The Origin of Consciousness in Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

[Andrew]

[Quote added by staff for context]

@claudiu

@Vineeto

This attitude of disparaging thought and thus human intelligence, and not religion in general, is what made India stand out in its “paramount contribution to the retardation of evolution”.

I was wondering re-reading what Richard wrote if that was specifically targeted at Indian-rooted religions.

By comparison, Christianity, although it has its fair share of anti-thought history like the Church deeming heliocentrism to be heretical and banning all Copernican books when presented with clear evidence that geocentrism was false [L], did nevertheless later provide an environment wherein more intellectually-inclined believers could conceptualize the world as created by the rational mind of God, and therefore could see rationally understanding the world as being praising of God’s creation, which allowed them to experiment and eventually develop a system of finding things out about the world that later became formalized as the scientific method – the benefits of which have been innumerable, including of course leading to Darwin developing his theory of evolution, but more saliently so in enabling the vast increase in the health, wealth, and prosperity of humanity that has been seen due to the advent of the industrial revolution and capitalism (which contrary to some modern beliefs has the function of vastly reducing poverty, not of generating it).

Although all worldviews, belief systems, viewpoints, narratives, etc., are feeling-fueled and thus miss the point as they are all entirely redundant and inherently flawed, nevertheless some are more propitious than others.

(Lest this be taken as some defense of Christianity, it should be noted that, for example, America was founded by Christians who happened to believe in a slightly different flavor of Christianity than the ruling powers at the time, and were thus fleeing persecution and death, which directly led them to make the sensible decision to explicitly separate church from state, which separation has evidently been immensely beneficial for the well-being of the citizens therein.)

I see it like this:

• when human ancestors hadn’t evolved sufficient intelligence yet, the instinctual passions were more propitious than not, as it enabled them to survive and reproduce. Some passions were more propitious than others, with the ones not conducive to survival at all having been evolved away (e.g. an excessive suicidal instinct with no herd-benefit would quite naturally fail to propagate)
• after evolving the basic passions, further evolution bore out that for example tribalism in human ancestors was better than not being tribal, these organisms survived better. This is evident in wolves too so we are not yet even at the point of cognition
• as cognition started to develop but was inchoate, and it was not possible yet to fully make sense of the world with sensible thinking, beliefs evolved, the tribes that had certain beliefs survived better than those that didn’t have beliefs at all (at that point).
• there was a memetic selection of which beliefs were most effective, this where you end up having religions and such, again with some being more beneficial than others
• all the above followed patterns of “mosaic evolution” with e.g. Indian religions retarding the process more than Western religions
• nevertheless at some point in the past, perhaps centuries perhaps millennia, humans had evolved everything they would need to be able to become actually free – at which point it was definitively the case that all the above (ie instinctual passions, tribalism, beliefs) were not only redundant but actively harmful as compared to what was now possible
• and from that point of it being possible, to the next few centuries or millennia, it took a very special (as in extraordinary) naive boy from the farm to be naive enough to see that it is possible and then go and actually have the mettle to go all the way and actually do it, for the benefit of every body
• the good news for us is since he did it, a handful more have succeeded in only a few decades (compared to the centuries/millennia needed for the first to have done it), and the way is clearer and more well-laid out than ever… so really no excuse not to do it now I include myself in this lol

Cheers,
Claudiu

I hadn’t read that quote of Richard regarding the disparagement of thought in Indian religion.

I know this may sound like a banging on about a theory, but I do find it a far stretch to imagine (which is what we are doing when talking about human evolution) that 400000 years of modern human/ Neanderthal (generically interbreeding evidence means we are one species), with the later having a significantly larger brain than ours, where for the majority of that time thinking and feeling like modem humans do.

It seems far more likely that up until relatively recently, they had a very different, far less ‘self’ like existence.

It’s very much a “theory of mind” issue, in which we project ourselves onto the other and literally imagine a ‘self’ like our own being there.

‘self’ consciousness is just far more likely to be very modern, if not entirely overlapping Indian religions.

One of the points Jaynes makes, if not the central point of his work, is all the practices of altering our consciousness towards “trance” is an attempt to get back to the pre-modern mind.

To imagine that of the 103 billion humans who have lived in the last 40000 years, let alone 4000000 years were all so similar to us in self consciousness yet so absolutely incapable and devoid of anyone as intrepid as Richard seem a really vivid imagining.

That is to say, there was something in the way for there to be the breakthrough. That something being a lack of ‘self’ consciousness. Not a lack of a ‘self’, but lack of the individual modern version of it.