Gee’s Reviews > Gods, Voices, and the Bicameral Mind: The Theories of Julian Jaynes > Status Update

Consciousness began between 1400 and 600 B.C., Jaynes concludes, with its first explicit dictum to be found in the personage of Solon of Athens, who is attributed to have first advised:
“Know thy self.” With Solon, says Jaynes: “Suddenly we are in the modern subjective stage”

Jaynes distinguishes between instrumental or short-term deceit and long-term deceit, which he defines as treachery. This distinction is important, since chimpanzees have been observed engaging in the former but not the latter.
Long-term deceit requires a time orientation and introspection. Animals and bicameral man, says Jaynes, cannot engage in the latter

In the Iliad, there is no volition, no free will, no
soul, no plans, no motivations, few abstract nouns, and no ego; there was no private ambition, no private grudges, no private frustrations. It is
significant, too, that in the Iliad there are no secrets, falsehood, or deceit.

The development of consciousness allows people to reflect upon their actions, to narrate and
temporalize those actions, and to realize that those actions may have moral significance.
The tasting of consciousness, then, Jaynes understands as an essentially linguistic event
and, like the tasting of good and evil, an irrevocable one

with the clash of cultures toward the end of the
second millennium B.C.E., along with other factors that Jaynes mentions, such
as the invention of writing, there would have been social selective pressure to
evolve a more flexible and reliable way to predict and interpret the behavior
of other people

classical scholars, along with
Julian Jaynes, have
puzzled over the absence of mental state terms in the ancient literature. But by the
middle of the first millennium B.C.E. we see writings featuring very
modern-sounding individuals complete with a wide range of mental state terms. This
shift in the literary record supports Jaynes’s theory of the collapse of bicameral
civilizations

studies have shown that theory-of-mind performance can be predicted by the
number of older siblings living in the household

the history of the last five
hundred years is a history of adjustment to the loss of bicameral authorization entirely,
a loss speeded by the growth of science, itself a result of the evolution of
consciousness. But it has been in the last two hundred years especially that the
loss has become most overt. The self, still unprepared, must now take
everything on itself, for the gods and Muses alike have disappeared