![]() ![]() ![]() It is ‘software’ that had to be invented, like tools such as the wheel. Consciousness, in Jaynes’s definition, is a box of conceptual tools that is not ‘included with the hardware’. The pivotal question is which concepts are available in a language. But language alone is not enough for consciousness, according to Jaynes. They were social creatures with a fully developed language. This is not to say that people with a bicameral mind were barbarians waving their bludgeons and uttering monosyllabic sounds. They were hallucinated voices that provided the answers when a person entered a stressful situation which couldn’t be solved by routine. ![]() These gods were no judging, moral or transcendent gods, but were more like each person’s problem solvers. The human part heard voices and experienced these as coming from gods. It is a mind with two chambers, the mind that is divided in a god part and a human part. ![]() Jaynes calls the mental space of these pre-conscious people the bicameral mind. In other words: they had no subjective consciousness. They did not have the ability: they had no introspection and no concept of ‘self’ that they could reflect upon. How did human beings who lived five thousand years ago view themselves? How did they make decisions and how did they reflect on their past? Julian Jaynes (1920 – 1997) proposes a radical answer to these questions: until a few thousand years ago human beings did not ‘view themselves’. ![]()
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