Anyway, what is the Bicameral Mind? The Bicameral Mind concept is basically that before humans were conscious, they basically worked in a ‘split’ manner. The right brain would provide orders to the right brain (via auditory and visual hallucinations, though mainly auditory ones), which the left brain would then follow absolutely. The way this works in practice is that when a person feels stress, a voice appears which tells them what to do. Then they know what to do the next time it happens.

Yeah, that sounds like schizophrenia. Though my understanding (after reading about it for a while) is more like schizophrenia accidentally unlocks something that was always there.

Jaynes goes further and claimed (and I largely believe him) that the Bronze Age civilizations were not conscious and a majority of their population was ‘Bicameral’. I plan to go into more detail later, but it does go a bit further.

That said, I know exactly why the book failed to make the theory (series of hypotheses) accepted. I will eventually move that to the book’s dedicated page, but I’ll explain it here anyway.

Jaynes writes a bit poetically. This sometimes makes it difficult to understand what he’s getting at and makes him sound very certain about what he’s talking about. That’s the first issue.

The second issue is that Jaynes kinda…jumps forward in an unnatural way. To be clear, the logic often does follow, the problem is more the lack of steps between. It’s sometimes too abrupt. If you are not already on-board, those jumps can end up losing you.

Some things also could be described more clearly, but they often aren’t.

The best part of the book is where he goes over the various definitions of consciousness, explains the issues (and cites research on those things) and then provides his own. That is pretty damn good.

The rest is pretty okay, though I haven’t finished reading it.