alt Hacker NewsThere was a book in the 1970s called "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes, where he argued that ancient civilizations -- and he used examples from Homer -- lacked the current modern sense of self-consciousness. If you look at their behavior, they interact with some external divine voice that drives their actions, whereas if you read modern literature you see people being driven by an inner voice which they associate with themselves.
This shift from the "bicameral mentality" of the external voice to the modern mentality of the inner voice was hypothesized by Jaynes to be rooted in some biological changes in the brain. At the time there was split brain research that showed these two parts of the brain function independently almost as two different minds in the same skull. See this 2007 survey: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6323702_The_bicamer...
Replies
Not relevant to the article.
Also, that study is extremely dubious/barring on fan-fiction.
Homer (if he was even a person) recited oral epic poetry (that we've lost most of) and we've written down an extremely lossy version of it.
Why should we take any of the mythical character's interactions with mythical gods as any insight for the brains of real humans???
It'd be like year 4000 historians citing World of Warcraft claiming the Lich King is a very obvious example that humans lack an internal monologue because he was not able to distinguish his own motives/actions between Ner'zhul/Arthas (both spiritual entities inhabiting the "Lich King" body).
It was a successful pop-sci book when it came out, but its conclusions continue to be met with a lot of skepticism today.
Okay but this article is about evolution hundreds of millions of years ago.
> they interact with some external divine voice that drives their actions
...in a specific region, in a specific time period, immediately before the economic and then societal crash of the eastern Mediterranean that changed culture in the region forever.
The hypothesis breaks down pretty hard when you realize he just kind of handwaves away people in the rest of the world not having any kind of abrupt cut-over in the styles of recorded literature that forms the backbone of his arguments.
[dead]
That would imply a biological change in all humans in the last ~3000 years after humans had already dispersed across the entire globe?
That means whatever the change was would have to had occur simultaneously in separate populations all over the world within almost no time at all.