Jan 27, 2020, 10:10 AM
A rather strange bias we see in archaeology tries to explain everything they don’t undrestand as mystical or religious in origin.
We watch horror movies and tell campfire stories, and we enthrall each other with suspension of belief and woo woo, but that does not mean we are not eminently practical in real life.
While reading the ancients – even though it is very difficult – it’s very clear that they thought as rationally and practically as we do while still ‘going all woo woo’ over the same nonsense.
In fact, most letters are pretty tedious and could have been written a century ago.
It’s one thing to read the iliad today in translation and another to hear someone recite it in its rhyme and tempo. When you hear that tempo and rhyme you realize that homer whether one person or many, and shakespeare are the same man.
The difference that we cannot imagine today is the pervasive violence in everyday life of the ancient world,and how dependent we were upon family structures for mere survival, and how terrifying it was to be left along without their support – ostracization was a death sentence.
As for the general bicameral mind, this story has not played out well against the evidence. It’s true that each of us varies in cognitive agency, and we may even say that what differs most between us is agency (or ‘executive function’). It’s true that all language is a means of calculation and the more precise and non-false the terms and complete the linguistic transactions the more we are able to devote the processing power of our frontal cortex to yet another iteration of thought. So it’s more that language and knowledge increase the radius in time, space, population, and permutation of our thinking, just as prices assist us in imputing, and managing our resources and time.
But my understanding is that the wooo wooo apparent in ancient myth is just a tool for holding attention under suspension of disbelief so that the narrative is accompanied by sufficient emotional novelty that the story is remembered.
That does not mean that a tribe of warriors conducting a raid or a set of 10k bc flint miners were doing or thinking any differently than we are.
I am old enough to remember that class of our fellow white men that could not read. They did not think any differently. They simply had less accumulated knowledge, and less confidence in their knowledge.
So you know, I don’t buy the whole thing because I see that there are woo woo people and empirical people in every generation across time.
As far as I know language will eventually emerge in any creature with sufficient cognitive capacity (neural density in relation to body weight), that has a body that can move through space (because that is the origin of consciousness – spatial modeling).
Once you have language it is such a fucking competitive advantage every competitor is screwed.
So the bicameral mind is the result of two hemispheres needing to time their movements using the cerebellum.
But in our brains the corpus callosum especially in women ensures that the hemispheres are working on concert.
The major difference is that men are more longitudinally connected (fast, limited info, and time) and women more horizontally (slow, lots of info, in present moment). And even as such these are only limited biass not complete differences.