Given that many diseases are known to have a psychosomatic or neurologically-based component, one may wonder whether Jaynesian consciousness (or the lack thereof) might have actually caused changes in the whole body , not just the brain. This is a highly speculative question since we can’t just go b...

I was reading one of the criticisms of Jaynes’ work (and the response to it posted on this site), and the criticism hinged on how the “man” half of the brain would be able to obey the “god” half’s instructions, if it wasn’t already conscious? I think part of the problem might be the use of “god” and...

When most people hear the word hallucination, they usually think of the auditory or visual kind. However, smell-related hallucinations exist too. There are two terms for them: phantosmia means smelling an odor when none is present, while parosmia is when a real odor is perceived differently than it ...

Because of the ongoing violence in Haiti, I started researching more into the history of the country. Specifically, I wanted to see what is motivating one of the gang leaders responsible for the recent attacks (Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier). One article I read mentioned that he admires former dictator...

Justin Mohn is a man from Levittown, Pennsylvania who is currently awaiting trial for the grisly slaying of his own father, Michael Mohn. The case attracted national attention due to a video Justin posted on YouTube, in which he ranted that the government and “woke mobs” were destroying America, and...

I thought of something else along similar lines: the difference between eternalism (also known as four-dimensionalism) and presentism as a philosophy of time. This is partially orthogonal to the “open vs. closed” view of time; one could potentially be an open presentist, a closed eternalist, or an o...

If you’ve been following the news recently, you know that Argentina just elected a president who is quite “out there”, having run on an extreme anarcho-capitalist platform. He won because of widespread popular dissatisfaction with his opponent’s party, which stemmed from the dismal state of the Arge...

I’m actually working on writing something right now that connects to Jaynes’ theory. It’s going to be a three-part book, which hopefully will challenge a lot of people’s underlying assumptions. The first part draws parallels between the current sociopolitical situation in the United States and that ...

Here’s another article that uses the word consciousness to mean something very different from what Jaynes meant by the term. The sad thing is that they could have easily used another word (like “perception” or “awareness”); if they had done so, the ideas in the article would have been clearer, and ...

I wonder if anyone’s ever done a comparison between Jaynes’ theories and those of Agner Fog, known for his theory of regal and kungic societal structures , or regality theory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regality_theory ). The two theories aren’t necessarily incompatible, as the regality theory h...

I wonder if anyone here has heard of a book called Bronze Age Mindset , written by “Bronze Age Pervert” (believed to be a pseudonym of a man named Costin Alamariu). “Bronze Age Pervert” is highly active on social media under that name, and his book has gained a following among some (mostly young) fa...

I find the idea of a tension between psychedelics and addictive substances very interesting. I think that the parallel could be extended beyond just chemical substances as well (for instance, many popular activities such as gambling or social media use are known to be potentially addictive). I live ...

Unlike some theories of consciousness (such as the Penrose/Hameroff model), Jaynes’ theory of consciousness is substrate-independent (since it views consciousness as a creation of language, rather than focusing specifically on the inner workings of neurons). This means that according to Jaynes’ mode...

Did Julian Jaynes ever relate his theory to the way different societies have perceived time (as either cyclical/closed or linear/open)? It seems there are strong parallels, since the gradual change from a “closed” timeline to an “open” one overlaps with what Jaynes considered to be the bicameral era...

There is an important concept in computing theory called Turing completeness, which says that any system that is Turing complete can simulate any other system. If you have a computer language (or even other types of systems, like Conway’s Game of Life or Minecraft), and it has access to an infinite ...