Someone over att Near Future Laboratory mentioned the Bicameral Mind and off I went down the rabbit hole.
Thus, consciousness, like bicameral mentality, emerged as a neurological adaptation to social complexity in a changing world.
Wikipedia: Bicameral mentality
The idea of the Bicameral mind is that humans quite recently didn’t have a conscious introspective “drive” – but rather we were actually hearing voices that our conscious executive part would execute on. A remainder of this system can be seen in the “commanding voices” of schizophrenics.
If the idea being that humans developed or “turned on” self consiousness some 3000 years ago as a response to societal pressures, is there a way to turn it off again if the pressures change? If we previously thought that our drives and actions were commanded by gods and voices in our heads, what will happen if we once again start giving up our own agency in favour of aligning ourselves with external voices – can we revert into this post-hoc rationality of what it means to be a person?
I’m thinking that there’s a parallell between how I understand Julian Jaynes theory on the bicameral mind and the functions of strong external voices – be they religious or political.
In other words: If we start experiencing what other people are saying as stronger than our internal voice, we will treat it as our own drive. It’s not just a question of a consciously parasocial relationship with gurus or influencers – it’s a genuin interpretation of their “voices” as internalised commands. Hand-to-God these commands drive us, and we want nothing more than to execute on our interpretation of what they say.
It’s not only that we belong to a fandom because we happen to be socialised into it, but that the mechanism of fandom (political, religious, etc) works because it latches on to our bicameral mind that just recently – evolutionarily speaking – was used to obeying commands.
Is this what might happen if we’re once again moving towards an authoritarian and isolationist world, propelled by external crises such as global warming and the knock-on effects of that?
When in fear, listen to the loud voices of confident men telling you how to feel.