real thing. And so okay, so
I love this exploration. Right now, Malik has appeared and
we're driving to work and we say, oh, we snap
(15:06):
out of it, and we say, okay, well, maybe if
I get off at the four Street exit, there won't
be too much traffic and it'll be a little bit late,
and everybody will understand because it's muleck again. Right. But
here's a question. What if you couldn't do that, the
part where you snap back and come come to your
consciousness and you make a model in your mind of
(15:29):
how to get to work. What if your mind was
not capable of any of that. What if you were
a being for whom every activity in your life was
in that unconscious autopilot state that we get into sometimes
when highway hypnosis, or when you're mowing the lawn, any
of these things that you just do without thinking. Could
(15:49):
it be possible for a being to exist in a
permanent state like that. It seems like it could be possible, right, Yeah,
I feel pretty close to that every once in a while. Well,
they're they're also quite a few mammals who appear to
behave that way, you know, I guess is this in
any way related to medic cognition, you know, thinking about thinking? Yeah,
(16:10):
medic cognition is often associated with the basis of consciousness.
I mean, people have all kinds of debates about what
consciousness exactly is, uh, And we're obviously not going to
settle that question today. But metic cognition, which thinking about
thinking or regulating your own thinking, having the idea of
not just having a thought, but thinking about the fact
that you had a thought, is often what consciousness consists
(16:33):
of in some models at least. So would it be
possible two in What would that be like to not
think about thinking? Well, I mean it seems like it
would be okay for lots of tasks. I mean, you
could get through a lot of your life without thinking
about thinking until you hit these novel stimuli moments where
(16:54):
you needed to make a decision and think about sort
of like you needed to do some internal city mulation
and modeling, like picturing that map in your head and
trying to figure out how to get there when instinct
and conditioning won't suffice. What do you do? Now? Here's
where we're going to get to the book that is
at the center of today's conversation. So recently on Stuff
(17:16):
to Blow your Mind, my co host Robert Lamb and
I did a couple of episodes on the concept of bicameralism,
which was introduced in nineteen seventy six by the American
psychologist Julian Jaynes in his book The Origin of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. And I gotta
say at the outset, this is one of the most
(17:38):
fascinating books I've ever read. It makes an argument about
the nature of consciousness and about the history of consciousness
in the human species that ultimately I think is probably wrong,
Like I probably don't agree with it, but it is
a fascinating hypothesis to explore with him because he pulls
from so many different disciplines with tons of thoughtfulness and evidence,
(18:03):
and it's just a really fascinating ride to go on.
And it made quite a stir when it came out.
I mean, it was pretty popular for a you know what,
ultimately is an academic work, right, Yeah, It's gotten a
lot of attention over the years in in weird, odd
kind of smatterings like it is actually not something that
has been revisited a whole lot in the scientific or
(18:23):
academic literature. One of the things that's frustrating about it is, Okay,
so it introduces and we'll get to what the hypothesis
is in just a second. I hate to keep teasing you,
but it introduces this fascinating radical hypothesis about the history
of consciousness, tries to offer some evidence for it, and
seems to make some predictions about what would be found
in the future. So what you really want is for
(18:44):
a bunch of scientists to start testing what would be
predicted by this hypothesis and see if it's true. Uh,
it's it's The testing of its predictions has been somewhat
slim there. There have been a few studies that have
mentioned it, uh, some favorably, some favorably, but I guess
the best we could say is that it remains controversial.
So this is in no way consider it a widely
(19:07):
accepted hypothesis, but a lot of philosophers and scientists do
consider it interesting and valuable, even if it's not necessarily correct. Yeah,
and I appreciate that you point this out. There might
be slim testing, but there's nothing definitive either way, right,
there's no absolutely yes, absolutely no. Well, I think a
few I think a few neurologists have said, look at
(19:29):
modern neuroscience disproves his claims, but but others don't necessarily agree.
So I think what I should just do now is
start by giving you the straightforward version of Jane's conclusion,
and then we can turn back to explaining it a
little more. Yeah, yes, by cameral mind in a nutshell. Yeah. So,
Julian Jane's hypothesis in this book is that until about
(19:53):
three thousand years ago, human beings meaning our species, Homo sapiens,
was not conscious us. So that's kind of odd, like,
how do you how do you imagine that? Because there
has not been significant biological evolution in three thousand years,
you know, since about one thousand BC, So what could
have happened? Uh, we'll get to that. So he says
(20:15):
that around one thousand BC, modern human consciousness meaning our
our awareness of awareness, our internal ability to neurotize, like
we were talking about in that in that example, it
began as a cultural invention, probably in Mesopotamia that's spread
across the world. And before that time, for a long time,
(20:37):
for thousands of years, before about one thousand b C,
almost all humans were not conscious in the way we were.
But we're commanded in all novel behaviors by hallucinated voices
that they called gods. Yeah, that's that's insane. So in this,
in this uh understanding, if we have Nott driving by
(21:02):
seventy five, he sees his ancient god, he doesn't think, boy,
I've got to take the exit to street. Instead, he
hears something. What if he hears the voice of Molok
telling him watch out for Molok right there? He might
think Seeing that, he might think so now, just I mean,
I'm afraid if I overcomplicated this by introducing Molik into
(21:23):
the example. But no, I mean, my question though, is
like this is not figurative. This is like the hypothesis
is that there is an auditory hallucination of a voice.
This is not like you know, a metaphor self. No, no, no,
that that is exactly what he's saying. He's literally saying that.
Before about a thousand years ago, people were not conscious.
(21:44):
They did not have the ability to snap out of
the hypnotized state and think about what they would do. Instead,
what happened is they stayed in the hypnotized state their
entire lives, and when some kind of novel stimuli arose
something that could not be dealt with on basic instinct
and conditioned behaviors, like when we're mowing the lawn. Uh.
(22:05):
When that happened, a voice would tell them what to do,
and they would hear the voice audibly within their head
and then be uh commanded, I guess and yeah, and
they and they would obey intellectably. They would obey in
the sense that James talks in the book about instinctual obedience,
like how in you know, social animal species, when there
(22:28):
is a dominant individual that you can really very strongly
control people's behavior by. Yeah, by displaying these dominant uh
sort of signals and getting up in somebody's space and
telling them what to do very firmly, people tend to
obey uh. And so he he says that this sort
of instinct, the tendency to obey, is internalized and it
(22:52):
turns into the temporal lobe of the non dominant hemisphere
of the brain. So, and most people that's going to
be the right himis sphere. You are a right handed person,
the non dominant hemisphere is gonna be the right hemisphere,
the temporal lobe of the non dominant hemisphere generating this
auditory hallucination and commanding the dominant hemisphere what to do.
(23:14):
So part of the question would be how does the
non dominant hemisphere know what to do? And you would
say there that what appears to be happening is that
the non dominant hemisphere in Jane's model, is the place
where the integration and synthesis of information is taking place.
So it's doing the kind of judgment part that we
would normally do consciously. Like you would, you would put
(23:36):
together a bunch of stuff in your mind, some pictures
and some words and some ideas, and say, okay, here's
what I need to do. Instead of all that happening consciously,
this would happen unconsciously, isolated in the right hemisphere, delivered
as an auditory hallucination to the left hemisphere. So would this,
without getting too far into the technical details, would this
(23:59):
activity synthesis also include memory of past events? Now here's
an interesting thing. You have to imagine what memory would
consist of if you did not have the ability to
be conscious. Now, I don't think we have the space
today to fully discuss exactly what Jane's theory of consciousness
(24:19):
is because it's a complex thing. Essentially for him. I'll
try to give you the simple version for Jane's consciousness
is based on language. He says that you couldn't be
conscious without having a language. So there are some kind
of disturbing takeaways from this. One of them is that
it's impossible for say, animals to be conscious if they
don't really have a language that's capable. Here here's the
(24:41):
key part of generating metaphors. So metaphors are sort of
the ultimate workhorse of what language is. It's when you
describe an unknown thing in terms of a known thing.
One of my favorite quotes from that is from a
quotes pertaining to that is a throwaway joke or observation
in the television show community. A metaphor is a thought
(25:04):
wearing another thoughts hat. That's a good one, man. You know.
The funny thing about metaphor is even the word metaphor
is a metaphor. The word metaphor comes from Greek. It
means to carry across. So it takes this unknown concept
of the abstract idea of taking the definition of one
word and using it to help understand another word. But
(25:25):
it takes that from the literal act of carrying something
from one place to another. So the word metaphor is
a metaphor, and what's more meta than consciousness? I mean,
like the ability Consciousness basically is the ability to extend
our understanding of reality and kind of wrap it in
a sort of digestible form. Or we can think about
the past, we can think about the future, you can
(25:47):
think about the present all at the same time. That
is Jane's theory. So Jane says consciousness is a place.
It is a metaphorical mind space based on the analogy
of real space. Now that might sound kind of hard
to understand for a second, or might take a second
to segment set in. But when you start testing that
against your experience, at least for me, I often find
(26:09):
that that's true in the same way that the meaning
of the word metaphor is this abstract thing that's taken
from the literal physical action of carrying something from one
place to another. Consciousness, for Janes is this abstract space
that is based on the metaphor of real space. And
when I was reading up on this to the idea
(26:30):
of that god voice, we've basically subsumed that into this
kind of unspoken voice, unheard voice that is our consciousness.
So it's like we don't hear the voice, but we've
absorbed that essentially into our ability to you know, process
all of this stuff. Yeah, it's interesting. So here's one thing.
(26:52):
A bicameral person and a conscious person might not necessarily
do different things in the same in the same situation. Right.
They might both come to the whole in the freeway,
see the god molech not know what to do for
a second, and then take the same route to get
around to work. The only difference is how the brain
(27:12):
organizes and integrates and delivers that information. Now, there might
be other cases where a conscious person and a bicameral
person would do something different. And before we get to
too lost on this point, there there is another disturbing implication.
I want to plant the seed here for our exploration,
and that is that if Jans is correct, when we're
(27:36):
following this line of reasoning, language is a pre existing
necessity for the development of consciousness, which means that language
predates consciousness the way we would understand it. And so
that is to me, that is a real stereotype buster,
because we associate language, whether written or spoken, with this
(27:59):
act of consciousness of awareness. Yeah, I mean this is
a super radical hypothesis. I mean when I look at
this and I say, I find it interesting, but I
don't believe it. It's not necessarily because I have found
any of his particular arguments very faulty. Uh, most of
his arguments are I feel like, are moderately too strongly persuasive.
(28:21):
It's just that it goes so strongly against what you
would tend to think, is that, you know, the base
assumption that if there is such a thing as consciousness,
it's a biological invention based on how brains work, rather
than a cultural invention made possible by language. Um. But
one thing, one other thing I should mention, just to
(28:42):
make clear, is also his idea about how the evolution
of consciousness comes across. So basically you have to imagine
in human history there's a three stage evolution where human primates,
uh first without language, are like he imagines animals are,
which are just stimulus response machines automata that humans like
(29:05):
us that had very powerful brains, brains just as biologically
powerful as ours, capable of as many calculations and all
that kind of stuff, and they were just working on
instinct and conditioning. Which and that's it, right, because it's
hard to imagine that. Does that mean agriculture as well?
(29:25):
Does that mean other other things we consider completely human inventions,
you know, like cooking, hunting? Does that exist before consciousness? No?
I mean hunting, I think probably does. But once we
get to agriculture, that's the next stage. So you've got
the animal stage where we're just stimulus response machines. Then
the evolution of language makes possible the transition to buy
(29:49):
cameraality by cameraality comes after this stage, and that's when
we're in the state where we're still not conscious yet
but we're hearing these hallucinated voices. And then in the
third stay it about three thousand years ago, we make
the final transition to modern human consciousness, where we have
the ability to narratize in this metaphorical mind space. Well,
(30:11):
here we are, I think that's a good place to
take a quick break, and then we'll dive into that
metaphorical mind space, and we're back. This is already such
a head trip, you guys, I think we've got a
pretty good forty foot view, right, we understand some of
(30:34):
the basic differentiators. And now, now, if you'd be so
kind you, I know that everybody listening is wondering what
evidence does Jane's base these claims on, or what you know,
what does he draw from? Because you mentioned that it's
it's it's a far reaching argument. Yes, so it's a
it's a very multidisciplinary approach. He draws from the history
(30:57):
of literature, he draws from our key oology, he draws
from anthropology and understanding ancient religions and societies. He draws
from uh neurology, from studying the function in different regions
of the brain. That might be one of the most
limited areas. Because he was writing back in nineteen seventy six.
We know more about regions of the brain now than
(31:18):
we did then, but we still knew a decent amount then.
And like I said, that, the picture is not clear
to me what neurology since then has had to say
about his hypothesis. It seems that there are some results
that sort of go against it and others that sort
of go in favor of it. So I don't know
if that helps us in one direction yet. Um. But
(31:40):
then also psychology, of course, which was his own field,
so I might go to one of his primary examples
of how ancient literature would inform this, because literature is
a great place to look for evidence of consciousness. You
can just look at the characters and see are the
characters conscious? Do they in prospect? Do they have the
(32:01):
ability to neurotize in mind space? Here is a really
crazy thing that I never noticed before. But James makes
this argument pretty strongly. I haven't I've asked in our
audience to see if anybody with expertise in the classics,
you know, in ancient Greek literature can contradict what he
has to say. I haven't had any takers yet, but
(32:21):
he makes the argument pretty convincingly that the characters of
Homer's the Iliad are not conscious. Yeah. This this was
the mind blowing thing for me as well, because again
we I think I'm learning about what a high pedestal
we place the concept of consciousness on the understanding of
(32:45):
something like one of the world's most famous works of
literature is that it must inherently be made by conscious thought. Yeah,
I mean when you picture the writer you pick, I
mean maybe you don't. I do. I picture a person
in thought. I picture a person who is consciously introspecting
(33:09):
about what to write next. But you have to imagine
that literature before the conscious period, if the obviously, if
this is true, we're just entertaining it. Yeah, we're what
ifing if there were such a thing as a bicameral period,
what would the writing process of a bicameral author be? Like,
this is a person who does not have the power
to introspect or narratize in a mind space. It would
(33:31):
be transcription, right exactly. It would be essentially taking transcription
from literature that is compiled and integrated unconsciously by the
right brain in in most people, by the non dominant hemisphere. Wow,
it sounds like there's a plan almost uh and so
uh and so. You would see examples of this in, say,
(33:54):
how how the ancient act of composition is described. Here's
something kind of creepy. What if you took some of
what appears to be the literary conventions of ancient literature
just literally? How about sing to me? Oh, Muse, the
song of all these Greek poems starting with the invocation
(34:16):
of the Muse. Now we usually look at that as
a literary device. We say, Okay, they're just being metaphorical.
They're saying, like, I'm trying to get into the mood
about writing. I want some you know, I need this
introspective juice, and so that's my metaphor, this god, the
Muse is my metaphor. What if you just take them
at their word. They're asking the God to start telling
(34:38):
them what to write. That's amazing, well, but I mean
it also, it doesn't. It's not too far of a
jump from the way we think of ancient civilizations and
the way they treat gods and act as though all
things come directly as a result of their relationship with God.
And it's very specific. It's like, my crops grow because
I did this thing and the God's made it. So
(35:00):
it's not it's not figurative in any way. And it's
not just these external activities like what allows the crops
to grow, what changes the weather. It's internalized influence of
the gods that we see in Jane's interpretation of the iLiads.
So he looks at the Iliad, and he says, I'm
looking through this thing and trying to find places where
characters are introspecting. He says, there's maybe a couple of places,
(35:22):
and these appear to be later additions to the text,
added by scribes long after it was first composed. If
you look at the original version of the text and
what appears to be its oldest parts. Characters do not
make decisions by internal introspection. When novel stimuli arise, a
god shows up and tells them what to do. So
(35:42):
Achilles is about to strike down Agamymnon, He's like, I
I don't know what to do. I'm so angry, I'm
gonna attack my king. And then a god shows up,
grabs him by the hair and says, don't do it,
and then repeat it again and again throughout this ancient
epic poem. Whenever people are faced with novel stimuli, a
(36:03):
god shows up says do this, and they do it,
so as you said intellectively, right, yeah, And so there's
another There's one thing that really stuck out to me
about this, where James claims there is no concept of will,
nor nor a word for it in the Iliot. I
sure do remember thinking that the Odyssey was a hell
(36:24):
of a lot more interesting than the Iliad when I
was a kid, And he makes that contrast, I mean,
the Odyssey seems to have a lot more evidence of
consciousness within it than the Iliad does. For James, at last,
there's inner torment in the Odyssey characters developed. So with
a lot of his a lot of his claims with
(36:44):
the Iliad in particular, dwell on some word usage exactly. Yeah,
So James points out that in the Iliad there are
a number of words in the ancient Greek vocabulary that,
if you look to later texts, have meanings that are
clearly associated with consciousness and conscious introspection, but as deployed
in the Iliad, means something else. They have these corporeal,
(37:08):
non conscious meanings. For example, the word see. He like
our word psyche in later centuries. He says this, you know,
you can find it all throughout Greek literature. It means
consciousness or mind or soul. But in the Iliad, He's like,
it looks like this is just referring to sort of
life fluids like blood or breath. The word thumos, he says,
(37:30):
in later centuries, you look through Greek literature, and this
appears to me to mean something like emotional mind or soul.
In the Iliad, he says it means something more like motion,
like when a soldier dies on the field, the thumos
goes out of their arms and legs. The word noose,
which he says in later Greek literature, appears to means
(37:51):
something like conscious mind or consciousness. In the Iliad, he says,
it means like field of vision. So if you can
see something, it's in your noose. Kind of kind of freaky, huh,
And Zeus holds uh like Zeus holds a Disseus in
his noose. Yeah, he holds him in his eyes, and yeah, Zeus.
(38:15):
The news of Zeus. I mean it's no, no, no,
I mean it's it's kind of creepy to imagine it.
It is, no, it is, and I mean it's like
it's all entirely practical and functional stuff. You know. It's like, literally,
this is what I see, this is how I interact
with it, and yet there is still like this mystical
(38:36):
element to it where we're being fed instructions by these
like deities. So it's it's it's it's fascinating counterpoint where
there's no agency. Yeah, and it goes straight back to
Jane's idea of consciousness being a metaphor based on physical
space because or physical actions in physical space. Because think
about how often in your consciousness you express conscious content
(38:59):
or conscious behavior with the metaphor of vision, like when
somebody is explaining something to you and you don't get
it and then you finally consciously comprehend it, I see,
or or having vision, having a vision being like someone
that has foresight that can take a top down view
of something mentally, and oracles have a part to play
(39:22):
at our story later. Yeah. So this also maybe calls
to mind for some of us the concept of like
soma or sarks or numa. You know, Uh, there's the
word soma that eventually comes to mean body, right, but
it's always in the plural and homer and it just
(39:42):
means dead limbs of a corpse. And now there's a
drug called soma that gives you dead limbs like a corpse. Dole,
is that the name? For about three months? That's why
you were inning the whole past three months. I knew
it was so obviously, his his exploration of the iliad
(40:07):
is just one of the many historical avenues that James
goes down in his book, there's no way for us
to explore all of them here if you want. If
you want more detail, you can read his book, or
you can go listen to the two episodes that Robert
Lamb and I did on Stuff to Blow your Mind,
where we we go a lot more into We still
don't cover everything, but a lot of the different examples
he discusses from history. Some of the other things he
(40:28):
brings up are, for example, the theocratic organization of ancient society.
When you look at the rulers of many ancient kingdoms,
it is just almost ubiquitous that the king is a
god or a representative of a god. Now what if
instead of thinking about that metaphorically or as some kind
(40:50):
of tool of social control, we just took it literally
and said, Okay, what they're saying about the role of
the king is correct. The God tells the king what
to do, and then the king commands the people. We
are all ruled by this non dominant temboro lobe, exactly
the king's right hemisphere, or if the king was right
handed left handed, the yeah, the non dominant hemisphere of
(41:11):
the king is presenting to the king as a god
telling the king what to do, and that is being
interpreted by the king's dominant hemisphere as instructions that must
be carried out and delivered on his commands to the people.
And if that's that's the case, there's another interesting twist here.
If that's the case, it explains why God's often only
(41:35):
appear to the person they're interacting with, right person they're commanding. Yeah,
so think about this. In the history of religions, early
religions seem to have a lot of direct interaction with
idols and with God experiences directly. I mean, if you
read about the religious phenomenology of the most ancient religions
(41:56):
in the world, people talk constantly about conversations with the gods,
where the gods tell them what to do, and they
talk about going to see the gods. Oftentimes these are
represented as idols, like and part of Jane's theory is
that idols where things created to just help people trigger
their hallucinations when they wanted information, they could put themselves
(42:17):
themselves in an altered state of consciousness by interacting with
these idols that would get the hallucinations going. Now you
see that and then you see this transition to other
kinds of religion. It's not that people used to be
more religious and now they're less religious. Religion just seems
to be a very different kind of thing later on.
(42:37):
So in the last two thousand years or so, you
start to see these religions based on things like faith
and dogma, which, if you imagine a bicameral world, even
though everybody's believing in gods, what's the role for something
like faith in there, Like, you don't need to be
told to believe in a doctrine or something. It's just
like you're talking to the gods all the time. There's
(42:59):
no need for faith, and you're doing what they say instantly. Yeah,
faith sort of inherently incorporates the idea of overcoming doubt exactly,
and especially law written law. This is a big thing
for James where he talks about how one of the
major factors precipitating the transition from the bicameral mind to
(43:20):
the conscious mind is well. One thing he points out calamity.
So there will be these widespread disasters in the late
Bronze Age collapse and all that that caused problems in
the way society was working that sort of put pressures
on people and forced them to find new ways to
structure their minds in order to live. But the other
major influence he highlights is literature, and literature would include
(43:43):
written law. Think about how the presence of a written
law would undermine your relationship with the gods that tell
you what to do. Yeah. If there's any kind of
conflict there, where which side do you choose? Yeah? And
so he he actually argues that there were probably going
to be these periods where, say, within one particular religious tradition,
(44:04):
there would be a conflict between the conscious people who
are trying to practice the conscious version of that religion
and the bicameral people who are trying to practice the
bicameral version of that religion. He gives one example from
uh from the Old Testament where he says, you know,
there are these passages in the Old Testament and in
the Hebrew Bible where it says you really should not
(44:26):
tolerate anybody who has an obe. What does that mean
this word obe? And he says that what he thinks
this word means is like familiar spirit, meaning that there
could have been at the time a brotherhood of conscious
priests who are trying to enforce the conscious version of
the religion and saw the people who were trying to
practice their bicameral hallucinated voice version of the religion as
(44:49):
blasphemous and and causing trouble within their their control over
what faith in doctrine was. Does this tie into monotheism
at that point as well? Yeah, it would be hard
to have monotheism under bicameraality. You could imagine that if
the bicameral world transitioning into a conscious world, you would
probably see a concurrent transition away from polytheism and towards monotheism,
(45:13):
which kind of does line up with the timeline we see.
So you can see how fascinating this is and how
easily this becomes a very very deep rabbit hole. But
we would be remiss if we did not point out
that there is also a lot of criticism here. Sure,
I mean, there are there are tons of reasons to
(45:36):
doubt this. I mean, one would just be to say, well, okay,
he puts a lot of interesting evidence on the table,
but uh, a statement, this radical, you know, hypothesis, this
this radical doesn't really get anywhere until it makes predictions
about things yet unknown that we find out are in
fact correct, and so I would say has not yet
(45:57):
met that burden. I don't think it has predicted much
that we've discovered. Oh yeah, it's true. One thing that
might be interesting would be if we discover whole cases
of ancient documents that we've never found before. You know,
archaeologists turn up ancient literature is previously undiscovered, and we
find a transition along the lines of what he claims
(46:17):
is there for the Iliad and the Odyssey. So if
we see you know, uh, four thousand year old literature
or you know, year old literature having all these words
that later on we know in these languages mean things
about consciousness and in context do not mean anything about consciousness,
I'd say that's a good that's a good prediction. Confirmed
(46:38):
that we're seeing more things line up with the timeline
of literature not reflecting consciousness and then later reflecting consciousness.
Why there's no effort to do that kind of analysis,
I don't know. I mean, I've seen some people try
to look at other ancient works of literature and say,
you know what, how much introspective content is there? But
(46:58):
I don't know that anybody's really gone that deep on
it yet. I mean, there might be a study out
there I'm not aware of. But there's also there's also
a heap of not to make a heap problem, but
there's there's also a heap of differing constraints. If we're
talking literature of that age, then it may be radically
(47:19):
different in one place for entirely unrelated reasons. Well, right,
I mean, so think about the alternatives. Let's just assume
that the bicameral hypothesis is not correct and that people
have always been conscious. And yet at the same time,
let's just take Jane's as as correct in his argument
that those words in the Iliad don't reflect any conscious content.
(47:42):
What would explain that? That's an interesting problem in itself.
How come these conscious people creating an ancient work of
literature did not put any consciousness into the work. That's
you know, that's a fascinating question. I've got to ban
myself from using the word fascinating for ease the rest
of this episode and in this in this exploration, I
(48:05):
guess one of the big questions people would run into is, okay,
is fascinating? Even the people who criticize James and disagree
with the idea. Say, wow, what a oh, I did
it again? What a what an interesting that MAT's word?
What an interesting what? What an interesting proposal? What a
(48:25):
brain raking proposal. There we go, You've got the double oo.
That's pretty rare. Got to earn that one. But to
what end? Where does this lead us? What are the implications?
How does this exist in the modern world? But not
so fast been first we're gonna hear from our sponsor.
(48:51):
We've returned some of the implications that are pretty clear.
Here is the idea that religion is related to internal hallucinations,
which may may seem offensive to some people. At this time.
We're not advocating this, we are saying it's the argument, right. Well,
I mean, James wouldn't necessarily say that modern religions are
(49:13):
related to internal hallucinations. I think you would have said
that the ancient religions of the bicameral people's. But as
as as we were talking about earlier, modern religion is
just very different, I mean just descriptively very different from
the kinds of religion that you would imagine would have
been practiced by bicameral people. And what are what are
(49:33):
some what are some vestiges if they exist. Well, one
thing that would be quite obvious that James point out
points out is the condition of schizophrenia. So schizophrenia is
often characterized by the perception of auditory hallucinations. People hear voices,
and they hear voices with great lucidity. Often it's a
(49:54):
lot of times it's hard for people who have never
had an auditory hallucination to imagine that you could hear
a voice that isn't really there and hear it as
clearly and as you know, as as I don't know
what the word as really as as absolutely concretely as
the voice of somebody in the room. But it can.
(50:14):
I've read tons of reports that can absolutely feel like that.
Auditory hallucinations can be incredibly convincing and powerful and can
have this kind of sway over behavior. Many other things
about schizophrenia do seem to line up with some of
the phenomenology of what Jane's imagines would be the bicameral mind.
So there's a sort of loss of the ability to
(50:37):
narrotize the self. Sometimes, uh, sometimes people with schizophrenia have
difficulty imagining the like like the draw a person test.
There's a test sometimes used to diagnose schizophrenia, where um,
people who have the condition have difficulty drawing a person.
Then then there's the additional thing, for instance, the idea
(50:58):
that in some cases people suffering from schizophrenia are able
to tickle themselves. Did you hear that one? No, I
haven't heard that. But that's that seems like it couldn't
maybe be compatible with the bi cameral hypothesis just because
of the division between the hemispheres of the brain that
would be implied there. And what's another strange thing about
(51:19):
this is that regardless of whether you agree with this
idea or whether you disagree, there is no denying that
it is influenced the modern world, even if it's untrue
in very strange and meaningful ways. If part of the
argument is based on literature and art, the the concept
(51:40):
of bi cameralism itself has been driving literature and art well.
Not only that, we've talked a little bit about how
this hypothesis could be used to explain the evolution of religion,
I suppose, but I don't think we've really touched on
the idea that when those voices went away, it was negative,
it caused anguish ramatic And this is another thing that
(52:02):
ties into schizophrenia. I mean, we often think about schizophrenia
as a sense of being abandoned, you know, by your God.
Yeah exactly. I mean, like I was saying, with schizophrenia,
often people um don't necessarily perceive all of the voices
that they hear during schizophrenic hallucinations as negative. Like sometimes
they see the voices as helpful, or sometimes they see
(52:25):
them as comforting. Other times they do see them as
negative or very distressing. Um As, I would imagine in
some cases, the bicameral gods could be like the gods
in this case would have been your own mind, So
they would have been as powerful and as various as
people's own minds tend to be. So you could have
voices that would be very smart and very helpful. You
(52:46):
could have voices that are not so smart and not
so helpful. You could have voices that are illogical and
commanding you to do bad things. You could have voices
that are nice, you could have voices that are mean
and critical. I mean, just think about how much in
a visuality there is in the way our our minds
are built. And you can imagine that same thing in
the relationship between the bicameral god and the bicameral person.
(53:09):
But anyway, if you find your voices helpful and comforting,
when they go away, this can be very distressing to you.
And James pulls together a lot of evidence to suggest
that when people's gods vanished, when they made this transition
from bicamerality the consciousness, it was traumatic for them. Like
he cites all this ancient literature of people saying I
(53:29):
want my God's back. He even cites an example from
the Psalms where people are saying, my heart pants for you, Oh,
God's where are you come back? It makes me think
of the fall, the fall of Man of Adam and Eve.
Let's I was explained, is like, that's when it happened, right, Like,
that was literally what caused us to be abandoned. Before
that we were all one. It was that he calls
(53:50):
it the el aheim. I believe the great ones that
the elheim is one of the words in the Hebrew
Bible used for the name of God. It's usually translated
in modern English translations in a singular for God, but
it he he argues that really in the ancient context
it should be translated as God's It is a plural word,
but the way I understand it, it could mean singular
(54:13):
or plural um and he what just says we should
translate it plural, you know how how it would be
in the ancient context, and it's people talking about how
they want the voices back. Yeah, And just this gets
into one tiny thing that we've covered before on this show,
which is the possibilities of hallucinogens physical the eating of
substances in early man and how possibly that could have
(54:35):
played a role in the connection or a separation, you
know what, a melding of the mind in a way
because of things like psilocybin. Yeah, Terence McKenna, right, yeah, yeah,
food of the gods, Terence McKenna. Some of these ideas
are put forth there. It's fascinating stuff. Ter Grandpa Terry
talking on the ranch telling everybody what's going on. I
(54:57):
wish you guys have invited Nolan I to hang out
with him when you were when you were hanging out
and learning questions. No, I never hung out with Terence.
That would have been great. But it just makes me sorry.
It just makes me think, I wonder if there is
something there, you know, if we just forsake of argument.
Take that the bicamera roll theories are correct, and you
(55:18):
have these two separate hemispheres, and then somehow you're introducing
these chemicals that are causing other types of hallucinations physical
chemical hallucinations. Will check it out. Uh. Philip K. Dick,
the sci fi writer, he was known to dabble in
the hallucinogenic arts, shall we say. In fact, I think
(55:38):
he kind of like had this like crazy flophouse that
he owned where people would just kind of hippies and
stuff would come through and sleep on the floor and
they would share their drugs and he you know, there
was a period in his life where he just kind
of existed, I believe, in a constant hallucinogenic state. And
he absolutely adored Jane's book, And in fact, he wrote
him a letter personally, um, expressing this love of the
(56:02):
book and how it really helped him explain some things. Um.
There's a a trilogy. I think he didn't finish one
of them, but there was a trilogy of books, one
of which is called Valas that Philip K. Dick wrote,
where the character's name is horse lover Fat which horse
lover um I believe Philip is translated to mean horse lover,
and dick is the German word for fat. So he
(56:24):
basically is writing about himself, and in this book he
is narrating it as like an omniscient narrator, but then
sometimes switches to where he's talking about himself as though
he's the same person that he's narrating about. And this
the one big part of the story is based on
if the real thing that happened to him, where he
claims that a pink laser from outer space shot into
(56:45):
his brain and gave him knowledge of a strangulated um
in testicle in his son that could have potentially killed him,
and the knowledge that he received allowed him to intervene
and save his son's life. Um and from that point on,
you know, again, psychedelics, a lot of a lot of
that at play. He claimed to hear these voices. So
(57:09):
what do you say in the letter? It's a long letter,
but I'll just read you a couple of parts where
he says what I did not expect, however, was to
find myself under the jurisdiction of an ancient god who
commanded me first this way and then that, extricating me
from a highly stressful situation I had found myself in
no theory of my own, and for three years I
(57:29):
have studied in labor to come up with a theory
or by anyone else assumingly means anyone else but you
talking to Jane. Uh could account for the exquisitely beautiful voice,
the inner voice, which I heard off and on for
eleven months. At first I told my wife that the
Elheim we're talking to me. Later, during one of my
many hypnogogic dialogues between me and this articulating entity, it
(57:53):
also communicated in dreams. In written form, it informed me
that Jesus was a name for Zeus Zagreus. However, in
most dreams early on, it appeared in the form of
Sybil of Apollo, but with a third eye and lateral
lens form by which she could see and hence no everything.
He then wraps it up with this. Let me say
(58:14):
in conclusion that your superb book has now made it
possible for me to discuss my experience as openly without
being merely called schizophrenic. That's awesome. He was even a
great writer of letters, and it's heavy stuff, and of
course we were talking about modern literature. We would be remiss.
You can read that letter in full online, and UH,
(58:36):
we would be remiss if we did not at least
briefly mentioned Westworld and Westworld encounters some topics like this. Now,
given the shows, given our mutual agreement between us as
host and between our audience, we are not going to
spoil West World for you. But if you enjoy science
(59:01):
fiction and you enjoyed this episode, we do highly recommend
that you consider checking it out. If you can afford
an HBO subscription or no, friend, let me let me
spoil it. John Wayne is God. Everybody knows that, and hey,
hit us up. We'll share our HBO Go accounts or
at least our moms. So in the course of our
(59:22):
exploration today, there's another big thing we have to mention.
We have touched on a controversial topic, the concept of
hearing voices sometimes called auditory hallucinations. And if you are
listening to this and you feel that you are suffering
from a condition related to this or similar to this, UH,
(59:43):
please know that you are not alone, you are not isolated,
and there are organizations around the world that are waiting
to support you. To help you, you can call Lines
for Life at one d to seven, three eight to
five five. You can also check out If you are
someone who both feels you hear voices and you feel
(01:00:04):
at peace with this, or you want to explore it more,
you can also check out organizations like the International Hearing
Voices Network. Guys, I'm hearing a voice right now. It's
super producer Paul, and he's saying, Wow, you guys have
been recording for like an hour and fifteen minutes already.
I didn't hear that. I just Oh, you didn't hear that.
(01:00:25):
I don't think he's talking again, are you? I just
heard that the crocodile must be fed a bunch of times.
What's that? Man? I don't know. I have a voice
just whispering zanzibar at all times, at all times. Even now,
it's very difficult to focus. I can really specific form
of tenitis. It just sounds like zanzibaritis. Aside, Joe, thank
(01:00:50):
you so much for coming on the show. Than a
lot of fun. This is a very nice stove tailed
to our earlier episode with Joe as a gnosticism. Oh
that one was fun too, So if you enjoyed this episode,
please check out our earlier works on nasticism. Joe, you
were also on the show when we talked about internet
trolling and shills. Oh yeah, paid government online manipulators. Yeah,
(01:01:15):
that's uh, that's become a little more relevant since we
first talked about it. Huh, that's fake news. So it's
fake news. Um. One thing that is not fake, however,
is stuff to blow your mind. If you have checked
out our show, if you like our show even a
little bit, you're going to love these guys and the
(01:01:35):
topics that they explore. So don't delay. As soon as
this podcast ends, click over, check out Stuff to blow
your mind. Get a deep dive into the bi camera mind. Yeah.
I was on a very short trip last week, um,
and I listened to your episode on It and the Deadlights,
and I really dug it and I very much enjoyed it. Well.
(01:01:55):
Shout out to my co workers Robert Lammer Christian Sacer. No,
that was two news on there. But they do a
great just great. They talk about like you know, Penny
Wise and the deity from it and kind of cat
they couch it in terms of you know, predatory behavior
and in in nature, and it was you know, it
was really really great. I really enjoyed it. Did you
(01:02:17):
just spoil it? For me, I think Stephen spoiled kid.
I'm just kidding. We saw it together. Come on, we
did see it together. It's true. So the voices in
our respective heads are compelling us to end today's episode, However,
not the show. We'd like to hear what you think.
Is there some sand to this argument? How much a
(01:02:39):
grain to grains a heap? I'm glad you went there.
Anything you want to you want to talk about anything
we've covered on this episode, you can find us on Facebook.
You can find us on Twitter, where we're conspiracy. Stuff
is a pile smaller than a heap. I feel like
it is, intuitively, but I don't you know, I don't
(01:03:00):
know who the authority would be on that. You know what,
If you guys are an authority out there, let us know.
Send us an email. Please let us know the difference.
It's it's killing us. Uh. You can send us an email.
We are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com
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