this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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chapotraphouse
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It's wild that some people don't have a little David Attenborough in their head that narrates what they do like an anthropologist angel on their shoulder. Like their lives aren't an extended nature documentary where they live at the mercy of the narrative's critique and plotline. They don't even mentally see things from interesting camera angles that advance mental cinematography, it's just flat and their own thoughts.
One of my favorite weird scientific theories says that prior to a few thousand years ago, this internal narrative voice was mistaken for the voice of the gods, and explains why so many old texts are full of gods saying and doing things with people. The theory says that as we became fully conscious in the way that modern humans are, this narrator--which is actually the linguistic centers in the left hemisphere--finished integrating into the rest of the brain, and we started recognizing that it was actually just our internal monologue, not the gods; this was supposed to be the catalyst for modern human mentality.
It's almost certainly false and pretty fringe, but I've always really loved it as a theory. It's called "the bicameral mind."
Someone read Robert J Sawyer's WWW trilogy
I've actually never heard of this, but I'll look into it!
It's extremely lib YA sci-fi that uses Bicameral Mind as a kind of focal piece of understanding how consciousness arises. A latent consciousness formed from emergent properties of the internet starts waking up and gets cut in half by the Great Firewall, then reunifies itself and becomes conscious. Also there's a blind girl protagonist that teaches it to process existence outside the internet by accident while acclimating to a brain implant that returns vision.
The climax of the trilogy is the Internet brain decisively taking ownership of the government of China's entire digital infrastructure and demanding that Xi Jingping institutes a liberal democracy.
Author's a lib, but has much less libby books. Far-Seer is about the Galileo equivalent of a race of sapient dinosaurs discovering they live on a tidally unstable moon and fighting their theocratic society to prove it. Calculating God is about an archaeologist participating in a first contact event with aliens that are looking for God, while he simultaneously comes to terms with his terminal cancer. The Neanderthal Parallax trilogy is about an accidental portal opening to a parallel earth where neanderthals won and homo sapiens went extinct. This one is really good and paints the world capitalism created as evil, though it doesn't go so far as to name capitalism as the problem explicitly. Also, every Neanderthal is bi and poly.
Doesn't look like anything to me.
This is somewhat the premise of an old nutty book book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. The book has a section towards the end called The Auguries of Science that is very dear to me.
Yeah, Jaynes is the one I was talking about. The theory is certainly nutty, but I enjoy it from an aesthetic perspective. It's a fun story to think about.
This guy goes hard.