Mitch's Blog

An intriguing defense of Julian Jaynes' theory of how human consciousness emerged

Scott Alexander reviews Julian Jaynes’s alternative-science masterpiece, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” and argues Jaynes is half-right:

Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact. So I’m going to start by reviewing a slightly different book, the one Jaynes should have written. Then I’ll talk about the more dubious one he actually wrote.

Alexander argues that what Jaynes discovered is not the breakdown of the bicameral mind — left-brain and right-brain merging into an integrated whole. Jaynes discovered the origin of theory of mind.

Until the Bronze Age, people operated without theory of mind, and they hallucinated gods to compensate. When theory of mind emerged, it spread like a virus.

Turn on what Terry Pratchett called “first sight and second thoughts” and try to look at the Bronze Age with fresh eyes. It was really weird. People would center their city around a giant ziggurat, the “House of God”, with a giant idol within. They would treat this idol exactly like a living human – feeding it daily, washing it daily, sometimes even marching it through the streets on sedan chairs carried by teams of slaves so it could go on a “connubial visit” to the temple of an idol of the opposite sex! When the king died, hundreds of thousands of men would labor to build him a giant tomb, and then they would kill a bunch of people to serve him in the afterlife. Then every so often it would all fall apart and everyone would slink away into the hills, trying to pretend they didn’t spend the last twenty years buliding a jeweled obelisk so some guy named Ningal-Iddida could boast about how many slaves he had.

If the Bronze Age seems kind of hive-mind-y, Julian Jaynes argues this is because its inhabitants weren’t quite individuals, at least not the way we think of individuality.

New Paper Finds That When You Reward AI for Success on Social Media, It Becomes Increasingly Sociopathic. “… when [AIs] were rewarded for success at tasks like boosting likes and other online engagement metrics, the bots increasingly engaged in unethical behavior like lying and spreading hateful messages or misinformation.” Fortunately, this is not a problem when people use social media.

The Oatmeal’s comic/essay about AI art starts as yet another AI rant, but then goes in an interesting direction that more or less aligns with how I think about using AI for writing. I use it for what the Oatmeal calls administrative drudgery — dragging cans of paint up the stairs to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I do not use it to write.

The Romantic: How Diane Keaton’s quest for beauty left an imprint on American culture — A beautiful appreciation of a beautiful spirit and woman.

President Donald Trump is desperate for an enemy to justify the extreme force he wants to deploy on blue states and is trying his hardest to convince people that antifa is so dangerous that, as Attorney General Pam Bondi said at the roundtable this week, they need to be exterminated like ISIS or Hamas. The Trump administration also has a nearly pathological habit of accusing their enemies of being exactly like them. Which is why they think the left is a dark money-funded domestic terror cell full of pedophiles and spree shooters that wants to destroy America.

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[Jack] Posobiec, an influencer who never ascended to Kirk’s level because he just can’t stop going full Nazi, said at the roundtable, “Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost 100 years in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.” What happened to antifa after that, Jack?

— Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day, The war against giant frog costumes