Thanks for the link DarkMatters, you saved me a couple of seconds of googling haha. After brushing up on what the bicameral mind hypothesis entails, it sounds a lot to me like the identifiers of "god" and "gods" in this case are being used rather liberally. As a matter of fact, I would go as far as to say how liberally the terms are being applied (at least on Wikipedia) is excessive because how remarkably unclear the different intended meanings of the words are supposed to be considering the vastly different contexts they used them in.
Of course, at the same time, a fundamental difference between what I incorrectly remembered the concept being about and what it actually appears to be is that Jaynes isn't asserting something about the nature of the mind and consciousness as we know it the modern sense. That is to say, it seems his idea is more geared towards building an understanding of and providing an explanation for ancient man's hypothesized lack of conscious self-awareness and their tendency to mistake a phenonemon wholly unrelated to external gods as receiving directives ordained by some sort of divine force.
Still, I think for clarity's sake it's important to make an explicit distinction between ancient man's (alleged) schizophrenic-like auditory hallucinatory experiences being directives from what they believed to literally be gods and the usage of that term when ascribing the source of the voices resulting from the bicameral mind (or in the modern age, schizophrenic minds) as being from God or gods. I don't know, maybe I'm being too anal here in pointing that out and everybody already gets that, but I've got a penchant for stating things like this in as clear of terms as is humanly possible... actually almost more like an obsessive need to do so. Casually using the same terms when talking about people who truly believe they were voices from deities when a critical point to his hypothesis is that they are not in fact coming from deities (neither in a literal sense, nor any kind of metaphorical/symbolic sense) really only opens people up to the possibility of misunderstanding what he was actually saying. I guess the way I see it is that, when the goal is to get closer to the truth and intellectual enlightenment, the goal should be to explain your understanding in the least uncertain terms as you possibly can.
In any case, the idea that modern society has caused a paradigm shift of sorts in the way human beings think and how they view reality in such a way that it has caused us to develop a more stringent/rigid sense of self-awareness doesn't seem all that farfetched. Neither does recognizing the parallels between ancient man's experience of receiving divine directives and the commanding hallucinations schizophrenics and positing that the two phenomena are at least in some way fundamentally related (if not, in some cases, outright what was actually responsible for the divine commands instructing their behavior). The idea that schizophrenia or the positive symptoms of psychosis in general are vestiges of man's old bicameral state on the other hand seems to be pushing the limits of credulity to me. There are simply too many assumptions going on when going on to make a leap that big and I feel coming to that conclusion sorely lacks so much needed nuance.
For instance, from what I read, there doesn't seem to be much in-depth conscious recognition that who experiences these commands and the rather complex way human social interaction and society at large's views affect our belief systems make ideas like "man's earlier bicameral state (of mind)" seem poorly thought out. I would venture to guess that a significant portion of humanity, for lack of a better way of putting it, was simply gullible or perhaps rather all too ready accept ideas like God's or several gods' existence and their (in my opinion) almost inexplicable interest in beings like ourselves and our daily struggles (along with the idea that they intervened in our lives on a regular basis). A large proportion of people today seem to almost have a need to simply uncritically accept these kinds of ideas out of a need to justify their existence and that it has some kind of significance. I can only imagine living in a time where not only does deviating from socially expected behaviors and beliefs means total ostracization (at best, if not actually being harmed or killed), when getting something like an infenction carried a real chance for death or the need for amputation, and where life is just miserable toil in general.
This would leave the entire society insanely vunerable to having firm conviction in the ideas that community members like medicine men, shaman, clergy, etc., that happened to experience these types of command hallucinations expressed. Especially when medicine men and shaman were commonly using psychotomimetic hallucinogenic drugs to regularly communicate with these supposed gods. I'm sure to a large degree most people would have a level of what Jaynes is calling bicameralism, but I feel like the problem was much more localized to a rather select group of society and the community and they simply had abnormally large influences on the beliefs of the general populace.
|
|
Bookmarks