This makes me think of Lev Vygotsky. He was an early Soviet psychologist. But his writings weren't available in the West until the 1980s. He believed language began as social speech as part of what he called the zone of proximal development where the speech of others helped the child's developing mi...

@Tanker62 - "it's difficult to imagine the Abrahamic God behaving like Zeus who regularly fathered children with mortal women..." Let me make a simple point. Brian J. McVeigh's most recent book, The Psychology of the Bible, covers somethng related to this. He wasn't talking about Zeus, but...

There is one speculation based on observations of children. Some suspect that a child first develops a theory of mind for other people before doing so for themselves. That is to say that theory of mind is inherently social and so Jaynesian consciousness might in a sense be an internalization of this...

The ending of the article fits Jaynes' theory:

The human remains were kept for between "a few decades" and "a couple of centuries," he added, suggesting that they could have been buried once the deceased had "passed out of living or cultural memory."

Welcome to the forum, Kevin. Few people visit here. Almost all the activity is at the Facebook groups. But I don't like social media. I wish people would use this discussion board, instead.

Before you pass judgment on Julian Jaynes' theory, I'd recommend more fully exploring the info about it, as there is so much info available. The book itself is, of course, solid scholarship. But it's many decades old at this point having originally been published about a half century ago. Check out ...

That is interesting. Offhand, I'm not sure I've heard any discussion about Jaynesian consciousness and aslphabetic language. I'd be curious to hear anyone's thoughts on this.

You might want to look into eidetic memory. It would be related to the mnemonic systems that were dominant prior to written text. Lynne Kelly has some books on this. She notes that the Australian Aborigines can follow the songlines from memory.

I wrote about this:
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.c ... not-cause/

It isn't very active around here. But let me introduce myself anyway. I'm no one special. I have no expertise in any field of study. I don't even have a college degree. But having been raised by parents who were teachers, I picked up a love of learning and a love of reading. I read widely. But in ce...

Here is one thing to keep in mind. Our way of defining 'god' and 'religion' didn't exist in bicameral societies. The notion of religion as a specific category of something separate from the rest of society didn't develop until well into the Axial Age. Bicameral people probably would have had a more ...

I extensively commented on that blog post. The blogger never gave much of a response to anything. Since then, he has taken down every single post he ever wrote about Jaynes. I don't know if that is his way of admitting that he had been wrong and careless or simply an act that he no longer wanted to ...

If anyone is interested, I wrote a piece on Westworld and the bicameral mind:

https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.c ... d-freedom/