Critique 10 – Pre-Bicameral Mentality and Art
Critique: Jaynes seems to say that bicameral minds, with hallucinations of god talk, actually emerged at the beginnings of civilization (around 10,000 years ago), as a form of social control as communities became larger than tribal bands, with the god voices evolving from the actual voices of kings, and then of dead kings (who merged into gods). This begs the question of what sort of mental life preceded bicameralism, and on this Jaynes is remarkably silent. If people had selves before bicameralism, is it reasonable to suppose they’d give up those selves and their understanding that their inner voices were their own? And if so then obviously Jaynes can’t claim a later origin for introspective consciousness. One is left to infer that before civilization, people were not even bicameral, with consciousness even more impoverished than that. Yet archaeological evidence shows that even pre-agriculture and pre-civilization, humans led quite sophisticated lives with plenty of technology and artisanship. Language goes back tens of thousands of years, and it’s hard to imagine the people who developed and used it didn’t know when they were talking to themselves. We’ve found jewelry 80,000 years old, and it’s hard to understand such adornment if wearers had no sense of self.”
Response: Jaynes suggests that the bicameral mind most likely evolved along with the evolution of language in the late Pleistocene, beginning around 50,000 BC (see Jaynes, “The Evolution of Language in the Late Pleistocene,” in The Julian Jaynes Collection). Jaynes briefly addresses the question of whether humans could have lost consciousness prior to bicamerality on pages 346-347 of The Julian Jaynes Collection, suggesting that all of the relevant evidence makes this scenario highly improbable. Earlier, pre-linguistic people would have been intelligent and able to problem-solve, but lacked language or an introspectible mind-space. Jaynes outlines quite clearly how consciousness is not necessary for tool making, cave art, or even problem solving. On the evidence for consciousness being unnecessary for cave art, see Nicolas Humphrey “Cave Art, Autism, and the Evolution of the Human Mind” and Julian Jaynes, “Paleolithic Cave Paintings as Eidetic Images” in The Julian Jaynes Collection. See also Helen Keller’s autobiography, The World I Live In, for descriptions of mental life before language.
Learn about about Julian Jaynes’s theory by reading our latest book, Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind: Interviews with Leading Thinkers on Julian Jaynes’s Theory.