Thread · HN Continuity

There was a book in the 1970s called "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes, where he argued that ancient civilizations -- and he used examples from Homer -- lacked the current modern sense of self-consciousness. If you look at their behavior, they interact with some external divine voice that drives their actions, whereas if you read modern literature you see people being driven by an inner voice which they associate with themselves.

This shift from the "bicameral mentality" of the external voice to the modern mentality of the inner voice was hypothesized by Jaynes to be rooted in some biological changes in the brain. At the time there was split brain research that showed these two parts of the brain function independently almost as two different minds in the same skull. See this 2007 survey: <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6323702_The_bicameral_mind30_years_on_A_critical_reappraisal_of_Julian_Jaynes'_hypothesis" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6323702_The_bicamer...