Before Inner Thought: Has Consciousness Changed Through History? | Brian McVeigh

SPEAKER_00 0:02 Consciousness, it's both a gift and a burden for Homo sapiens because the gods have stopped talking to us, but now we're godlike.

SPEAKER_03 0:11 For thousands of years, human consciousness looked very different. And the way we experience the world today, chatting to ourselves in our heads all day, feeling like an individual, that's new. Really new.

SPEAKER_00 0:26 Before about a thousand BCE, it's very difficult to find an in-depth self-reflection in the text. There was no sense that there's a mental space floating inside their head somewhere.

SPEAKER_01 0:41 That's Brian McVeigh, who's here to help us explore one of the most provocative ideas ever proposed about the human mind. That for much of human history, humans didn't have consciousness as we understand it today. And it wasn't that long ago.

SPEAKER_03 0:58 That's right. No inner narrator, no self-reflective I. Instead, guidance came from outside the self, through gods, rituals, and hallucinations that issued commands and organized everyday life. Not as a mental illness, but as a normal functional part of how societies worked.

SPEAKER_00 1:24 So the default mode of human psychic architecture, it's to hear voices.

SPEAKER_03 1:30 For McVeigh, consciousness wasn't something evolution simply switched on. It emerged over time through shared culture, language, ritual, and even technology. At one point, he says, the human mind was organized as if it had two chambers, what he calls the bicameral mind, with one side commanding the other with the voice of a god. Until something shifted.

SPEAKER_01 2:00 I'm Ollie. And I'm Matt, and this is what we did before, the podcast where we chart the history of modern inventions. McVeigh's work builds on ideas first proposed by Julian Jaynes, who came up with the idea of a bicameral mind. So you'll hear Brian mention Janes and what's sometimes called Jaynesian consciousness.

SPEAKER_03 2:24 But at its core, it's the argument that the consciousness we experience today isn't the same as what ancient humans or even surprisingly recent ancestors experienced. So we started by asking Brian to explain his theory.

SPEAKER_00 3:04 Hallucinations were pretty efficient as a means of governing societies, but eventually they started to break down because population scale increased, social complexity increased, and so a new mentality was needed. And that is that new mentality is what James called consciousness. There's a problem with the word, unfortunately, because there's in English languages maybe five to six different definitions of consciousness. So when people hear consciousness, they assume, oh, James was talking about perception. He was talking about feelings, he was talking about cognition or reasoning. And that's not what James meant. He had a very well-delineated definition of what he meant by consciousness. And that's admittedly a little bit difficult for people to uh get uh to get past because they all have their own understanding of what consciousness means. But in any case, uh to go back to the hallucinations. So hallucinations originally were adaptive, they broke down, and by around a thousand BCE, culture invented consciousness. And this also is a very important point because people, when they hear the word consciousness, they assume, oh, you're talking about neurology, something to do with neuroscience or genetics evolution. James was very clear about this. And if there's one point in today's talk that I think needs to be highlighted, it's that for Jaynes, consciousness was not a consequence of biological evolution. Rather, consciousness was something cultural. It's something that was learned in the same way we learn political beliefs or we learn religious beliefs. In any case, once consciousness started to take root, it radically changed uh people's experience of the world, needless to say, because it became a more efficient way of dealing with social complexity.

SPEAKER_01 5:02 Okay. So um with this kind of deceptively difficult definition of consciousness, because I think to a lot of people that maybe haven't thought this uh thought about this that much, they think, oh yeah, consciousness is just the state of being awake or thinking or perception. Are we sort of saying that ancient humans um did have some aspects of consciousness or they just didn't have the self-awareness that we have in the sort of modern sense?

SPEAKER_00 5:30 Right. So if you look at their ancient writings, um before about 1200 BCE, it's clear that they were not experiencing what we would call consciousness. It doesn't mean that they had no cognition, obviously, or that they could not perceive the world and they uh designed very uh sophisticated, advanced civilizations. So something was going on upstairs, needless to say. However, compared to conscious people of today, there were some limitations. And of course, the other big difference is that they would hear hallucinations, not all the time. They would only hear hallucinations if they were under stress. And probably not everyone heard hallucinations. Uh, people were they followed scripts, routines, they were told what to do by their leaders. So I think that's important to emphasize because actually that's true with conscious people. Many of our actions throughout the day are based on habit. We're not conscious of most of what we do. And it's similar to consciousness and hallucinations, is why do they why are they triggered? It's when we're under stress that we're usually going to be very conscious about something. It's the same thing, same thing with hallucinations. People would hallucinate when they were facing an important decision or choice.

SPEAKER_03 6:54 What what do you mean by hallucination then? Is it something that we would know today as an experience that we have, but it's just that we appreciate it differently, perhaps to uh an ancestor? Or is it something completely different that they had going on in their brains?

SPEAKER_00 7:12 Well, I think that the way to answer that is to look at present-day hallucinations. So usually when we hear the word hallucinations, we assume that there's some neurological wiring that needs to be fixed, that there's something wrong with a person's brain. We associate it with schizophrenia and other mental health conditions. But um, actually, many people who are not diagnosed, there are many people in what we can call a non-clinical population who experience hallucinations. Most people, at least once or twice, maybe heard a voice and nobody was there. So what I'm saying is that hallucinations present day are a vestige of an earlier mentality. Hallucinations, the ability to hallucinate, was something that evolved. When it when it appeared among Homo sapiens, it's very difficult to say, but certainly uh if you look at ancient civilizations, that's all they talked about. Were gods visiting them? And no one is surprised when they hear that. They say, well, that's what religion is all about. But what Jaynes argued is that there are definite historical patterns that these descriptions of visiting gods, ancestors, what have you, actually were hallucinations. Not all the time. I mean, it gets a little bit murky. So by the time you get maybe 1500, 1000 BCE, you can make the argument that just because someone was recording being visited by a god does not necessarily mean they had a hallucination. But the evidence seems to point to the fact that before about a thousand BCE, most of the time when people talked about being visited by a deity, um, having an ancestor or a ghost, they loved ghosts, Mesopotamia. You know, it's not like today where ghosts are unusual. Ghosts are quite common. And I think that is just another piece of evidence to show that interacting with uh divine powers was actually quite common.

SPEAKER_03 9:11 Yeah, because you don't hear that so much anymore, do you, of people saying that God spoke directly to them. Faith seems to have taken on a different form in the modern age. It would be quite unusual for somebody now to say God spoke directly to me and I heard his words, or uh whatever the case might be. Uh and yet in ancient writings, that seems to be hugely common.

SPEAKER_00 9:33 That's right. In fact, the founders of most of the um the major religious traditions claimed that they were visited by a god or gods. It's not unusual at all. Um, and the if you look at the Bible, uh the Old Testament, especially, it's there's something very nostalgic. The New Testament is composed of books that indicate that something's been lost. They want Yahweh to come visit them. They're looking for Yahweh. And I think that points to an earlier time before the uh books of the Old Testament were written, where meeting with Yahweh actually was not that uncommon.

SPEAKER_03 10:13 And just for uh reference, Yahweh, I don't think everybody will know Yahweh um is what God is referred to as in the Old Testament, correct?

SPEAKER_01 10:22 That's right. Yeah. If we sort of go right back to very early Homo sapiens, um sort of long before any civilization that we recognize today, um we we've we've touched on hallucinations, but can we speculate what the internal kind of conscious experience would be like for those ancient humans? Day to day, you know, we we're many of us have an inner monologue or um we know what it feels like to be us and have a concept of self. Um could is there something that we can expand upon on that?

SPEAKER_03 10:57 Yeah, because I I know that Jane's work specifically is talking more about um societies from that that had civilization already, right? So if we're looking back maybe 300,000 years, I'm not sure how far back your research goes, but is there is there something you could speculate as to what humans were thinking then?

SPEAKER_00 11:16 Right. So I think the key word there is speculate. Um it's it's very difficult to know. Um now, as you know, we do have a lot of cultural artifacts, especially beginning around 60,000, 50,000, 30,000 BCE. Um the first evidence of monumental architectures 10,000 BCE in Turkey. They found some fascinating things that uh relatively new in terms of archaeological finds. And um this is quite exciting because we have to rewrite the textbooks actually. But in any case, other than that, there are no, I think the problem is why we have to speculate, is there are no written records, because there's a world of difference between finding some old monuments, uh finding, as I say, bones and stones, um other cultural artifacts, versus finding written text that tell us or maybe don't record what people were experiencing. So it's actually very difficult. I mean, I you know, there's an assumption that some people make that prehistoric people practice a type of shamanism. And um, I don't know if that's true. And I really I to me that's sort of reading things back into the past. There's no evidence. We we just simply don't have the evidence yet. Now, you know, we can extrapolate, I suppose. And James, you're right. I mean, James doesn't really get into that too much. He does talk about the origins of language and how that relates to hallucinations. Um, but um I think he he uh would be very careful, and I'm gonna be very careful. I I really don't know how to answer that question.

SPEAKER_01 12:53 And it's actually um a thought of mine, I guess, that in a way this is a catch-22, because um from what I've read anyway, uh, and correct me if I'm wrong, but language and uh writing and metaphor, as you've written a book about, are sort of tools of creating consciousness. Is that sort of correct to say?

SPEAKER_00 13:16 Yes. Uh yeah, so language to understand Jaynesian consciousness, and of course, what I mean by by Janezian consciousness is how Jaynes defined it. Um language is crucial. Things really don't make sense um unless we understand how language worked. So, of course, pre-conscious people had language. We know that because they they had written text, but they probably those languages up until about a thousand BCE, those languages, and I have looked at them. I'm I'm not conversant in ancient languages, but I I have gotten out the old dictionaries and done some statistical analysis. And what's amazing is that it's very difficult to find in these ancient languages clear-cut words that describe what we would call conscious experience. The what we can call mind words or uh a vocabulary that describes mental events is very, very limited. And we're not talking about one place, we're talking about anywhere that we have written languages. So there's a definite pattern there. And we're talking about maybe 15 to 20 centuries. So this is not a fluke in historical record. And to me, that is probably the one of the most important pieces of evidence that supports what Jane said about a shift in human mentality from a hallucinatory type of mentality to uh uh a conscious mentality.

SPEAKER_03 14:47 So are you saying that written language back then would have been more instructional, perhaps, than it would have been self-reflective?

SPEAKER_00 14:56 Yes. Yeah, I think that's a fair statement. And something uh else I would add to that, if you look at uh written language, up until again, just to use this uh as a uh as a point on a timescale, up until about a thousand BCE, almost all written texts have to do with what we would call religion. By modern standards, it's like they were obsessed with religion. It's almost as if there's something pathological about it. Written texts, if they were not specifically prayers or hymns, they were administrative records about how to keep the gods happy in their temples to make sure that they were collecting whatever needed to be collected to offer to the gods. So every so the what written texts tell me is that those civilizations were intensively religious. Everything revolved around religion. And um uh since we we bring up the written text, it gets a little complicated, but um well, for one thing we have to remember that very few people could read. Um only a priestly class typically could read the text. But uh Janes argued that uh eventually the written text started to erode the hallucinations because there's this idea that when people when priests would write something down, the text would read back to them somehow, or they would hear the words. This is kind of a bizarre way of looking at things. But what happened is once you write something down on a tablet, you can move that around. And that sort of took the power away from the gods. And so James has this argument, it's it's a little bit convoluted, I think, but he tries to show how ironically that technology of the written text started to erode um bicameral or hallucinatory mentality.

SPEAKER_03 16:52 So so we have this sort of 10,000 BC, we have the shift to farming, we have people settling in places like the Fertile Crescent, and soon after that's the beginning of civilization. So that that period must have impacted consciousness a lot, but it seems that the really big shift and uh the work that you're talking about here about the bicameral mind didn't happen until much later. So, what started shifting when civilization began? And why was there this breakaway point?

SPEAKER_00 17:26 Well, of course, you know, most people would say it had to do with the agricultural revolution. That's sort of a textbook response, and I think there's something to it, of course. I think it's a little more complicated than that because of, as I said, recent archaeological finds in Turkey, where they had monumental architecture, um, they had engravings and everything else 10,000, 12,000 years ago. And so the reason why I'm mentioning that is rather than viewing the agricultural revolution leading up to social complexity, leading up to a type of religion based on the voices of the gods, it could be that religion came first, that people were communicating with gods somehow, assuming that the archaeological finds in Turkey are some kind of um religious architecture, temples, what have you. That that's more of a footnote, I suppose. But in any case, by the time you get from around, again, there's a lot of geographical variation, but from around 10,000, 12,000 BCE up to around 4,000, 3500, 3,000 BCE, that's when you start to see a a big change, urbanization about 3,000 BCE. And so it seems that the agriculture revolution, once it got going, people started to settle. And it took centuries for these changes to really sink in. But once you had urbanization, you had a concentration of wealth, you had the formation, of course, of city-states, you had the um uh what we would call a sort of politics, but of course, back then there was no notion of politics the way we think of it. Um and that was all fine and dandy. Uh, that sort of explosion of civilizations, especially Mesopotamia around 1,000 BCE, really was the um the the uh the high point, you might say, the consequence of bicameral mentality. But what happened is human civilization became a victim of its own success. Because as the agriculture revolution led to an expansion of populations. I mean, it would contract here and there, famine, wars, things like that, but in general, populations were steadily increasing. And once population scale increases, it can lead to a lot of problems with governance, with uh people not wanting to take orders, breakaway, uh a lot, a lot more warfare. And so what was needed was a new mentality, and that's when consciousness started to develop. So it's important to keep in mind there's no clean break between hallucinatory mentality and consciousness. We're talking about, you know, probably you can find incipient evidence of a type of consciousness beginning to emerge uh d during the even during the heyday of um hallucinations, you know, if if you look carefully. And then by the time you get up to the late uh Bronze Age collapse, which is one of the most important events in human history, then civilizations started to really cultivate a culture that encouraged a metaphoric language, and of course that led to uh consciousness.

SPEAKER_01 20:45 So ultimately we still um physically have the same kind of minds or largely the same minds as our ancestors. And you've touched on um and spoken about the bicameral mind. I was just wondering um before we move on, if we could sort of define bicameral mind um just briefly for the listeners.

SPEAKER_00 22:08 Sure. So bicameral uh comes from the word um, as you know, two chambers, two houses, and that that's why modern governments meant in some modern governments. We do, we have a bicameral system um in the United States, and that's you know, Jaynes used that as a metaphor, a governance. So you have a higher legislative house and then a lower legislative house. So in Jaynes accounting, the higher legislative house was the right hemisphere. And so that's one chamber of this two chamber system. And so when someone would be confronted with a problem or some sort of novel experience, the gods we we could say uh would organize information on in the right hemisphere and then send commandments or uh messages, instructions to The left hemisphere, where people would follow the gods' instructions. Um, people rarely argued with the gods, they would just do what the gods or ancestors told them what to do. So that's what bicameral means. The right hemisphere communicating with the left hemisphere. And we in James pointed out, and I'm not a neurologist, so I have to be careful what I say, but James pointed out that it is a little bit odd that in modern humans, most of us, there's some variation, but most of us, the linguistic areas of the right hemisphere are dormant. So there's this idea that they used to do something differently. And it was culture, or it is culture that determines how these two hemispheres relate. So I think an important point to make about uh bicameral mind is uh that means two things. One is bicameral neurology. And when James in his book talked about bicameral neurology, he wasn't talking about the roots of consciousness. He was talking about hallucinations. What is their neurology behind hallucinations? And there's there's some evidence for that. Um but neurology is such a complicated field that I think there's still a lot more work to do to ground Jane's claims about um bicameral neurology.

SPEAKER_03 24:25 I feel like I've got a bicameral mind even now though, in some ways, um in that I've got this one, you know, this one part of my brain, which is the sort of thinking, logic, like the the brain that sort of speaks to me inside my head, my inner voice. And then I've got this, you know, what people often call the monkey brain, which just acts and does as it pleases based on instinct and and other features of human evolutionary biology, I suppose. So I d I don't know. It feels like there are still two chambers to my to my mind.

SPEAKER_00 25:00 Oh, there yeah, oh, there definitely are. And and an important point I wanted to make is that um the voices have not gone away, they've just been suppressed by this layering of culture. So the default mode of human psychic architecture is by caring, it's to hear voices. And that's why some people still do hear voices, especially when the mind is under a lot of stress, those vestiges are going to emerge. So um yeah, they it's it's still there. I mean, in terms of evolution, five, ten thousand years is just the blink of an eye, it doesn't really mean anything. And so that's why it's important to, as I said, make a distinction between when we talk about the bicaramel mind, their neurology versus bicaramel psychology. Now, with bicaramel psychology, I mean religion, experiencing divisions in the voices, belief in gods. Bicaramel psychology is very easy to demonstrate. There's needless to say, there's a tremendous amount. And you know, the other important point related to this to make is that it's a fascinating scientific fact that we have yet to find a civilization that was not religious. Um, I mean, now many civilizations or societies, of course, you could say uh officially communist or atheists, what have you, but when you go back in time before about a thousand BCE, you cannot find a civilization um that lacked religion, that lacked belief in gods. And to me, that's a very important piece of evidence that uh supports um Jane's theories.

SPEAKER_01 26:43 So um I was sort of wondering. Um we talk about the bicameral mind and the sort of hallucinatory hearing voices and how this can happen to people under stress or people with say schizophrenia. Um I was wondering if the things that we learn or theorize um about our ancestors and how the brain sort sort of naturally worked before consciousness tells us much about some of the more modern mental health things that we experience now that we have kind of modern consciousness.

SPEAKER_00 27:17 Sure. Well, I mean, for one thing, um for people who have hallucinations, and I don't necessarily mean people who have a full-blown diagnosis of schizophrenia, but there's actually a lot of people, as I said before, who hear voices. Their voices are not necessarily very distressing, but they don't like them. And there's actually organizations that uh these people belong to, and that they they try to teach these people that actually this is just a vestige of an early mentality of hallucinations. So that that that can be very reassuring to somebody who hears voices now and then, um, that it it's part of being a um uh a person in a way. And so rather than resisting to voices, try to integrate those voices. So so there's actually therapeutic techniques that are used. So that's one important practical application, I think, of James in psychology. And besides that, um consciousness itself, though it um was a cultural adaptation, too much consciousness can cause problems for people. And what I mean by that, um I'm a psychotherapist and I I see this with people, where because consciousness gives us this, if you will, extra mental space in our head, there's more things to worry about. So a minor worry becomes becomes anxiety. Um a little apprehension becomes fear, and it's because consciousness is working over time. I mean, that's kind of a simplistic way to put it, but the I guess the point I'm trying to make is there's actually a lot of practical uh research, um, there's a lot of practical applications that can be um grounded in Jaynesian uh psychology.

SPEAKER_03 29:07 I just want to roll back a little bit on this idea of the inner voice. So um I've got a bit of an interesting anecdote, I think, which may illustrate your point or or may be completely contrary to it, so you can correct me if I'm wrong. But I'm just wondering if the sort of ancient ancestors were hearing the inner voice that we typically hear when we're monologuing to ourselves or having a debate in our own heads or whatever, or reading a book perhaps, um, but mistaking it for a god, or whether it was different entirely, and you know, the hallucination that they were were hearing was nothing to do with an inner voice at all. Because my anecdote is I recently asked my daughter if she speaks to herself in her head, and she was like, No, I don't. And she thought it was such a weird question for me to ask. And she also used to say, uh, she doesn't say it so much anymore, but that her she she used to say, My books talk to me at night. And the same goes for her toy, which she calls Rag. Um, it's this comforter uh that Matt bought her actually when she was born, funnily enough. And um, she'd said, Oh, Rag always tells me to do things. Um, and and I thought this is so strange, but you know, she's a child and maybe that's just normal. But the fact that her books may talk to her at night uh or her toy might tell her to do things, is this an example of what consciousness could have been like for our ancestors? With the key difference here being that her consciousness is now being actively shaped and socialized, so she'll probably lose those abilities, as it were.

SPEAKER_00 30:43 Right. So, of course, um I never met your daughter, so I don't know, but there is this idea of imaginary playmates, and you know uh just because a child claims that a toy is talking to them or uh or a book is talking to them doesn't necessarily mean that that's the case. However, I think sometimes it is. I think I think this phenomenon called imaginary playmates is real. There's actually been a lot of research on it. It's something that a lot of psychologists shy away from because it sounds so bizarre. But I think that imaginary playmates is something that most people grow out of. It is a vestige of an earlier uh psychic architecture, I think. As I said before, hearing voices is the default mode of the human mind, but culture, specifically consciousness and the language associated with consciousness, suppresses those voices and we're discouraged from hearing those voices. Um, in fact, uh in the Bible, in the Old Testament, um, there's an instance where parents were told to kill their children who were hearing voices and communicating with Yahweh. That's an extreme example. Uh the fortunate we don't do that today, hopefully. But um in any case, yeah, it sounds to me that that that could be evidence of uh uh of an earlier mentality. But like I said, it's something that we grow out of. And many people don't remember these things. You know, I'm sure there are parents who would claim, oh, don't you remember you had an imaginary playmate and the person, you know, they're in their early 20s say, I don't know what you're talking about, because we just don't, we're not encouraged to have those types of memories.

SPEAKER_03 32:27 But it but it's not that she's mistaking her inner monologue or her her inner voice for the voice of something else. In the case of our ancestors, there really was something separate happening.

SPEAKER_00 32:40 Well, I think there was because at that time, during the pre-conscious period, society encouraged people to accept and listen to those voices. And that goes a long way into how people interpret something. I think it's uh pretty clear that uh hallucinations played a very important role in organizing societies. And you know, when you think about it, um it's really not that unusual. Um you think of Joan of Arc. So she heard voices, and until they um executed her, um they people believe that they went along with that. That was not that long ago. That was only six, seven centuries ago. Uh it's the same thing uh in with um many other people, uh Joseph Smith, Mormon and Mormonism. And I I don't want to question people's beliefs, you know. I'm I'm not anti-religious, but clearly you could make the argument that uh Joseph Smith was hearing voices. And in fact, that occurred not very far from where I live, um upstate New York. Um, and that was not that long ago. We're talking, I think, the 1830s, 1840s. So these things are still with us, they're not that unusual at all.

SPEAKER_03 33:55 Yeah, and Moses, uh you know, talking to the burning bush. Um, and it is it's always been a fascination for me that God seems to be very active. And in the old testament, he seems to be doing a lot, commanding a lot. In the New Testament, he seems to have taken a back seat. And by now, but you know, by the by the time we reach the 20th and 21st centuries, he's sort of like given up. He's like, I'm taking a back seat. He used to be um cruel and he used to you know demand attention and worship, and now he doesn't seem to bother so much. So there is that's a really interesting tie-in.

SPEAKER_00 34:33 Yeah, you're right. There's that's why I think we have uh uh Old Testament and a New Testament, because the New Testament represents writings that uh could accommodate this new conscious mentality. Um, of course, people did not write it that way, they didn't think it alone think of this change in those psychological terms, but definitely that's what was going on. So in the New Testament, you have angels, you have um more intermediaries. Well, Jesus himself, uh, you could make the argument, was sort of a desperate attempt to bring Yahweh into this world, uh incarnate, um because before then uh people were not uh uh they weren't as desperate uh to talk to God. The idea is that, well, if you're uh if you're patient enough, Yahweh will talk to you. And you know, I I think it is since we're talking about um the Judeo-Christian tradition, you know, besides Moses, um, of course, there are other people in the Bib in the Old Testament who um talk to God, but there are also prophets where you know, I some people would call it a type of spirit possession, possessed by God, where Yahweh spoke to these people, and that's more evidence for a vestige of of an earlier uh mentality.

SPEAKER_01 35:55 I'm wondering sort of if we come closer to present day, um, you know, with we've spoken about language and community and ritual and thing and metaphor. The technological sort of growth that we have in present day, uh, the way that we communicate, the way that we live in kind of silos, more isolated a lot of the time. Do you think that uh, and not to mention obviously the technology that we have, do you think that the information and everything else that has changed quite rapidly maybe having effects on our consciousness or may have effects going forward?

SPEAKER_00 36:30 Most definitely. Um, I mean, I think it's clear that well, technology always impacts and shapes somehow human psychology, and we see that now. Um, it's just more sped up, you might say. Um, so we talk about human psychology and technology, but we also want to be more specific and talk about Jain Zian consciousness and technology and how, as a type of cognition, Janesian consciousness, how is Janesian consciousness being shaped by social media, shaped by AI? And I'll be honest with you, I'm not really I've thought about it. I I don't really have any definite answers, uh just some speculation. Um don't ask me why I think this, but I suspect because we use screens a lot, there's a certain type of visuality that has taken over the world, you might say, um, beginning with TV in the 1940s and 50s. Now screens are everywhere. I don't I I I can't make a clear argument, but I just have an intuition that that all those screens, all this visuality is somehow eventually it's going to teach us to be to engage more with mental imagery, that our images are going to become more clear. Our mental eye will um will see things, will see more things. Um and of course, everyone's a little bit different. Some people have very strong mental imagery, some it's weaker. There's a small population that does not have any mental imagery. But in any case, just for the sake of argument, um, most of us do have mental images. And I think somehow technology is going to make those images clearer. And that may enhance some of our abilities. We may be able to, we won't, we won't need virtual uh a device to um augment uh the environment. We won't need virtual reality. We'll we'll have a built-in virtual reality in our head where we can see things more clearly and store things. Specifically, what what will that ability do for us? I'm I'm not sure, but I think it would be uh quite interesting to come back 100, 200 years from now if we could do that and see how things have changed. So that's just that's just one example. I think another example is with um social media, I think the way to look at it is throughout our existence as a species, Homo sapiens, technology externalizes uh our nature. We're allowed to store information outside our bodies, outside our minds. Um devices increase the power of our senses. So there's this, as I said, externalization. But anytime the you have externalization, there has to be a reaction inside the actual psyche, inside our mental architecture. And there's more and more internalization. And in fact, I think that's what consciousness is that the more we externalized, the more we had to connect with people, the more we extended our bodies, our minds had a shift. And again, I know this is kind of an abstract argument, and I don't have a lot of uh clear-cut concrete examples, but I think that's what's happening now with social media. I mean, you you I'm sure you've met people on Facebook, they have 3,000 friends or something like that. So, you know, there there's this increased externalization, and I think that somehow is going to cause changes within us. I think we see it already. I think people are more private. Since I was young, um, I there there's been a uh an increase in um the in privatism where people just want to cocoon themselves. And I think that's a reaction to what technology has done to us, how technology has kind of stretched us out with all these connections. Um so in any case, uh it's a little it's a little bit speculative at this point, but I definitely think that technology does uh shape not just psychology but our actual uh consciousness.

SPEAKER_03 40:41 So is that to say that ancient people weren't self-reflective, often referring to themselves as I or me or in an individual sense then? And and that's one of the major shifts that we've seen with consciousness.

SPEAKER_00 40:57 I think so. I I I think before about a thousand BCE, it's very difficult to find an in-depth self-reflection in the text. Um, people in their languages, of course, they had words, pronouns for I, me, but the I would just be a person's body. There was no sense that there's uh a mental space floating inside their head somewhere. Um and uh people were just not as concerned with what we would call deep philosophical questions uh during the uh preconscious period. That's something that would come later, and that's why from about maybe the seventh, eighth century BCE, there's an explosion of philosophy in Greece, um in China, in India. Um in the Judaic tradition, you have all these prophets, and then a little bit later you have almost a more philosophical type of Judaism developing, and that is because people were be had become much more what we would call self-reflective.

SPEAKER_03 42:06 That's so interesting because I want to do a whole episode what we did before uh before philosophy. Uh but it kind of sounds like bliss to me to not be musing philosophically on life all the time, and sometimes I wear myself out wondering about what the meaning of life is or what what the meaning of life is for me, or on a wider and a grander scale. It does feel like um not necessarily the best thing that we've latched on to consciousness. Maybe it was easier before. Maybe it's a bit provocative to say consciousness isn't good.

SPEAKER_00 42:45 Yeah, I I think you're right. I mean, I think just more of a as a footnote to what you just said, uh, to me, what a a very important point is that there was no philosophy or philosophers before 1000 BCE. There was certainly religion. People did question the gods sometimes and argue with them, but there's no in-depth philosophical mindset. That would not happen until much later. There's just no need to. And yes, consciousness, um, it's both a gift and a burden for Homo sapiens because uh the gods have stopped talking to us, but now we're godlike, especially with our technology. We have tremendous responsibility, but it leads to consciousness can easily lead to um a lot of self-rumination, uh, too much re self-re-reflexivity, you might say. Uh but the universe does not answer back. The universe is very quiet. It's very disturbing to be a deep thinker, because the gods are not giving us any direction. So it consciousness introduced this real existentialist ache um uh into the human condition that I think we're still grappling with.

SPEAKER_01 43:57 Yeah, uh I think um there's kind of a few schools of thought that there's a almost a meaning crisis going on in the world, or at least that humans have this deep innate desire for meaning in life. Um and I wondered if this is kind of a side effect of consciousness, or whether meaning was just easier with a by bicameral mind where it was just the meaning was that you were following the commands of the gods.

SPEAKER_00 44:26 Right. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. I think meaning w w was, uh as you said, just doing what you were told. Not just by the gods necessarily, or the ancestors, but by your parents, by your elders. But uh, you know, pe people were more likely to follow traditions, but consciousness really upends everything. In the Middle Ages, there was this this idea that your you could your soul could be alienated from God, and then by the nineteenth century, you had um Um, people like Kierkegaard, uh Nietzsche, who sort of introduced this very disturbing notion that um, well, in case in the case of Nietzsche, God is dead with Kierkegaard, uh, the idea that um you, there may god, there may be a god, there may not be a god, but you are an individual and you have to live in your own head and you have to be responsible for your own actions. You have agency. You cannot, like in the Middle Ages, you know, they would still maybe rely on the gods and the saints for things, but by the time you get into the 19th century, after the Enlightenment, when science started to really have a big impact, um, it was more difficult to argue that supernatural entities existed. And so there's this tremendous focus on the individual. And I think I, you know, with some of my clients, uh I sometimes I notice they want to talk about these things. They they want to talk about the meaning of life. They're maybe they're they're facing the end of their lives. Um, they want to know if it had meaning. And uh that's it's a very scary thing. And I think in our society, because in many senses we are so self-aware, we're actually afraid of that awareness. It's very, very disturbing.

SPEAKER_03 46:12 Well, I want to touch on um language and writing because um first of all, I want to know if if you feel that we created words in our heads and then and then needed a sort of an outlet to externalize them, uh, either through voices or through writing, or whether like we developed written language and vocal language before then we were able to internalize it as inner thought. And also, if all of this is part of the puzzle, like writing is part of the puzzle of consciousness shifting, why did the bicameral mind take so long to come about after writing had been invented? Because there were thousands and thousands of years of writing being in existence.

SPEAKER_00 47:00 So to try and answer your first question, um, the way I look at it, language is the consequence of changes in the environment, changes in social relations. Languages change and evolve. In fact, they can change quite rapidly if need be. And so I I view languages um more as a representation of something. Uh now, with that said, that does not mean that language um that words lack any impact. And this is where it gets a little bit uh a little bit challenging because some people accuse Janes of being a linguistic determinist, that you had these words develop, these metaphors, uh, these mental words, and that changed how people that that changed their experience. But it's a little more complicated than that. It's really a chicken or egg problem, you know, which came first. Um, but in any case, I I don't think James was a linguistic determinist. And what why I'm mentioning that is because I don't think just because a person hears a word, it's gonna change their cognition. So, for example, if someone came to me and tried to convince me that when I go to bed tonight, there are gonna be, I don't know, night demons in my room. And I never heard the word demon before, but they say tonight demons are coming in your room. That doesn't mean I'm gonna believe it necessarily. So words themselves do not have power, rather, a whole collection of words and socializing experiences give power and meaning to words. So, in any case, that I just want to point that out because this the the relationship between language and social relations, language and reality um is uh quite quite contested. Um but um the other to answer your question about um the relationship between writing and consciousness. So hallucinatory mentality broke down for a variety of reasons. Writing, I think, was one of them. I personally don't think it was uh a key reason. I think that hallucinations broke down because they just were not efficient anymore. They just the lines of communication got stretched between the rulers and the masses. Territories that had to be governed just got too big. People were performing more specialized roles as the economies changed. Um, people had to deal with strangers. As societies grew, population, they uh would bump up against each other. And though everybody believed in gods, they perhaps maybe they they weren't uh so uh enthusiastic about the customs of other people, and so they had to explain why are people different? And perhaps they would say, well, it must be something inside them. So all these different reasons um I think led to two things the collapse of hallucinatory mentality and the emergence of a new, more adaptive mentality, which was Jamesian consciousness.

SPEAKER_01 50:15 Okay, so consciousness isn't really just a side effect or that it popped up, it's actually almost like a social uh evil evolution of the way our minds worked. It it was just a requirement for us to continue developing in the kind of environments that we had. Is that sort of fair to say?

SPEAKER_00 50:36 Yes, yes, it is. It it it's an adaptive I I would call consciousness an adaptive technology, or I would call consciousness an adaptive set of ideas. And the reason why I'm putting it that way is to highlight how consciousness is something cultural, it's something learned, it's something that people had to develop over centuries. Um, it's not uh innate ability, it's not something that evolution uh gave us, it's something that people had to uh develop.

SPEAKER_01 51:05 Sort of on this note, could this kind of explain why um or or be part of the reason why, for much of human history, it feels like Homo sapiens made quite small gains technologically over a long period of time, and then kind of in the last 300 years or so the technological kind of advancement has gone up, and so has our sort of self-reflection and our way of kind of being able to communicate by text and things like that. Uh, is consciousness kind of linked in with this, do you think?

SPEAKER_00 51:38 I think it is. Um, how it is linked in, to be honest with you, I'm not entirely sure. I think it's very difficult to find direct connections, but I I I think it is. I mean, certainly uh human psychology is related to all these changes. And you know, I think also it's important to keep in mind that the idea that Homo sapiens should, or Homo sapiens has been evolving in terms of technology is kind of a modern assumption because we assume that technology is good. But the idea of technological progress or social progress, social improvement, really is a it's a new idea. It's only maybe a couple hundred years old. You know, before then the idea is that time goes in cycles, or there's no need to um radically change society. In fact, that that was considered very dangerous. But in any case, I think the challenge with understanding why there have been spurts of technological innovation is because those spurts, those changes occur because there's so many variables. I think there have to be new sources of energy, whether it's coal or electricity, for example, or domesticating animals could be anything. Um there has to be an acceptance among the population that they want change. Again, we assume people want change, but that's not always the case. Uh of course, uh, there has to be a knowledge base, a type of science that allows for changes in technology to figure out how to improve technology. So there has to be a politics uh behind it where the leadership says that technological change is good. Um, so for example, if you look at in the ancient Roman world, they're very sophisticated people, but from what I heard, the leaders did not want certain technological innovations because they were afraid it was going to put people out of work and they didn't want the masses wandering around looking for trouble. So that's just one example. But in any case, uh I think the point is there are so many reasons why technology changes. I think in the modern world, sometime around 1500, there was a major shift. It certainly looks that way. If you look at the Atlantic powers, certain things came together. Um from the Renaissance, there was an awakening of agent, self-agency, you might say. Uh, then the Enlightenment. Um and then, of course, uh really an explosion of science and technology in the 1800s. So, you know, actually, that's not a long time, three, four, five centuries ago. But in any case, uh, yeah, that that's that's kind of a big question, the relationship between uh technology and uh psychology. I do think to zero in on the relationship between techno technological innovation and jainzian consciousness, again, the the connection is difficult to prove, but I do think that Janezian consciousness, one of the things it does, it allows us to think in hypotheticals, to come up with hypotheses easier. It allows a certain imagination because it gives us a kind of mental space. We're able to ask more questions that perhaps pre-conscious people, maybe they could have asked the same questions, but it would have taken them a lot longer. And I think that's what technological change is all about. It's things just speed up. And I think Jaynesian consciousness does allow things to speed up.

SPEAKER_03 55:10 It's interesting that you mentioned the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Could those two things be associated with consciousness then?

SPEAKER_00 55:21 I think so. Uh I do think so. Again, it's um there's the same problem of how do you show that uh in terms of um of uh of an argument. You know, what's the evidence for that? I think it's the same thing with technology. How do you make that linkage between technological improvement and changing consciousness? But I do think it's the same rules. What I mean is with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment rather, there was sort of a liberation, you might say, the human spirit, that the individual was given power. And I think I don't think that um individualism or individuality is uh is an inherently Western invention. I think it just looks that way, things worked out that way. But I think one of the features of changing consciousness is what I call self-individuation, where the individual is asked to look within themselves and find strengths to find out what's different. How am I different from the collectivity, from the group? How can I do things that no one else has done before? And so that's a key feature of Jaynesian consciousness. And that's what you find in the Renaissance, that's what you find in the Enlightenment, where individual thinkers were celebrated, where people were more um, I don't want to mischaracterize two or three centuries of history, but people were just more open-minded, at least certain elites were more open-minded. And I think this has to do with uh there's a powerful sense of uh self-agency.

SPEAKER_03 56:56 We can forgive you for paraphrasing hundreds of years of history, don't worry. What does this tell us about animal consciousness then? Because we're often talking about animals being conscious, we're show you we're demonstrating that they can pass things like the mirror test, so they're they're understanding that in the mirror is is them, and it's a reflection of themselves. So we're starting to figure out at least um from a certain version of how we describe consciousness that animals do have consciousness. Are we saying that they don't have consciousness in the same sense as we do? Or yeah, how does that work?

SPEAKER_00 57:35 Yeah, I I would say that. I mean, to be precise, I would say that they don't have Janesian consciousness. Um, animals certainly have um very powerful cognitive abilities. I mean, if anyone has a pet. And I notice I've been asked this question before, and people get upset. What do you mean my dog is conscious? My cat, I know my cat communicates with me. Well, of course, there's cognition there. Dogs do relate to us emotionally, actually. And you know, I remember being um uh with James in his office talking about this, and he said that squirrels, if you look at if you study the neurology of a squirrel, it's very sophisticated. And he had done that. You know, remember Jane started out as a comparative psychologist. That is a specialty where they compare the neurology and the mentality, the behavior of animals and people. And what happened is he realized that his interest in consciousness would not go anywhere if he just stayed at that comparative neurological level, that he had to introduce culture into the uh equation. But yeah, so people, you know, they go back to some of the examples you used about um apes looking in mirrors and scratching themselves, you know. Yeah, there's something going on there, but it's certainly not um Janezian consciousness. And and animals, um we're beginning to find out now, actually, they're a lot smarter than we think. I mean, we you hear this all the time: the mind of animals as if we just discovered this. But uh actually, researchers for quite a while, going back to late 19th century, knew that animals um were quite sophisticated. It's just that their neurology, their mentality, whatever you want to call it, is completely different from ours.

SPEAKER_01 59:24 So we have language, we have maybe you know the ability to build things and create culture. And do you think then that this is the missing thing, or is it also something kind of physically with our brains as well that allows us to have this Jainzian consciousness?

SPEAKER_00 59:41 That's a good question. Um, I I I do think that the reason why animals cannot have Jainsian consciousness is because their neurology is different. Um, and humans do have a very well-developed, a very large neocortex. And that neocortex allows us to do things that no animal can do, even primates. And that is the difference. And I know some people, people who love animals, I love animals, I grew up with dogs, you know, some people get very upset and offended by this idea that oh, you're you're you're being uh anthropocentric or something. I'm looking down, disrespecting animals, but no, I'm just looking at the science. Um and um yeah, so just to reiterate that, because I think it is an important question, it's an important point, that animals, I mean, a million years from now, who knows? Dogs may evolve, they're they may evolve the neocortex and they can somehow learn consciousness, but as it stands now, um only humans have that neurological grounding. So if you remember at the beginning of our discussion, I talked about when we talk about the bicameral mind, we have to distinguish between the neurology and the psychology, and they're related, and the psychology rests upon the neurology, but you can't have a certain psychological, socio-psychological behaviors if you don't have certain neurological components in place. That doesn't mean we should reduce everything to neurology, and the a good metaphor, I think, is the difference between computer hardware and software. Things aren't really going to work on a computer unless you have the software. Um, it doesn't mean the neurology is not important. It just means the way James looked at things, the software is the culture and our neurology is the hardware.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:36 Okay, because this is actually um as a I'm a software developer, actually, by sort of trace, and um it's sort of something that I've been following in the background a little bit is watching um some news where people have sort of successfully uh simulated like a worm's brain, or you you know, um and I was kind of thinking uh along the same lines of what you were saying there, if at some point in the future if we were able to simulate every neuron firing in our brains, that's the hardware, but the software to uh have consciousness in that simulated brain is just not possible because you would have to have the culture and the human-lived experience that it that sort of simulated simulation wouldn't have. Is that kind of we're going into sci-fi territory a little bit here, but yeah, it's it's pretty it's actually very deep, uh very deep stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:32 I'm I think what you just described, I think is probably accurate. That's my feeling, because I'm asked that a lot. Like we're will you know, will AI develop consciousness? Well, um, and I'm I'm sort of doubtful. And I I I I think there's a difference between will a program become conscious versus can humans create an entity that becomes conscious? Those are two very different things. I do think probably at the rate we're going, we will be able to develop an entity that is not just pure electrical circuitry and uh programming, some sort of bio-engineered entity that can learn from the environment. You know, we're talking way in the future. Because I think consciousness arises because we're externalized, we are embodied creatures, we're connected to the environment. And so I don't know if that's clear the distinction I made between AI developing consciousness versus a man-created entity developing consciousness. I think the latter is a is a possibility. You know, maybe we we'll we'll build robots, but those robots have to be able to sense the world, they have to perceive the way people do. Consciousness is not this magical cloud floating around. Consciousness is something that's built up in in the mind of a child um over many years. And I think that um it's certainly a possibility um that we'll we'll be able eventually to do that.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:06 Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:07 We could get really deep with this into the realms of uh people are talking a lot about panpsychism at the moment, about how consciousness is fundamental, it's like a fundamental sort of fabric of the universe, and that would suggest that perhaps consciousness doesn't arise purely in the brain, although by this definition it sounds like really it is the mechanics of the brain coupled with culture and human experience, and nothing external like in the theory of panpsychism. I feel like I could do a whole podcast episode on that, but it might not be an episode of what we did before. Um and I I sort of want to get a little bit onto the future of consciousness. We've touched on how it may be changing and reshaped by technologies and tools and AI that we've got now. But is it possible? Could you argue that consciousness is still being experienced differently between different cultures today and different peoples, depending on where exactly in the world they're living in? Because we do often talk about the difference between Western ideologies and eastern ideologies, and and uh perhaps how uh tribes like the Hadza think compared to um people like us. So, yeah, is is consciousness, given that it is culturally informed, being experienced differently globally?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:23 Um that's a very uh good and important question. I think that the way to look at it, it's not so much that different cultures experience consciousness differently that different individuals do, because we're also very unique. Um and I would also say that all present-day cultures and all individuals um have a basic set of capabilities that allow them to be conscious. However, on top of that, there's a more subtle, nuanced layer of linguistic differences, of personal experiences that do shape uh how we experience consciousness. So um, yes, I do think that there are differences. And those differences do matter. I because as I said before, I think there are about uh 12 different features of consciousness. Not everybody will engage or utilize those features in the same way. So, for example, um being able to look at your use your mind's eye and look at your mental space, some people are very good at that. That's a feature, a key feature of consciousness. Some people struggle with that, some people don't do it at all. So that's one very particular example of differences. And also cross-culturally in many societies, um the vestiges of uh of hallucinatory mentality are still around. My dissertation was on spirit possession in Japan, and I viewed spirit possession as a vestige, a neurological leftover of the bicameramal mind. And so those so that that you know when you step back and look at the whole range of different ways of being a person in the modern world, there's act there's actually tremendous socio psychological variety.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:17 I mean it's just fascinating exploring the history of how consciousness has developed and evolved. This is obviously a theory so it may not have happened like this but this I mean it seems hugely plausible and makes a lot of sense to me at least. But it's not just fascinating, is it? Because you've written books about this, it's you've dedicated your your life to talking about this subject and you can talk to us a bit a bit about your books as well and why people might want to research this a bit more and pick up some of your work. But why does it matter beyond just a mere sort of curiosity or fascination? Why is it important that people understand that perhaps consciousness has changed and we did have these bicameral minds in the past and we don't anymore?

SPEAKER_00 1:08:06 Well um that's that's a that's a big question. I think um just I I think the way science works is when we develop a hypothesis and test it, we're not always sure what the result is going to be but often the the result of science scientific research is very unpredictable. So we don't know. So you know there's this debate in uh among um researchers is it uh which is more valuable pure research or something very practical how to make a better mousetrap um and I think we need both obviously but I I want to highlight and stress the importance of what we might call pure research or research that doesn't seem related now but eventually it might be. So for example in the case of Jane's um his work you know his his that book of his it's about consciousness yes but it's also about hallucinations and I think if someone wants to understand Jane's they should start with hallucinations and not worry about consciousness is because consciousness it's a lot more difficult to talk about when you're introduced to Janes but hallucinations we we know something about hallucinations and many people suffer um from hallucinations uh there's something going on there and I think jaynes sheds a lot of light on that um so that's just one example and um in one of my books I uh about psychotherapy I actually take the notion of Jane Zian consciousness and I break it down and I show how when it comes to a clinician developing techniques in order to help someone who's suffering from anxiety or depression or what have you what does our understanding of Jane Zing how does it help us develop those techniques and you know there's no need to go into the details right now but that I think is something practical. So in any case just to summarize what what I was trying to say um I think first of all we never know where pure research will lead or something that seems very academic and unrelated to the real world it probably will lead to something useful.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:10 And then the other thing as I already uh discussed is I see already how uh in my own practice I can use some of some of uh uh uh Jane's uh ideas to uh to help people clinically just as a I I mean maybe a final actionable tip for people could you argue that you know meditation is used as a way of quietening the mind so we can feel less stressed so we don't have to listen to our inner inner monologue so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:40 So is meditation maybe an attempt to return to like a pre-narrative mind and can it help us get back in touch with the way in which our ancestors may have experienced the world yeah so um I'm not sure how it would help us get back to the way our ancestors experienced the world um but I definitely think that there is value to meditation. A lot of people do use it uh whether they've been diagnosed with a mental health condition or not I mean in meditation originally as you know its roots were very religious and and in all religious traditions you can find something that looks like meditation. You know I think maybe some people when they hear the word they they think of Hinduism or India or something but actually all traditions have this meditative technique. And I think the way uh meditation works is you're basically you're it's related to hypnosis. It's not exactly the same thing but what it shares with hypnosis is an attempt to step back and not shut off your mind because that's impossible to do but not take the contents of your mind so seriously and don't judge the contents of your mind. So when I say contents of your mind another way to look at it is the voices to just let those voices yell and shout and do whatever they want but don't attach yourself to those voices. Just let them parade by in your head. So uh I I do think that there's a lot to be said um for the usefulness of meditation. You are not your thoughts yeah right that that exactly you are not your thoughts right yeah yeah there's always there's always a an eye uh that can step out and look that that that's what I don't want to get into the theory too much right now but the idea is that our mind is always jumping ahead and there's always an eye looking back on this narrative line. And sometimes we take that narrative too seriously and we have to be open to the possibility that there are different narratives and then I don't think they get stuck in that narrative.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:53 And I think that sort of um understanding these tendencies of consciousness can help us just to step back and look and see okay that isn't just me. I'm not attached to this thought this is just something that is arising in my brain and I would really recommend to uh all of our listeners and viewers um some of your books Brian uh The Self Healing Mind um a psychohistory of metaphors I was reading last night very interesting and um yeah so just wanted to get a little plug in there thank you appreciate that well Brian McVeigh it's been an absolute pleasure thank you very much for joining us on what we did before. Okay thank you uh for having me I enjoyed the talk a massive thank you to Brian McVeigh so Matt tell me what did you think about about all that well um it's fascinating because I don't really know where to start um firstly this idea of the bicameral mind uh we touched on this and hallucinations and I think your point about your daughter um and how she maybe experiences the world is probably one of the things that really clicked for me that this is a potential uh like real thing because I I remember sort of having some of these experiences as a child and I often think as an adult that maybe m my ability to sort of see the world is different to how it was when I was a a child and maybe that's because our default state the state that our ancestors just continued having it is to have this kind of more hallucinatory experience of the world.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:44 Yeah I think for me um it was also interesting to hear that they could sort of be vestiges of a prior version of consciousness that we experienced. That made a lot of sense as well but what I do want to talk about a little bit is how this kind of theory, this idea does seem to stray away from ideas of religion as though they were only a sort of a mental benefit for our ancestors that they that they were they kept a hold of because it was useful for societies back then and isn't so useful now. But in a way that does undermine religion and the existence of a god and I I wouldn't want to say that you know religion isn't true because all it was was voices inside the heads of our ancestors. It could be that both things are true. It could be that maybe ancient humans or our ancestors really were communing with God in a way that we can't today. There are so many explanations. So yeah I just wanted to sort of mention I don't know where you land on this argument but that it isn't writing off religion entirely but it's a very interesting explanation regardless.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:53 Yeah I think that we should probably take this um for what it is with uh as open-minded people whatever your beliefs I mean uh I don't think that even necessarily uh these thoughts on kind of evolution really discount religion entirely or even specific religions I think it's just that we're exploring a potential kind of uh explanation for how our minds worked and that can be separate from the the God argument I think.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:26 Yeah and you know at the end of the day and I did say this to Brian that this is still just a theory right we can't go back into the minds of our ancestors and actually figure out whether there were these two chambers that composed the bicameral mind. It is just something that we can sort of reflect on based on the writings of the time and based on how we saw civilization grow and change but um actually trying to tap into how they understood the world that's almost impossible and but it is really fascinating because no matter what it does seem that there was some sort of shift in the way that we thought so whether there was a time before consciousness that still remains a bit of a mystery but there certainly was a time before modern thinking I would argue.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:12 Yeah and um I think one of the things that clicked for me at least as a sort of tech person and maybe it did for you as well is this kind of idea that the brain being hardware and then sort of consciousness or just you know thinking in general being like the software that runs on the brain. If we look at it that way it kind of maybe explains a few things that maybe effectively we got a software update sometime in history and we're not that this kind of just happened out of chance but actually that it was a required update to allow us to work in the communities and um with the kind of worlds that we have i i in the last sort of 2000 years or so.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:58 Yeah and maybe maybe if there is a God or maybe if we live in the Matrix, maybe it was a legitimate update that was just run one day. That's where it seems to have happened in such a short um time period. But you know there are probably loads of arguments against it that we didn't get into and that we didn't flesh out as well that kind of pull apart the theory as well. So for anybody listening who thinks you know um we're suggesting that this is the the way that consciousness did develop I think there's a lot more nuance to be had and probably Matt um some future episodes to be had in this conversation as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:30 It's a huge topic um I have to say personally that I find his argument very compelling and um I plan to read more into this and listen to more podcasts about this but you know you only have to look at the um the fact that Brian has his life has been mostly dedicated specifically on this branch of theory around consciousness. So it's such an enormous topic there's so many things that we could delve into we've tried to uh and Brian's tried to distill it into an hour and that's just one kind of uh school of thought on it so yeah there's many more avenues we could go down on this one.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:12 And if you listening have any ideas of where you'd like us to go next with this topic or any other topic please do let us know in the comments and if we choose your idea we'll be sure to credit you in the outro of that episode. This is what we did before I'm Ollie.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:25 And I'm Matt and please do subscribe if you like the video or follow us if you like the audio it really does help us out. Thank you