Review: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A bestseller from 1978 which is still in print. My instincts said this was crazy, but parts of what he suggests are interesting - even if it seems like the kind of book people need to do bong hits before reading. The "hard" problem of consciousness is still a "hard" problem for me, and this is someone who took a stab at it. The opening salvo that consciousness is not necessary for concepts, thinking, reasoning, or learning is somewhat persuasive, but it is certainly a weak argument for the idea that consciousness did not exist until a few thousand years ago. His tracking of the bicameral mind sounds very much like a purely speculative theory that encompasses everything from religion to mental illness - which all come from some right-brain phenomena. I think he is probably correct that the nature of consciousness has changed through the millennia - a big piece of his evidence is that is in the Illiad is how all the characters are always obeying higher "gods" or "spirits" and the Odyssey has more introverted prose. Does this represent a change in consciousness? Who knows. Well Julian think he knows. His talk of how the right brain is responsible for many religious ideas, hallucinations, group experience may have some validity - but his examples of how society functioned just sounds like junk. There was an experiment recently that someone could stimulate a portion of your right front temporal lobe and you would have a transcendent, or religious experience, so maybe Julian was on to something. But currently, there is also a lot of evidence that the whole left-brain/right-brain theory is a bit misguided. Also, when you accidentally step on a dog's foot, and it squeals, is it not conscious? He would argue no (I assume), but my intuition strongly says Julian is dead wrong about that. So certainly I did not buy most of it, but as an interesting read, rather than a scientific tract, it has value.

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