Selects: Thrill to the Stunning Bicameral Mind Hypothesis

On the look back at a podcast.

The next seminar is Big Mama For Me. 84's Big To Me. I'm Sam Jack, and I'm Alex E. Grish.

“Each episode we pick a year, unpack what went down,”

and try to make sense of how we survived it. With our friends, fellow comedians, and favorite authors, like Mark Lamont Hill, on the 80s. They get those wild, I mean, it's wild, wild, yeah! I don't think there's a more important year for black people.

Listen to look back at it on the iHeart Radio and Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it was good, y'all. You're listening and I learned the hard way with your favorite therapist and host care games.

This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing, how many men carry a suit or armament. It's a new suit of world that you not to be played with.

And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to. Listen to learn the hard way on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, Bachelor Star Clayton Eckard

was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.

“You doctored this particular test twice in silence, right?”

I doctored the test once. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg Olespie and I'm imagining.

And my mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is LoveTrap. Laura, Scott Stelpoise. As the season continues, Laura Owens

finally faces consequences.

Listen to LoveTrap podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, guys. It's Josh and for this week's Select. I'm going with our August 2022 episode

on the bicameral Mind Theory. It is mind blowing, mind expanding, mind flabbergasting. It's just a really good episode. It's just really me and Chuck sitting around having a really interesting conversation about some really

interesting stuff. So if you feel like expanding your mind right now, I would say this is a great episode to listen to. Enjoy.

“Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production”

of IHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should know.

The ongoing, amazing mind blowing edition.

Even into this stuff lately, what's going on with you? I don't know. I don't know man, but yes, I'm definitely into it lately. It's weird. Approaching 50.

Existential crisis. I don't know about crisis. Maybe more like pondering, existential pondering. I don't think it's a crisis yet. I've still got five years still 50.

So give me time. How are you 45? I'm glad you're 47. I'm 45 and eight nights. Yeah, you got time.

Yeah, great, thank you for that. But no, there's no like one thing that's making me say, like, hey, when did humans become conscious or when did humans become intelligent? Or what do we do if aliens come down?

For some reason, it's just maybe a little more appealing to me than it has been in the past lately. I don't know. But yes, I'm definitely into this kind of thing right now. And this stuff, what we're going to talk about today,

it's based on a house-to-forks article that Robert Lam wrote. And I'm not at all surprised that Robert Lam is into this. But I just want to note that I've heard about this years and years and years ago and I've been meaning to do an article or an episode on it.

So I don't want you to think this is something we just stumbled across as is actually the fruition of years of planning and hope and dreams coming to pass in maybe the best episode we'll ever make. And of course, Robert and not Robert Lam,

the lead singer of the Banshikago. Just to make-- There's another Robert Lam and he was in Chicago? Still isn't Chicago. Is that Peter Catera's stage name?

No. Catera was the bass player and part lead singer along with Robert Lam who played keyboards and also sang lead on some. And before Terry Cath died, he played guitar and also sang. So they had three singers in the early days of Chicago.

That's just confusing. But none of them are our colleague, Robert Lam, who along with our colleague Joe had been doing stuff to blow your mind for many, many years. Another great show.

Yeah, and I didn't check, but I would place a substantial amount of money on the idea that they have their own episode on this Julien James by CameroMind. I bet they have. And we should also shout out philosophy for life, psychology

today, and frontiers in psychology.

I've got two more that aren't made up.

It's late star codex and poster name hazard on the site less wrong. That sounds like a great source. It is hazard. It was really talking about, oh, and one more. I'm sorry, a guy named Jeff Ward or Jeff Ward,

but you know, when they call it a joff on medium. So all of those combined with Robert Lam's article, the coalescing, again, probably the greatest episode will ever do. Yeah, and I sort of get some of this.

“I think you're going to help me out, so I'm because I do have some questions”

that I'll just throw out here in there. Because at times, I found myself reading the stuff and going, yeah, but isn't that just blank? OK, great. I'll do my best to answer.

And you're probably right when you're thinking that. And then you're probably like, yes. All right, well, I mean, I guess we should say then the whole hypothesis that we're going to be kind of breaking down today is controversial. And it's not provable necessarily scientifically speaking.

So it's sort of one of those, I mean, I think it goes beyond thought experiment for sure, and to true hypothesis land. But it was proposed by a psychologist here in the United States, named Julian James, in the mid 1970s, of course. Yeah, the year has born.

Yeah, '76, baby. So what he proposed was an answer to a longstanding question. And that was, when did humans become conscious? Like, when did consciousness emerge?

“Is it something that came along in the earliest archaic humans?”

Is it something that came along much later than that? And how could we ever possibly answer that? Like, what relics have been left in history, in prehistory, that would say, like, hey, this is evidence of consciousness. And Julian James took that up.

And he did it as an outsider, which was a huge strike against him, because automatically legitimate scientists are like, well, I can't build upon this theory, possibly this man is actually in my field of consciousness studies. But the thing is this hypothesis is so well-liked.

It's just roundly like, people just like it. It's just such an interesting hypothesis that it just won't go away. It hasn't gone away. And in fact, there's like a Julian James Institute.

There's groups that have sprung up based on this hypothesis. And what he says in a very small nutshell, is that sometimes about 1,000, 2,000 years ago, humans became conscious in the way that we understand consciousness today.

They developed the ability to think about thinking. They developed the ability to think about that other people are thinking.

They developed basically what's called subjective introspection.

And then as a result of that, they almost automatically gained free will in volition. So what he's saying is that if we went back in time in the way back machine Chuck, and we met somebody who lived 3,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago,

they would not be a conscious human in the way that we understand conscious humans. That's right. And he thinks it was a learned thing. And the idea that he throws down is that our mind,

“our brain, or was, rather, very important, was,”

because it no longer is. By Cameral, which means split into two parts, and we'll get to some actual science about the hemispheres of the brain later on. But in this case, he means split into two parts

where you have a part that makes decisions and a part that follows and that neither one of them were conscious. And here's where I get a little tripped up. Right out of the gate.

Is basically, he says that instead of an internal dialogue,

which we all have in which indicates a consciousness, like us talking to ourselves, us saying things like everything from like, hey, get up and go do this to just internally thinking about things, like humans do. That instead of that, we were sort of like human zombies

and that we were creatures of habit. We had routines and behaviors that we followed to a T. And whenever something disrupted that behavior, which is when a conscious mind you would think would speak up, that instead of that, an external agent,

in this case, they thought there were gods would enter their brain and create an auditory hallucination. - Yeah, and that they unquestioningly obeyed that auditory hallucination. And that's what helped them get through novel situations

for, you know, a mindless automatic thing. Something new came along that got in their way. This god would speak to them and say, go around that rock. It wasn't there yesterday, don't worry about it. Just go around it and it could be one of their gods.

It could be an ancestor guiding them. I think one, I think the Sumerians maybe made reference to angels walking beside them.

“Or, and this is really important later on.”

It's a big part of Jane's hypothesis. It could be your local ruler, the divine king who's in charge of you and everybody else that you know and love and have ever lived among. It could be that person guiding you in your life too.

And the idea is, these people heard this in the same way, like you said, that we hear our own internal dialogue,

but they never chalked it up to themselves.

It was always coming from the outside. - All right, here's, I guess where I had my first issue kind of grasping this, is there were no gods speaking to them and guiding them. This was just their internal dialogue.

They just didn't know it. - Yes, yes, yes, there was no gods, but to them, and this is a really important point. To them, it definitely was a god talking to them or an ancestor talking to them.

And in the same way that if an actual god got into your brain and like was speaking to you and you responded to it,

“if you could have looked at their brains lighting up,”

presumably and like a wonder machine, it would respond the same way. So it was entirely real to them. And the same way that a placebo effect

has real effects on your body,

this would have been the same thing. And then in addition to that, it was culturally supported. Everyone that they knew believed the same thing that the gods were talking to them. And so like that just lent support to this idea.

So no one questioned it. It was just, that's the way it was. - Well, so this, I guess brings me to, let me macro this out a little bit in my own dumb brain. And it may just be 20th century,

21st century person thinking that I'm engaging in. But if the idea is that before this, there was no consciousness, but what we're really saying is there actually was consciousness they just didn't recognize it as such.

Is that the whole point was that if you do not recognize it as consciousness, therefore you are not conscious? - Yes, because you're not okay, yeah. - It's experiencing consciousness in any way that we would recognize as you being conscious.

You're just kind of, Julian James referred to it. - I see what you mean just guys doing now. - Okay, so, but the thing is, there's like a lot of scholarly discussion on like, okay, what did James mean exactly?

How literal was he? Because he used words like automaton.

He never call them zombies.

Other people call them like zombies, but no one talked about zombies back then. - No, that's true. But, well, evil dead are not evil dead. Living dead, now the living dead had come out by then.

- Yeah, but it wasn't like today. - Okay, no, no. - I know they're definitely over zombies. - Autonomous ones. - So, he called them automotons and it's essentially

the same thing that they were, they just behaved automatically. They didn't stop and think about how they felt.

“And this is really important too, Chuck.”

Of course, they still had feelings. They had feelings about the people that were in their kin group. They had feelings about their local ruler. They had feelings about, you know,

stopping their toe. It's not like they just had no inner life whatsoever. It's that they didn't reflect on their inner life. They didn't think about thinking. They didn't have what we would recognize as consciousness.

And in the terms that James is describing consciousness, which is a really narrow definition of consciousness. And then on top of that, he also goes to great links to say, "Hey, I understand that you're gonna get all up in a tizzy "that I'm saying that these people weren't conscious.

"I'm not talking about consciousness in general." And I think that you overestimate just how much consciousness makes up our lives. Okay. How about we take a break? Okay.

I'm gonna go rip a bond. (laughs) Getting. We'll take a break, we'll come back and we'll talk about lots of other stuff right after this.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Two percent. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.

I'm Michael Ecer, an on my podcast, two percent. I break down the signs of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. All be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts and more

to look past the in-practical and a way to complex pseudo science that dominates the wellness industry.

were inherently inflammatory. We got it wrong, many of the problems that we are freaked out about in the world are the result of stress. - Put yourself through some hardships.

And you will come out on the other side, a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to two percent, that's TWO percent on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

- Do you remember when Diana Ross, double-tap little Kim's boobs at the VMAs? Oh, when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking.

“What the hell does George Bush got to do a little Kim?”

Well, you can find out on the look back at a podcast. I'm Sam J. - And I'm Alex English. - Each episode, we pick you here, unpack what went down,

and try to make sense of how he survived it. - Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill, waxing all about crack in the eights. - To be clear, 84 was big to me, not just 'cause of crack. (laughing)

I'm down to the talk about crack, oh, David. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - No, no, no. - Put yourself through your own. - I mean, at this point, Mark, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack.

So I'm starting to see that there's a throughline. - We also have eights on the table right now. So, (laughing) - Are you mentioning that sentiment? (laughing) Yes, I don't think there's a more important year

for black people.

Really? - Yeah, for me, it's one of the most important

years for black people in American history. - Listen to look back at it on the iHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Welcome to my new podcast, Learn In The Hard Way with me, your host and your favorite therapist, care games.

And in recognition of mental health awareness month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking tripfunting, Ryan Clark.

Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing. And we're still chasing it, and we don't know when we're done enough.

- Because people with scoreboard, what? Life becomes about wins and losses. Steve Burns, Dustin Ross,

“'cause you find it important to be a good person”

while you hear on earth, are you a good person because you're free? - 'Cause that's two different intentions, bro. - Absolutely. - And that's two different levels of trust.

I want you to just really be a good person. - Join me, care games, as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose on my new podcast, learn the hard way. Open your free, out-heart radio app,

search, learn the hard way, and listen to the name. (upbeat music) - All right, so I've kind of read my head around what this guy's saying now. It's, I will admit, it's a little navel gazey for me

when it comes to certain types of philosophy and hypotheses, I get a little bit like, what's the word, maybe I can be a little too concrete, or it's the French, my little, concrete and literal, in my thinking,

because it's not, you know, Friday night and college, like two in the morning, kind of discussion. - Right. - So I think that's where I am now, but I do think it's very interesting

“in that he, I mean, I think a lot of this is very interesting,”

but I think it's interesting that he thought

around the first or second millennium, BC is when things

to him changed and a consciousness began to emerge because of, well, eventually language, but specifically metaphor, which is to say that all of a sudden, we could make analogies in our brain, we could link things together.

We saw ourselves as almost as if they were characters, ourselves were characters that had like choices that they could make as characters. - Yeah. - And as these things like connected in the brain,

then it created just an effect like a domino effect basically. - Yeah. - Where all of a sudden, we could work out our own solutions. Or we knew we were capable of working out our own solutions. And we wasn't God saying walk around the rock.

They realized it was ourselves making the decision to walk around the rock. - Yes, but it's, but in part of that, that also required them to be able to reflect on the idea, like you said that they were able to now

make their own decisions, right? And you said something earlier where you're like, you know, you're talking about your own internal dialogue, where you think, hey, I should get up

and go outside for a second.

Like, that's different, right? You're thinking about you, yourself. And you realize that you are thinking about yourself. That's modern consciousness. What somebody who was a bicameral person during this time

would have thought is, get up and go outside.

because God had just instructed them to do that.

So it must be important. And they didn't think about where it came from. They definitely didn't think it was from themselves. And they didn't reflect on it. They just obeyed it.

That's Jane's position. And that if you compare those two things, you're talking about two totally different forms of mental life. And it's so different, he said,

that what we understand is consciousness just wasn't around until a couple thousand years ago. - Okay, I can buy that. I like it as a hypothesis. I can swim in this pool.

- Okay, good, good. But here's the 30 minutes. Here's the thing. It's really important to realize like,

“you said something that you're a literalist, right?”

That's actually really appropriate to approach this.

Because Juliet James, one of the very radical things that he did, was he took the ancients literally. Because when he started looking around and we'll talk more about this later, but he was looking for those artifacts

that would prove his hypothesis or lend support to it at least. And he was an expert in ancient languages, right? So he was really appropriate. He could actually read Sumerian and Mesopotamian.

And he took what they were saying when they said things like, the gods told us to do this that they thought that the gods told them to do this, not that they were using metaphor.

So he took them literally on their word and there's a real departure from anybody else who's ever examined the ancients of what they were saying.

- Yeah, and I think it's also something we should point out

now, even though it comes up later in our research is that, when you think of an, I guess an automatic society or a society of automatons, that's not to say that they weren't successful. He's describing some of the most successful,

you know, ancient civilizations that existed.

“But I think his contention is that it was a hive mind”

all working together as automatons that allowed this stuff to get accomplished and not the conscious mind. - Right, and he didn't, I don't think he ever used it as like, I don't think he ever explicitly said

that it was an emergent property of a hive mind, but that's kind of what he was describing. Kind of like, if you take one stone cutter and one stone Mason and three stone carriers and multiply that unit by 500

and give it a year, you have a ziggurat built. That's just, all those people knew what to do, they knew they were positioned in their place and they just did it. And so yeah, you could totally do that

with people who were thinking in this way and weren't conscious. You could probably actually get it done more easily than you could with people who stopped and thought, "I'm above this.

This work is not suited for me. I should be doing something else." Or, "Why is the foreman being so mean to me today?"

“Like they didn't think like that under James hypothesis.”

So they would probably get the work done more efficiently at least more quietly, I would guess. Oh, I mean, consciousness proposes her brought along a whole host of problems. - Sure. - I imagine, if you're the ruling class,

I think one thing that's interesting is that you mentioned about what is it? James, not James, James, James thought about a love Robert Lam's, James Addix and Joe can here by the way. - That was mine.

- Oh, that was yours? - No, wait a go. - Thanks. He said, James says, and then in parentheses, you put ha. (laughing) It's very good joke.

But what James said was that, and it's something you mentioned earlier was that consciousness, I think we think consciousness plays too big of a role in what is actually a life that can largely be still automatic on a lot of levels.

And this is from the actual book in 1976, and it's a little mind blowy, I kind of like it. Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we're conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

It's like asking a flat, and this is where it kind of comes home to me. It's like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it.

So that's where it comes home to me is when you, and it's metaphor, so how about that? He lays down a metaphor that makes me understand it a little bit more. - Yeah, because wherever the flashlight looks,

there's light, and this point, yeah. And this point is wherever your conscious mind looks, there's consciousness, but that doesn't mean that there's consciousness all over the place. And Robert Lam does use this a really good example

of unloading a dishwasher, right? Like when you're unloading the dishwasher, especially if you're one of those people who put all of your knives in one place, all of your forks in one part of the basket,

all of your spoon, and so on, right?

- No.

- If you do it like that, you can just be on autopilot

'cause you've done it so many times, but when you do something like drop a fork, that's out of the norm, that's a novel thing that doesn't happen every time. And so in the bicameral mind,

God would have said, "I command thee to pick up "thine fork butter fingers, and if you would lean over "and pick up the fork, and that was that." Instead, you might not even think about picking up the fork, you might do that automatically,

but it's still out of the norm, it's still different.

“And you have to kind of think about it a little more”

than just unloading the dishwasher. Now, if you take that dishwasher metaphor chuck, and you realize that 35, 9,000 years ago, there were no dishwashers, there was no ice cream scoop, there was no cookie scoop, there was no avocado splitter,

there was nothing like that. Wait, what's that? Is that a thing now? - Yeah, you don't know, you don't have one of those? - No.

- Oh, I'll send you on, you're missing out, it's a multi-tool for cutting avocados, getting the pit out, and then slicing them

as you scoop them out, they're essential as a matter of fact.

- All right, I do pretty well with my knife, but I would love to see one of these. - Okay, I'm gonna get you one for cutting avocados. - All right, okay. So the point is that there wasn't a big variety of stuff.

So there wasn't that many novel situations. Like we encounter novel situations like almost constantly, that's just modern life. And that's the basis of James's hypothesis that the reason that consciousness evolves

is because we started to get faced with more and more novel situations on a much more frequent basis. So it maybe it became inefficient for God to be talking to us every 30 seconds, or maybe we just got better at thinking for ourselves

and consciousness kind of evolved out of that.

“But the point is, life is much less complex back then.”

So you could have something like a bi-camera online.

You could have somebody who consciousness had involved in yet because they hadn't been introduced to enough experience in life. - And with that experience came the fork, falling on the floor, in other words.

- Yeah, or there's a lot more dishes to put away in much more different dishes to put away, rather than just forks. - Okay. - Sure.

- You know what I'm saying? Or you have one fork and you just carry it with you everywhere. You know, like you don't have to think about it. There was just less stuff to think about is what I'm saying. - Well, now you're speaking my language

because if I had it my way, every member of my family would have one fork, one spoon, one knife, one bowl, one cup, one plate. - Yeah. - And they were all responsible for keeping them clean

and put away. - Man, every time I hear one cup,

“I'm like, there's a joke in there somewhere,”

but I even have to come up with that I wouldn't be able to say it. - Oh, yeah, that's true. All right, so now we're at the point where we can talk a little bit more about this idea of metaphor and language sort of bringing about this change.

And so what James was throwing down in 1976 besides apparently a bunch of Rochclips was a, the emergence of agricultural societies kind of changing everything. And that all of a sudden, we are not living in groups of,

you know, 10 or 12 people that are hunting and gathering where even if there was sort of a leader within that group, it was very easy to disseminate information and follow that leader. But once we started settling down, planting and growing things

and gauging and trade with other people's that did a lot of things that complicated every process. And it meant that societies were much, much larger and that rulers couldn't necessarily speak directly to people anymore.

- Yeah, so another, not to specific people, like they could lay down and eat it and that would get disseminated in other words. - Right, so like, I read before back when I was an anthropology student that hunter-gather bands usually numbered no more than 30 people.

Like that was the absolute mass. And once you reach that, you'd split off into two different bands. So yeah, like the person in charge was like part of your moment to moment life. And if you're suddenly in a civilization

and you're building a ziggurat for somebody, he's probably not dating to talk to you. And part of James hypothesis is that this bicameralism emerged from all those new novel situations like learning to plant crops, learning to domesticate cows,

learning to engage and trade and talk to other people that we started to like need direction from the gods more and more. And it started to kind of get faster and faster. But in the meantime, it was a form of social control

was that local ruler who you were building the ziggurat for.

“So that would be a way to keep an increasingly large population”

in check. Right. And as they got bigger and bigger and they started trading with people like we were saying, that was sort of the beginning of the end

for his, not his bicameral mind, but the bicameral mind. And one of the biggest problems with all of that was when we started writing stuff down because all of a sudden, these auditory hallucinations that he felt like everyone was having to instruct them

on what to do, there was now stuff down on paper that you could read and you could refer to and go back to and pass around and post on tablets at the walls of the city or whatever. And that was all of a sudden you weren't waiting

around for a god to tell you what to do. You could just go read that tablet. - Yeah, so the power that we gave to the gods commands were kind of transferred to the written word. And yeah, that seems to have been like the death now

for the bicameral mind, right?

“And there's something really interesting”

that's worth pointing out. James apparently didn't have any hypothesis on what came before the bicameral mind. Because he said it started as a result of the increasing organization

that agriculture brought along. And that there wasn't bicameral minds before that. But he doesn't say what was before then. And people even asked him like, OK, what about 100 gather societies that are still around today?

Where would they have gotten consciousness?

And he never really answered that.

But it's definitely worth pointing out that that's an open question. But he basically says bicameralism, or the bicameral mind, should say, bicameralism is the Senate in the house. But the bicameral mind lasted from the advent

of agriculture about 11,000 years ago, till about 2,000-ish, maybe 1,500, or no, 3,000-ish years ago. So it was about a 7,000-year span of bicameral mind to them as life got more and more sophisticated. We started thinking for ourselves.

And what he says is that language, in particular, the written word, but also language got more and more sophisticated. And as it got more sophisticated, there was more of a potential for us to start thinking

in metaphors. And metaphors, as you said, is the basis of consciousness and the way we think in Julian James' mind. And there's actually a lot of support for that Charles. May I?

Oh, please. So that post-by-hazard on less wrong? No, yeah, let's see what Hazard has to say. It's called consciousness as metaphor. What James has to offer.

And what Hazard says is that, like, Hazard just puts out like a paragraph from like an economic report. And it's about recessions in Europe. And it talks about Germany plunging into recession with UK falling deeper into recession

or France emerging from recession. And what Hazard points out is that all of these descriptors imagine a recession as a three-dimensional physical thing that we can-- entire nations can move into and out of.

That's not true. Recessions aren't three-dimensional. They aren't physical things. You can't emerge from them. You can't fall into them.

But we just think about it like that. And that's metaphor. So we think in metaphors so frequently, we don't even recognize it anymore. And that was James' point that when we gain the ability

to think in metaphors, we became conscious. We started thinking for ourselves, we became capable of introspection. And it was the evolution of language that led us to that point.

Like basically, we just hit a threshold.

We're suddenly languages sophisticated enough that it could unlock new thoughts in our brains and it turned unlock consciousness. I mean, that makes sense because a metaphor is literally not literal. And if you did-- if that was not a thing yet,

then it chives with the whole notion that everything they were doing was very literal up at that point. And that would have been a pretty seismic shift if you can compare with like all of a sudden.

Yeah, and you even see this in like movies that are trying to emphasize how backwards or back in time, some group is. And they emphasize it by having that group take everything literally, usually to chronic effect.

“Like in Kingpin, when Randy Quay was an Amish person, right?”

He took everything literally, and it was hilarious, hilarity, and sued. But it was also to demonstrate how just simple

He couldn't engage in metaphors.

He didn't think like that. That's actually based on-- I don't know whether purpose or not,

“but that's based on Julian James hypothesis.”

Yeah, and you know what? That's a nice segue to children. Because when you have a human child, it's very funny to see how literal they are for those first years.

And that they don't understand metaphor. They don't understand-- certainly don't understand things like sarcasm. And you have to change the way you talk to little kids because they do take everything so literally,

and think so literally. And children are referenced with James, the idea that I think what age, like kids up until the age of five,

basically, don't really have much of a human consciousness.

And the idea that children are just little narcissist walking around is a fun joke. But it's true because they don't know that other people think differently than they think up until about the age of five.

They don't realize there are other lines of thought and ways of thinking and ways of feeling about things that other people have.

“Exactly, that's what's called theory of mind, right?”

And on Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander went to Great Links to basically say that Julian James using the term consciousness just really muddied the waters unnecessarily, and he had just used theory of mind it would have made a lot more sense.

And Scott Alexander, I think I said Anderson. Scott Alexander makes some really good case for it. And that's kind of what he's pointing out is, like it's possible that because you learn-- it's not-- you're not born with it.

You learn it through experience. It just kind of evolves in you as you grow as a person and experience more and more novel stuff and interact with people more, almost like a microcosm of what happened in civilization a few thousand years ago.

Yeah. You gain theory of mind. So the fact that you can learn and that you do learn something that integral to consciousness really supports the idea that maybe consciousness

as we understand it was learned, it did evolve. It was an emergent property of an increasingly sophisticated language. It's a fascinating thing to see happen in a child's life, to see these little light bulbs come on, seemingly

out of nowhere, but you realize it is very much a learned thing. Man, it's bad. Very fascinating. All right, I say we take a break. And we'll talk a little bit about just some other fascinating

stuff when we get back right after this. [MUSIC PLAYING] Two percent. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.

I'm Michael Ester. And on my podcast, two percent, I break down the signs of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world, while speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts,

and more, to look past the in-practical and the way to complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry. We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory. We got it wrong.

Many of the problems that we are freaked out about in the world are the result of stress. Put yourself through some hardships. And you will come out on the other side. A happier, more fulfilled healthier version.

Listen to two percent. That's TWO percent on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. [MUSIC PLAYING] Do you remember when Diana Ross, double-tap little Kims boobs

at the VMAs? Oh, when Kyle Hay said that George Bush didn't like black people. I know what you're thinking.

“What the hell does George Bush got to do a little Kim?”

Well, you can find out on the look back at a podcast. Tom Samjet, and I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a here, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill, waxing

all about crack in the eighths. To be clear, 84 is big to me, not just 'cause of crack. [LAUGHTER] I'm down to talk about crack on the eighth, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no, just so you don't know.

I mean, at this point, Mark, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack. So I'm starting to see that there's a throughline. We also have eggs on the table, right now, so-- [LAUGHTER]

Why are you finishing that sentence, man? Yes, I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Really?

Yeah, for me, it's one of the most important years

for black people in American history. Listen to look back at it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

Welcome to my new podcast, Learn In The Heart, Wait With Me. Your host, and your favorite therapist, Keer Games. And in recognition of mental health awareness month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field, and conversations

with so many incredible guests.

I'm talking trip fontane, Ryan Clark. Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase, that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing. And we're still chasing it, and we don't know

when we've done enough. Because people with scoreboard, why? Life becomes about wins and losses.

“Steve Burns, Dustin Ross, because you find it important”

to be a good person while you hear on earth, are you a good person because you're free? Because that's two different intentions, bro. Absolutely. And that's two different levels of trust.

I want you to just really be a good person. Join me, Keer Games, is we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose

on my new podcast, Learn In The Heart, Wait.

Open your free, out-heart radio app search, Learn In The Heart, Wait, and listen. Now. What was going to summarize is what we're going to talk about, but I didn't feel like it all was said before.

I think it's nice. It's Lucy Kucy, Kenna talk about one of my favorite parts of this hypothesis. Definitely. Is we were, we're kind of jumping around now,

but jumping back to where we talked about writing things down

“all of a sudden, it was around here in human history”

that there was a collapse of societies in the Mediterranean around the Middle East. It was called The Late Bronze Age Collapse. And it didn't take that long. And it met like these very advanced sort of societies

in a matter of decades. A number of them, a lot of their culture was lost. Sort of they called it, in fact, the Greek dark ages. And it lasted for hundreds of years. And driving with this was when humans

started to lose, and it kind of all makes sense that they were losing with a written word with metaphor and language coming along. They were losing this voice as a God. They felt like they were losing their gods,

because all of a sudden, the gods were silent to them. They weren't speaking to them in their mind, because they were gaining consciousness. And here's where it gets super interesting. James has a hypothesis that says,

it's about here where the organized religions that we know today were born out of a kind of nostalgia

basically for these gods that left them.

Right? Yeah.

“I think that idea is really interesting.”

It is. And I mean, the timetable really jibes. And it is really interesting that that late Bronze Age collapse happened when it did. But the idea is not just nostalgia, but also desperation.

Because these people had guidance. They didn't have to think. And this poor set of generations over a few hundred years are maybe some of the most pitiful humans that ever lived. Because they went from just knowing what to do

because the gods told them what to do, to having no idea what to do, because their gods had abandoned them. And as a result of that, they started forming religions. They started, you know, besieging the gods to give them a sign.

This is when Oracle started to become a thing. Profits started to become a thing. Superstitions, like Omen's grew. Like there was a Sumerian Omen. If the horse comes into your house and bite you,

you will soon die and your family will soon be scattered. Stuff like that, right? So this didn't exist before because the gods were in charge of everything. Now they were suddenly gone.

And I just think it must be, but it's been really pitiful and dark to live through that time. Yeah, I mean, they were lost, I guess, as a people. Yeah, and that was figuratively, they were lost, but literally too, because that late Bronze Age collapse,

they think, was brought on at least in part by climate change and probably invasion. There's this mysterious group called the Sea Peoples that seem to have overrun different cultures. And so like culture after culture would fall,

those people would become refugees descend upon another culture and pushing that to the breaking point. That culture would fall. It was just like a domino effect of collapsing cultures all at once. So they really felt like the gods had abandoned them.

Like they'd angered them or something like that. They were genuinely lost. So what James did to help support a hypothesis, which makes sense was to go back and look at literature and of the time and see if it sort of supported this.

I know one of the things he wrote a lot about in his book

because he's kind of like here's proof right here. I mean, if you look at the Iliad,

they were basically automaton's.

“They just listened to the gods and did what the gods said.”

And they substituted, like the words that we would use to substitute in for the Iliad to indicate consciousness just weren't there. Right, so they were more like physical descriptors, like my belly was quivering,

or my heart was fluttering, or something like that, not. I think the example that's used is fear-filled Agamemnon's mind. - Yeah. - Well, there wasn't a mind, so they would describe fear

in other physical terms, right? - Like a stomachache. - Yeah, and that it wasn't until later on when new translations were coming along that people who were now conscious turned the stuff

into metaphor and James is saying, they didn't mean it as metaphor before. They meant it as literally, and they didn't have descriptors for minds. And when they say the gods were guiding them along,

they meant it literally. And he was saying that the Iliad in particular started to be written about 1100 BCE,

“and then around 700 BCE, it was like in its form”

that we see it today. But along the way, it was kind of added to, and it was written during the transition from bicameral mind to modern consciousness. - Right.

- He sees it as basically a document

that traces that transition. - Yeah, very interesting. There was some other stuff to you, right? Literature wise. - Yeah, so that wasn't the only one.

He also founded some of the religious texts, like evidence that people felt like God had abandoned them. There's something a Mesopotamian poem called the Lidlule Bell Nemecki, and it says, "My God has forsaken me and disappeared.

"My God has failed me and keeps that a distance. "The good angel who walked beside me has departed." And again, most other scholars would say, "There's something happened, "this guy was blue, he was in a funk who knows,

"but it's all metaphorical, and James is saying, "no, this guy had God talking to him, "now he doesn't anymore." - So should we talk a little bit about the actual science here with the brain?

- Yeah, I think so. - Because this is something we've covered before in the past when we talked about alien hands and drum. - Oh, is that where it came from? - A gazillion years ago.

There was evidence that when the, there were certain epilepsy patients where it was so severe that they would sever the corpus colosum, undergo a corpus colostomy.

And the corpus colosum is basically the thing

that makes the two hemispheres of the brain communicate with one another. And with alien hands and drum,

“I think they found that it could be brought on”

by the surgery where all of a sudden the left arm was doing something and without being told to do it by the right brain. And they have, James, I think, or people since James,

was it James or was it just people trying to prove his theory? - I think that people saw this, these experiments as support for James's theory. - Okay, so they looked at these surgeries, these corpus colostomies.

And they're called brain patients basically where they, you know, after the surgery, it's not like they felt all out of whack, they felt like a regular, you know, whole human being. But they learned that there were these little things

that would pop up where a hemisphere would take an action based on this information that it didn't have access to. And the example they gave was if they like instructed the right hemisphere to just walk to the kitchen, and they would get up and walk to the kitchen,

but they would say, hey, why did you get up and walk to the kitchen, the left hemisphere, the language dominant hemisphere is the only part that can respond to that. But the left hemisphere doesn't know why it got up.

And the really fascinating part is that they wouldn't say, well, I don't know, I'm not sure why I just did that. I just did it. They would make something up on the spot and say, you know, I felt like getting up and going to make a bowl

of cereal. And it's almost like we had this natural instinct to be at somebody when faced with a question that we can't answer about why we did something. - Yeah, because the left hemisphere wants to explain things.

It wants to tell the story, using metaphors, usually. And this became the left brain interpreter theory. And it kind of supports Jane's idea that the consciousness is a flashlight looking for a dark spot in a room and it just can't find it.

And the idea is that the left hemisphere creates the explanation, the stories for our behavior. Even if it doesn't know why we did something, but that's just what it does. And there's a saying in consciousness research

among people who subscribe to the left brain interpreter theories

Like it thinks it is.

It's more in the press office.

Like it's the one that's public face and you're explaining what you're doing. - But it might not have all the information. So sometimes it's just bi-es thing. - It's very interesting stuff.

- Yeah. - And sort of tying in with the kid thing. Who is this, how do you pronounce the name of that one researcher, Koochjin? - Question, Koochjin.

- K-U-I-J-S-C-E-N. - Oh, yeah. I'm just gonna say Koochjin.

“- I think that's pretty, pretty dead on.”

That's the person who runs the Julian James Society. Today, because James died in 1997. I don't think we ever pointed it out. - Yeah.

- But this person basically says,

"Hey, if you look at people who hear voices "and that's not necessarily to say someone "that has schizophrenia." Because that is one percent of the population. Apparently, the highest 10% of the population

can, you know, does hear things basically. So, it's the idea of the command voice, basically, is to do something. And if you're hearing a voice that says, move to the window and look out on the street,

that's one thing. If you hear a voice that says, take the knife from the drawer and put it in someone's head, then that's another thing all together. And we were talking about kids earlier,

the idea of the imaginary friend kind of jobs with this lack of consciousness, 65% of kids have imaginary friends. I had an imaginary friends. My daughter had, for years,

what she called her ghost friends, which is a lot creepier way to put it.

“But I think that's all just sort of to say”

that nine percent of people who are hearing voices who are not suffering from schizophrenia is that's proof of that initial bicameral mind at work, right? - Yeah, and Julie and James believe that children go from a bicameral state to a conscious state

as evidenced by that development, a theory of mind, or as evidenced by imaginary friends, and that they're kind of recreating what society, or the human species went through thousands of years ago, as they age and develop very interesting.

So, you might be out there, especially if you're a concreteist, like Chuck, thinking like, you might be rocking in your seat right now, face flushed about to faint out of rage.

- Oh, good. - A camera on? - Because, like, this is, by definition, unscientific. It's not provable in the form that James put it forth. It's more of a concept, an idea. And apparently he was well aware of that.

He didn't tout it as anything more than that, but Custian, the director of the Julie and James Society, likes to point out that it was, he was basically laying the groundwork for an entirely new way of looking at things,

so that other people could come along and take it up and figure out how he was wrong, how he was right, what needed flushing out, what made sense, and it's that form. And people have been doing that.

Again, this is like a crackpot theory

that has never gone away,

because the more people pay attention to it, and the more we start to understand about the brain, the more sense it kind of makes, and it seems to be gaining traction rather than losing it over the, like, 50 years that it's been around.

- I think it's interesting. - I don't hate this stuff. - I'm not rocking in my chair. - David Bowie loved it. He said that the origin of consciousness

is the breakdown of bicameral mind. I think that was it. - The book. - The song. - No, he said it was one of the top-hundred books to read. Oh, all right, I believe that.

- Totally. - It's very bowie thing. - For sure. - And other people too. And then one other thing, another way to put all this

to kind of sum it up, I saw it put, is that we developed at some point back in the in-history a left brain bias, that's a, you know, which kind of ties into your original view, the whole thing, which was, you know,

they weren't conscious that they were conscious. - Right. - You know, like that. - You got anything else? - I might, but I might just not be aware of it.

(laughs) - Man, as I said, this is the best episode we've ever done. (laughs) Since Chuck Giggles, which everybody loves,

“I think then it's time for listener mail.”

(bell ringing) - This is about the freedom of the press episode. - Mm-hmm, and this was a Josh request. Hey guys, how freedom of the press were to struck a particular chord with me.

At least to work as a science teacher,

by pseudoscience on the internet

and weren't being provided the tools to recognize this. So I did a masters in the library and information science and now a school librarian on a mission to vanquish disinformation. - Awesome.

- While I've included the topic of journalism in terms of approaching news critically, as with any online source of information your recent podcast on how freedom of the press works really inspired me to put forward more information

and content about media freedoms and the risks for journalists. Here in Sweden, it's very easy to take freedom of the press for granted. Last year in sympathy with my American colleagues, I put up a display of band books tracked by the ALA.

And each book had a tag listing the years and ranking a book was challenged and I encouraged the students to guess what for. I led to a lot of really good,

“that's what I love this experiment with students.”

I led to a lot of really good discussions and many students had realized the scale of how many books have been band or challenged. We're horrified to see their own favorite books on display

and we're also shocked by the justification as are we always.

Now the COVID restrictions are being lifted and very much looking forward to taking students to the world's first library of censored books, the Dowett Isaac Library in the Malmir archives. There's a no Malmir.

So that students can see the extent of limitations on the press and media freedoms around the world. Thanks again for the fascinating show and all around amazing series, kind regards, mid-Vingliga, Hells-Nigar.

That is must just be a citation in Swedish. That comes from Ms. Alice Antonson. She her hers. Thank you, Alice, that is amazing. I'm so glad we got to that listener meal

because I've been proud of that person for a very long time, ever since that email came in, totally. How about Sweden, huh, keeping the American dream alive? I love it. And Chuck also, though, before we sign off,

there's something I've been meaning to address that you said earlier, you said you have a dumb brain? No, you don't. Did I say that? Yeah, you did.

Okay.

“So if you want to get in touch with us like Alice did”

and show the world what a hero you are, we would love to hear that kind of thing. You can email us to [email protected]. (upbeat music) Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio.

For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the look back at it podcast. - The next time you know that it was a big moment for me.

84's big to me. - I'm Sam Jack. - And I'm Alex Egrish. - Each episode, we pick you here, unpack what went down,

and try to make sense of how we survived it. With our friends, fellow comedians, and favorite authors, like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s. - They get it was a wild, it was a wild, it was a wild year. - I don't think there's a more important year

for black people. - Listen to look back at it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Hey, it was good job. You're listening to learn the hard way

with your favorite therapist and host care games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having on what a licensed professional who knows

what he's doing, how many men carry a suit or armor. It's a new suit of world that you not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to. - Listen to learn the hard way on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - In 2023, Bachelor Star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.

“- You doctor this particular test twice in silence, right?”

- I doctor the test once. - It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. - Regular lesbian, like a man's shooting.

- My mind was blown. - I'm Stephanie Young. This is LoveTrap. - Laura, Scott's new police. - As the season continues, Laura Owens

finally faces consequences.

Listen to LoveTrap podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - This isn't iHeart podcast. (upbeat music) - Karen T.D. Human.