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Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated

Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow. The being said, I'm reading "Proto" By Laura Spinney, and the thing that strikes me is how recently the world's major languages developed. Everyone assumes we had language fifty thousand years ago, but the actual language families we know about all seem to trace to no more than about 10,000 BCE, and maybe a lot younger than that. The odds of Proto-Indo-European being traceable to a single tribe in the Black Sea region circa 4500 BCE seem really low to me, but that's what seems to have happened.

carbonguy 1mo ago
Slate Star Codex reviewed Jaynes' book as well, which is how I first heard about it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-... To your point: > Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow. SSC's article points to a Reddit thread that suggests even folks in the mainstream of culture may undergo a "consciousness transition" as adults: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_thought_with_language_until_now_this_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_though...
- bonoboTP 1mo ago
  I'd distinguish verbal inner monologue from consciousness. Many people think on the daily without narrating things to themselves in sentences, without feeling brutish or animalistic. I can plan complex human actions including theory of mind considerations without narrating it as a monologue. It's still very conscious. Also that reddit post seems like a fake story made up by a teenager as a sort of scifi. It's just too on the nose. Yeah he lived life without understanding that his friends still exist while out of sight... I guess the OP just learned about some developmental stages of toddlers or object permanence etc and wrote a story like this as fanfic.
bonoboTP 1mo ago
The language thing is just that without writing, reconstructions based on regular sound correspondences only allow us to infer backwards by a few thousand years. It doesn't mean that anything particularly interesting happened exactly at that time to human language. It's just that language changes relatively fast on this timescale so current languages don't offer enough clues. And the origins of language are famously uncertain. Might have been recent and relatively sudden (<100 thousand years ago) or a gradual slope for many hundreds of thousands of years.
- GlenTheMachine 1mo ago
  The conclusion linguists are coming to is much stronger than that. The data indicate that the last common ancestor of languages as varied as Hittite, German, and Latin was spoken around 4500 BCE in Ukraine. It's a linguistic equivalent of a genetic bottleneck. It isn't merely that we can't know what happened before that. It's that the proto language was in fact relatively recent.
  - bonoboTP 1mo ago
    Doesn't contradict what I said.
  - stasomatic 29d ago
    In Ukraine of all places? (I'm from there). It seems rather sensational.
- IAmBroom 1mo ago
  It does mean something very interesting: almost all surviving western languages come from a hypothesized, singular(ish) language (PIE). And PIE existed within the last 10ky. It is unthinkable to assume language evolved an order of magnitude slower pre-PIE than it did after. How could that work? Humans didn't change. Humans change language, generation by generation (and interaction by interaction). "We don't know" doesn't mean "a 50,000 BCE human could speak fluently with a 40,000 BCE human." I couldn't do that with someone from 1326 AD in "English" - and I study that era's language.
Telemakhos 1mo ago
Jaynes relies on some earlier work that's been invalidated, like Bruno Snell's idea of archaic Greeks lacking a concept of an integrated body because they painted what appear to be individual limbs on vases from the geometric period. Snell wrote _The Discovery of the Mind_ in 1946. Since then archaeology has found amazing art like the Pylos Combat Agate from before the geometric period, demonstrating lifelike, realistic bodies rather than assemblages of limbs: the aesthetic of the geometric period was a choice, not evidence of a different kind of consciousness lacking a sense of self.
agaj-nimm 1mo ago
The fact that 100k years ago we could have seen 7 Pleiades with the naked eye but angles shifted since and now only 6, but unconnected traditions speak of 7 entities in tales of their origins may indicate we have had language far sooner than 10,000 BCE.
- IAmBroom 1mo ago
  Or, the number "7" has magical/emotional importance to (at least) Western peoples (as does 3, 12, and infamously - 13). If they were 8 and now 7, but still called "8 sisters", I'd be more impressed.
detourdog 1mo ago
Our language development and our awareness is currently tied to writing/record keeping. Hard for us to know anything about prehistoric languages.
- GlenTheMachine 1mo ago
  Turns out that isn't exactly true. You can poly concepts from genetic drift to language and infer what they must have been like. It's revolutionized the field of linguistics.
  - detourdog 1mo ago
    That may work prehistoric cultures that have fragments in our current languages. This is an incomplete picture because we don’t know about the dead ends. Oral histories disappear when the cultures die out.
- IAmBroom 1mo ago
  Very currently. Just 1,000 years ago people memorized Beowulf to keep the text. But it is hard for us to imagine times before us, it is true.
whtrbt 1mo ago
There’s a fascinating book called Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett that covers the Piraha people in the Amazon. Their language is unusual: no recurrent sentences, almost no discussion of the past. I’m not suggesting they are unconscious but there appears to be something different going on with the Piraha sociolinguistically.
- xhevahir 1mo ago
  It is an interesting book, but as far as I know no one has verified Everett's work. I've just noticed this article that talks about it: https://news.mit.edu/2016/data-amazonian-piraha-language-debate-0309 https://news.mit.edu/2016/data-amazonian-piraha-language-deb...
- detourdog 29d ago
  Can you describe a recurrent sentence? I can’t think of what it means. I did search but only found examples of recurrent in a sentence.
geophile 1mo ago
"Somehow" We have no idea what consciousness is, and cannot reliably detect it in other mammals, or even in other humans. I assume that you, GlenTheMachine, are conscious, but I cannot prove it. I think the most we can state, with a little assurance, is that people under general anesthesia are not conscious.
adolph 1mo ago
> If consciousness spread virally “The nam-shub of Enki is both a story and an incantation,” the Librarian says. “A self-fulfilling fiction. Lagos believed that in its original form, which this translation only hints at, it actually did what it describes.” [0] 0. Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash: A Novel Stephenson has Hiro state it more explicitly in Chapter 56.

carbonguy 1mo ago

Slate Star Codex reviewed Jaynes' book as well, which is how I first heard about it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-... To your point: > Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow. SSC's article points to a Reddit thread that suggests even folks in the mainstream of culture may undergo a "consciousness transition" as adults: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_thought_with_language_until_now_this_is/ https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_though...

bonoboTP 1mo ago
I'd distinguish verbal inner monologue from consciousness. Many people think on the daily without narrating things to themselves in sentences, without feeling brutish or animalistic. I can plan complex human actions including theory of mind considerations without narrating it as a monologue. It's still very conscious. Also that reddit post seems like a fake story made up by a teenager as a sort of scifi. It's just too on the nose. Yeah he lived life without understanding that his friends still exist while out of sight... I guess the OP just learned about some developmental stages of toddlers or object permanence etc and wrote a story like this as fanfic.

bonoboTP 1mo ago

The language thing is just that without writing, reconstructions based on regular sound correspondences only allow us to infer backwards by a few thousand years. It doesn't mean that anything particularly interesting happened exactly at that time to human language. It's just that language changes relatively fast on this timescale so current languages don't offer enough clues. And the origins of language are famously uncertain. Might have been recent and relatively sudden (<100 thousand years ago) or a gradual slope for many hundreds of thousands of years.

GlenTheMachine 1mo ago
The conclusion linguists are coming to is much stronger than that. The data indicate that the last common ancestor of languages as varied as Hittite, German, and Latin was spoken around 4500 BCE in Ukraine. It's a linguistic equivalent of a genetic bottleneck. It isn't merely that we can't know what happened before that. It's that the proto language was in fact relatively recent.
- bonoboTP 1mo ago
  Doesn't contradict what I said.
- stasomatic 29d ago
  In Ukraine of all places? (I'm from there). It seems rather sensational.
IAmBroom 1mo ago
It does mean something very interesting: almost all surviving western languages come from a hypothesized, singular(ish) language (PIE). And PIE existed within the last 10ky. It is unthinkable to assume language evolved an order of magnitude slower pre-PIE than it did after. How could that work? Humans didn't change. Humans change language, generation by generation (and interaction by interaction). "We don't know" doesn't mean "a 50,000 BCE human could speak fluently with a 40,000 BCE human." I couldn't do that with someone from 1326 AD in "English" - and I study that era's language.

Telemakhos 1mo ago

Jaynes relies on some earlier work that's been invalidated, like Bruno Snell's idea of archaic Greeks lacking a concept of an integrated body because they painted what appear to be individual limbs on vases from the geometric period. Snell wrote _The Discovery of the Mind_ in 1946. Since then archaeology has found amazing art like the Pylos Combat Agate from before the geometric period, demonstrating lifelike, realistic bodies rather than assemblages of limbs: the aesthetic of the geometric period was a choice, not evidence of a different kind of consciousness lacking a sense of self.

agaj-nimm 1mo ago

The fact that 100k years ago we could have seen 7 Pleiades with the naked eye but angles shifted since and now only 6, but unconnected traditions speak of 7 entities in tales of their origins may indicate we have had language far sooner than 10,000 BCE.

IAmBroom 1mo ago
Or, the number "7" has magical/emotional importance to (at least) Western peoples (as does 3, 12, and infamously - 13). If they were 8 and now 7, but still called "8 sisters", I'd be more impressed.

detourdog 1mo ago

Our language development and our awareness is currently tied to writing/record keeping. Hard for us to know anything about prehistoric languages.

GlenTheMachine 1mo ago
Turns out that isn't exactly true. You can poly concepts from genetic drift to language and infer what they must have been like. It's revolutionized the field of linguistics.
- detourdog 1mo ago
  That may work prehistoric cultures that have fragments in our current languages. This is an incomplete picture because we don’t know about the dead ends. Oral histories disappear when the cultures die out.
IAmBroom 1mo ago
Very currently. Just 1,000 years ago people memorized Beowulf to keep the text. But it is hard for us to imagine times before us, it is true.

whtrbt 1mo ago

There’s a fascinating book called Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett that covers the Piraha people in the Amazon. Their language is unusual: no recurrent sentences, almost no discussion of the past. I’m not suggesting they are unconscious but there appears to be something different going on with the Piraha sociolinguistically.

xhevahir 1mo ago
It is an interesting book, but as far as I know no one has verified Everett's work. I've just noticed this article that talks about it: https://news.mit.edu/2016/data-amazonian-piraha-language-debate-0309 https://news.mit.edu/2016/data-amazonian-piraha-language-deb...
detourdog 29d ago
Can you describe a recurrent sentence? I can’t think of what it means. I did search but only found examples of recurrent in a sentence.

geophile 1mo ago

"Somehow" We have no idea what consciousness is, and cannot reliably detect it in other mammals, or even in other humans. I assume that you, GlenTheMachine, are conscious, but I cannot prove it. I think the most we can state, with a little assurance, is that people under general anesthesia are not conscious.

adolph 1mo ago

> If consciousness spread virally “The nam-shub of Enki is both a story and an incantation,” the Librarian says. “A self-fulfilling fiction. Lagos believed that in its original form, which this translation only hints at, it actually did what it describes.” [0] 0. Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash: A Novel Stephenson has Hiro state it more explicitly in Chapter 56.