The Bicameral Mind: The Theory Behind "Westworld" - and the Paranormal?

Our standard discussion venue is the Front Street Cafe in Fishtown on the corner of Front & Girard Streets. SEPTA's Girard Station is just a block south, and there's also usually spaces available for street parking in the surrounding neighborhood. If you can't find a spot on the street, there's a paid parking lot called "Park America" a half-block north at 1320 N. Front Street.

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For all the sci-fi fans who just got done watching Season 1 of the HBO Series, Westworld, this meetup will be right up your alley! We'll be discussing Julian Jaynes' "bicameral mind theory", which was used in Westworld as a plot device to explain how automatons with "Strong AI" (artificial intelligence that can simulate a human mind) could gradually develop consciousness. In this discussion, we will address the "bicameral mind theory" in its original context - i.e. as a way to explain the evolution of human consciousness in prehistoric times and as a possible explanation for a variety of strange psychological phenomena today.

INTRODUCTION TO THE "BICAMERAL MIND" THEORY:

In his famous book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, published in 1976, Julian Jaynes hypothesized that in ancient times humans did most of their daily activities using the left hemisphere of their brain, but that the "voice" of the right hemisphere would appear & guide them in times of stress or crisis. Jaynes though that in modern people the right & left brain hemispheres cooperate more seamlessly and we merely interpret this internal dialogue as our consciousness, but ancient people were more "bicameral" - i.e. they were left hemisphere dominant with a right hemisphere that occasionally interceded, almost akin to people with split brains (due to surgery that severs the corpus callosum) who develop "alien hand syndrome". Jaynes analyzed various ancient texts like the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Homeric epics and concluded that ancient people did not have a subjective sense of "self" or "conscience," and he theorized that they thought the "voice" of the right hemisphere was the voice of the gods, muses, djinn, angels, demons, tribal totems, animal or plant spirits, or dead ancestors speaking to them. Ancient peoples had various tools for invoking this "voice", such as special chants & divination rituals, and they even had people who were especially in touch with the "voices" who served as shamans, oracles & prophets.

Jaynes theorizes that the "bicameral mind" of ancient peoples began to gradually break down among inhabitants of the city-states in the Eastern Mediterranean & Mesopotamia during the wars & social turmoil leading up to the "Late Bronze Age Collapse" (c. 1200-1150BC) and the ensuing "Intermediate Period" or "Dark Age" (c. 1150-800 BC). During the "Axial Age" (c. 800-200 BC), the civilizations of these regions reformed & developed in such a way that bicameralism gave way to the "birth of consciousness" which expressed itself in the creation of new religions, philosophies & legal codes that relied on human subjectivity & agency so people could internalize & follow moral principles (e.g. the Golden Rule). This process also seems linked to the rise of literacy, trade specialization and market-based trade in the cities. Consciousness enabled people to better handle the more complex environments of the Iron Age cities where various ethnic groups & different religious sects often lived side-by-side, but it also left these people with a certain sense of "disenchantment" and a longing for closer communion with the gods. The breakdown of the bicameral mind didn't occur among primitive tribal peoples until much later in history, when they came into regular contact with the major urban civilizations, either via sustained trade, conquest or colonization.

Jaynes thought that remnants of the bicameral mind probably still exists in all of us, and that this can help explain schizophrenia, the auditory hallucinations invoked by psychedelic drugs, and various types of religious & paranormal phenomena.

Check out the Wikipedia entry on "Bicameralism" for some more basic info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

THE STATE OF THE "BICAMERAL MIND" THEORY TODAY:

So what does modern psychology & neuroscience have to say about Jaynes' bicameral mind theory? It's been mostly ignored & dismissed after simplistic theories about the left brain & right brain were debunked, but a minority of scholars have kept and interest in Jaynes' more profound speculations alive. The neuroscientists Stanley Koren & Michael Persinger invented the "God Helmet" to conduct transcranial stimulation of the left brain hemisphere in order to investigate Jaynes' theory, and it does evoke mystical experiences and altered states in some test subjects. The neuroscientist Antonio Demasio has also found some affinity between Jaynes' speculations and his own research into the evolution of consciousness. The philosopher & cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has said he thinks Jaynes' theory may be wrong in the particulars but correct in its intuition that human consciousness is partly a social construct.

The psychiatrist & Oxford literary scholar Iain McGilchrist has updated some of Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind theory to line up with the latest research in neursoscience, and combined it with ideas from Louis Sass's book Madness and Modernism (1994) and wrote a book entitled The Master and His Emissary (2009). Essentially, he thinks modern people have an unhealthy overrreliance on the left brain's narrow logic while ignoring the right brain's more holisitc & imaginative faculties. He's given a short talk on "The Divided Brain" that was turned into an animated short by RSA Animate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI

HOW THE "BICAMERAL MIND" THEORY RELATES TO PARANORMAL PHENOMENA:

Our discussion will be based on the writings of Kevin Simler, an up & coming rationalist blogger, who recently did a 4-part series on Julian Jaynes' work and argued for how it's still relevant. Please try to read or at least skim all four of Simler's short essays:

1. Kevin Simler, "Mr. Jayne's Wild Ride"

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/mr-jaynes-wild-ride/

2. Kevin Simler, "Accepting Deviant Minds"

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/accepting-deviant-minds/

3. Kevin Simler, "Neurons Gone Wild"

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/

4. Kevin Simler, "Hallucinated Gods"

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/hallucinated-gods/

• NOTE: If you want to contemplate something very weird, pay special attention to the third essay which introduces the concept of the "tulpa" taken from Indian & Tibetan Buddhsim. The tulpa is a mental apparition that appears to have its own thoughts & agency and is cultivated through extensive meditative work. It can be thought of as a psychological phenomenon that lands somewhere between a child's "imaginary friend" and a dissociated identity state in someone with Multiple Personality Disorder. Tulpa cultivation has recently caught on with an internet subculture. Simler suggests the tulpa may be similar to the god-like voice Jaynes' describes as emanating from the right brain hemisphere in the bicameral mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa

** ANOTHER THOUGHT: To connect this discussion of the bicameral mind with our last discussion about extraterrestrials & UFOs, consider Terrence McKenna's theory that "we are so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions it encompasses." This is similar to some passages from Iain McGilchrist's book that talk about modern man's alienation from the wise, holistic & imaginative perspective of the right brain.