Julian Jaynes’s Four Hypotheses on the Origin of Mind
Marcel Kuijsten, Introduction to Marcel Kuijsten (ed.), Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind (Julian Jaynes Society, 2022).
Excerpt: The history of ideas teaches us that new, paradigm-shifting theories typically face an uphill battle. Often they are initially rejected, then only gradually appreciated, with many details misunderstood. The concepts of plate tectonics and seafloor spreading were rejected (and often ridiculed) for decades. Glacial theory and the germ theory of disease were similarly dismissed. Many initially rejected Darwin’s theory of the origin of species by natural selection, and a widespread misunderstanding of the details of this theory continues to this day. Serious applications of Darwin’s theory to understanding human nature (beyond Darwin’s own early efforts) took nearly 100 years to get underway — but eventually inspired entire new fields of study such as evolutionary psychology and human evolutionary biology.
This pattern of initial rejection, slow appreciation, and continual misunderstanding certainly applies to Julian Jaynes’s theory of the origin of consciousness and a previous mentality he called the bicameral mind. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Jaynes, a psychologist who taught at Princeton for more than 25 years and served as the first Master of that university’s Woodrow Wilson College, argued that consciousness, as we experience it today, is not an innate feature of the human mental apparatus but developed only relatively recently, emerging around the first millennium bce in Greece, and somewhat earlier or later in other cultures. Prior to that, non-habitual behavior was guided by auditory hallucinations that were interpreted as the voices of leaders, dead ancestors, or the gods. Only later, through the development of metaphorical language and writing, did humans develop an inner mind-space that facilitated introspection and an inner dialogue. …