/dead/ - Post-Left

It does not make much sense to me. The original thesis sounds doesn't sound really convincing, and applying it to our present situation does not seem to help us at all. I much prefer this article: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/66877/engineering-self/

IIRC Jaynes seems to frame "consciousness" as being a bit too foundational to our psychology. What he discusses seems more along the lines of a theory of self, something contained within your language or your "software." Different modes of consicousness make more sense as a tool for interpreting the more fundamental drives and biological states we have. Moving into some new mode of consciousness or theory of self does make sense in theory if the mode of production is transforming.

I see where the article is going and sure it makes some important points about where people's heads are at right now, but I think that the change we're seeing now is a different one. The bicameralism-to-consciousness change is a change in theory of self, but the current breakdown is in our relationship not to ourselves but to the reality around us. We mostly have a sense of who we are, but the heuristic failure being described indicates a breakdown in our ability to trust information about the world. Many alternative interpretations of reality are competing for our acceptance, so perhaps the change to happen here would be in our ability to imagine a "multiverse" of different interpretations that different people believe in, and someone with the new mindset would be more adept at "traversing" across different "alternate realities" by internalizing and understanding different beliefs about the way the world is, without necessarily accepting those beliefs themselves.

The capacity to do this sort of thing is already apparent when it comes to fiction. People love to get engrossed in fictional realities and to develop an understanding of some comic book universe and so on. The same kind of obsession with "lore" can be applied to the real world (as we see with people like history nerds), but also to the different political and social theories that compete with each other. Maybe in a similar way to the fiction Jaynes was using as a reference point to explore a change in psychology, contemporary fiction can tell us something about where people's minds are going. The multiverse concept has become pretty popular in recent years in fairly mainstream movies and TV.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvUzdJSK4x8
Something to consider. I was watching this and they mention the bicameral mind at around 7:30. It is mentioned as a theory that posits that humanity needed a long historical development to reach consciousness. They claim the opposite, that (pre)history is best understood if we disregard the usual trope of the "stupid savage" living in blissful ignorance and assume that people in the past were aware of themselves and knew what they were doing.