Visual bicameralism in the BioShock franchise

Discussion of the influence of Jaynes's theory on works of fiction, film, and in popular culture.
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minnespectrum
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Joined: Tue Jul 11, 2023 3:12 pm

Visual bicameralism in the BioShock franchise

Post by minnespectrum »

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with BioShock. It’s a franchise of video games with a dystopian sci-fi theme. When the first BioShock game was released, it spawned a lively discussion about whether some video games should be considered art—many people argued that this one qualified.

The creator of the franchise said that he was inspired by historical architecture (particularly art deco) as well as by the philosophy of Ayn Rand, upon whom the first game’s villain (Andrew Ryan) was loosely based. The game takes place in Rapture, an underwater city originally intended to be a sort of Objectivist paradise, but instead ends up as a complete dystopia instead.

Needless to say, the Objectivist mindset is very far from bicameral, given how egocentric it is. However, there are characters in the franchise who have what might be described as a bicameral mentality: the Little Sisters.

Actually, calling them bicameral is probably an understatement. The Little Sisters started out as orphaned human girls, who were implanted with a symbiotic sea slug that produces ADAM (a serum upon which most of Rapture’s technology is based). After a while, there wasn’t enough ADAM to go around, so the Sisters were brainwashed to harvest ADAM from the corpses of Splicers (humans who mutated and went insane due to heavy ADAM use). They are aided in this task by hulking cyborgs called Big Daddies. The Big Daddies were once human, but now they don’t even talk (they make low-pitched, whale-like sounds instead). Their job is to protect the Little Sisters from Splicer attacks.

Here’s where the bicameral part comes in. Obviously, this job is not something any normal little girl would want to do. At one point, you (the player) play as a Little Sister and discover that they hallucinate that the world is completely different, not only auditorily, but also visually as well. Big Daddies seem to them like heroic human knights in shining armor, and as protective father figures. The Splicer corpses seem like “angels” in peaceful repose, whose blood looks like rose petals (thus making the task of collecting it seem more appealing). Rapture itself seems like a fairy tale instead of the decrepit hellscape that it actually is. When Splicers fight each other to the death over ADAM (as they often do), to Little Sisters, it seems like the Splicers are dancing.

Moreover, Little Sisters view all Big Daddies as the same, archetypal figure (almost like a god). If “her” Big Daddy is killed, a Little Sister will grieve for a bit, but once she finds a new one, she will immediately follow him just as though he were her previous Big Daddy come back to life. In keeping with this, a Little Sister will always use the same name, “Mr. Bubbles”, for her Big Daddy.

BioShock 2 has an even more explicit bicameral aspect, as its villain (Sofia Lamb) is an extreme collectivist who dislikes any sort of individual selfhood, and wants to re-engineer humanity to create perfect altruists, who would act only based on what is best for society as a whole. Lamb’s ideal world seems to be a bicameral one, just without the hierarchy, and with the “voice of the collective” (so to speak) replacing that of the gods. It’s little wonder, then, that Little Sisters are among her most loyal followers.

In general, the Little Sisters don’t seem to question what they are seeing, hearing, or doing, they just keep following the same routine. The only time the hallucinations “break down” is intermittently, when something particularly traumatic happens; then, the Little Sister sees a brief glimpse of the world as it really is, before it snaps back again to the hallucination. A brief flash of consciousness!

Obviously, this was some powerful brainwashing (and the game does give hints at how it was accomplished). The idea of a visual aspect to bicamerality is interesting, though—did Jaynes ever consider this possibility?

If people in bicameral times did experience visual hallucinations, they would probably have been a lot more subtle than the auditory ones (since visual hallucinations are generally rarer). But maybe (for instance) a person could look at a king and hallucinate that he had godlike attributes, such as a halo. One wonders if the (often unrealistic) way ancient statues portray the human form actually betrays something about how the people who built those statues saw the human body—in a literal and not just in a metaphorical sense. Particularly the bodies of socially powerful people.

Indeed, Greeks did tend to conflate physical beauty with moral character a lot. It’s not hard to imagine that this could affect visual perception in some people, such as causing them to hallucinate that someone they admire is more conventionally attractive than they actually are. Or even to hallucinate that the emperor has on the most beautiful robes ever, when in fact he is naked. :lol: Even in modern times, studies have shown that cognitive biases do affect people’s visual perception, though the effect is generally small.

The fact that the Little Sisters are children makes the idea that they could have that profound of an altered perception much more believable, since a child’s brain is significantly more impressionable than an adult’s.
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