Andrew:
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.
I do find this fascinating. From Wikipedia:
[…] Jaynes proposed that until roughly the times written about in Homer ’s Iliad consciousness as most people experience it today. Rather, the bicameral individual was guided by mental commands believed to be issued by external “gods ”—commands that were recorded in ancient myths , legends, and historical accounts. This is exemplified in not only the commands given to characters in ancient epics but also the very muses of Greek mythology who “sang” the poems. According to Jaynes, the ancients literally heard muses as the direct source of their music and poetry .
Jaynes asserts that in the Iliad and sections of the Old Testament , no mention is made of any kind of cognitive processes such as introspection , and there is no apparent indication that the writers were self-aware. […]
Jaynes theorized that a shift from bicameral mentality marked the beginning of introspection and consciousness as we know it today. According to Jaynes, this bicameral mentality began malfunctioning or “breaking down” during the 2nd millennium BCE. […] The Late Bronze Age collapse of the 2nd millennium BCE led to mass migrations and created a rash of unexpected situations and stresses that required ancient minds to become more flexible and creative. Self-awareness, or consciousness, was the culturally evolved solution to this problem. This necessity of communicating commonly observed phenomena among individuals who shared no common language or cultural upbringing encouraged those communities to become self-aware to survive in a new environment. Thus, consciousness, like bicameral mentality, emerged as a neurological adaptation to social complexity in a changing world.
Jaynes further argues that divination , prayer , and oracles arose during this breakdown period in an attempt to summon instructions from the “gods” whose voices could no longer be heard.
I find this highly compelling, and fascinating if true…
And it would speak volumes as to what @Kub933 's initial point was the whole time!
Wow human-kind really did get screwed over by those holy men, what have they done!? […]
But it is those god men that peddled their snake-oil, they offered a promise of eternity for the ‘self’. Those feeling beings could have long ago gladly allowed their self-immolation, but instead the god men locked ‘humanity’ into endless cycles of suffering for a promise of an afterlife .
And what a perverse worldview spawned from this […] This has me viewing self-immolation in a completely different light, it is nothing weird, in fact it is something way overdue. Something that if not for the “retardation of evolution over the last 3,000 to 5,000 years” would have likely been the all-round state of affairs.
In other words, it would mean that just as humanity evolved and developed the seismic, species-delineating shift of being able to self-introspect and thus gain the capacity to become actually free…
… those “holy men” and “god men” came and literally kept alive the hallucinatory, delusory madness that humanity had just managed to crawl out of due to selection pressures… literally dragging the human mind back to, or retarding its progression away from, the days before genuine self-consciousness was possible.
What utter madness it would be if true! I appreciate Kuba’s point much more now.
Cheers,
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