 Welcome everyone to Not Related. In this episode we're going to talk about the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, which is an idea and book coined by Julian Jaynes, that's Jaynes, J-A-Y-N-E-S. It is a theory of consciousness unlike any other that encourages you to totally reinterpret all of human prehistory in society, and it's an idea that I think needs a lot more publicity, because it's definitely going to make you think. So I am, as always, I say as always, but those of you watching this as the time that it comes out will know that this is the first episode, but I, as always, am Luke Smith. If you have any comments about this episode, you can email me at lukeatluksmith.xyz, and I might read your comment out on the next episode, or you can send donations at paypal.me slash lukeimsmith. That's lukeimsmith, Amazon Master. Anyway, let's go ahead and get the show on the road. Now, the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, this is one of the most interesting books, one of the most unique book reading experiences I have ever had. I read this book probably around five years ago. I don't even remember where I ran across it, but it is an experience unlike any other. Now, one of the reasons this is so appealing, not just as an academic idea, but as an experience, is on one hand this theory of consciousness, which I'll go into in a second, is there's a lot of very unique scientific backing to it in clinical psychology and psychology, general cognitive science. There's a lot of interesting historical evidence for it, even social and religious evidence in the early religious traditions of different cultures. There's very interesting evidence behind it, and it's a whole smorgasbord of just interesting coincidences that this theory accounts for. So it's not something that can be brushed aside, but at the same time it's a theory of consciousness that almost has the feel of ancient aliens. It encourages you to totally reinterpret the way that we understand human prehistory and the way humans are actually constructed and our mental life. It's very unique, it's very rare to find those two things together, scientific rigor on one side, and on the other side just, I don't know, the visceral joy of something that's so out there, but is still scientifically defensible, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to cover this in our first episode. So I'll go ahead, James is a little awkward when he introduces the idea in the book because he rightly understands that it's the kind of idea you have to gradually accustom someone to by showing the evidence for and then gradually revealing the idea. But I'm going to go ahead and tell you the gist of the idea at the beginning and then we'll go through the, again, the smorgasbord of evidence for it as the podcast continues. So as I said, we're going to, as I said in the introductory episode, I should say, I have show notes, I'm going to go through those, I'm going to take a break around in the middle, I'm going to answer user comments from the YouTube video, of course, since it's our first episode, I haven't gotten feedback on any episodes so far, but I'll read comments on that, talk about those, and then I will go on and finish the show notes. So anyway, the gist of James' idea is that consciousness is ultimately not inherent to our neural architecture. It's not actually part of our brains in the way we think of it. It's not something we're born with, we don't automatically get it. Instead, his idea is that consciousness is something that we deliberately create, we have to create as part of being in modern society. That is, the human brain isn't necessarily conscious when you're born, but in different societies, humans gradually develop different mental models, different mental habits, and one of those can be consciousness, and so in his idea, not all humans are conscious. It's not as if your neighbor isn't conscious, but in his idea, all humans in modern society have to develop this interior world of consciousness, but it doesn't necessarily exist in prehistoric societies, or possibly even in uncontacted tribal societies, so that's one of the ideas behind it. Now specifically, it's place in history for him. His idea is that consciousness arose around the time of the Bronze Age collapse, and that is an event, people don't often talk about it, but it's sort of a fall of Rome before Rome. It was a huge social upheaval around the period of, you know, maybe 1200 BC, or 1177, if you know the book of Eric Klein on the topic, 1177 BC. And this is a period where you had a lot of different empires, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Hittites, a lot of different empires that all at the same period collapsed. And in his idea, before this period, humans and human society was built around having unconscious people. People did not in fact have consciousness, but after this collapse, due to the social upheaval, there were social and cultural changes that amounted to humans gradually creating consciousness in their brains as a mental habit. Now that is the historical theory behind it, and we'll go into why James believes, again, this ancient aliens tier theory, what the actual evidence behind it is. Now the psychology behind it, the reason this theory is called the bicameral mind, is that according to James, actually not just according to James, this is well understood in science, the brain is bicameral. You have a left hemisphere and you have a right hemisphere. And those hemispheres of your brain are largely independent. They can actually think independent of the other. In fact, if you don't know, there are people out there called split brain patients who due to, you know, they might suffer from seizures or something, due for some medical reason, they have to have their corpus callosum removed, and this is the part that connects the two brains. And these people, very interesting, these people actually really have two quasi-independent brains, and you can, you know, in experimental circumstances, you can actually communicate with one side or the other or tell one side to do something or the other something, and they're very interesting results. One common example that I think really shows how crazy this is is, you know, it's possible for, you know, one side of the brain, we'll go into this in a second, is generally thought of as being the linguistic hemisphere. So what you can do in experimental circumstances is you can send a message to one side of the brain telling, you know, an experiment participant to get up and turn off the light or something like that. And so the participant will, of course, get up, they'll go to turn off the light. But then when you ask them, ask their linguistic center, what are you actually, why do you get up? What are you doing? And this is not the same side that was told to get up and turn the light off. They'll make up some kind of confabulated response. They'll say something like, oh, I was going to go get a coke. They won't lie, they'll just instantly make something up. And that sort of shows you in these split brain patients the fact that they can do things like this. This is a sort of basic thing that you might hear in Psychology 101. But it's one of these, it shows the fact that really people like this have independent brains. And if you don't have connections between these two brains, they really do work very much independently. Now in Jane's theory, the brain of unconscious people before the Bronze Age collapse was one in which the two hemispheres of the brain were mostly independent. And on the, you had the left hemisphere, which tends to, if you're right handed, tends to be the linguistic center. And this is really the place of the ego for him. And that did, that was sort of the linguistic side of it. That was the human side of it. And on the other side, on the right side, you had what amounted to a kind of hallucinogenic sphere of the brain. And his idea, pre-conscious people, what would happen is the right side of the brain would do some kind of mental effort. It would be solving problems or something like that, or it would be recalling evidence or something like that. And it wouldn't be integrated fully with the left side. Instead what would happen is the right side would sort of export its, it would make its judgments and push them on to the left side. And those would appear to the left side as a kind of divine intervention. This would appear to people as kind of a hallucinogenic voice. People would, well, we're talking somewhat metaphorically because we're talking about non-conscious people. But it would appear to the left side as if this voice had just commanded them out of nowhere to do something. So that is the theory. So the theory is in these pre-conscious people, the hemispheres of the brain were largely independent. Humans were not really conscious. And instead how people experience the world was they really just hear the recommendations of the right hemisphere appearing to them. So that is, you've now heard the full insanity of the theory. Now let's go through why it might actually be something that's worth looking into. So the book begins, I think, since James has this very unique theory of consciousness. He has a very good section at the beginning that criticizes other theories of consciousness and why a lot of them are insufficient for dealing with, you know, the way that we approach different things. Now I recommend, even if you're not interested in James's theory, I recommend if you're interested in consciousness, read the preface and I think the first chapter, I think possibly the second, are very good just for talking about consciousness in general. And I'll say what they amount to. Now if you're smart, you're probably thinking in the back of your brain, OK, so how do unconscious people, you know, let's say these pre-Bronzage collapse people, how are they even doing basic things if they're not conscious? I mean, what are they doing, just sitting around? Well, I'll say the first section of this book is incredibly good because James goes through a lot of the things that we think of as being inherent to consciousness or dependent on consciousness, I should say, that aren't really a part of it. That is, we like to think, you know, just in general, we have the perspective that, for example, if I'm doing higher level decision making, let's say if I'm thinking about, you know, what kind of product to get at a store or if I'm working through a logic problem or if I'm doing, you know, just higher reasoning or something like that, we have the idea that our consciousness is doing that. And James does very well to deflate this idea because a lot of people, well, let's put it this way, we have the idea, since we are aware of decision making going on in our brain, we have the idea that we in our conscious mind are doing that. But that's not necessarily true. James goes through a lot of examples of daily life, first off, where we are not really even conscious of the kind of mental effort that we expend in things. One common example is driving. So driving is one of the most dangerous things you do every single day. It's something that can get lots of people killed, but it's something that if you have driven before, driving is not something you ever really think about. You don't have to think about how you're actually moving your foot as you press the gas or the brake. You're not really aware of all that stuff that's going on, even the turning or something like this. Or a better example that's even probably more complex is if you play video games and, you know, you're using a controller or if you're on the computer or keyboard. If you're good at that game, you're not even really thinking about what keys you're pressing or you can even think of a piano or something like this. In fact, being made aware of what buttons you're pressing or what keys on a piano you're playing can actually disturb what your brain is doing. If you become conscious of that kind of stuff, you arguably get worse. So James goes through a lot of stuff like this where humans like to think that our reasoning is part of consciousness, but it's not really. So since I work in linguistics, this is something that's very obvious to me all the time. So for example, in English, so you know English. If you're listening to this podcast in English, I assume you do. And there are a lot of aspects of English grammar that especially if you're a native speaker of English, you are just not aware of. It's just not something that you even realize. So for example, you know, if you have a verb like, I am not sad. So if you want, so you have I am sad, you throw on not I am not sad, that makes the negation of that sentence. Or you should not go or you should go add on add in not that makes you should not go. It goes right after the verb. So there are some verbs in English. The general rule is you put the not after the first verb. But a lot of verbs in English actually really the majority of verbs in English don't actually work like this. So if you say, I speak English, you can't say I speak not English or that's really archaic or bizarre, aberrant English. But you as a native speaker of English automatically know that to make a negation of I speak English, you say I do not speak English. Now, why do you do that? You can talk to a linguist. They'll tell you about do support. They'll tell you about, oh, you know, only T's and not V's can take negation or something like that. But that is a rule of English grammar. We don't need to go through it, but it's an implicit rule of English grammar that every speaker of English knows you're just not really aware of. It's not something you have to do reasoning about. James, again, goes through all these different theories of consciousness that amount to saying a lot of them. The one idea that we have, the metaphor he uses is consciousness is a lot like a flashlight that we shine in a room. And we have the idea if our eyes are that flashlight, we are only seeing the things that are lit up at any given point in time. But the rest of the room might be entirely dark. And that's the same kind of illusion we have with consciousness. We're only aware of those things that we directly see, but we have the naive idea that because we can move the flashlight and light things up, that all of the brain must be conscious or something like that. And that's not the case. So his idea, what you should get out of those first couple of chapters is just the idea that consciousness is not as necessary as you think. It's a kind of mental model that is used for particular things that he'll go into. But it's not something that we really need all the time. It's possible that a lot of days you're sitting around and you're basically either not conscious or your consciousness doesn't really matter, or it's just sort of spectating. Now I should say James is not a proponent of the idea of the helpless spectator, which he goes through in the book. Now this is a more radical idea of consciousness in which consciousness just doesn't do anything. It's just a part of the brain. It's just an accident that emerges. We can see what our brain is doing, but consciousness has no effect on it. Now, again, there's good evidence to think that a lot of the things we think of as being part of our consciousness aren't really. So when you make a decision to pick something up, even before you're aware that you want to pick that up, your muscles in your hand have already started to move. This is something that can be shown in experimental circumstances. So consciousness might sometimes appear as a spectator. It might just be looking at things. But James' theory is not just that consciousness does nothing. He does think it does something. He thinks it's important because it's a mental model of the world out there. So let's be clear about what he actually means by consciousness as we go forth. So first off, one elementary problem that people talk about in consciousness theorizing is the idea of qualia, or the singular is qualae. So one thing you need to realize, so think of the color red, or look to whatever is red around you. The thing you need to realize about consciousness is that red, as you experience it, does not exist. There's no reality of red in the real world. Now, if you know anything about perception of light, you'll know that red, what we perceive as red, that feeling of redness inside of you, that is, well, in the outside world, it's really just a kind of wavelength of light. Now we happen to perceive it when it gets in our brains and our eyes and brains process it. In our mental theater, it appears as this thing that we know as red. But that is what's called a qualae. It's something that has no existence in your brain, that appearance of red. And it's really just a kind of mental model of something that exists in the external world. That's one thing that's important to realize. Now for Jane's consciousness, or Brian McVeigh, who has taken some of Jane's ideas, calls this conscious interiority to be clear. The idea of consciousness for Jane's is everything we see, everything we experience, is a kind of, we take our external stimuli, interpret them, and then we sort of create this mental module where we see all these qualae and we can directly interact with them in our perception. That's what consciousness is. It's this kind of mental theater for him. Now I think you could say in some way that what he calls pre-conscious people, they could have a kind of a consciousness, but it's not like this mental theater that he's talking about. They might have a different way, they might have qualae, but they don't have the mental theater that Jane's talking about. So depending on your definition of consciousness, it might be that these pre-conscious people, as Jane thinks of them, are in fact conscious in some way. But the important takeaway of course of this line of thought is that a lot of the things we think of as being inherent to consciousness, we like to think that our consciousness is making decisions, solving problems, and stuff like this. A lot of this stuff that we think consciousness is doing, it's not actually doing, it's aware that it's happening. We have the illusion that it's controlling something, but consciousness is really something a little different. It's something that, in Jane's idea, it's just a mental theater that we can do certain types of reasoning, but it's not something that we necessarily need, even to live in relatively complex societies. So I'm going to take a break in a minute, but before I do, think about where this puts us. I'm going to talk afterwards about the kind of evidence we actually have for this theory, but think about the kind of stuff we'd expect. First off, if primeval people or early ancient people were in fact non-conscious, you would expect a couple things. First off, you know, linguistically or culturally, there are going to be a lot of things that people like this don't have a concept of. For example, people are not going to have a concept of consciousness. They're not going to really have that idea of an internal state. People aren't going to talk about that in that way. Now these people can, of course, talk. They can write. We have lots of written culture from them, but it's not necessarily the case that they're going to be writing things in the same way that we are, or they're not going to have the kind of mentalistic existential thoughts that we're going to have. Additionally, even though, keep in mind, James, of course, is not a proponent of the helpless spectator theory. He thinks that consciousness does have an effect on our actions. It doesn't have as much as we might think, but in some abstract domains it does. And in his idea, our social structure is organized in such a way to facilitate conscious people. The social structure of unconscious people is going to be very different. And in his view, for example, the hallucination, as he calls it, the fact that the right brain makes all these higher level decisions and sends its solutions, its derivations to the left brain. That hallucinogenic experience, as he describes it, is going to play a huge part in early human civilization, and a lot of civilizations are going to be ordered in such a way to facilitate this. So there might be religious or social traditions that help get to this point. And when we get back from the break, I will go into some of the ways where not only is this a viable theory, but it actually explains a lot of the weird things about the differences between society as we know it, modern society. And I guess the sort of pre-modern, pre-Bronzage collapse world. So I'll be back in a minute. It's going to be a second for you, but after that I will read some emails and then continue on. Alright, and I'm back. Of course, that was no time for you, but that was a little bit of time for me. So I'll go ahead and go through some YouTube comments that I had just relevant to the podcast. Obviously, of course, since this is the first episode, I don't have anything from the previous episode, but I'll go over a couple of these just why not. Remember, you can email me comments about the podcast at luke at lukesmith.xyz. You can also send donations at paypal.com slash lukemsmith. That is M as in monosaturated fat. Anyway, so comments. Babbler says, do you have any plans to talk about economic history? I think it's a fascinating field. So there are plenty of podcasts to mine out of it. Maybe you could get Greg Clark or Pseudor Rasmus as guests. One could only hope. Also, what are your thoughts on the Pseudor field as far as you know? I don't know who Pseudor Rasmus is. I don't really keep up with the economic realm. Gregory Clark would be interesting. I have read, what is it? Farewell to Alms. I will say on economic history, I have extreme skepticism. Those of you who have been around for a while might have gleamed it. I have a lot of suspicion of quantitative methods for economics. Well, really quantitative methods for a lot of things. I think that a lot of it is casting abstractions where they don't belong. Finding correlations that don't really, you know, looking at a complex mess of reality and summing it up in ways that are too simplistic. I'm not totally against the field. I'll say that. I think that there's something to glean from it. But I think that a qualitative approach is usually a bit more honest. Not to say that it's even better. But that's my view of the field. I think that doesn't just apply to economic history, but also to economics generally. I generally just don't believe in the field as a quantitative field. I just think it has more pretenses than it actually deserves. Every once in a while I will say something that just clarifies something. Every once in a while I will say something that I don't believe in economics. Some people understand that as some kind of dog whistle. A lot of my Marxist subscribers. So I'll get these emails, you know, sympathetic emails like, oh, yeah, I don't believe in bourgeois economics either. It's totally BS. But yeah, that's not what I mean. I mean, Marxist economics is actually a, I think a microcosm of why economics is so terrible. The economic line of thinking is so terrible and you should never really take it too seriously. And it reaches just sort of ludicrous conclusions from whatever inputs you give to your system. It's just the art of making, starting with simplistic assumptions and drawing them to ludicrous conclusions. So that's one of the reasons I'm not very sympathetic to it. That's why I'm sort of a telebion on most things economics. Other comments. Levi says, what do you think consciousness arises from specific neural patterns rather than just being a basic function of the interaction with matter? Well, first off, let me interrupt. I don't really know where I said that. When it comes to consciousness, I am a, I guess, a big brain nihilist. I don't really think, I don't really have any particular pet theory on what consciousness is or how to approach it. I mean, there are some statements I can make, but I don't think it's the kind of thing that even we're going to satisfactorily figure out. But I'll continue reading this comment where I leave off. Personally to me, as someone from ACS and physics background, if anything, it seems the opposite that consciousness probably goes far beyond and much deeper than what we think. The matter in our brains doesn't seem to have any more core properties to it than a glass of water does. Sure, it moves in changes in a much more complex way, but it seems strange to me to think that specific patterns would suddenly gain a new property. I'm not saying that a properly organized neural network or a glass of water has the same complexity as the referencing patterns of the human brain, but to think that there's something inherently different with one seems absurd to me. Well, first off, if you say something, this is me responding, the quote is over, if you have trouble understanding where some kind of property emerges from interaction of smaller things, that's the basic problem of emergence. In fact, that's the problem of consciousness. You mentioned a glass of water in this. One common example is, of course, when it comes to water, water is wet. Water is made out of a particular molecule and atoms. None of those atoms are wet. None of them have the property of wetness. Wetness is something that emerges from the interaction, the complex interaction from some of those inputs. And consciousness, frankly, is in one way or another sort of the same thing. You have this appearance of things because you have a complex interaction of neurons that might not by themselves be conscious at all. Now, there are some people who will say something like neurons or microtubules or something like that are conscious, but I sort of think of that as being a fringe or unjustifiable theory. And the reason I say that is because when it comes to consciousness, your consciousness isn't just... Well, what does it mean for your earlobe to be conscious or a rock to be conscious? Not really. I mean, there are some people out there, especially who want to be big-brained and have these near-eastern theories of consciousness. They have this idea that, oh, maybe everything in the universe is conscious. And the reason I don't subscribe to some theory like that, which I'm not trying to say that this commenter is saying this, but it's sort of implicit, I feel like. The reason I don't believe in something like that is because what is in your consciousness is very specifically based in what kind of sensory apparatus you have. You have eyes, you have ears, you have all of these different things that directly influence and are aggregated in your brain. And your consciousness, as you perceive it, is a sum of all those things. So what would it mean for a rock that doesn't have eyes or anything else or any kind of brain generally to be conscious? It doesn't mean anything or simple organisms or something like that. I think rather we have this tendency... First off, consciousness is not something that's going to be easily explained. It seems like this commenter is really just complaining about it, not being easy to explain. But additionally from that, we have this tendency to see consciousness even where it doesn't belong. In fact, earlier in the book, Jane's notes that one thing that we take for granted... Take a worm, for example, this is the example he uses. If you take a worm and you cut it in two, one of the sides is going to be totally inert. It's not going to be moving at all. And the other side is going to be looking like it's in terrible pain, it's writhing in pain. Oh, I can't believe you cut this worm in half, it's totally bad. But the thing Jane's notes is that actually that's not what's going on. The side that is writhing in pain is actually the side without the brain. So if there's any kind of consciousness in the worm, it's not that side that's in pain. The other side is going through a kind of chemical reaction or something that causes it to have this apparent pain. Now, of course, when we see that, we have this tendency to incarnate things, it put consciousness on them when we feel like they belong. In the same way a child thinks that stuffed animals or action figures might be conscious. But that's just something to be aware of. I think that it's very straightforward that consciousness is something that is really one per brain, barring potentially split brain patients. It's really something that exists, there's really only one of it, and you can't say it's not necessarily meaningful to say things at a lower level are conscious. Or parts of your body or something like that, or molecules. I don't think it's at all meaningful to say that they have consciousness. Although I would say there's a possibility that higher level things have consciousness. Those of you who have read something like Goethe-lescher Bach might be familiar with where Douglas Hofstadter said, well, maybe ants are conscious. But you could imagine an ant colony being conscious, and they move in such a way that, you know, more or less has a kind of conscious being to it. But that's not really just an example. But anyway, so that's that. Other comments, let's see here. So Menoff says you should talk to Jean François Garryépis. He's a neuroscientist and I think it would be an interesting conversation. I don't know anything about Jean François's neuroscience work. I know he exists due to all this blood sport stuff. I don't think I've even like watched one of those videos. I know he's out there, but I mean, I'm not against it. I just don't really know the guy. Guillermo says, hey, I'd like to hear more about why you are against going to college, even if it's free. Do you have any videos on the topic? No, I don't have any videos on the topic. Although I will say once you get out of college, you very quickly realize, wow, what a waste of time that was. I mean, my view of it is even if you get paid to go to college free, you are the only theoretical thing you can get out of it is the check on your resume that says I went to college. The number of people who actually learn something from college is very low or even more importantly, you know, I was the kind of person, I learned things during college, but it wasn't because of the classes I took. I did my own stuff. The best thing you could possibly get out of college is just exposing you to other people. But the idea is, I mean, especially nowadays, the idea of colleges being the kind of place where it either makes you a better person or improves your ability to work, both of those I think are pretty bad. And it's something I think everyone sort of knows it. So a couple of people asked me about this. I might do a video on this later, but, you know, it's just not the kind of thing. Once you're out of it, I mean, it's the same thing as like was high school really useful to you or was middle school really useful. Once you're out of it, you're like, wow, that was a waste of my time. I wish I honestly, for most people, it'd be better for them to just sit around and do whatever for four years and just trying to figure things out instead of going to having the formality of all these classes that are at, you know, best a waste of time and that were just brainwashing or just, you know, really drive it into you and sort of annoy you. So anyway, so that again is comments. That's all the ones I'm going to talk about today. If you have any other comments about this episode or anything else, send them to Luke at LukeSmith.xyz. Again, donations, which I will also read out are going to be at paypal.com slash LukeMSmith. That's M as in trying to think of monster energy. I have a white monster energy on my desk. It was a gift. Okay, so anyway, let's get back into it. Now let's actually get into the kind of evidence. That's behind a theory like this because it is a little off the wall, of course. And it wouldn't be worth talking about if it was just a bunch of speculation. It's nice to actually see what's behind it. Now I'll go ahead and say one of the reasons I like the kind of evidence that he presents is that before I knew about this, I always had the perspective as someone who was sort of knowledgeable of the classics and things deeper into antiquity. One of the things you realize very quickly when you're looking at really ancient documents is that aside from the translation you have to do from one language to another or to modern English, usually, there's a kind of cultural translation, not just cultural in the way that we understand it, but there's a mindset difference between ancient people and the people of the day. And James, of course, has a good theory of why that is. His idea is that these people are not conscious. Now anyway, let's go ahead and actually get into it. He starts off his evidence actually talking about the Greeks because the Greeks, of course, are relatively familiar culture. A lot of us are familiar with the main works. What's most important for him are the Iliad and the Odyssey, mostly the Iliad. And in his theory, now the Iliad and the Odyssey, of course, if you don't immediately remember, the Iliad is the one that's about the Greeks invading and sacking Troy, and the Odyssey takes place afterwards. It's about Odysseus trying to return home. So that's what the Iliad and the Odyssey about. And of course, they're traditionally associated with Homer. Homer is thought of as being the person who wrote them, but really they're based in a longer, earlier oral tradition that probably predates him by quite a bit. Now for James, James takes the theory that the Iliad was written in a period much earlier back when Greeks and other people in the area were bicameral. And the narrative structure of the Iliad, which is very unique and the fact that it's written in a particular kind of poetry and other things like this are based in the bicameral nature. So let's go ahead and get into it. Now one of the things I found very interesting is that when you're talking about a people who are non-conscious, people who don't have the kind of conscious, you know, the internal world that we have, they're going to have a culture and a language very much distinct. Now James' specific theory is that when you look at the vocabulary of ancient Greek, specifically how words have changed in meanings over the centuries, you see something very interesting. That is, there are a lot of concepts in later Greek, some of which we actually have in modern English. For example, the English word psyche comes from the Greek word psouke, which in sort of later Greek takes on the meaning of psyche or mind or something like this. Or there are other words like thumos or, you know, just different abstract nouns that in later Greek mean something very mentalistic and abstract, which in earlier Greek, which in the Greek of the Iliad, have very specific, non-conscious physical meanings that really have a usage that's totally different from, you know, the way we think of them. So there are a couple parts in the book where James notes this. For example, on page 69, he talks about some of the words, how they've changed over time. For example, the word psyche, which are psouke in Greek, of course, which later means soul or conscious mind, is in most instances life substance, such as a blood or breath. A dying warrior bleeds out his psouke in the ground or breathes it out in his last gasp. The thumos, which later comes to mean something like emotional soul, is simply motion or agitation. When a man stops moving, the thumos leaves his limbs. But it also somehow is like an organ itself, for when Glaucus prays to Apollo to alleviate his pain and to give him strength to help his friend Sarpedon, Apollo hears his prayer and casts strength in his thumos. The thumos can tell a man to eat, drink, or fight. Diomedes says in one place that Achilles will fight when his thumos in his chest tells him to and a god rouses him. So James' idea is that you have this enormous lexical shift from the Greek of the Iliad to later Greek, in that the early Iliadic Greek, which is a vestige of the bicameral period, there are all these words that later take on psychological characteristics, but they don't originally have that connotation. They're originally just words for either body organs or something hormonal or something observable out in the real world. So again, your psyche bleeding out of you, your psyche nowadays is something very mentalistic in the way we understand it in English. You can't bleed out your psyche unless you're being extremely metaphorical. And notice, as he says before, Achilles or anyone else is a person that's governed by these sort of organ, these abstract nouns that mean something hormonal or something organ-based, but he's also driven by the gods. Now again, in James' theory, the right hemisphere is hallucinogenic in nature. It has all this higher level thinking going on in it, which of course people are not conscious of. And when it makes decisions, when it creates, it decides what's good to do. It makes the other portion of the brain hallucinate. It sends a message to the left hemisphere, usually appearing as something verbal or possibly even something visual that makes the other side hallucinate and get the answers that the right hemisphere has created. And for James, this is perceived as something divine. So he gives the example of one telling part of the Iliad is actually in the first book of the Iliad, where Achilles has this internal, his thumos is telling him to strike down Agamemnon for basically stealing one of his women that he captured or something like that. And he tells, you know, he has these internal, he doesn't have an internal dialogue. He's not debating. He's not rationalizing what's a good thing to do, but he has these internal feelings that tell him, I have to strike at Agamemnon. I have to, you know, get revenge or something like this. And what happens is his goddess says, actually, no, don't do that. I think the text literally says, you know, she grabs him by the hair. And for James, the goddess appearing is actually how ancient people would have perceived in whatever way they'd perceive it the appearance of the right hemisphere making some kind of judgments that the other hemisphere can understand. So that's his idea. The mental life of these kind of people is instead of having internal worlds, they have these abstract, hormonal, organic parts of their body which enforce them to, you know, operate in some way. And they also have the voice of gods that talk to them. And this is, you know, James talks about one of the facts that in our modern, post-ironic, Bugman atheist view, which everyone, even people who aren't atheists, have where we now think of everything rationalistically, we look at something like the Iliad and we think it's all a big joke or a big metaphor because the people in the Iliad are not sitting there rationalizing. Instead, gods are talking to them. Different voices from different gods have different reasons, motivations, priorities and they're all speaking to these people and people are almost like billiard balls. They're just sort of bouncing off either their internal states or the messages of the gods. People are not rationalizing in the way that we understand them. Now, a lot of people, when they look at this Iliad, people who don't subscribe to James' theory, they might think this is all a big metaphor. All the use of gods are just like some big poetic device because you don't want to talk about someone's internal states but it's a little suspicious. James says there are no internal states. This representation of gods speaking to people was how people actually understood their mental life at the time. That's how it actually was, which is definitely an interesting reinterpretation. The evidence is not just the poetic composition of the Iliad and its narrative style which is very distinct from the modern but also the fact that this kind of language doesn't have internal states. It doesn't have words for the kind of things that are in consciousness. Those words that gradually come to be used to mean the conscious mind or something else, they have a semantic shift. They steal words that are something physical. They gradually either grammaticalize them or change the meaning to mean something psychological. These concepts were not always there. Of course, James looks at later Greek texts. He thinks of the Odyssey as being something written after the conscious mind. Odysseus is deceptive. He can fool people. He can manipulate them in different ways. This kind of behavior requires some kind of abstract understanding, his own mental states, but the mental states of other people. That requires consciousness. Later in the book, around Page, I think I wrote it down, around 286, he actually talks about Solon, the law giver. If you don't know anything about Athenian history, Solon is the guy to whom the laws of Athens are attributed. He goes through the fact that Solon almost seems like he's one of the first conscious writers of the period. He's one of these people who puts forth these laws that are not just conscious, but they seem to be put in place to fight the bicameral tendencies of people, the pre-conscious tendencies. There are a couple parts where he specifically says, not only does he use abstract words in their abstract sense, but he specifically says, when you do something wrong, don't blame it on the gods. You're the one actually doing them. This is a kind of vestige of the bicameral mind where people are doing things because their internal voices are causing them to do it. Solon is sort of putting his foot down, and I guess meeting that in opposition. This is the Greek environment that James gradually comes to create. Aside from Greece, we can also talk about places like Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia, I should give a caveat before we talk about this, one thing that I think is worth wondering is what is the specific nature of the bicameral voices? Because, okay, people are hearing these voices that come from their right hemisphere. Their brains are sort of working like how ours work in that the right hemisphere has its own things to do. Both hemispheres are doing their thing, but when the right hemisphere sends a message to the left, it appears to them as some kind of voice from on high or something like that. What is it or what is the nature of that kind of voice? Now, in James's idea, the voice for different people can be something different. He actually goes into some clinical psychology work or neuroscience work that has to do with stimulating the, you know, if you have the language centers in specific places on the left side of the brain. On the right side, there are some the centers that he thinks of as being hallucinogenic. First off, one of the interesting things is even nowadays, we can take people, put them in experimental circumstances and stimulate electrically these parts of their brain on the right hemisphere. And one of the things that happens a lot is that they actually do hallucinate voices in a way. They hear voices either of random people or of maybe their parents or something like that or someone, you know, important to them socially. They hear these voices. Often they're understandable. They're just like mumbles or whispers or something like this. James actually goes pretty deeply into this kind of stuff. Now, in the bicameral, when you have a bicameral mindset, James's idea is that these voices the voices will take on voices that are familiar to you. For example, you might hear your parents, you might hear a king, the king of the city, you might hear a God, a God has a particular personality, particular desires. So for example, if you put yourself in the circumstances of one of those Greek people that has, of course, a pantheon of gods, you might hear when you're a child. Let's actually spell it out. When you're a child, a Greek bicameral child, you learn about gods, you learn about Apollo, you learn about Zeus, you learn about Hera, you learn about all of these characters who have different desires, different priorities and you internalize those. And when your height, right hemisphere, makes some kind of decision, a lot of the times it's thinking in terms of what does that archetype want? What does, what would Zeus say? It's sort of like, you know, it's sort of like what would Jesus do but, you know, as a part of your brain. And you might think of that as being something a little weird, but even today, you have an internal voice of your parents. You can very easily hear your parents saying something, or maybe your friend or husband or wife or something like that. Or even people you haven't even met. So for example, you know, you have a pretty good idea what, you know, Donald Trump is going to say in response to something. You, you not just understand his voice, you have a good intuition of what his voice sounds like, but you know sort of how he's going to respond to things. And this is a natural part of socializing. You learn the kind of voices and personalities of different people. So for James, when people hallucinate voices, they're hallucinating based on the voices that they learn in society. They're appearing to them as you know, oh, you know, I have learned that this is what Zeus wants. So I might hallucinate his voice. And that is, that's how these voices appear to people. Now, when it comes to Mesopotamia, what James supposes or argues for is that Mesopotamia and Egypt and a lot of these other bicameral societies are organized in a kind of theocracy. Now, a lot of times people will call these kind of societies palace economies. I don't know if anyone's ever heard of that term, but it's basically a highly centralized, often city state, often bigger than a city state, but it's a society that's organized, it's sort of centered around either a priestly cast. Well, nowadays we would think of it as being organized around a priestly cast, but at the time, people literally thought of cities as being owned by particular gods and the gods would rule. And what were those gods? They were not incorporeal beings in the way that we think of, you know, a Christian might think of a god, but they were literal objects. They were little literal idols. That is, gods were physical beings. They were little maybe stone statues, maybe metallic, maybe full size statues. This is actually how people thought of gods. And they were beings that in the were not only given prominent positions in the cities, but were also perceived to speak. And according to Jains, they were literally there were hallucinations of the voice of this god. So in Mesopotamian society, one of the things he mentions is actually mouthwashing ceremonies, which is sort of a funny thing, but people would literally honor the idols, the gods, by washing their mouths so they could speak more clearly to people. And people would put idols in very obvious locations, for example, the ziggurat or the shrine of the idol, the god, would be at the center of the city. And in Jains' perspective, this is all done for very specific reason. When people see the reminders of the god or the god itself or the god's temple, it's supposed to provoke a kind of hallucination. It's supposed to provoke the hallucination of its voice so people can do do this higher level reasoning. And in fact, if you look at the structure of how these cities are actually put together archaeologically or, you know, in terms of how they're constructed, even at the level of individual houses, people would all have personal gods. They would have personal idols. The idols could often represent something ancestral. They could be an ancestor of the family or they could just be, you know, some god that they worship. And, you know, they would always be in a prominent position so even if you're in the home you could look over and see your god and, you know, in Jains' idea it would help you, it would facilitate the hallucination. And even the designs of the idols were constructed in such a way to facilitate this. So the idols would often be constructed with enormous eyes. And, you know, according to Jains, this is sort of to hallucinate or to provoke this, I guess, simian nature to look at another creature in the eyes. That is the core of the soul, the seed of the soul and to provoke this kind of drastic hallucination. So these idols would have enormous eyes that take up, you know, most of their faces. Now, if you're an ancient aliens proponent, they're of course aliens, but but Jains' idea of Sumerian society and earlier Akkadian society and even Egyptian and stuff like this. A lot of these early polytheistic societies are organized in such a way where, again, humans are kind of like billiard balls. They are unconscious. They're going from place to place. They're doing what the unconscious mind can easily do. And when they need something extra, they have to have this hallucinogenic either statues or temples or other things that help people tap into their right hemisphere. They create that hallucinogenic voice that help them do things that are more advanced, more abstract or something like this. So this, again, is something he says takes place in Mesopotamia or the divine monarchies of Egypt. Even if you look at some of the earlier ruins of pre-Columbian America, you see things like he mentions Kotosh, which is a place I think it dates back I think around 2000 BC or something like that. And it's organized in the same general structure. You have this everything, it sort of circulates around the central temple and also idols in each of the individual homes. So this is the kind of social structure James is thinking about. The idea is all of early religion, all of early, even architecture, even society is based around the fact that humans are, again, billiard balls. They are driven by their hormones, they're driven by their basic unconscious forces that you don't need a conscious mind for. And on the other hand, society is built in a way to facilitate this kind of hallucination. Now there is, of course, other literary evidence as in different cultures, as time goes on. And of course, as the bicameral mind begins to break down. Now, again, for James the bicameral mind breaks down in the Near East and Greece and all of these areas around the time of the Bronze Age collapse, you know, 1177 BC, that kind of time period. Not to say that, you know, all across the world that's something that happens. But, you know, I might break down in China at a different point. It might break down I think at one point he even speculates that it's possible that even a lot of Native American societies, the Aztecs, for example, they could have been bicameral up until the point that Europeans invaded, because their kind of social structure seems to be similar. But that's the idea. So there are other literary points of evidence that he goes into. Now one, for example, is the Hebrews. So the Hebrew Bible, of course, is not written in, now we, of course, know that there is a particular order to the books as they're shown in the Old Testament or whatever. But of course, that's not the literal order of the writing. He actually looks at well, he compares two books in particular that show the same kind of contrast that the Iliad and the Odyssey do. And that is Amos and Ecclesiastes. So both of these are books of the Old Testament and both of them are very distinct. Amos is typically thought of as being the first book of the Bible written conclusively. It dates back, I don't have the exact date, but in his rendering it's far before the origin of the conscious error. And if you read Amos, if you open your Bibles and open to the book of Amos, you'll see that it's very direct. It's written in such a way that it seems like a bicameral voice ordering people around. It says God says this, God orders this, you have failed to do this, this will happen. It's a narrative structure that, well, it's really not even a narrative. It's a list of orders that I think, in Jane's idea, it's a list of orders that should appear to the reader and should provoke a kind of bicameral reaction. He's going to hallucinate the voice of this king, and in fact it's written as a hallucination. Amos is just a prophet but not in a religious sense. He's really just a guy who's hallucinating a voice and who is writing it down in its authoritative sense. And this is what, there's no internal states in the book of Amos. There's no feelings, there's no deep psychological angst in it. It is a book written with a purpose. It is a bunch of directions. It's directives for what you're supposed to do and stuff like that. Now contrast that with Ecclesiastes. Now Ecclesiastes is one of the last books of the Bible ever written and it is the most emo book of the Bible by far. It is a bunch of angst. In fact, it doesn't even talk about, I don't think it even talks about God. It is the writer, I think it's traditionally, I think people think that Solomon wrote it but I don't think that that's something that's consented to by scholars but I think tradition says that Solomon wrote it. But either way it was, by consensus scholarship it's thought of as being the last book of the Old Testament written. And it is the most existential book in the world. You know it's a book from which vanity of vanities all is vanity. It's that book if you're familiar with it. And if you go through it, you see not just psychological states but deep psychological reflection. It is not only very anti-bicameral. It's something that is utterly different and shows a mentality totally different from Amos. I mean if the writer of Ecclesiastes and the writer of Amos were ever in the same room together which I mean obviously many years separate them but you know if you ever put them in the same room they would have really nothing in common with each other. So that is you know the literary situation. Now he also goes through we don't have something like the Iliad or Odyssey for Sumerian culture. But he does go through similar things that happen in Mesopotamia. You have you know the fall of the Assyrian empire and stuff. And you see a shift not just you know from the Sumerians to Babylon to the Assyrians and stuff like this. You don't just see a shift in the politics of it but a total shift in the narrative structure of dynastic orders of different kind of directives. They change from this voice that's more like Amos which is more like hallucinating a bicameral voice. They take on a more psychological affect as time goes on. And he actually it is sort of interesting you can check the book out for the specifics but it goes into a lot of things where people are literally conscious people after the Bronze Age collapse are literally you know pondering where did my gods go. I don't hear the voices anymore what's happened I don't know what's going on. And a lot of the fall from grace from early society the fall from grace that I think a lot of people think of when they think of you know the exodus from the Garden of Eden. I think that James has the idea that this is a kind of an ancestral memory of the bicameral period where in his idea most people are living in these bicameral theocracies that are relatively peaceful because people are governed by these voices that are based on you know what their king or what their god says. So that's his idea there's a big difference here but one of the last points that I think is worth making about the theory as it you know supposes things about history and linguistics and things like this is that it's not just that James says that these primeval societies didn't have a concept of consciousness the internal world. It's not just that they lacked that idea of the mentality that we have but they also had concepts that were relevant to the bicameral mind and not to us. Now one example he uses is that he says in different cultures he says this in different places in the book but in different cultures he says that a lot of these cultures actually had words to describe the bicameral voices in their head. He for example says in Egypt there's this word in the Egyptian language simply called Ka translated in very different ways some kind of spirit some kind of personal spirit some kind of directing force some maybe some kind of soul and he says the Ka is really just it's a bicameral voice it's someone describing their right hemisphere brain as it appears to them in hallucination. Same thing in Mesopotamia he goes over the word Ili which is thought of as being a personal God related to the Semitic root for God in general. That's what he thinks of as being the bicameral voice and in Hittite even in Hittite I think this one's a little more questionable but he says there's this word in Hittite called Pankus and it's often thought of as being sort of an advisory council in Hittite of sort of mysterious nature and he actually says it may probably more sense if he just said this is also a word for the bicameral voice as it appears to people. So in all of these situations his view is not just that we excuse me ancient people lack the concepts that we have in our mentality but there are a lot of concepts in the bicameral mentality that have been lost to time because we look at these words we look at these concepts you know even during the Bronze Age collapse you might look back at these concepts that were used by them and you don't really know how to translate them you don't know what to do with them and that's one of his last suggestions on this. Now we've reviewed a lot of the historical evidence and of course there's more in the book you should check it out but I think this should give pretty much a thorough enough view of what Julian Janes actually thinks prehistory is all about how it's separate from modernity how the mentalities of people are different and why they are different now the last part of this book I think is interesting again more for the population of people who are interested in consciousness per se but also his particular theory in that he goes into I think it's actually book three the book is actually divided into three books which are you know around 150 pages each or something like that but the last part I think is very interesting in that we've talked about how our mindset works and we've talked about how the bicameral mindset works but how does a culture make the transition from one to the other now a lot of the specifics in the Bronze Age collapse he isn't too clear on his idea generally again is that there is social upheaval in the Bronze Age collapse that's not what the book is about how that is caused but the idea is in these different cultures where a lot of the authority figures is dissipating and where a lot of migration is happening and when a lot of international trade is happening a lot of people gradually begin to lose the bicameral voices begin to mislead people or they can't find good voices to start off on they don't have a consistent theocratic culture they don't have anything of this sort so what gradually comes to happen is that the bicameral voices decreases the bicameral voices decrease in people's mind of prominence and stuff like this and his idea again is consciousness is a kind of learned it's a theater that we create in our minds as a model to solve for the lack of the bicameral mindset and as the societies gradually dissipate as they begin to fail the consciousness the consciousness that we know of nowadays comes to bear in the different psychologies of people so that's what we end up having now one of the interesting takes is not only is his theory an explanation of bronze age religion and religion beforehand not only do you have these sort of bicameral theocracies and things like that but in addition he wants to account for the religious traditions that exist afterwards that is even though people of Rome were conscious or people of classical Greece post the you know after the Iliad after you know the grease of the period of the Peloponnesian war something like this even though people of that period he thinks of his being conscious a lot of their cultural institutions are holdovers from the bicameral era so he goes into a couple of different things that I think by themselves are a little confusing his cultural institutions but they make a lot of sense in the bicameral theory now his idea I mentioned earlier that he portrays the lack or the fall of the bicameral mind is a kind of falling from grace and this is how a lot of people interpret it at the time that is there is some kind of paradise era where people lived in a kind of peace and then they left the Garden of Eden so to speak and now there is a world of chaos and complexity and stuff like this so his view in this light is that a lot of religious traditions try to recreate bicamerality so one example is the use of oracles so an oracle is often a person I think they tend to be more women than men but a person who is kept away from the norms of society they are raised in a particular environment they often go through hallucinogenic experiments maybe with drugs maybe with something else but his idea is that the use of oracles while individual people had lost their bicameral voices in things like oracles or prophets or something like this they as a cultural institution they are supposed to reproduce the bicamerality they are supposed to be people who either are more in touch with this than others or at least sort of cargo cult it they pretend to have these voices that other people might not actually have one example he is not just talking about this in the Delphic oracle in Greece or something like that but also the prophets of the Old Testament the Nabi or the Nabiim I guess they are in the plural form that is his view of the Hebrew prophets is not that they they don't really do things that are prediction often they make declarations of what's going to happen in the future but that's only as a kind of punishment like this is going to happen if you don't do why or something like that so in his view this kind of prophecy is a kind of these people are a kind of bicameral people the prophets in Israel or something like this are supposed to be a traveling group of people who keep the bicameral culture of beforehand it might not be exactly the same as earlier cultures but it's a kind of replication of that earlier pre-Bronze age collapse society and these people maintain that voice and they have they still have this psychological effect of having that bicameral voice appear to them but not only do we have these kind of religious institutions as holdovers but things we take for granted one is music and music I think has an entire chapter in the book that's worth reading one of the points he makes about music and it's actually an interesting point is that we often think of music as being something or even lyrics of music as being something linguistic because often they carry language on them but they're actually something totally different they're processed and memorized in a totally different way for example well one example that I think should drive it clear to you is if you think of like your favorite song that has lyrics just think of that for a second and if you think of the lyrics to that song let's say I ask you in person tell me the lyrics of your favorite song you'll probably what'll probably happen is you'll start to recount them and very quickly you realize you don't actually know the lyrics and you have to sort of sing it to yourself even if it's a song you listen to all the time you have the way you've memorized the lyrics is ultimately with the music and if you take the music away from it you can't really recall the music you don't just people don't just memorize long text and things like this now one of the things that Jane says related to this is oral traditions things like the Iliad and the Odyssey even things like that the fact that people memorize things they're not really memorizing entire books or something like that they're memorizing tunes they're memorizing lyrics they're memorizing a poetic meter and the words that gradually evolve over time they fit in that poetic meter and that makes it easier to remember as you even the way the Greeks at the time would talk about it would be the muses have to sing through me I have to have divine inspiration to be able to sing and in a bicameral mindset how this would be understood is the the right hemisphere I have to have the inspiration of the right hemisphere it's not a linguistic memorization it's a kind of lyrical memorization and music is a kind of way or poetry generally is a kind of way of tapping into this other kind of mindset that people have so this is his view of how music and other kinds of institutions like this arise in human society and why they survive there's something different we again we have this idea to go back a little further we have this idea that this is something in our conscious mind we memorize music we memorize lyrics we memorize poetry and stuff like this but I think the view that you have that's more proper in antiquity and even more proper nowadays if you really think about it is that lyrics and stuff like this there's something that's not memorized by our conscious brain it's something that is memorized by something that is not consciously we're not consciously aware of and repeating lyrics repeating stuff like this we're tapping into something a little different we're tapping into something you might think of as being inspiration but for james this is something that it has you know a deeper deeper bicameral point of it so I think we're about at the point where you probably have a good enough view of the general theory and the evidence behind it I have touched on mostly the historical evidence I think that it's the most interesting it's the most it really gets right at what kind of things you have to reinterpret with this kind of theory but there's a lot of other stuff that I definitely recommend the book for reading james actually talks a lot about psychological states like schizophrenia which he also thinks of as being a kind of vestige of this bicameral mind other things as well even things like a possession as it happens he thinks of it as being psychological states that reproduce the bicameral mind in a lot of different ways but I definitely encourage you to read the book for all of this I'm not going to cover it all here I think we're about running out of time for this period I think you know I don't know what the optimal time for a podcast is but we're definitely at more than an hour at this point so anyway so I'll wind it down so what do I think is good about this theory I'll say the things that I think is good I've sort of already alluded to them one is that there are so many theories out there of consciousness and history and things like this that don't fail to account for the fact that I think the early ancient mentality of people the mindset of people is so utterly distinct from what we're familiar with so distinct that even when you read some of their documents you're faced with a narrative structure that's so different that it needs a kind of accounting and there are a lot of this there's a lot of these differences that are accounted for by the fact by a general theory like this that accounts for the difference in how people think then versus how people think now so that's one of the things that I think is really good and one of the things that I think makes it a pleasurable theory is that it integrates this kind of information again the information about schizophrenics and takes that with Greek vocabulary and the social structure of Samaria and all of these different cultures and it integrates them into one thing in a very impressive way I think I don't honestly know how James came across such a crazy idea but it's definitely one that it's very interesting in the place it holds now the I guess the I don't want to say the downsides but there are some there are some extra notes to throw on this first off although this is a theory of the origin of consciousness and why it exists the way it is in our mentality there are a lot of the problems of consciousness that it doesn't actually answer and doesn't really try to answer because again James is talking about what he calls consciousness but is really more I think I said McVeigh calls it conscious interiority he's really looking at a specific kind of conscious perception that we create in our brains so you could imagine that you know humans that exist in this earlier society that's bicameral you could think of them as being conscious in some or being conscious in some way and the problem with that is that although you have explained some kind of consciousness you haven't explained how we actually get these perceptions where the actual qualia come from that is not something that James really tries to account for so in that if you're looking for a theory of consciousness like that this is I don't want to say it doesn't work it's just not sufficient that's not something that James actually wants to talk about why is it that we actually are capable of feeling these things and we actually see red and it appears as red for us why does that happen it's it's something that James doesn't answer and it's something that I again to give my opinion I am not very I'm not very optimistic about it I don't think that that is an answerable question in the realm of consciousness at least from what I know so that's not something you're going to get a solution for and if you think that's what a theory of consciousness has to do you're not going to get that but regardless this is a pretty fascinating theory for that now there are lots of ways to take this theory and do stuff with it there have been many people there is a Julian Jane society you can look it up I think it's julienjanes.org something like that they have a lot of literature I'm thinking about getting the julienjanes collection which I don't own I want to read it's a collection of different things I think written by him and other people but I might want to continue by reading that sometime in the future so I might end up getting that but from what I can tell a lot of people take the intuitions of the research and apply it to cultures that are vexing or practices or mental states and sometimes you can get a lot of currency with it so it's a very productive theory and that's one of the reasons I wanted to do a video on it or podcast on it just because it's one of those things that a lot you don't really hear a lot of people talking about but it's a theory that I think a lot of people would be very interested in to say the least I guess I mean it is one of those things and I will say now that you know of it I encourage you to well I don't even have to encourage you to do this but you'll start running across things start running across events and other things and it'll always make you think you know what maybe the reason this happened is because people didn't work that way that we do now maybe they were unconscious maybe they were something else and it's definitely something to think about and I will say some passing comments at the very end one thing that I think is interesting is you have bicameral people who are either non-conscious or conscious in a way utterly different from us and we have you know people like us who have a particular mental repertoire that has this cognitive theater that we're all familiar with that is conscious interiority depending on whatever word you want to use but is it possible for example for humans in a particular society to develop a third type of consciousness or fourth is it something that is the mind so plastic and so manipulatable that we can develop other forms of consciousness based on our inputs is that a possibility it's just something to think about or even is our conscious perception is the metaphors that we create that come to bear in the conscious in the mental theater could those be systematically different for different people not just you know maybe the people in your family maybe across different countries or across in different cultures or something else like that that's something to think about I think that this kind of way of looking at the evolution of consciousness changes the way that you're going to interpret a whole lot of things and really it opens a lot of doors for the kind of things that you can do with the human brain it makes it a lot more plastic it makes a lot more manipulatable than other theories of consciousness are and that's something that's interesting to say the least but that's just a parting thought for you to think think about anyway if you have any comments any kind of questions about this feel free to email them to luke at luke smith xyz any you know thing you know good real life questions like does my anime pillow have a bicameral voice feel free to send them to me and if you have anything that's worth reading I will read it out I will say is one minor addition I do want to keep the podcast due to syndication issues it'd be best if I keep the podcast clean of bad language so if you send anything laden with obscenities I won't read it or at least I'll censor it but that's just a note it's not a personal thing I'm not against it just note that so again email me any kind of suggestions for the podcast or anything at luke at luke smith xyz for the next couple episodes I'm going to be covering mostly a couple books that I've had in mind I want to focus on books for the first couple of episodes just to keep I guess keep it nice and structured but I'm open to any kind of medium in the future be that hosting shows with someone else or interviews or something like that it all depends but I have a couple books lined up I don't want to put the name on which one I'm going to do next time so we'll just I'll leave you in suspense so see you guys next time thanks for listening to not related