Julian Jaynes proposed the idea that conscious self-perception and self-examination of oneβs own thoughts and motivations, and conscious analysis of the emotions of others are learned behaviors which have to be invented. The idea is essentially that when bronze age societies came into existence, people had bicameral minds, where rather than perceiving their thoughts and emotions as coming from within themselves, they perceived them as coming from gods/kings commanding them to do things. Then when societies got too big, they collapsed, because that mindset is not ammenable to living in a city or country with millions of people, leading society to splinter apart, and form all modern religion as a way to try to get the gods to return to us, or re-enact the bicameral mind. I think this lens could be useful for building the society stage of thrive
For everyoneβs information, Julian James also believed that sc-hizophrenia and other mental illnesses did not exist until the breakdown of the bicameral mind, and that any such mentions of insanity in Homeric literature are mistranslations.
Um, ik the yt video you got this from and it turns out that the theory has many glaring flaws, like how the bronze age collapse doesnβt have an equivalent in areas outside the eastern mediterranean basin
The origin of consciousness in humans happened when God created adam on the sixth day
You know that wonβt happen in Thrive right
i said it trough the biblical perspective, ofc that wont be in Thrive
I do wonder if something similar to this bicameral mind could happen with hive(mind)-ish civs thoughβ¦
Could this occur in sentient machines?
Maybe, probably if they were designed with their sentience like that in the first place though
I doubt that, the first time I heard of this was in a pretty small podcast posted like 4 years ago. Anyway I agree that Jaynesβ idea is probably not very accurate, for that and a myriad of reasons (for instance, I donβt think the oddysey actually recounts or originates from a tale from the bronze age, it dates back to the iron age)
Yeah. So I donβt think itβd be worth the development time to explore this concept in awakening/society stages