A Fresh Face in Hell with Jonathan Evison
A Fresh Face in Hell with Jonathan Evison is an hour long, conversation based, format. Guests include writers, musicians, athletes, actors, philosophers, scientists, and an array of experts across a variety of disciplines. Subjects will be treated with a mix of humor and thoughtful exploration.
A Fresh Face in Hell with Jonathan Evison
Brian McVeigh - When the Gods Fell Silent
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As we’re currently discussing the Illiad and the Odyssey, I thought it was an opportune moment to revisit my conversation with Brian McVeigh about Julian Jaynes’ theory on the origins of consciousness. Jaynes believed that early humans lacked coordination between the two hemispheres of their brain. Consequently, they didn’t possess a sense of self, operating on a kind of autopilot. They would hear voices in their heads as the two hemispheres functioned independently. Without explanation, early humans attributed these voices to the voice of God or gods. However, as humans developed a greater capacity for language during the Bronze Age, the separation between the hemispheres began to dissolve, leading to the development of an inner voice and, consequently consciousness. If this sounds familiar this was the premise for HBO's Westworld series. A fun little mind walk, enjoy!
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Welcome to A Fresh Face in Hell. I'm your host, Jonathan Evan. Every week we talk to someone new and interesting, somebody intellectually curious, somebody who will hopefully renew our faith in this cold, cruel world we live in. A Fresh Face in Hell. Greetings, Fresh Face. I'm camping this week, so we're gonna revisit uh an oldie but a goodie. It's one of our very earliest episodes, didn't get a lot of play, never made it to YouTube, but it's my conversation with Brian McVeigh, who is the protege of the famous Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, who uh proposed a theory called the bicameral mind and the uh origins of consciousness. These theories are controversial, and whether or not you subscribe to them, uh they are undeniably thought-provoking. I mean, it'll give you a lot to think about. Um, but before we revisit the conversation with Brian McVeigh, like, subscribe, follow, smash those buttons wherever you're consuming the podcast, and by all means, go back and explore our backlist. We got 80 odd episodes back there. Sure you missed one or two along the way, so check them out. So, Brian, if you would uh walk us through Jane's conception of the bicameral mind.
SPEAKER_00So, his idea was that uh, and by the way, this is based on a lot of evidence. It wasn't something like he just dreamt this up. Um, this was uh something that he devoted his life to to understand uh the original question was consciousness, and that led him to the bicameral mind. And basically, the idea is that um the uh human brain has two parts, the right hemisphere, left hemisphere. And he always wondered why the right hemisphere, though it had some functions, seemed to be uh almost a vestige. He was we weren't sure what it was doing, um, especially when you looked at linguistic production. Um and so he uh it it's sort of a long, complicated story. I I won't go into it um uh because there were many twists and turns, but basically it had to do with hallucinations. And he wondered why it seemed that about 3,000 years ago, so many people were having hallucinations. And as I said, it all came together in his mind. And the idea is that, well, what was happening is that there was a different type of communication between the hemispheres when it came to language, and that when people were under stress or they needed instructions, they would receive commands or orders from what were believed to be uh the gods. But the tricky thing about Jains, uh, that I just want to throw this in there because there's a lot of misunderstanding. When people read or hear about Jains, they assume that he is offering a neurological model for how the mind works. But actually, it's more complicated than that. Of course, there is a neurological grounding to the mind, but the major contribution of Jaynes is that he talked about how, or he showed how it's culture, specifically language, that shapes uh this idea of consciousness. And uh, and again, not to get ahead of ourselves, but the problem is one of these terms, uh, namely consciousness. That is very misleading for a lot of people who try to understand Jains. And uh in his book, of course, he's very careful, he's very specific what he means by the word consciousness. And he claims, and I think uh, and I've done a lot of research on my own on this. If you look at the uh written uh word, well, if you look at text before 3,000 uh uh through 3,000 years ago, it isn't really clear that people had what we would call uh consciousness. There's no linguistic evidence. They, of course, talked about a lot of other things, but they were not recording or talking about what we would call subjective, introspectable uh experiences. And again, you know, just to repeat, this word consciousness, I think um can be very confusing for people because the Jews and pop uh scientific literature all the time. You know, you know, they're doing research on this part of the brain, that part of the brain, and they discovered what consciousness is or where consciousness is located in the brain. But of course, that to me is very misleading. And uh consciousness does not mean perception, it does not mean thinking, it means a certain type of uh awareness, a certain sense of subjectivity that uh only humans have.
SPEAKER_01Like the ego, yes, the ego, for instance, like more like ego thinking versus I mean, because there's a lot of um, I don't want to say precognitive, but sort of unconscious or uh uh you couldn't say pre-conscious, but we do a lot of stuff on auto drive, you know, almost instinctually. I mean, driving a car or I mean just things we don't even have to think about just because of repetition. Uh and some people sort of live under that level. I want to talk about that later. So yeah, that's one of the things that's I think important for people to understand is we're not talking about uh suddenly Janes isn't just talking about suddenly people could have thoughts. Right. They were just walking around like you know, gorillas before or whatever. And now that so is James, I mean, technically speaking, is is is is the theory of the bicameral mind is this a theory or is a hypothesis? I mean, is it scientifically defensible? Is you know, has this been tested and what were those tests?
SPEAKER_00Right. So that's that's a really important question. Um, and Janes came up with four hypotheses. Um and uh his book actually, uh there's a lot of evidence in his book, but the way he viewed his book, he viewed it as uh sort of a map or an agenda. And like I said, there were four hypotheses. Uh, one had to do with when consciousness emerged. The second uh uh hypothesis had to do with the nature of consciousness, that consciousness is not something genetic, it's not something inborn, it's something culturally culturally acquired. Uh the other hypothesis has to do with uh the neurology of uh the bicameral mind. And then the fourth hypothesis has to do with dating. The the the the what century, what period did consciousness start to emerge? So again, I know that's a lot there, but those are four hypotheses. And and you know, I think the important part of your question is there evidence for this? I definitely think that there is. I've written a lot of books on this, I've done a lot of research. Um, and what I've done is I've taken each hypothesis and I've broken them down into sub-hypotheses and looked for the evidence. And that's what real science is. There's one hypothesis that I have not really done any work on, and that's the neurological aspect of the bicameral mind, because I'm not qualified to do that. I'm not a neurologist, but the other hypotheses um I think uh are a lot easier uh to demonstrate. And and by the way, even the neurological hypothesis, there is a lot of evidence uh on that. Uh well, yes, schizophrenics for one.
SPEAKER_01Uh so uh James submits that he he believed, I believe, if I'm if I'm right here, that he he believes that this this this higher consciousness, this, this uh uh uh uh arose around the Bronze Age collapse, which would be around 1200 BC. That's the collapse of Egypt, the Hittites, the Syrians, all these empires. Um, how was the emergence of this consciousness related to these collapses?
SPEAKER_00Or is this just coincidence or I think it's definitely not coincidence. Um, and I think what's what happened, you know, there are a lot of there's a lot of speculation, uh a lot of uh theorizing on what led to the late bronze bronze age collapse. Um, it was probably a number of things, but one thing I think is that to put it simply, these civilizations at the time simply got too big. The populations um were too large. Um the the elite simply couldn't keep track of what was going on, there were a lot of pressures, and so one of the reasons for the the this collapse of civilizations was the fact that the bicameral mind was not up to the job. The bicameral mind was very effective for small-scale agricultural uh city-states. But beyond that, as societies, as states started to grow larger, the populations became bigger, the economics became more complex, the the bicameral mind could not handle that complexity. The voices of the gods got too tangled up. It it's sort of like a communication network. That's what the mind is, really, a communication network. And where there are too many things going on, it leads to chaos. And that led to uh that was one of the reasons why you had Bronze Age uh collapse. And what replaced the bicameral mind, of course, was this idea of consciousness, or just to be clear, I like to use the term Jaynesian consciousness so people understand that we're not uh talking about thinking or cognition or perception. We're talking about a particular type of cognition, a highly specialized type of cognition that is based on language, that is not genetically um that's not something that we're genetically born with.
SPEAKER_01And so this this allows the hemispheres, once we've crossed this threshold, the hemispheres for the first time can communicate with one another instead of operating as two separate entities. Which now I I remember he used to, you know, he talked about um he talked about the Iliad. He talked about biblical texts in terms of like these people are never making cognitive decisions on their own, they're always being spoken to by the gods. God told Moses this, or I mean, and and this is prevalent in all world religions, and so dive into that a little bit for me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so the so you know this is this is this is a very important point because we have become so used to assuming that all peoples were religious uh thousands of years ago. And no one ever asked the question well, why is it that it was not until a certain period, about a thousand BCE, give or take two or three centuries, that people started to ask really hard questions. People started to doubt the gods. Before that time, no one doubted the gods. And so we have to really reevaluate the role of religion in human history and look at it as presenting evidence that people did have a completely different mentality uh before about a thousand BCE. And you mentioned the Bible. The Bible is a wonderful text because basically what the Bible is about, it's trying to, it's uh it's it's writings that um indicate how people were longing for an earlier mentality, a bicarol mentality when God or the gods directly spoke to people. And when that started to collapse, of course, it led to all sort of uh uh uh different developments that you see in the Bible. So the Bible really is a sort of a narrative or chronology of change in um human mentality. Um, most of the books of the Bible were written about the 5th or 6th century BCE. However, many of those books are referring back to an earlier time, they had this nostalgic sense that Yahweh used to walk among people and talk directly to people. And of course, that had been lost. But this is what the early um Hebrews were longing for, and you see that reflected in their writing. And by the time you get to, of course, the the New Testament, people are are living with a completely different mentality. And Jesus um really spoke to uh a different mentality. Jesus was about this idea that the kingdom of heaven is within, that the kingdom of heaven is not necessarily a literal place, that the kingdom of heaven is more of an uh an interior space within a person's soul.
SPEAKER_01And it asks the New Testament asks for more accountability on a personal level, not just the threat of you know being struck by lightning or whatever. Yes. Uh so I mean, in a way, is it safe to say that if the the the hemispheres of the mind are integrated for the first time? And I know this sounds kind of crazy to people because the timeline sounds so tight, but you know, I mean, we still thought the earth was flat 400 years ago. Uh the psychological utility of believing in God sort of loses some of its cachet, right?
SPEAKER_00That's true. So, um, and by the way, when when we talk about the hemispheres being integrated, you know, the the even during bicaramel times, uh the hemispheres were integrated, but in a very different way. But to get back to what you just said, you know, what's interesting, what I think is overlooked by many uh scholars, it's actually quite startling that before about the 12th century BCE, there's no what we might call, for lack of a better term, philosophy. What I mean by that, there's no questioning of the gods' existence. No one uh the people sometimes argue with the gods, they get upset with the gods, but no one says, hey, wait a minute, maybe the gods are a human invention. That does not come until much later. And to me, you in certain parts of the world, for example, Mesopotamia, from about 3,500, 3,000 BCE to about a thousand BCE, you know, you're talking a couple thousand years there. Why is there no skepticism? There's no questioning of the gods. And I think the reason is because these people had a very different uh psychology, where questioning the existence of the gods was just culturally impossible.
SPEAKER_01Because according to the theory, you're hearing these voices that must be coming from without because the person is not consciously thinking of them. Now, what I'm wondering is, is how did culture evolve that far? If uh, you know, I mean, how does this work in societal terms? How how do you discern all these mixed messages? If everybody's inner voice is a God, I mean, how does the society achieve any kind of continuity? I mean, who whose voice becomes the authority? If my God's telling me this, I'm just listening I spent a lot of time with paranoid schizophrenics in my caregiving days, and and and you know, if everybody's hearing a voice and and there's no uh there's no discernible pattern, I mean, how how I mean it uh isn't that chaos? And maybe isn't that why I mean that would that would sort of speak to the need to integrate those two hemispheres?
SPEAKER_00Yes, so that's a good point that you bring up. Um, because on the surface, it does seem quite uh quite a claim, as you seem to be suggesting. Well, how come people, you know, you would assume people are maybe hearing different voices of the gods? And so this would lead to chaos. But there's a couple things we have to keep in mind. Uh, one thing is that most of the time, people probably were not hearing voices, and most of the time, people were behaving the way that we behave through when we drive a car, for example, a lot of our actions are non-conscious, we're not even thinking about things, and so the voices only made an appearance when there was a problem, when something was unclear to somebody. So that's one thing to keep in mind. Then the other thing is people did not necessarily have to hear the same voices. What's important is that at some psychic level, people assumed other people were hearing the same voices. People uh assumed that everyone was on the same page. You know, I think uh one way to look at it, if um Martians or an alien race uh studied human psychology in conscious times and modern times, they would say, Oh, it doesn't make any sense because everyone has a different interior life, everyone is in is using their mind's eye to see something different all the time. So, how come human society can still function? How come it's still integrated? How come it still works? Well, because we don't necessarily have to be seeing, quote, the same thing with our mind's eye all the time. What's important is that we assume that people are having in general the same experiences. So I think it's the same thing in the pre-conscious bicameral, uh in the bicameral period, people um made the assumption that everyone is hearing the same voices. And uh, but but I should add to that, there was chaos. There were there are if you look at the historical record, if you look at the Bible, for example, there's a lot of confusion. There's about in certain instances who's talking to who? Is this God? Is this an angel? Um, is God talking to this person and that person? So the lines of communication were often um tangled. Uh so uh it it it it did lead to problems, and eventually things got so bad that it led to the collapse of civilizations um during the uh late Bronze Age collapse.
SPEAKER_01So, yeah, so if I'm following you here, basically until human societies became until we moved away from the agrarian cultures, until societies became complex enough that we needed all of this infrastructure to support a larger population. Um we didn't really need the right brain as much. We could function much as primates do, uh, in terms of just learned behaviors. You know, this is how we function on a daily basis. Um, not a lot of deep thinking going on, but we can perform tasks. I think that's what a lot of people are gonna find confusing about this is that again, that word consciousness, they're gonna think what Jane's and is saying is that like we just couldn't think before that. Right. I think we're talking about a sort of abstract thought that um honestly, listen, if your IQ is under 85, I I you you may not, I don't listen. I'm standing in front of Safeway the other day, and there's a bunch of Trumpers out front of the, and so I'm kind of they're talking about a rally that's gonna happen down at Fat Smithy's, and I'm like, I gotta hear this. I want to hear, I want to hear some reasoning behind this, like why they're so gung-ho on this guy. So, you know, I'm cleaning up my car because I'm parked right by the front. I'm kind of choosing a card. I'm trying to, and and and I listened to these people for five minutes, and I swear they did not, there was no depths to plumb. There, they didn't give me anything. They were talking. I mean, one guy's like, Well, I couldn't find my 2024 hat, so I'm gonna wear my 2020 hat to the rally, and then the other guy's going, I think I'm just gonna wear my uh red MAGA t-shirt. For five minutes, these people talked and they never plumbed any depths at all. They never uh, I mean, I I think some people sort of exist on this pre conscious level where it was like nobody said anything about policies or or their beliefs or anything. They were like nine-year-olds talking about their swag for a you know, a Backstreet Boys concert or something. It was just, I don't, I don't know. I just I know that I feel like you can walk around and not think abstractly and and get along just fine in this world. You're probably not gonna produce any groundbreaking art, but I mean, I I mean you could basically function, am I right?
SPEAKER_00I think so. I mean, you know, we have to keep in mind that in ancient civilizations, um, they did uh even in preconscious times, they did engage in some pretty sophisticated abstract thought. Um, I mean, they they built the pyramids, they uh utilized uh sophisticate sophisticated mathematics, um, they did all types of things. Um, but you know, what I think a better way to look at what you're talking about, it's not so much a matter of abstract thought. I think there's another important concept here that James talked about. He did not theorize on it much, but it relates to politics and this idea that the word that he used is authorization. And the biteral mind was about being authorized to do or to think certain things. And I think in the the modern, postmodern world, uh, what happens, uh, you know, how do we explain um dictators not just getting power but staying in power? And I think a lot of it has to do with um they want uh a single line of communication, of authorization. They don't want complexity, they're afraid of change, they're afraid of social transition, they're afraid of something that's different or alien. And the easiest thing to do is just say, I'm only going to get my instructions from one God or from one person, from one personage, and it starts to become cult-like, and that uh of course uh can lead to a lot of problems.
SPEAKER_01So when we talk about um hemispheres of the brain not uh communicating fluidly, I mean, I my mind goes right to schizophrenia and um psychosis and um you know. Behavioral neuroscientists have talked about psychosis as being actually a group of symptoms that tend to surface in early adulthood when we're trying to figure out who we are and what we want to do. Now, if you take this statement and sort of apply it to the uh apply it to the evolution of culture, like pre-bronsey cultures maybe being at a point of sort of adolescence in their development, does that I mean is that making any sense to you in terms of a it it could in certain ways.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Utility?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um, I mean, I think the the I think the challenge uh comes when societies start to become very uh complex. And if you look at uh Bronze Age civilizations, even though they were very sophisticated in many ways, in some ways um people had all the answers on and in their little universe on how to do things. Society was very predictable. There are uh all types of rituals and ceremonies that they just followed, and and that's fine. But what happens if you're being invaded, or if there's uh an epidemic or some natural catastrophe, or this is um more uh insidious, but when populations start to get too big and the needs of people become uh varied, then you're going to uh lead to that, then that's going to cause uh stresses. And oftentimes cultures can evolve, they can adapt um if they're given enough time, but uh in other situations, they if they're not given, it's it's not just a matter of technology that saves us, it's a matter of culture, of having the proper language to process all this change. Um, it's it's a matter of having a sophisticated language that we can um use to not interpret just our own behaviors, our own feelings, but the behaviors of uh other people. So you you know, I think I think uh this is a slightly different topic, but um one thing that's important, I think, when it comes to um psychological uh disorders is does the pay does the person have the language to express their emotions? Do they have the language to uh talk about what is threatening them or how they're feeling? Is there nuance there? Um and that's why if you look at the uh glossaries of uh ancient languages, when I say ancient languages, I'm going way back, I'm talking uh bronze age, they don't really have a lot of psychological terminology because they didn't need it. But now in the postmodern world, people are very complicated beings, and we need uh a much more sophisticated um language in order to interpret our own sentiments and the thoughts and feelings of others.
SPEAKER_01So what we're talking about here uh essentially is kind of a natural selection, right? I mean, moving from a bicameral mind to an integrated mind. Does Jane's uh the does he hypothesize how long this transition took? Or because it seems like pretty fast, right? When because usually we're talking about natural selections and and and you know, evolutionary changes, you know, I mean, you know, just the growth of the jaw or something like that, or you know, the things like that. We're talking about huge periods of time. And here we're talking about centuries.
SPEAKER_00Yes. So what's important to keep in mind, um, you know, when we use the word evolution, we can it can be used in uh the to talk about genetic changes in the natural world, or we can use evolution to talk about social cultural changes, and those two types of evolution are very different. I mean, one is based on genetics, the other is based on learning things.
SPEAKER_01Um, so I So culture accelerates, we know that. I mean, we just look at that look how technology has accelerated. It took, you know, how long? Thousands of years to get to the industrial revolution, and then since that time, look what we've done in 150 years. Is that kind of what you're saying? Right. I mean, it can be it's exponential.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yes, yes. And and in fact, it's I I I can't quote prove this, but it seems to me that history is speeding up, and it seems to be speeding up faster and faster, especially since the uh 18th, 19th centuries. And a lot of that has to do with technology and who knows where we're gonna go. Um, it it's actually quite uh disorienting when you stop and think about it. But you know, um it doesn't take much for uh a culture to change, and it doesn't necessarily take a long time for a culture to change. Um, so probably the seeds of Jaynesian consciousness were already there in bicameral civilizations. So I'm talking about maybe 2000, 1500 BCE, changes were already occurring, and Janes doesn't go into this too much, but in his book, he does suggest that there were many societies that were partially bicameral and partially conscious. Um, that's not an either-or thing. Um, and you can make that argument uh today, I think, with I mean, there are a lot of vestiges of uh the bicameral mentality, such as uh hypnosis and uh schizophrenia. So it's not an either-or thing.
SPEAKER_01So then the ego basically, but we're we're kind of talking about it in terms of the ego. The ego sort of happens once the hemispheres are working continuously. This is this was what we would call the emergence of the ego. And the ego, of course, is that function that purposely directs our thoughts and actions, but also inhibits our actions.
SPEAKER_00It's a sort of um the ego controls impulsive behavior, right? It can short circuit a behavior. Um, and so you know, it depends. You you can use the word ego, um, or you can use uh a word uh that I I would just use the word self, um, because the ego sometimes can also have certain connotations, but um, but certainly a type of individualization of the person occurred where the individual was taken as an important unit of society. Um, and of course, especially especially in postmodern times, I mean, that's what it's all about, the individual, no matter what society you go to. Um, and that is a sort of a a major global development, this idea that each person the counts because within their mind they have this incredible um what the word that James uses is introcosm. So we're talking about not just a macrocosm or microcosm, these ancient um uh ways of looking at the world. We're talking about an introcosm, something that exists within the person. And that um uh that what happens is we have more needs as humans. Uh in a sense, human nature is becoming more and more complex, not because of genetic evolution so much, but because of a cultural evolution.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Now, people are gonna say, a lot of people, I mean, I had this kind of knee-jerk reaction, and I think a lot of people are. Um, so we're talking about um James is sort of talking about God's almost uh in this pre-pron Bronze Age period, almost as if they're parts of the nervous system. Uh, like the examples we touched upon the Bible, um, God talking to Moses and and and and and how in in the the characters of the ill Iliad are only compelled to action by the voices of God. Nobody ever says, you know, nobody makes a decision on their own without the gods directing them. Um people are going to argue that, you know, how do we know this is just not a poetic device? Right. Uh, what did James have to say about that? What the what are your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's an important uh question. Um, so the reason why Janes would say that um it's not just a poetic device is because if you look at global history, global religious history, there are these huge patterns. Um you can you can trace a trajectory. Um in all civilizations, they all start out. The term that I use is super religious, where the gods are everywhere. There's no modern uh uh definition of politics. Uh the uh science seems stuck uh in a certain era. And uh these peoples by today's standard seem to be obsessed with the gods, and not just gods, by the way, but their ancestors that they communicate with and and spirits and what have you. And so the question is, what's going on here? How come we cannot find to the to date uh uh an ancient civilization that was not super religious? So there's a there's definite patterns there, and you see this in all uh religious literature, and you you you you see a sort of an evolution that um the gods over time become less important, they're sort of pushed aside, and religion undergoes these changes. You you see this um in India, uh of course, the best example uh in terms of a written text is um in uh the uh among um the Jews with uh the the change uh from the Old Testament to the New Testament. Uh no, no matter where in in Egypt, you see the same changes. So that's what we have to pay attention to. Um and the only way to really appreciate Jains, I think, is to stand back and look at these major patterns. And then it then it's not so convincing, at least to me, to say, well, well, this is just a poetic device. People used those poetic devices once they were conscious, but originally they were they they were not just poetic devices. People actually had these experiences, what we would call hallucinatory experiences, where they would have the gods or the ancestors communicate with them.
SPEAKER_01It is interesting. I wonder if somebody um could produce an exception to what we're talking about here as kind of a blanket thing, which is that nobody was really philosophical before 1200 BC in an individual sort of like this is my individual experience in the universe. I I'm I'd be I'd I wonder if somebody can't find, I mean, because when you talk about it in these blanket terms, you're right. I mean, I'm just thinking about as a in terms of larger cultural movements, I'm not, you know, it's kind of true that people are talking to gods and God is providing the guidance and and the philosophy. Um, so I mean schizophrenics basically operate with a bicameral mind. Uh have you you you obviously you've heard of the um uh the the schizophrenia simulators where basically they put an ear, they put an earplug in your right ear, and you just hear this voice all day long. And you're supposed to go through your normal life, solve problems and everything, but the whole time you're hearing this voice, often critical, which again we're in the realm of uh ego, superego, like you're not good enough. Don't do that. That's a stupid thing to do all day long. This thing is incessantly, this is what these schizophrenic uh simulators do. They're just all day long just self-critical. Don't do that, but they're that you're hearing the voices out loud in your ear, and you're supposed to like it, it gets in the way of doing simple mathematical equations. All of a sudden you can't do long division because you you got this voice in your brain. Um is this uh is is the schizophrenic sort of the modern is this what is this what happened to people that didn't evolve to the bicameral or past the bicameral mind? I mean, I don't know that much about schizophrenia. I just yeah.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I think what's important to keep in mind about schizophrenia is that uh people who suffer from schizophrenia are still conscious, it's just that a vestige of the bicameral mind has erupted into their psychological system. And of course, I can be uh uh uh very needless to say, very disorienting. And you know, people who did not um adapt fast enough uh uh during the uh the transition from uh bicamerality into uh conscious mentality, um, there's evidence that sometimes they were just uh killed off. Uh that that there's evidence of that, for example, in the Bible. But I think overall, people probably were given enough time to adapt and to uh uh learn the language of uh consciousness. And basically that's the important thing to keep in mind how land how consciousness came to be. It it came to be through language, and Jane spent a lot of time talking about this. Um, it's almost sort of a it's not it's not necessarily a linguistic deterministic argument that language caused consciousness, but certain words um allowed for the architecture of consciousness to emerge. And that's why, as I said before, if you look at glossaries of ancient languages going back in the Bronze Age, their psychological vocabulary, or what we might call meant mind words, was very, very limited. They did not have a lot of words for thinking or mind, and they certainly had no abstract notion of mind or thinking. Um, and so to me, that's a key piece of evidence that consciousness is something that is rooted not in neurology per se, though you need, of course, a brain. Um consciousness really is rooted in uh linguistics in a certain type of language.
SPEAKER_01So is uh I you know, this is pretty heavy stuff. So are you are we are we saying that is language the bridge between the hemispheres? Because I've I've heard the I know that 1% of people in their lifetime will be diagnosed with some sort of psychotic disorder. And um and also I'm I've noticed that crystal meth seems to isolate people's hemispheres. So that speaks to some maybe some sort of uh you know chemical trigger, but like are is what you're saying that that is it is the language that helps integrate the hemispheres.
SPEAKER_00I don't um well, yeah, I I think I think you could make that argument. Um, you know, like I said, even in uh even for for uh a bicameral individual, the hemispheres to some degree are going to be integrated. It's just that they're in integrated in a very different way, and in the bicameral uh mind, um it sounds strange to put it this way, but culture has socialized the right hemisphere to communicate as if it were a god to the left hemisphere. But then when consciousness evolved, that system broke down because of uh social complexity, and uh a new type of language, a con you might call it a conscious language, a language um that uh was filled with words that referred to what was going on inside a person. And you can trace this out, actually. And James does that in his book, Looking at Ancient Greek. You can change, you can trace this evolution of a language, going from a language that lacked psychological words or psychological vocabulary, then changing into uh a new type of language that possessed words that um again, for lack of a better term, you might call them mental words or psychological vocabulary. Help me out with some, I mean, uh give me, let's think of some examples of these terms, like well, for example, well, it could be any any word that describes emotions, anger, uh hatred, uh happiness. I mean, ancient languages had those words, but they were very, very limited. They lacked uh nuance. Um the the word to um uh the more abstract word such as mind or mentality certainly did not exist. Um, it's very different, it's very difficult to uh talk about the mind in a scientific abstract sense if you don't have a word for mind. Um, and I think a concrete way to understand this is the this idea um how language taught people to believe that there is a space inside their heart or inside their head. Uh we don't take that literally, but it's a very useful way to communicate, um, to use our heart or any other organ as a metaphoric expression to talk about how I feel. If you look at psychological words in modern language, they're almost always, they can almost always be traced to an earlier language that was very colorful and very metaphoric, uh, that was based on um inner organs. Of course, that that that you see that in all languages. That's why we refer to the heart a lot when we talk about psychology. And so, you know, it's it's a strange concept, but the idea that James is proposing is that there are people could not, there's no dualism they of what's going on inside my mind versus the outside world. That there's only the outside world, there's only an external reality, there's no um the there's no mind's eye, you might say, that can see something in my imaginary space in my head. So change uses the word spatialization. And spatialization is the belief that there are psychological processes happening inside me somewhere. In ancient civilizations, usually it was in the heart. Sometimes it might be the stomach or the liver or the blood, even. It was only recently that we started to think that psychological processes happen in the head, actually. But um, and so I'm not I'm not sure if that's clear, but uh the idea is that it was language that created this belief that psychological events happen inside the person. They don't really happen inside anywhere, really, because psychological processes are information. They're not um that that's a problem with neurology, I think. Neurology is always looking for some part of the brain where things are happening, but that's sort of a uh a misattribution. It it's it's not a good way to um uh look at neurological events. Neurological events, strictly speaking, don't have a location, they have an effect in in the in the real world. But in any case, um uh so so it it's it's uh it's important to uh pay attention to how language played a role in the development of modern consciousness.
SPEAKER_01So we're talking about that Jane had proposed this. I mean, so basically it is it's actually not, it sounds like it's not a theory so much as a hypothesis. And if it's a if it's a theory, what testing did Janes or have other people in the field conducted? I mean, is is there examples of experiments that have you know put a finer point on on these propositions?
SPEAKER_00Or yeah, so in the world of neurology, and as I said, I can't really speak about neurology, I'm not trained in that field, but I know there have been a number of neurological studies that support what Jane's uh had have uh argued. And you can find these on uh if you go to the Julian Jane's website, uh these studies are listed. And also in my own work, um, I published about a maybe uh a dozen books or so. And what I do is I try and test Jane's hypotheses. As I said, I've looked at the Old Testament and New Testament in one of my books. Um, in another book, I looked at ancient Egypt to see the transition from bicameral uh to the conscious mind. Um I've uh uh I've looked in my other uh works, I've looked at um changes in world religions. So, you know, and in my writings, I try to be as scientific as possible. I'm not just defending Janes, I'm giving examples of how his theories explain a lot of evidence that up to now really has been um uh has not been well integrated. Uh and also, you know, with James, James talked not just if you want to under appreciate what James was saying, it's not just about changes from uh looking at changes in ancient civilizations, it's also about vestiges of the bicameral mind that we see all around us. Um, and Jane spent a lot of time, well, of course, schizophrenia has a whole chapter on that in his book, but also um hypnosis. There's no we know a lot about hypnosis, but it's not supposed to happen. What's going on there? So, Jane's the beauty of Jane's is he looks at spirit possession, glossolia, uh, channeling, all these things, and he integrates them into one nice theory. Up to now, that's never been done. Um people just sort of like don't. Really have a theory that ties everything together. That's why some people, uh proponents of James, have called him the Darwin of psychology, because he has brought so many of these things under one theoretical umbrella and tied it all up very neatly. And also hallucinations, for example. You know, no one doubts the existence of hallucinations, but there's really no they're not supposed to happen. How why are they happening? What's going on there? It's not enough to say, oh, it's just uh loose neurological wiring in the brain. We need a more robust theory to account for hallucinations and uh things like, as I said, spirit possession.
SPEAKER_01Well, you talked about channeling and an example from my own life. I've written 20 novels, okay? Um I often talk, you know, I finally got good at it. You know, 10 of them weren't very good. I was, you know, you could smell the coffee on my breath. Uh, and I was thinking, I was like, hmm, what happens next? And but when the work is going good, I talk about just getting out of my own way, getting this sort of um, getting this sort of logical, like I have my outline and I have my idea what's supposed to happen and and you know what decisions characters have to make. And I might be trying to move my characters around like pawns on a chessboard with this sort of critical side of my mind. But when the work's going good, I'm not, it's like subconscious, pre-conscious. I I mean I I write myself into my best passages. Um, the kind of like they say in science, how you know accidents have produced some of the greatest results. This is what happens to me during the course of my work. I've learned to like say trust the process. And that means to trust my unconscious mind. It leads me to places that I can't figure out in an outline. It it it sort of, and and so there's something there. There is something there leading me, and I'm I'm telling you, I mean, like hours go by. I'm and I'm not saying channeling, I'm not hearing a God's voice dictate it to me. It's not exactly that, but I am hours go by, hours and in minutes. You know what I mean? It's like when I'm in the work, time never goes. I mean, it's the antithesis of standing in the DMV line. Uh I, you know, uh, so I mean, does that does this this this idea of of of trusting the subconscious, like the subconscious knowing, uh, you know, in a way being wiser than the conscious mind, does this does there any does this fit anywhere within the Janes paradigm?
SPEAKER_00I think it does. Um, there's a lot of things uh you could say in relation to this. Um, I mean, for one thing, for all its utility, consciousness can get in the way. Um, consciousness is not necessarily does not necessarily help us solve problems. And that's why there's a maybe you've you've heard this. Uh, there's a saying, I think it came out of uh England uh among their scientists, discoveries happen in the uh bed, bath, and bus. While you're not really thinking about anything, a solution to a problem will occur. The more you try and figure something out.
SPEAKER_01Me with walking my dog, that's exactly what it takes. I take a break in the middle of my writing day and I walk the dog about five miles, and and I come back and I I crack the code.
SPEAKER_00That's right. And that's why you know, with hypnosis, why people are able to do some interesting, incredible things while they're hypnotized, because consciousness has been temporarily suppressed, and so they lose inhibition, they they lose their fear, as it were. And so this is uh like you know, think about trying to ride a bike and trying to be conscious of everything you do. There's no way you could do that. So years ago, I used to practice judo, and anytime I would throw someone, I wouldn't be thinking about it. My body would just take over, or my unconscious would take over and would just know at that moment this is when I should put my foot here, put my arm here, push back on this, on the shoulder, whatever, and boom, the my opponent would be on the mat. If I would consciously try to think of every move, there's no way I could uh defeat my opponent. So there are many examples.
SPEAKER_01When you think about typing it, for example, yeah, you can't George Will called this equipoise when he was talking about athletes, like hitting a baseball. There's so many things to be thinking about while you're up there. Uh shifting your weight, uh, keeping your keeping your elbow down, keeping your weight on your back foot, uh, you know, all this stuff, but you can't when when when hitters are slumping, they're getting mental. They're thinking about it. When hitters are hitting well, they don't think about it. All these things are seamlessly operating in a sort of pre-cognitive way. And he he called that equipoise, uh, which I think is a is a cool uh uh a way of putting what you're saying about the judo. I have to ask you, because you know we talk about Jane's. I I think that Jane's uh hypothesis has been a lot more uh influential than people realize in terms of like like can let's talk about the effect of the influence it's had on our culture since the 1970s. I mean, a recent example being Westworld, which very much deals with the bicameral mind, correct?
SPEAKER_00Yes, yes, um, and I can't offhand I can't think of uh some other examples in uh literature that James has had an impact, but he has. Um not not as well known perhaps as Westworld, but um well, talk about Westworld a little bit. Yeah, actually, I um I wrote something on that. It's uh it's it's just a very short book, it's up on Amazon if anyone's interested. And um the this uh actually um I think the character played by Anthony Hopkins, I think he says that actually the bicameral mind has been disproven, um, which I don't agree with. But in any case, um this this is uh Westworld is like a lot of sci-fi. Um the question is really uh can humans create consciousness? And uh, you know, my feeling on that is that uh well probably not. Um we can certainly create uh machines, uh AI that mimic uh consciousness uh and that look like and act like quote, they're conscious, but I think it's it's it it it's uh philosophically it's kind of a a challenging proposition to make. Um but Westworld I thought was very exciting because it uh shed light on a lot of these issues, and that seems to be a common theme in sci-fi, actually.
SPEAKER_01Can combine well, it's a fascinating conceit, it if nothing else. And that and that's what I would say about all of this, because there's gonna be a lot of people who are skeptical of this uh hypothesis of the bicameral mind, but what they cannot say is that it's not fascinating and it doesn't make you seriously recontextualize maybe what your thoughts are, whether or not you believe it uh one way or another. So I want to thank you for uh walking us through this today. He is Brian McVeigh. Uh, he is an expert on the theories of Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind. Uh, I'm gonna close by asking you one question. Uh, assuming the um, you know, uh veracity of the bicameral mind, for the sake of argument here, what does the world look like today? Sorry to lie, this is a big one for you. What does the world look like today had we not evolved past the bicameral mind to integrate the hemispheres? What what what might a world with, I mean, how many billions of people we have now? What might that look like?
SPEAKER_00Um, yeah, that is a big question. It's funny you should say that because um I'm actually writing a novel um that sort of answers that question. And um, it's not a pretty world, it's very dystopian. And basically what happens is you have a very small elite that did somehow evolve to become conscious, but they're in charge of everybody else who are not conscious, and they control people by uh letting the people believe that they're hearing the voices of gods, and so that you know, I mean, that certainly is within the realm of possibility, where you have one very uh smart group of people, maybe they settle Mars or something, and they decide that we want people under our thumb, we want people it's starting to sound like the billionaires, except for the smart part.
SPEAKER_01I sort of like your model because at least they have some uh evolutionary advantage instead of just money, right? Right, yeah. And and when I'm talking about those people out in front of Safeway, I'm like, they think they're hearing a god, as far as I can tell. I don't know, man.
SPEAKER_00It is so so. This is uh yeah, just let me th throw that in. I I I do think that uh it's I'm shocked that uh we are returning to this um sort of almost a vestige of the bicameral mind where people want simple answers from one leader and they're not willing to listen to their own voices and to question what they're hearing. So there are serious implications about this, uh, about what Jane's had to say about uh human psychology and how it relates to politics.
SPEAKER_01Ugh, it's a troubling thought. Uh thank you, Brian, so much for joining us today. He is Brian McVeigh. Find him on Amazon or wherever books are sold. He is the author of 16 books. Not, you know, not most of them are a large part of them informed by the work of Julian Jaynes. Uh that structural construct, anyway. Uh, we really appreciate you joining us today, Brian. Thanks, man. Well, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed myself. A Fresh Face in Hell with Jonathan Evison is brought to you by Fresh Face Pods and produced by Jason Botkin and yours truly. Check us out on Instagram, YouTube, or at our website at FreshFacepods.tv. Don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter for updates and special content. And if you love the podcast, by all means run it and buy all of Jonathan Evison's award winning novels wherever books are sold.
