[this is a draft. Some of the things written here are guessed, unconfirmed, and maybe wrong. You are not seeing me say these words. You are seeing me trying to figure out what to say.]
I'm wondering if I should post a summary of the bicameral theory in LW for its metascientific significance, as a revolutionary theory that seems not to have done much, because I don't think the core interesting stuff has been boiled down very well. I'm not good at this kind of work so I'm going to need a bunch of votes of confidence from yall that yes this is the theory and yes this is the part of the theory has not been falsified
bicameral evolution of consciousness
- thought, the measuring and spreading of ideas, used to be purely collective. A person did not and could not think in an ongoing way on their own. Logic and Reason happened when people disagreed, as a way of resolving those disagreements, spreading the ideas that most needed to be spread, and coming to a decision. It was purely discursive.
- the precursor to consciousness, bicameralism, was a crude internalization of the discursive process. It took the form of the hearing of an imaginary interlocutor, who would often generate good ideas, push back on bad ones, and sometimes remind us of things we already knew.
- the imaginary interlocutor became more sophisticated over time, until internal thought as we know it was developed within that subcognition. The interlocutor became an internal congress, in some ways richer and more insightful than the cognitions it was speaking to.
- The barrier between the imaginary interlocutor and the self began to progressively crack and dissolve around 2000bc (and there are many historical accounts of this, but the ancients lacked the metacognition to describe it as literally as I now do) and continued until about 1000ac, at which point the unified conscious neurotype became ubiquitous. This was a process of the interlocutor becoming more intimately connected and coordinated with the central cognition, until we came to see it as "Me" rather than "My brain" (Most bicameral cultures would put it, "Me" rather than "My ancestors", or "My God".)
A story of the evolution of conscious thought
A likely candidate for the pathway of the evolution of conscious thought in humans, which explains some of its peculiarities
I privilege this theory with description because each evolutionary step is short, simple, and easy. A different story may turn out to be true, but this one seems like a good starting point to me.
If this document has found its way to you, I hope it comes as an amicable visitor, invited and arriving at the correct time, and not as the vexing, burdensome intrusion of a procelant. I hope you are not asking "why do I have to listen to this dilletante speak about something outside of its specialties". There is a reason I was first to expound this theory, even though I am not an archeologist, and even though I am not an evolutionary psychologist. If I had spent my formative years studying those things, I would not have been able to spend them studying logic, language, computation, and various fringe theories of metacognition. If I had time to study those things before burdening you with my account, I would have. Unfortunately, we are all mortal. But these subjects equipped me to measure- with kolmogorov's razor- the intricacy of each advance, and identify the true path of least resistance, and they equipped me to look inward, and read the code of our blind engineer, and figure out which stratum must have been written before the others.
Remember that advancements happen when old ideas dance with foreign partners.
I will now summarise the theory. If this summary of the theory surprises you, that is good. That means I may have a contribution to make. I hope that you read on and examine my explanations, perhaps the theory will not seem surprising in light of those.
- Stage one: Open nouns. The ape develops the ability to name anything significant. Individuals, food sources, other animals, sensations.
- Stage two: Adjectives. Standard modifiers that apply across noun phrases.
- Stage three: Past stories. The ape, on hearing a series of noun phrases spoken, learns to infer an associated series of events (concurrent with learning to speak a series of noun phrases when the ape wishes that one of its troupsmen had seen the same story).
- Stage four: Future stories. The ape, (with some sentence modifier, tonal, gestural, or an explicit word like "should") tells stories about the future they would like to see. Group planning becomes possible.
- Stage five: Discourse. The ape develops a sophisticated social process for negotiating and resolving disagreements about should-stories.
- Stage six: The ape internalises the models of its tribesmen and is able to conduct the discursive process in its imagination.
- Stage seven: The internalised discourse becomes more intelligent than the process that directs it, it is the ancestor of critical, deliberative thought. It is often related to as a god.
- Stage eight: The barriers begin to break down, the internalised discourse is no longer seen as a divine "The voice of the guardian spirit of the tribe", becomes a grounded "My thoughts, good thoughts"
- Stage nine: The present. The ape is struggling to tear its individual capacity for reason completely off from the political mire of social compromise discourse. It still cannot think robustly without a conversant to bounce its speech off of (see the bizarre behaviour "rubberducking"), and it still has difficulty thinking true things that would be imprudent for it to speak (there are words that are hard to explain otherwise, "unthinkable", "thought crime", "thought police", "free thinker", but many of these apes will insist that their thoughts are unconstrained, when they are not). If it tells a lie 9 times it comes to believe it, so hopelessly tangled are those cognitive functions- reason and the model discourse- still.
The story again, in greater detail:
The story starts with nouns. A fluid (cultural) association between mouth sounds and things. "Redfruit", said one ape, to another, gesturing. The other ape says "Pandanus", gesturing in another direction. Pandanus (imagine some ancestor of durian) beats redfruit, and the troup follow the one who knew about the pandanus, to whom much esteem is awarded. The troupe as a whole were able to make a better decision than they would have if one or the other had led the way on the basis of status. They were able to pool and process shared information in ways they could not have before.
Adjectives emerge easily. Red. Ripe. Big, or Small.
Once we had enough nouns, it became easy to tell stories about things. We'd remember what happened, one thing after another, and we'd say the names of the figures as we recalled them. If our audience trusted us, it would be as if they had seen the same intrigues that we did, and their experience would be expanded, and they would do the same for us in turn (primates tend to be big on reciprocity).
"Big kanzi, Adolescent nyota, in-heat sarah. Adolescent nyota; fighting. Big kanzi; hollering. Peace. Absent adolescent nyota, Absent in-heat sarah. In-heat sarah."
The speaker is recounting this memory because they believe they witnessed the apes called Nyota and Sarah leaving the sight of the alpha, big Kanzi, after Nyota made a display of strength. This would be politically important if a new baby ape were born to Sarah 7 months later. If the speaker were the only one who had this memory, they would barely be able to do anything with it, but if there were other witnesses, a record of testemonies, Nyota's status can be measured more accurately, and I'm sure big kanzi would be thankful to know that this new child was not his.
It becomes very useful to be able to tell stories about things that haven't happened yet, future-stories, sequences of nouns that hint at a series of events that the speaker proposes should happen.
Andre might say, "Should. Michel, field. Buffalo. Shouting, valley. Andre, Spear, Meat. Should." Andre is proposing that Michel will frighten a herd of buffalos towards an area where Andre can ambush them. (Michel would be unlikely to understand this if he had never seen a hunting expedition before, but Andre knows he has)
Now our apes can plan.
If Michel is adamant that he should receive more credit for the catch instead, Michel might say the same thing in return, with the names swapped, so that he is the one who does the ambush.
As soon as we could propose desired-future-stories, we could disagree about them. In making plans, it was necessary to develop a logic for resolving our disagreements. That was discourse.
We shout disagreeing should-stories at each other, and we act out the democratic logic of group reasoning until we can agree on a compromise.
That was when language started to dress reason, not within, but without.
We have always had a need to understand the people around us. Our models of others are as vivid as ghosts, who walk alongside us.
A person's should-stories rarely had much power if they couldn't convince others to agree with them. Our apes had to be able to imagine what would happen when they voiced them; what would the others say? What does the democratic logic of our collective reasoning process end up agreeing to, how could we manipulate it, depending on who was present or not?
That was thought's ancestor. Not abstract, individualistic logic (no, we might take contemporary Individualism's vehemence as protesting a tad too much to believe that reason is innately individualistic; it seems evidence of reason's providence as a collective process- which is patent in other ways), instead, deliberative thought began as should-stories spoken for a group, a group of people who all had to come to agree on something mutually satisfying. To a certain extent, they still are. Many of us still find that we need to talk our ideas over with another person before the thought process will work correctly, before we'll converge on anything sane.
The voice of the group was then internalised. This was the bicameral era; an era in which our apes could not think without imagining some other ape instructing them. We have been rising out of it, continuously, over the past several thousand years.
The imaginary interlocutor seemed to become more sophisticated over time, until internal thought as we know it was developed within that subcognition.
Records of the practices of ancient cultures seem to indicate that centralised cognition (which we sometimes call "Consciousness") began to start to see and control the imaginary interlocutor around 2000bc, and the phenotype of unified consciousness was ubiquitous by around 1000ac. Prior to this time- if Julian Jayne's bicamerality interpretations are to be believed- the internal interlocutor was generally related to as a deity or a spirit, a commanding voice formed from the voices and myths of a person's community, which handled most deliberative decisionmaking. If anything, Jaynes' account of ancient cultures is an extraordinary case of examining how little we know. There certainly are extraordinary hallucinatory spiritual experiences among present uncontacted cultures. Now, when we read that the ancientegyptians said things like, "The Phaoroh has 14 Kas [Ka meaning, roughly, 'ghost personality impressions']" They spoke as if their experience of cognition were dramatically different to ours, are we supposed to assume it was all figurative?
Does a good psychologist ever say, "but surely they don't really mean the things they are saying when they try to explain the strangeness of their neurotype"?